Long Journey Into the Night

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin presents us with a reading of a painting by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus. The ‘Angel of History’ is blown by the winds of what we call progress, but with his back to the future and face turned to the past. The future remains unknown but he can see the debris piling up behind him, created by the ineluctable barbarism that drives civilisations forward. For a generation like mine, shaped by the inexplicability—and, yet, the inevitability—of the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, a succession of dates, of which 1975 and 1984 are milestones, stand out.

The journalists Coomi Kapoor and Sanjay Suri, who lived through and reported on events of the Emergency and the Sikh killings of 1984 for The Indian Express, have now produced their accounts of the times.

Kapoor’s book is a personal history of those days, and her work at The Indian Express and the fact that she was the sister-in-law of the maverick politician Subramanian Swamy, meant she was in the thick of it. Her account provides a reliable and often piquant narrative of events, including the bumbling inefficiency of policemen acting on insufficient information about those whom they were to arrest, as well as the fabled story of Subramanian Swamy entering Parliament in disguise and asking the Speaker to announce the death of democracy. The Emergency allowed for an indiscriminate arrest of opponents ranging from opposition leaders like the future Prime Minister AB Vajpayee, LK Advani and royalty like the Rajmatas of Gwalior and Scindia, to over 100,000 individuals, many of whose stories never emerged into the light of history. Kapoor retells the stories of the ruthless Chief Minister of Haryana, Bansi Lal; the libertine VC Shukla who became the Information and Broadcasting Minister; the charismatic yogi Dhirendra Brahmachari; the over- zealous destroyer of slums Jagmohan, who headed the Delhi Development Authority; the socialite Rukhsana Sultana, who attempted to woo the Muslims of Old Delhi while surrounding herself in clouds of perfume to quell the odours of the city; the tough-as-nails chief of the The Indian Express Group Ramnath Goenka, who made of the newspaper a beacon of democracy in those dark times; the wily opportunist and peasant leader Charan Singh who was to become Prime Minister for a brief period; and of course, the firebrand trade unionist George Fernandes, charged and then acquitted in what came to be known as the Baroda Dynamite case—who then won a legendary election victory from Muzaffarpur, post Emergency, while still in prison.

Kapoor provides information around the rise of the ambitious, unscrupulous and ruthless Sanjay Gandhi and his coterie, which allows us to see some of the legacies of that period. Sanjay’s pipedream of a cheap car for the people resulted in forcible dispossession of peasants from land in Haryana (an ongoing process, now in the interests of real estate) to set up a car manufacturing plant. Traders and industrialists were hustled into buying shares in Maruti Ltd; the board of the Central Bank of India was manipulated to appoint a stooge who would sanction loans to the quixotic project; and under the terms of the industrial licence for the production of 50,000 cars in a year, in 1975-6 only 21 cars were produced. A rocky beginning for a car that was to become the middle-class’s prized possession a decade or more later.

Sanjay Gandhi’s sterilisation campaigns resulted in riots and resistance in UP and Haryana in 1976, resulting in police firings in Gorakhpur, Muzaffarnagar and Pratapgarh. Pipli, in Haryana, became the centre of a riot which drew in villagers from UP and Punjab, resulting in warnings from the police that they would resort to aerial bombing if necessary. In Uttawar village in Gurgaon, the resistance provided an excuse to begin forced vasectomies among the largely Muslim population of this Mewat region. The slum clearance programmes in Old Delhi, the Turkman gate massacre of protestors and forced sterilisation targeting Muslims force us to reckon with the communal nature of Indian politics in which all parties share. Kapoor does very little analysis with all of this information, and we are left to draw our own conclusions. ‘A solid phalanx of humanity covered the historic Ram Lila grounds on the night of June 25 1976, endorsing the call for Indira Gandhi to step down,’ she tells us, finally. ‘JP [Jayaprakash Narayan, who led the opposition] recited Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s evocative poem, Singhasan khaali karo / ke janta aati hai, (surrender your throne because the people are coming) to thunderous applause.’

The razing of slums and the creation of resettlement colonies in Mangolpuri, Jahangirpuri, Trilokpuri and Sultanpuri created a set of spaces where another history was enacted. The riots following the assassination of Indira Gandhi on the morning of 31 October 1984 mapped onto these very same areas. Over the next three days and radiating outwards from the All India Medical Institute for Sciences where her body lay (10 of the gurdwaras attacked were around AIIMS), riots erupted that resulted in the death of at least 3,000 Sikhs. They were dragged out of trains and buses and burnt alive; those killed outside of the city were dumped along GT Road to Punjab and in Burari in north Delhi; and the resettlement colonies were attacked. Sikh shops were systematically looted, except where police officers did their duty, as in Karol Bagh. There was direction from the Congress, inaction on the part of the Government under Rajiv Gandhi, and massive dereliction of duty by the police force, which stood aside and looked on.

Sanjay Suri, who as a reporter for The Indian Express was present in the city, witnessed the aftermath of massacres in the city, heard a Congress leader arguing at a police station to let off apprehended looters, and saw the Member of Parliament Kamal Nath at the head of a crowd stopping just short of attacking a gurdwara. He also writes about how his editor asked him to suppress accounts of rape, fearing that publishing these stories would fuel more killings and retaliation.

‘You can’t look back on 1984 and forget the law as the police then did,’ he says. ‘It was the standard to judge police action against, it was the standard they had been trained in.’ While the narrative of events is familiar to those who lived through those times, the significance of 1984 lies in Suri’s interviews with the few individuals who did their duty and emerged untarnished from 1984. Testimonies from senior police officials of the time, Ved Prakash Marwah, Amod Kanth and Maxwell Pereira, are revealing in their details as much as silences. Marwah gathered information and wireless transcripts towards a report which would have showed up both police inaction as well as political interference; a report which never saw the light of day. Both Kanth and Pereira acted against orders to stand down, and Pereira quelled a crowd in the old city about to attack Sis Ganj gurdwara with just his wits, a few men and one revolver. There were policemen who put duty before mere official hierarchy and in Sabzi Mandi, the police station became a refuge for displaced Sikhs who stayed there for up to a year.

Suri suggests that there was not much retaliation against Hindus in Punjab for the killings in Delhi and suggests that this may have been because those killed were not Jat Sikhs and belonged to other classes. This is a surprising argument since in those days, Sikhs were killed for being Sikhs, regardless of class. There was also the unique phenomenon of burning Sikhs by necklacing them with rubber tyres doused with kerosene; a phenomenon witnessed neither before nor after 1984. Suri does not provide an adequate explanation for this. He is also insistent at the beginning of the book that there was no direction from the Congress High Command to carry out retaliation, though later in the book, he suggests that Congressmen were involved directly in killing or covering up killings. There was a longer history to the attacks on Sikhs in 1984, and it is not surprising that the first significant narratives of Partition violence came to be written soon afterwards, including Urvashi Butalia’s magnificent The Other Side of Silence (1998), on the repressed memory of vivisection that attended Independence. There is not enough in this book about the recurrence of rumours, of Partition-era Sikhs poisoning the water supply, of bodies arriving from Punjab—which contemporaneous accounts of the riots like Uma Chakravarti and Nandita Haksar’s The Delhi Riots record. Many at the time remarked on the neat inversion of 48 and 84.

What these books show is how a few upright individuals and the decency and courage of people of all classes and political persuasions have shaped democracy in India. The redeeming feature of Suri’s book is the series of interviews with key policemen who did their duty of maintaining law and order while all around them the organs of government and the administration looked the other way. Kapoor suggests that the declaration of internal emergency was already present as an idea in early 1975 and reproduces a letter written in January of that year by the Chief Minister of Bengal, SS Ray, suggesting to Indira that an ordinance was ready which could be enacted within 24 hours to put away her opposition. Other than this, both books substitute personal reminiscence and known fact for revelation or analysis. While they help mark the anniversaries of these crucial events in the history of modern India, they do not help us understand them any better.

(Dilip Menon holds the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg)

About The Author

Dilip Menon