Relatives of Sikhs who were killed in the 1984 riots protest at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi in this March 7, 2011 picture
From : The Hindu
We must not allow the pain and suffering of the Sikh victims to be
transformed into a political instrument to mute calls for justice for
the ‘other' victims of similarly orchestrated massacres.
More than a quarter century on, not much remains of
‘1984' — shorthand for one of the largest pogroms in India's
postcolonial history when thousands of Sikhs were massacred in
retribution for Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination — in the
public memory. The voices of victims and eyewitnesses one often heard in
courtrooms have almost retired in exhaustion. The names of
state-appointed serial commissions to establish the facts on ground have
by now joined footnotes of history in a long line of ineffective
judicial commissions of similar nature. And more remarkably, the
miscarriage of justice through long-winded judicial processes where
eyewitnesses routinely turn hostile due to threats, incentives,
pressures exerted by fixers, or because of plain weariness has ceased
evoking any mass outrage. In any case, the victims are supposed to have
‘got over' the event and ‘moved on,' precisely as enterprising and
forward-looking communities are expected to do.
‘Moral retort'
Even
as 1984 largely fades from public memory as a signifier of mass deaths,
rapes, and the state's lack of will to protect its ‘minority' citizens,
it has been resurrected within the political discourse in an unexpected
new role — as that of a ‘moral retort'. In the past decade or so, we
have witnessed its reappearance mainly as a moral counterweight that is
dispassionately invoked from time to time whenever the BJP is confronted
over its culpability in the 2002 Gujarat violence. In this functional
incarnation, 1984 has been often described by L.K. Advani as the
“greater shame and agony” than the killings that followed the
destruction of Babri Masjid as well as the massacre of Muslims in
Gujarat. This memorial evocation of 1984 violence thus serves at least
two entwined purposes. At once, it underlines the depth of suffering
experienced by the victims at the hands of a high-handed state, and then
in doing so, reduces the suffering of Gujarat victims by placing the
victims of 1984 hierarchically above them. Probably the most unsettling
aspect of this moral taxonomy is that collective suffering of a group of
victims is used to minimise the claims of suffering of another victim
group.
Consider the following: Mr. Advani has often
painstakingly made a case for prosecution of the perpetrators of the
massacre of Sikhs, while in the same breath he minimises or rather
dismisses the Gujarat massacre. His much-favoured discursive device to
achieve this dual objective is to imbue the 1984 violence with a kind of
uniqueness that separates it from all other events of violence in
India's recent history. In widely reported interviews, Mr. Advani
routinely describes the massacre of Sikhs as a state-orchestrated pogrom
while the Gujarat violence for him is merely a ‘riot' that happened
spontaneously as an emotional response to the Godhra incident. It
couldn't be more ironical and insidious than this: to claim to feel the
pain and disenchantment of one group of victims of state violence only
in order to dismiss the suffering of another group.
This
malaise goes beyond one political leader and one party, however. Any
quick search of various online debates would reveal how the collective
suffering of thousands of victims of state violence is routinely
utilised in the public domain. The most frequent theme that makes
zealous online activists dig into the public archive of memory is that
of Narendra Modi's chances of becoming India's Prime Minister. In the
rough speak of online debates, contributors ask without hesitation if
the Congress party can demand accountability of Chief Minister Modi
given its own record on 1984? The online supporters of the Congress
party similarly point to the moral bankruptcy of the BJP-RSS vis-à-vis
their role in the 2002 pogrom. The point raised in this discourse is not
about demanding justice for the victims of either 1984 or 2002; it is
about cynically denying justice to one group because the other has not
received justice yet.
The victims of anti-minority
violence — the dead and the displaced, the widows and the orphans — have
thus unwittingly become participants in what has to be among the most
tragic and bizarre political theatres in contemporary India. Their pain,
loss, and suffering have been transformed into a political instrument
to mute calls for justice for the ‘other' victims of similarly
orchestrated massacres. It is as if the two massacres somehow cancel out
or make up for the horror and pain felt by the victims in Delhi and
Ahmedabad. This moral retortion is intended to serve as an eraser on the
nation's violence scorecard: ‘your victims' against ‘our victims'
equals a clean scorecard.
Truth and reconciliation
Societies
that experience violent ruptures, and are keen on repairing them,
usually follow either the judicial system to seek redress — to identify,
prosecute, and punish the guilty — or the more favoured path in recent
years of post-apartheid type truth and reconciliation commissions where
the focus is less on punishment and more on grieving, mourning, and
forgiving. In many cases, for instance South Africa and Guatemala, both
the justice system and the truth commission are invoked to heal the raw
wounds. The most significant ingredient here is the willingness of the
state actively to participate in the reconciliation processes. And this
is precisely what has been lacking in the case of both the1984 and 2002
massacres. The state, if at all, has seemed less than eager to repair
the breach of trust with its minority communities.
The
much-favoured gesture of conciliation adopted by the Indian state has
been the establishment of commissions of inquiry chaired by retired
judges. The purpose and objective of such bodies is deliberately left
unclear. The terms of reference are often weak, and the outcome is
usually wrapped in an indecisive legal language that seldom makes any
forthright and readily legible statements. The victims who are invited
to narrate their stories of suffering in duly sworn and attested
affidavits do so with the hope of gaining justice. Yet those hopes
remain unfulfilled as commissions seldom have power to do anything
beyond making non-binding recommendations. The 1984 violence, for
instance, has been the subject of 10 commissions in the past 27 years;
in one case the commission wound up with the suggestion that three new
commissions be appointed instead. The commissions, it seems, grow and
die in a life cycle of their own that eventually has little to do with
the crimes they are supposed to investigate. They are neither proper
courts where the accused can be tried nor are they truth and
reconciliation type of bodies with an agenda to better community
relations. The only trace they leave probably is a voluminous report,
often diluted at the last minute, which may or may not ever be made
public by the government in power.
A widely held
belief among social scientists and activists is that victims of
suffering most of all want to be listened to in order to heal their
wounds. Indeed, the therapeutic effect of being able to narrate one's
suffering — and to be able to reveal one's wounds publicly — cannot be
underestimated. Yet what is often forgotten is that for the victims, the
path to reconciliation and forgiveness is as much about seeking justice
as about articulating their woundedness. The cheerful images of those
accused of organising violence in news media — being felicitated by
supporters, addressing election rallies, etc. — can surely neither be
read as signs of justice nor reconciliation.
(Ravinder Kaur is a historian based in Copenhagen.)
