And so: the murder in Delhi, a few weeks later, of the prime minister.
The city-wide anti-Sikh rampage of murder and destruction that followed this assassination blew open the troubled heart of the city. Sikhism was, far more than Islam, the sibling of Hinduism: its founder, Guru Nanak, was part of a sixteenth-century movement of reform and renewal within the Hindu religion. Until recently many Hindu Punjabi families gave their first-born son to the Sikh religion, often in fulfilment of a vow made when a childless couple prayed for children. Like the events of 1947, then, the violent eruption of 1984 had all the fervour of a struggle over the nature of the family. Sikh militancy had been fuelled by the sense that Hindus treated Sikhs as India’s illegitimate offspring; Sikhs had in turn rejected an Indian state they described as “effeminate” and unleashed instead their own principle of virile, martial valour:
In one of his speeches Bhindranwale propounded the idea that it was an insult for the Sikhs to be included in a nation that considered Mahatma Gandhi to be its father, for his techniques of fighting were quintessentially feminine. He (Gandhi) was symbolized by a charkha, the spinning wheel, which was a symbol of women. “Can those,” asked the militant leader, “who are the sons of the valiant guru, whose symbol is the sword, ever accept a woman like Mahatma as their father? Those are the techniques of the weak, not of a race that has never bowed its head before any injustice — a race whose history is written in the blood of martyrs.”… To be able to claim true descent from the proud Gurus (the ten acknowledged founders of the Sikh religion), it was argued, all corruption that had seeped into the Sikh character because of the closeness to the Hindus was to be exorcised… The dangers of a “Hindu” history, it turned out, were not just that Sikhs were denied their rightful place in history but that the martial Sikhs became converted into a weak race: “The Sikhs have been softened and conditioned during the last fifty years to bear and put up with insults to their religion and all forms of other oppression, patiently and without demur, under the sinister preaching and spell of the narcotic cult of non-violence, much against the clear directive of their Gurus, their Prophets, not to turn the other cheek before a tyrant, not to take lying down any insult to their religion, their self-respect, and their human dignity.”44
The Sikh male identity — which included the wearing of a beard, and the carrying of the sword (or, in a different context, the Kalashnikov) — thus brought him naturally into conflict with the Indian state and, ultimately, to the assassination of its female leader. But for many Hindus, the idea of the supreme mother was paramount, and Indira Gandhi’s death was immediately seen as an obscene assault on their idea of the Indian ‘family’. Leaping as outraged sons to avenge her death was a clear duty: “Indira Gandhi is our mother and these people have killed her,” yelled the Hindu crowds.
It should be evident that, for both sides, this crisis of 1984 had everything to do with the unfinished business of Partition, which had done so much to call into question the masculine credentials of both siblings, Hinduism and Sikhism. It was thirty-seven years since Partition, and many of those involved in the present atrocities, on both sides, were seeing these scenes for the second times in their lives. Sikhs who had spent that time rebuilding their lives found themselves subjected to rape and murder all over again; once again they lost their homes and livelihoods. Hindus who had mulled for decades on the ignominy of their flight from West Punjab found themselves taking frenzied revenge on their one-time fellow refugees. The violence which began on 1 November 1984 was fuelled by paranoid rumours, some of which drew explicitly on the unresolved nightmares of 1947: trainloads of dead Hindus, it was said, were arriving from Punjab, where Sikhs had unleashed a campaign of annihilation. It was also rumoured that Sikh militants had poisoned the Delhi water supply, and there was a crisis of drinking water in the city; people travelled far to regions they thought unaffected to collect water for their families.
For four days the violence raged. Mobs patrolled the city with knives, guns and tanks of kerosene, which they used to incinerate people, houses and shops. It is not known how many people were killed; estimates range between 3,000 and 10,000. What was clear to all, however, was that the organs of the state were conspicuously lax in trying to quell the reprisals. It is all but certain, in fact, that members of the Congress Party sponsored the entire episode, handing out weapons and liquor to Hindu avengers and promising them rewards for murders. Congress MPs who owned gas stations provided kerosene for their operations, and in some cases sent vehicles stocked with kerosene to accompany them on their forays. Congress Party officials handed out lists of addresses of Sikh families so that they could be targeted systematically. Rather than acting to control Hindu mobs, the police further incited them with rumours that Sikhs were plotting to bring down the state. Hospitals refused to treat Sikh victims and police stations refused to file reports of crimes against Sikhs.
Indira’s surviving son, Rajiv, who was sworn in as prime minister on the night of her death, gave his own infamous — and indifferent — explanation of this violence: “When a great tree falls, the earth shakes.”
For the city of Delhi, the ‘Sikh riots’ turned ‘the law’ into an obscene nonsense. One commentator relates an incident in the west-Delhi neighbourhood of Sultanpuri, one of the areas where violence was at its most intense, where a Sikh community leader and his two sons were set on fire. The three men were shrieking for someone to bring water. Observing all this, the police inspector shouted that no one should think of coming to their assistance, but he said it in these terms: “if anyone dare[s] to come out and interfere with the law (kanoon ke khilaf kisi ne hath uthaya — literally, raise their hand against the law) he [will] be shot dead.” The Hindu mob had become the law, the kerosene fire had become the law. Another policeman went around announcing by megaphone that any Hindus who were caught hiding Sikhs from the mob would have their houses burned down because it was illegal to do so.45
The discrediting of the law was complete. For people in Delhi, whatever other reason there might be to comply with the law, it could no longer be a moral one, for the law had no moral content whatsoever. This impression was only strengthened as successive investigations of the massacre failed to find significant evidence of wrongdoing in the Congress establishment: to this day, no one has been held accountable for what happened. The official response has been a thirty-year-long shrug. The law has no comment.
Delhi was corrupt anyway. But the riots now sent a definitive message that the law was a degenerate part of Indian social life and one’s only moral duty was to oneself. One had to look after oneself, since no one else would do it, and now there were no legal constraints on how one should go about it. It is from this date that the ‘compound’ feel of Delhi’s residential neighbourhoods dates. No more those gentle practices of the past — those middle-class boys who took beds down to the street to sleep incautiously in the open air on hot nights. Such trust of the outsider and the street was put away, and middle-class families replaced their thigh-high walls with ten-foot spiked steel gates. The subsequent boom in private electricity generators has to do not only with the erratic nature of Delhi’s power supply but also with the mentality of self-reliance: no one else should be able to interfere with one’s electricity. The same goes for private wells. The rumour of poison in the municipal water was only that, but its effects persist.