 "Kanhaiya Kumar")
There is much that thousands across India have come to admire about Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students’ union president Kanhaiya Kumar. But it has shocked many that Kanhaiya believes the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 in Delhi was somehow less dastardly than the anti-Muslim riots of 2002 in Gujarat. He has also suddenly become an apologist for the Emergency.
On Monday, Kanhaiya said at a discussion that the violence in Gujarat was carried out through the state machinery, while in Delhi it was due to mob frenzy. This wasn’t all. He went on to claim how there was a difference between the Emergency (of 1975 to 1977) imposed by then PM Indira Gandhi and the threat of communal fascism that the country faces today under the Narendra Modi-led government.
Here are some excerpts from Kanhaiya’s speech according to a PTI report: “During Emergency, goons of only one party were engaged in goondaism. In this (fascism), entire state machinery is resorting to goondaism.”
Kanhaiya further said: “There is difference between riots of 2002 and 1984 Sikh riots. There is a fundamental difference between a mob killing a common man and massacring people through state machinery.” The student leader followed it up by talking about Islamophobia, saying that “connotations, meaning of a word change. Hence, it is important for us to understand history before we reach to conclusion on anything.”
On the 1984-anti Sikh riots, Kanhaiya needs to follow his own advice and study the copious material available on the subject before he reaches a conclusion about 1984 riots being less dastardly than the 2002 riots. A joint report by the People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) and People’s Union of Democratic Rights (PUDR) on the 1984 riots, ‘Who Are the Guilty’, will come in handy. He can also go through ‘When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and its Aftermath’ by journalist Manoj Mitta and lawyer H S Phoolka.
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There are over half dozen splendidly researched books as well as first person accounts that will tell him how Congress leaders led the mobs on Delhi’s streets which raped Sikh women, killed Sikh men and looted their homes and shops for three days. The police wasn’t just a bystander but at places helped the rioters by ensuring that Sikhs were disarmed before the mobs went in.
It was little different in 2002 in Gujarat as Mitta has shown in his book ‘The Fiction of Fact Finding – Modi and Godhra'. He will do well to read the similarities between the anti-Sikh rioting in Trilokpuri in Delhi in 1984 and killing of Muslims in Naroda Patiya in Ahmedabad in 2002.
Or better still, Kanhaiya only needs to turn to his Communist Party of India (Marxist) leaders like Sitaram Yechury and Prakash Karat to understand 1984. Both were then strapping men in their 30s and upcoming leaders who roamed the streets of central Delhi to rescue several Sikh men being chased by frenzied mobs and ensured that they found shelter until order was restored by the Army on Delhi’s roads.
As for the Emergency, Kanhaiya needs only to read about the Turkman Gate incident in Delhi in 1976. The police, under orders from the Congress leadership that was then led by Sanjay Gandhi, shot at and killed people, mostly Muslims, when they protested demolition of their houses. And to compare the current government – whatever its acts of omissions and commissions might be – with the one during the Emergency is a bit excessive.
