1948: The Delhi we want to forget

After a hearty breakfast of toast and fruit for breakfast, she stepped out of the white bungalow, crossed the ponds and the lotus ponds and then passed into the dim green shade of the pipal avenue. The time was 31st of October 1984 and the Bougainvillea was in flower. She smiled at her sikh security guard, Sub-inspector Besant Singh. He did not smile back. Instead he pulled out his revolver and emptied the clip into the country's first female prime minister. His friend, The constable, further emptied his stem gun into Gandhi. As required, an ambulance was waiting outside her house, but that being Delhi, the driver was off to a tea break. She was ultimately carried to the All India Medical Institute by her daughter, where she died at the age of 66, ending the ironfist-like grip this Kashmiri Pundit family had on Indian Politics.

What ensued was a 4 day long repulsion of the delicately created fabric of Hindu-Sikh unity in the capital city. A mob outside the AIIMs hospital where the prime minister was murdered by sikh bodygaurds led a mob outside shouting “ Blood for Blood “ rummaging through the streets of Delhi. The then president Jail Singhs car was mobbed and stoned as he arrived at the Hospital. The Delhi Congress leaders then did little to calm down the mobs as they marched through the streets. Some leaders like Congress MP Sajjan Kumar and trade-union leader Lalit Maken handed out ₹100 notes and bottles of liquor to the assailants On the morning of 1 November, Sajjan Kumar was observed holding rallies in the Delhi neighborhoods of Palam Colony , Kiran Gardens and SultanpuriIn Kiran Gardens at 8:00 am. Kumar was observed distributing iron rods from a parked truck to a group of 120 people and ordering them to "attack Sikhs, kill them, and loot and burn their properties". The police bureau accused the Delhi police of keeping their eyes and ears closed as the brutalities continued.

Trilokpuri was the dumping ground of the poor of Delhi. It was constructed on a piece of waste land for Delhi’s poor on the far bank of the Jumna river. Meant to be a temporary house for the squatters Sanjay Gandhi had evicted from the pavements of Central Delhi, the area remained as one of the desperately poor parts of the city, hidden from the public view, to help protect the delicate image of this cultured city. In a report by the Ahuja committee, set up after the mobs were quieted, a reported 2733 sikhs were killed in the capital in the days that followed the assanition. Most of these killings took place in the deceased grounds of Trilokpuri,

One of the survivors who was displaced from his home on the rich bank of the jamuna to this dredged land during the partition recounts his tale.

About 150 of us assembled on the wasteland on the edge of the block. The mob stoned us and we stoned them back. During the stoning his son was hit badly on the head, resulting in the bruises that will last his whole life in the form of head injuries. After the hopeless stone throwing had been going on for hours, the police suddenly interfered and escorted the mob away. They confiscated our Lathis and kirpans.

The mob returned later, they would knock on the doors, if it wasn't open they would break the doors down. They would break open the ceilings and pour the kerosene. They would burn everything alive inside. They used our very own kerosene to murder us. They lured some of us out, promising not to turn anyone. The ones who came out were made to drink kerosene and set them alight.

Sometimes when things happen in the dark, they are kept away from the twilight. According to an April 2014 Cobrapost sting operation, the government muzzled the Delhi Police during the riots. Messages were broadcast directing the police not to act against rioters, and the fire brigade would not go to areas where cases of arson were reported. The reason, while never to be certain about, could be largely pointed towards the radical nature of the Sikh community during that period and the relentlessness and emphasis on the creation of Khalistan, which they refused to go without. Operation Blue Star was ensued from the 1st of January to the 3rd of June, saw hundreds of killings in several violent incidents spread all over Punjab. A specialized operation had to be carried out to eradicate a group of militants from the golden temple complex.

The fear instilled in the hearts of the sikhs took time to heal, but soon enough the sikhs were again found to be serving food to the poor hindus in the Langars. But this narrow string of social competence among this complex democracy that we live in. Seeing the recent upsurges in the region with the lynching, sacrilages and the political controversy, One keeps to ponder if the symbiosis that has been created over the period of these hundreds of years is still balancing on the tip of a needle, ready to tumble. After all, even the heart of India, Delhi , the storehouse of culture and the labyrinth of civilization, would be incomplete without the heavals of the Sikhs. It was during the partition that the Sikhs, caught in the middle of this complex migration, migrated to the grounds of Lutyen, turning the provincial capital of 500000 to a metropolitan half the size of London.

By Arka Chaudhuri