The riots were a breaking point for many. Many Sikh families left Delhi for ever after 1984. But for those that remained, and indeed for Hindus, Delhi would never feel the same again. For many of my generation, who were children or teenagers in 1984, the Sikh riots were the foundational coming-of-age experience, revealing, as they seemed to do, the deep truth of Delhi’s social relations. Bloodshed, it seemed, had not ended with Indian independence. This time it could not be blamed on the British, or on Pakistan, or on the insider within. It was eternally inherent to the city.
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Jaswant is a member of Delhi’s Sikh aristocracy, the descendant of one of the contractors who built the 1911 city. In his early seventies, he has a rakish flair about him: he wears a floppy hat and carries sunglasses in his shirt pocket.
“In the 1970s, this lurking sense that the elite could do what the hell they wanted turned into a syndrome. People became giddy with power. They sucked up to Indira Gandhi, and Congress made sure they did well. So many of Delhi’s big businessmen got their start during the Emergency, when those who supported Indira got big breaks and favours.”
Jaswant is horrified by the Delhi elite of which he is a part, and his comportment is deliberately calculated, in part, to irritate and offend this class. Other members of his circle dislike him intensely. “He is mad,” they say. “He does crazy things. In a party he just unzips his thing and starts pissing in the bushes in front of everyone. He dresses in a crazy way, talks in a crazier way. He has crazy parties.”
Jaswant is indeed eccentric. His life has been full of turbulent, ambiguous relationships and immense private tragedies, and he has emerged from all of this more headstrong and contrary than ever. But among all the people I speak to about Delhi, he is unique in his readiness to speak about the violence and exclusion to which so many of them are immune because of their class. And in this respect his eccentricity seems well directed.
“Look at this Delhi culture. The refugees from West Punjab came to Delhi and they became cart pushers. They showed astonishing enterprise and they have amazing stories. But now they’re filthy rich and they have no social conscience at all. They’re racists, they’ve totally forgotten their own origins. They were refugees themselves but they have no care for the millions of refugees who are in Delhi today. Our north-eastern people who come to Delhi to work are molested and raped every day. It’s horrible. I mean, my blood boils. I don’t know how I stop myself from going out and throwing stones.
“If you want to know the personality of this city of Delhi, go to Kashmir or the north-east and see what happens under Delhi’s orders. India only holds onto those territories by military brutality, intimidation and rape. If there were any rule of law, whole jails would be full of the Indian soldiers who have raped and mutilated. Including members of my own family, who have given the orders. But they are protected by the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. Of course this is antithetical to the constitution, which guarantees the right to life. But it doesn’t matter anymore because there is no rule of law. This is a completely lawless society. Nobody is accountable to anybody. The people who run this country are all lawbreakers.”
Jaswant’s horror at what surrounds him was crystallised during the Sikh attacks of 1984, which did not pass by people like him. Delhi people had always sought out positions and connections to insulate themselves from the wildness of things, but the mobs of 1984 were willing to take on any Sikh target, no matter how powerful.
“After Indira Gandhi’s assassination, with the encouragement of the press and politicians, not less than 15,000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi. The official figure was 3,000, but it was far more than that, and it happened in the most brutal way possible.
“The petrol station my family owned next to the Imperial Hotel was surrounded and they were threatening to burn it. The manager called to tell me what was going on and I said, ‘Why don’t you call the police?’ and the manager said, ‘The police are the ones who are doing it!’ Eventually the crowd was dispersed by shots fired from the Imperial Hotel.
“I was alone in the house with my kids. Hindu friends came to stay with me to help us. They knew what kind of state I was in, and they wanted to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid. I gave way to self-harming behaviour. I decided to cut my own hair off rather than have state-sponsored goons do it. I smashed my parents’ crystal and cut my hair off. I still have the hair.
“I lost faith in everyone. Including my friends who were trying to help but whose behaviour I found patronising. I was from Delhi and they were from outside. Who were they to protect me? My family built this damn city. I should have been protecting them.
“Two years later I was at a traffic light and my car stalled because it was cold. There was a motorcycle behind me and the rider was annoyed. He leaned in my open window and said, ‘Did you Sikhs never learn your lesson?’ There was not a hint of remorse in Hindus: they were delighted to have ‘taught us a lesson’, and they continued to display the most menacing, ghoulish behaviour.
“Another time I was walking in Connaught Place and a girl saw me in the street and asked if she could say something to me. I was afraid of the insult she was about to give me. But instead she said, ‘Can I just say how handsome you look in your turban?’ I was incredibly moved by her compliment, you can’t imagine what it meant to me.
“But in general I was outraged by the fact that no one really came out against the genocide. All around me people were trying to suck up to the Congress and they refused to say anything against what had happened. Even the Sikhs. My brother was a socialite and a businessman, and he refused to be affected by any of this. He just went along with the dirty flow of the city.
“One time, at a party at the house of an ex-army officer — a man who later killed a guy he suspected of having an affair with his wife — I got into an argument about how the press should not have said that the bodyguards who murdered Indira were Sikh. And that man said to me, very coldly, ‘You should watch what you say. You know what can happen to people like you.’
“I know those people welclass="underline" the ex-army, the ex-navy, the ministers, the landowners. They’re all violent, indecent people who make a mockery of the excellent education they have had. Arms dealers, contractors, suppliers of women to powerful men, all paying each other off, getting their pound of flesh. Arms dealing has a lot of prestige in this circle because it makes you rich and you can say you’re being nationalistic, keeping the military supplied. That’s what they say. They are proud of what they do. And their wives are proud of it too: if they have to sleep with a general or somebody, they’ll do it.
“But they’re also very nervous. They escape all the time: they escape into golf and bridge. They escape to London for the weekend. Their money escapes to the Channel Islands and Switzerland and Panama. They are an effete elite. They have all had bypass operations. They all have pacemakers. They are riddled with diabetes and arthritis. They are corrupt not just in their money-making but in their bodies and souls. They’re very superstitious: their fingers are covered with stones which are supposed to protect them from evil forces, and they have little gods and goddesses in every corner of their house. Because they don’t know who they are, and their confusion expresses itself in prejudice and violence.”
Jaswant’s romance with India’s marginalised populations irritates a lot of his peers, who find it pretentious and perverse. But after what he experienced in 1984, Jaswant feels at home among such people in a way he does not among his own kind, who fill him, in fact, with the most profound despair. It is only among the poor and oppressed that he finds some reason for human optimism.