Pav Singh's '1984' book review: Anti-Sikh riots, for European eyes

1984

India’s Guilty Secret

Pav Singh

Rupa

268 pages; Rs 500

Almost 35 years after the anti-Sikh riots that followed former prime minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination, there has been no justice but certainly a surfeit of literature, documentaries, and cinema on the carnage that will remain a scar on India’s collective memory for eternity. Pav Singh (an anglicised version of Parvinder Singh), a British-born and -bred author, seeks to add to the stable but fails miserably in what is a confused mix of journalistic endeavour and academic rigour — or rather, the lack of both.

It is hard to trust a book when the realisation dawns on the reader that the author wasn’t witness to the tragic tales he seeks to narrate; yet he derives conclusions that shadow his own religious dogmas. The reader gets a hint of this in the introduction to this book. Mr Singh’s folly lies in the fact that he starts by painting Indira Gandhi as a Sikh-hater, much before the days of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and Operation Blue Star. He says 30 per cent of all people incarcerated on Indira Gandhi’s orders during the Emergency were Sikhs — “something Mrs Gandhi would neither forgive nor forget”. For the author, the Akali Dal is synonymous with Sikhs. The author erroneously and rather dangerously assumes that imprisoning the Akalis, who were and still are the principal political opponents of the Congress in Punjab, indicated an intrinsic repulsion in Indira Gandhi’s mind for the Sikhs and their religious faith. To assume that Sikhs were synonymous with Akalis is to forget that the Congress itself had nurtured and produced regional leaders like Beant Singh and Giani Zail Singh. Many Akali leaders like Buta Singh and Swaran Singh would later rise and shine in the Congress party. 

The author uses a similar suggestive analogy to legitimise the armed siege of the Golden Temple by Bhindranwale and his men; by saying that Sikh leaders had taken cover in the Golden Temple to escape Indira Gandhi’s wrath during the Emergency as well. Using the Golden Temple to evade political persecution was a tactical strategy during the Emergency; comparing it to the armed siege of the religious site by pro-Khalistani forces bent on destroying the integrity of India indicates an improper understanding of the notion of a country stitched together with fragile threads of federalism. This incomplete understanding of the country is also evident in his description of the kurta pyjama as a “simple garment worn by Indian politicians to indicate an often false sense of piety”.

It’s not just the bias of a British-bred author yearning to study the horrific violence against his community in a far-away land that would be disconcerting to the discerning eye. Mr Singh milks the tragedy of the Sikhs to appeal to European tastes and make it more comprehensible to Western notions of justice by drawing repeated parallels with the Holocaust: From comparing the attacks on Sikh gurdwaras on November 1, 1984 to Kristallnacht; the burning of Guru Granth Sahib to the desecration of Jewish Torah scrolls in the 1930s; the rampaging mobs on Delhi’s streets to Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen, or death squads during World War II. He compares the use of phosphorous by mobs to burn the faces of their Sikh victims with the use of this chemical by German bombers over London during the war. “In Germany after the war, many Germans would claim they know nothing about death camps. Disturbingly, in India, the burnings were not only common knowledge but celebrated,” he claims.

Mr Singh’s book is a mélange of disparate second-hand accounts and randomised press reports presented with selective gore. It is littered with claims that would barely pass muster in the most unaccomplished newsroom and is rife with unsuitable comparisons to international human rights tragedies like the Rwandan genocide. He makes little effort to obtain first-hand accounts of victims or their families, relying instead on judicial documents and witness accounts that have been in the public domain for years. He succeeds in re-packaging the miseries of the Sikhs for the West without opening any new cracks that would shine more light on their plight.

Despite the book’s myriad failures, it succeeds on two counts — in directly questioning Rajiv Gandhi’s role in instigating the riots against Sikhs and highlighting the “judicial scandals” of the Justice Ranganath Misra commission and the Justice Nanavati commission formed to investigate the riots. More importantly, Mr Singh outlines the contours of the nature of inquiry that should be conducted by a commission or an investigative body if the truth of 1984 has to emerge and all the perpetrators involved in butchering the Sikhs have to be brought to justice.

Mr Singh’s book is a breeze to read for a new generation of British-bred Sikhs and every other 30-something who is interested in knowing more about the events of the time when they were too young to make sense of the world around them. It does nothing to add to existing knowledge of tenebrous events, fails to give vent to the anguish of survivors or, for that matter, add to the existing evidence and discourse on the role of the perpetrators. Mr Singh wants to sell a book; not tell a story. He succeeds in accomplishing neither.