I do not know if this matters. If anything matters. Especially when close to 4000 lives did not matter. When the survivors who were left behind to mourn them and battle an implacable system, did not matter. Have not mattered for over 29 years. Today the news that Congress leader Jagdish Tytler “may be in trouble” because a Delhi court has set aside a closure report of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)and ordered re-investigation of “allegations that the former minister instigated a rioting mob, which murdered three men 29 years ago during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots,” led me to watch once again Lakhwinder Kaur, the widow of one of the victims Badal Singh as she faced inane media questions with tired hope and old grief and said, “Till we are alive, we will fight.”
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And I finally understood that in the darkest of times, something matters. The will to fight, to go on, to not concede defeat. But then again, these are just words. What do we know about living with the memory of a loved one going up in flames and to live on with no closure. I also disbelievingly watched weary warrior Harvinder Singh Phoolka saying with a new surge of yes, real, tangible hope, “For 29 years, I have been telling the victims to have hope..today I have a reason to believe myself.” Yes, the same man who has been at the forefront of the seemingly futile fight for justice for almost three decades and did not give up. In a perfect world, the riots should not have happened. In a less than perfect world, the riots should not have gone unnoticed by the State, the orchestrators of the riots should have been punished and the victims should have been rehabilitated but as we know, we live in a world where political assassinations make history, not violence against ordinary men and women.
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So in the national capital of a democratic country ruled by a functioning government, armed goons walked fearlessly on the streets, vandalising homes, torching thousands of men while the law makers and law enforcers watched on and did nothing. And continued to do nothing when the blood shed stopped but the wounds continued to fester in the hopeless Widow’s Colony in West Delhi’s Tilak Vihar where not one Prime Minister has set a foot to make even a token statement of empathy. Will that change now? Will the media see some TRP currency in this news finally to chase it relentlessly to its just conclusion?
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I found a story that I had written on the 25th anniversary of 1984 riots and I still do not know if the words of an empathetic outsider can change anything but what if truth was never hidden and always brought out in the clear light of the day to be examined and dealt with? But then there are many versions of truth. The gilded truth as when the media presupposes facts about a given situation or when people blog about their seemingly boggling array of achievements that no one else has heard about. There is the bleached truth when you take out facts that are not really comforting from a situation and make up a new version. Like the support being drummed up for Sanjay Dutt.
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Then there is the ugly truth of 1984. Still staring us in the face while we continue to look away. Because we cannot imagine being unheard and invisible for over 30 years. Or to be in the skin of that old Sikh woman who lost all the men in her family to a night of naked butchering and a few years ago, said on CNN IBN that she knew she would never get justice but that she would fight on till she had one breath left in her body because “till we are alive..our story is alive.” Another mother who saw her son being burnt alive , cried out in hopelessness, “This is the first time someone is listening. No one has heard my story. Not God. Not man.”
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4000 people killed and not one murderer caught and endless stories of women crouching and watching their men being killed, mothers trying to strangle their daughters to save them from rape, 11 members of a family killed in such a way that even their bodies were not found for the last rites. Homes burnt, lives destroyed and policemen watching from the sidelines. And we live on with a blind reassurance that the same would not happen to us some day if we were on the wrong side of statistics?
We live on in a new resurgent India where such things do not happen anymore. For the victims of 1984 though, time stands still. As does the wheel of justice. Today though, something has shifted. And hope smoulders. Just about.
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