This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  Eventually, the cases of some of the brutalized women—like Bilkis Bano—would go on to make national headlines. When I first met her at a relief camp in Godhra, Bilkis sat on a thin plastic sheet under a flickering gaslight, swathed in black, her broken arm in a cast. That evening she was unable and unwilling to put words to the nightmare that still haunted her. Not once did Bilkis cry as her friend told us what she had been through. First, her forty-year-old mother was raped; then the men lunged for her two sisters, followed by her sister-in-law. Finally, it was her turn. She was gang-raped by three men she recognized from her village. That she was three months pregnant made no difference to them as they flung her down, ripped her clothes off and took turns assaulting her, bruising her back, breaking her arm, leaving her praying for the relative mercy of death; praying for anything but this. But the worst was not over. Her three-year-old daughter, Saleha, was killed by the mob as Bilkis lay battered and bleeding.

  Later, she and her husband, Yaqub, would ask for their case to be shifted outside Gujarat in order to secure a successful conviction against the culprits, but not before fighting threats and intimidation to withdraw the complaint or accept that they would never be allowed back in their village. They would find a way to tell their daughters why they spent so much time in the courts and why they were on the news every evening. They would name their newborn after their firstborn who was murdered in 2002.

  ■

  Rape survivors are often stigmatized and shamed by a cultural mindset that seeks to transfer blame from perpetrators to victims. But when sexual abuse becomes a tool of mob violence, it is a different matter altogether. These women were not embarrassed; they did not seek silhouettes and shadows to crouch behind; they wanted no false names or hidden identities. But, in the toxic, highly charged post-riot environment, their accounts were subsumed by the larger volatility of national politics.

  On the floor of Parliament, the NDA Defence Minister George Fernandes fell back on the past to rationalize the present, ‘Yeh jo sara rona roya ja raha hai, ek ek kahani bata kar, jaise yeh kahani pehli baar desh mein ho rahi hai. Ki kahan ma ko maar kar pet se bacche ko nikala, kahan ma ke saamne uski beti ke saath balatkar hua, kisko aag mein jalaya gaya. Kya yeh sab pehli baar ho raha hai? Kya 1984 mein Dilli ki sadkon par aisa nahin hua tha (Why are people building a narrative of sob stories as if this is happening for the first time? Is this the first time that a pregnant woman has been killed; her foetus ripped out? Is this the first time that a daughter has been raped in front of her mother? Is this not what happened on the streets of Delhi in 1984)?’

  In that year began the tragic bookending of the Indian debate on secularism with two unspeakable pogroms. From that time onwards the 1984 riots in Delhi that took place on Rajiv Gandhi’s watch and the 2002 Gujarat riots that took place on Narendra Modi’s watch would be used to checkmate one another in what might be called the chessboard of competitive communalism. And secularism, the foundation of the republic, fashioned out of our astonishingly diverse society, would find itself challenged again.

  II

  I was thirteen the year Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards as she stepped out on the gravel pathway of her garden, her firm, brisk stride abruptly halted by the thirty-one bullets aimed point-blank at her abdomen. Only one missed its mark; twenty-three went right through her, seven were trapped inside her body. When we were sent home early from school we didn’t quite understand what had happened. No one said much in the school bus. Although a holiday had been declared that day—31 October 1984—none of us celebrated. We were frightened. The roads were deserted, Delhi was absolutely silent—yet, we could subconsciously feel the gathering of the violent forces that would soon rip through it.

  When we reached home and settled down in front of the television, the public broadcaster was still not ready to tell the country that Indira was dead. All India Radio was playing film songs. But the word was out on the street. BBC Radio was the first to begin reporting that Indira Gandhi had been killed. Restive crowds gathered outside the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. As the motorcade of President Giani Zail Singh arrived at the hospital, stones were hurled at the Sikh Congressman who had famously outdone fellow sycophants by offering to sweep Indira’s doorstep, if ‘Madam asks’. That was the first hint that no one was going to be spared. ‘Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge (There will be blood for blood)’, the crowd outside the hospital roared, their call to arms building up to a crescendo, as they declared vengeance on thousands of innocent people who had nothing to do with the death of the prime minister.

  At home, doors were being latched; we were told to stay put and not venture out. Our parents and neighbours spoke in worried, hushed tones, as they phoned relatives and friends. My mother’s sister was married to a Sikh; as a child I would tie my long hair up into a knot on my head to play the part of a ‘sardar’ to look more like my cousins. My father’s closest friend was Sikh. 1984 scarred us all.

  In my neighbourhood—originally a refugee colony created for post-Partition migrants from Pakistan—there was a very high concentration of Sikh families, many of them shopkeepers, automechanics or local electricians. News was trickling in from the local bazaar that shops belonging to Sikhs were being set on fire and razed to the ground. They were lucky, given what was happening elsewhere in the city. Men wearing turbans had become targets for homicidal rioters. Gurudwaras where people had sought protection were surrounded by men armed with giant kerosene cans. In buses and on trains, Sikhs were dragged out by their hair and burnt alive in front of helpless, and sometimes complicit, spectators. Entire colonies were widowed. In less than four days, almost 3,000 people were killed.

  The rioters were in control of the capital. Eyewitnesses would later testify that the hunting packs were exhorted to kill by assorted Congress politicians who would go on to become ministers and chief ministers in the ruling establishment. Rajiv Gandhi, who had become prime minister after his mother’s death, inducted party colleagues like H. K. L. Bhagat and Jagdish Tytler into his Cabinet despite credible allegations against them. The national elections that had followed two months after the carnage became the perfect setting for majoritarian muscle flexing in the capital. H. K. L. Bhagat, often called the ‘Old Fox’ of Delhi politics and identified by witnesses as one of the Congressmen who incited the mobs, won with the highest margin in east Delhi. This was the area which had seen the largest number of killings in the capital.

  Police officer Ved Marwah, a former Delhi police commissioner who was appointed to conduct the first enquiry into the 1984 pogrom, argued that in most places the mob was made up of no more than twenty to thirty individuals who could easily have been contained had the military been alerted or had the cops just done their job. But he found case diaries in police stations left blank. Officers had clearly refused to even register cases, leave alone pursue them. Marwah discovered that the police had simply abandoned vulnerable areas in the city, giving the rampaging mobs untrammelled freedom to kill. Later, when he tried to conduct an enquiry into the role of police officers who had displayed such a gross dereliction of duty, they took him to court.

  It is now well known that despite the existence of a large military cantonment within the capital, the military was not deployed during the crucial forty-eight hours after Indira Gandhi was assassinated. Former Prime Minister I. K. Gujral asked Delhi’s Lieutenant Governor P. G. Gavai to send in troops but found no takers for his suggestion. Celebrated Sikh writer Khushwant Singh said he felt like a ‘Jew must have in Nazi Germany’. When he tried to reach the country’s Sikh president, Giani Zail Singh, he was advised to move into a friend’s home till the trouble passed. Not everyone had that option. Cartloads of petrol cans were ferried across the breadth of Delhi, seventy-two gurudwaras were incinerated as policemen stood by idly, not even bothering to use the lathis they wielded. Deposing before the Nanavati Commission, one of the multiple enquiry committees subsequently set up to investigate the riot
s, Major General J. S. Jamwal (the commanding officer of the Delhi area in 1984) said his men were standing by ‘in readiness’ but the executive orders to move in didn’t come till two days later, by which time seventy-two critical hours had elapsed.

  For the next three decades, the victims of 1984 would be knocked around from court to court, their tragedy lost in a maze of criminal cover-ups and judicial delays. In 2013, the government informed the Lok Sabha that 442 of the 3,163 persons arrested had been convicted; there wasn’t a single politician among them. Even the charge sheet prepared by the police on 8 April 1992, implicating Congress leader Sajjan Kumar in a murder case—he was repeatedly named by witnesses and victims—was not placed before the court for two long decades. By 2013, Kumar was acquitted on what H. S. Phoolka, a crusading lawyer for the victims, would call ‘fudged records and the protection of the Delhi police’. Phoolka charged that the police officer who kept the charge sheet locked away in a dusty file never to see the light of day had been rewarded with a promotion.

  On 12 August 2005, twenty years after the riots, the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh offered his regrets. ‘I have no hesitation in apologizing to the Sikh community. I apologize not only to the Sikh community, but to the whole Indian nation because what took place in 1984 is the negation of the concept of nationhood enshrined in our Constitution.’

  Justice, however, was another matter.

  ■

  In the age before private television came into being, Doordarshan, the public broadcaster, censored and controlled by the government, was the only network in India. And so, 1984 was the pogrom that was not on television. This aspect differentiated it in a critical way from the aftermath of 2002 when a still-young television industry made it impossible for murderous men to hide from the omnipresence of the camera. In many other ways, though, the two pogroms were eerily similar. Both were methodical in their madness while masquerading as ‘spontaneous’ expressions of violence. So precise and targeted were the outrages committed by the rioters that when bazaars were burnt, every shop that did not belong to the community under attack—Sikhs in 1984, Muslims in 2002—was left unscathed. Both set out to punish people entirely unconnected to the original sins of the perpetrators—the assassins of Indira Gandhi in 1984 or those who torched the Sabarmati Express in 2002. In both, the mobs which murdered went about their business without fear of the law because of the political patronage they seemed to enjoy. Worst of all, thousands of lives could have been saved both in 1984 and eighteen years later, in 2002, had the governments in power acted swiftly to contain the riots by directing the police to do their job or by calling in the army without delay.

  III

  Nearly two decades after 1984, Gujarat’s moments of shame and murder lasted about the same amount of time as the pogrom that had preceded it—seventy-two hours. What apologists described as a spontaneous upsurge of violence in response to the carnage on the train was in fact the consequence of a lethal combination of acts of omission and commission. Within hours of the incineration of four coaches of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra on 27 February 2002, in which fifty-nine people died, prominent local functionaries of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal—both affiliates of the loosely organized right-wing Hindu Sangh Parivar—began mobilizing their cadres and exhorting them to take ‘revenge’. The protagonists and patrons were different but the slogan was exactly the same as in 1984—‘khoon ka badla khoon’. History was condemned to repeat itself, not as farce, but as tragedy.

  Most of those dead on the train were kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya, where the BJP had long campaigned for a ‘Ram Janmabhoomi’ mandir. The president of the Sadhu Samaj, Gopal Nand, called upon Hindus to unite in retaliation and demanded to know why twelve hours had passed without ‘action’ against the burning of the train. Busloads of loyalists began moving into nearby districts to spread the word. By the night of 27 February, the attacks on innocent Muslims—bystanders at a railway station, shopkeepers, villagers on the run—had begun. Just after midnight, there was in fact specific intelligence warning of possible riots as the bodies of those who had died on board the train at Godhra were being brought into Ahmedabad, escorted by Jaideep Patel, the state unit president of the VHP. Its office-bearers went ahead and announced a state-wide bandh, one that provided them greater cover for the free movement of both arms and men. But there were still no preventive detentions or crackdowns, there wasn’t even a curfew ordered till the next afternoon, even though a mob of 3,000 had gathered outside Sola Hospital to which the bodies had been brought in a macabre funeral procession.

  Across the state, it was the same story. The police either refused to get involved or in some cases sought reinforcements of troops that were dispatched far too late to quell the rampage. In the hours after the horrific attack on the Sabarmati Express, the police control room in Ahmedabad was overrun with wireless messages warning of communal mobilization and asking for more men on the ground. All day and night on the 27th, as the bodies of the murdered kar sevaks were brought back to Ahmedabad—a decision that arguably contributed to the conflagration—state intelligence officers kept alerting the administration to the perils of what could follow. No specific early action was taken on their inputs. Did the Gujarat pogrom (in which almost 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed) take place because of the abdication of responsibility, misjudgement, incompetence, or other acts of omission or commission?

  The city’s police commissioner P. C. Pande, would later defend the delay in placing legal restrictions on people gathering together by arguing that ‘circumstances did not exist to warrant the imposition of curfew… And any hasty decision would have led to panic in the city’. ‘Panic’ does not even begin to describe what happened as a result of that specious theory. Vigilantes flooded the cities and villages drowning all reason or compassion in a deluge of hatred.

  ■

  When we began the ninety-kilometre journey on the highway that connected Vadodara to Godhra—where it all began—we were the only car for miles on end. The otherwise humming four-lane freeway that ran all the way to Indore and Delhi was lifeless. Tragic signposts marked the trail of mob violence—an open packet of salt, a broken bottle of ketchup, an overturned cart, shards of glass, a burnt-down shed. The men and women whose sources of livelihood had been plundered were missing. They had either fled to safety or had been killed.

  Up ahead in the distance, clouds of soot hung in the clear sky. A factory had been set ablaze. A few kilometres from the fire, a couple of policemen leaned lazily against the single barricade on the road, unapologetic about their determined lack of intervention. This was the industrial township of Halol, a major hub of manufacturing companies. As we made our way through the ashes and debris of wood and metal, we found that factory after factory owned by Muslims had been systematically attacked by the arsonists. At a scrap-metal centre, we missed the mob by a few minutes. Distraught workers told us that a band of about a hundred men had descended on the factory because four of those who had died on the train at Godhra had lived in the neighbouring area. The police had not responded to calls for help in the past forty-eight hours. The villagers would stay up at night, forming a small circle of protection around their families—but preparing for the worst.

  Many of the aggressors had no personal connection to the tragedy at Godhra. But the politics of hate touched them all—perpetrator and victim. The violence was simultaneously senseless and perfectly controlled. It never got its targets mixed up.

  At a car-manufacturing unit in Halol we walked straight into a bunch of looters who started to run as soon as they saw our cameras, but then began to enjoy the attention as we pursued them to enquire whether they had started the fire. ‘Kaun baat karega, madam, kaun baat karega (Who is going to talk to you)?’ they said tauntingly, daring me to follow them as they hastily left the scene of the crime. The complete absence of the police—the army was not called out until three days after the violence had broken out—had created an ana
rchic free-for-all. Thugs were able to saunter in and steal from the burning factories whatever the rioters had not already destroyed. Such was the sense of impunity the rioters enjoyed that a group of young men on motorcycles led us from one scene of destruction to the next without being the least bit afraid or apologetic.

  As we got closer to Godhra the air was thick with tension. The roads were no longer deserted; every 200 metres, small bands of men waved down cars and passers-by, hammering on the windows and windshields of vehicles with their long wooden lathis, forcing them to come to an abrupt halt. What you said next would determine whether it was to be a moment of redemption or retribution. The ‘open sesame’ answer to get past the blockade was to make sure you weren’t from the ‘wrong’ religion. ‘Hindu ho kya? Jaane do, jaane do Hindu hain yeh,’ said one man forcing his head halfway into the car and staring at each one of us in turn as if he were endowed with superhuman powers to detect the presence of ‘unacceptable’ faiths. In that moment, I took a deep breath, tried to keep my voice steady and not betray the burst of revulsion and panic I felt welling up inside me. In other circumstances, my answer to the question—What’s your religion?—would have been, ‘I am agnostic and multicultural, but areligious’. At this time, to make it past the mob unscathed, there was only one good answer.