SACW | 14 August 2005

[sacw]

South Asia Citizens Wire  |14 August,  2005


[1]  'If Bush Is So Acceptable To Manmohan And The Congress, Why Lose 
Sleep Over Modi?'
An Interview with Arundhati Roy (S. Anand)
[2]  India : Anti Sikh riots of 1984 riots and the endless wait for justice
  (i)  Victory To The Mob - The Nanavati report is utter garbage 
(Khushwant Singh)
  (ii)  A Misfired Apology  (Sangeeta Mall)
  (iii)  ENSAAF's response to Nanavati Commission report and Govt's 
Action Taken Report
[3]  Sri Lanka: Condolence Letter following assassination of Lakshman 
Kadirgamar (Madanjeet Singh)
[4]  Rights and peace activists plan to jointly celebrate Indo-Pak 
independence at the Wagah-Attari border

______

[1]

Outlook Magazine
August 22, 2005
Special Issue: Independence Day Special

INTERVIEW
'IF BUSH IS SO ACCEPTABLE TO MANMOHAN AND THE CONGRESS, WHY LOSE 
SLEEP OVER MODI?'
The world is a small place. At least it is to the Booker-winning 
author. She talks on, perhaps, every defining topic of our times.
S. Anand interviews Arundhati Roy

I was about to buy batteries for my recorder for this interview and 
was avoiding, as usual, a certain unrepentant brand associated with 
the Bhopal gas tragedy. Sometimes, such independent choices are not 
even possible in this world which some say is becoming flat. What are 
your thoughts?
We live in an Age of Spurious Choice. Eveready or Nippo? Coke or 
Pepsi? Nike or Reebok?-that's the more superficial, consumer end of 
the problem. Then we have the spurious choice between the so-called 
"corrupt" public sector and the "efficient" private sector. The real 
question is, does democracy offer real choice? Not really, not 
anymore.

In the recent US elections, was the choice between Bush and Kerry a 
real choice? Was the choice between Blair and his counterpart in the 
Conservative Party a real choice? For the Indian poor, has the choice 
between the Congress and the BJP been a real choice? They are all 
apparent choices accompanied by a kind of noisy theatre which 
conceals the fact that all these apparently warring parties share an 
almost complete consensus. They just exchange slogans depending on 
whether they're in the opposition or in the government.

So there's a lack of choice despite political democracy?
The last Lok Sabha election was fundamentally about two issues: the 
economy and right-wing Hindu nationalism. I would say that in most 
rural areas, issues of economy were at the forefront of the voter's 
mind. During the countdown, the campaign rhetoric of the Congress was 
about marginalising disinvestment, taking a new look at 
privatisation, taking a new look at 'corporate globalisation'? But as 
soon as it won, even before they took office, senior Congress leaders 
had begun reassuring the market that it would not make any radical 
change.
Look at what's happening now. Privatisation and corporatisation are 
proceeding APACE. Meanwhile, by arbitrarily adjusting the poverty 
line, by redefining what constitutes poverty, the Planning Commission 
drastically reduces the official number of poor people to 27 per cent 
of the population. Half of India's rural population has a food energy 
intake below the average of sub-Saharan Africa. Yet one of the first 
things finance minister P. Chidambaram does is to slash the rural 
development budget to the lowest it has ever been! The one ray of 
hope was the Rural Employment Guarantee Act. But I'm not at all sure 
it will go through. Is it just smoke and mirrors, a game of Good 
Cop/Bad Cop that trades on the almost saintly status of Sonia Gandhi 
and the credibility of some extraordinary people in the National 
Advisory Council in order to garner the Congress some brownie points?

PM Manmohan Singh, who lost a Lok Sabha poll from the posh South 
Delhi constituency in 1999, is called a decent, incorruptible 
statesman. Is he able to carry off a neo-liberal agenda because of 
this non-politician halo?
I don't know why technocrats like President Kalam and this new breed 
of bureaucrat/politician seem to have the middle class and the mass 
media in their thrall. Maybe because they have power without being 
frayed at the edges by real political engagement.

Maybe because they are the architects of the process separating the 
Economy from Politics-and thereby keeping power where they think it 
really belongs, with the elite.Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia 
and P.Chidambaram have fused into the Holy Trinity of 
neo-liberalism.Their vision of the New India has been fashioned at 
the altar of the world's cathedrals: Oxford, Harvard Business School, 
the World Bank and the IMF.They are the regional head office of the 
Washington Consensus.They are part of a powerful network of 
politicians, bureaucrats, diplomats, consultants, bankers, 
businessmen and retired judges who trade jobs, contracts, 
consultancies and vitally-contacts.Right now, for example, there's a 
lot in the news about the scandalous Enron contract being 
"re-negotiated" for the third time-the contract that resulted in MSEB 
having to pay Enron millions of dollars not to produce electricity. 
The renegotiation is all very secret (like the initial Enron 
negotiation). The nodal ministry involved in the re-re-negotiation is 
the finance ministry headed by P. Chidambaram who, until the day he 
became finance minister, was Enron's lawyer. The other members on the 
committee are Montek Ahluwalia and Sharad Pawar-the two who were 
instrumental in signing the disastrous contract in the first place. 
It's like asking an accused in a criminal case to investigate the 
crimes he's been accused of.

Do people in rural India view these technocrats and 
bureaucrat-politicians differently?
A few years ago (when Manmohan Singh was between jobs), I was in 
Raipur at a meeting of iron ore workers from the neighbouring 
districts. I'll never forget a young Hindi poet who read a poem, 
called Manmohan Singh kya kar raha hai aaj-kal? (What's Manmohan 
Singh doing these days?). The anger in the poem was so acute, so 
shocking even to me. All the more so because it was aimed at such a 
gentle, soft-spoken man. The first two lines were: Manmohan Singh kya 
kar raha hai aaj-kal/Vish kya karta hai khoon mein utarne ke baad. 
(What does poison do once it has entered the bloodstream?) At the 
time, I came away disturbed and shaken.... But today? The thing is, 
rural India is in real distress-and many do link their distress to 
Manmohan Singh's reforms when he was finance minister in the early 
'90s.

What did you make of the PM's Oxford address?
Timing is everything, it was an unambiguous political statement. 
Right now, Western powers and several right-wing academics, like the 
historian Niall Ferguson, have embarked on a project of valorising 
Imperialism. This is the argument they use to justify the invasion 
and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and all the ones still to 
come. At this point in history, for the Indian PM to publicly and 
officially declare himself an apologist for the British Empire is 
pretty devastating. After a few cautious caveats in his speech, 
Manmohan Singh thanked British Imperialism for everything India is 
today. Ironically, at the top of his list was all the machinery of 
repression put in place by a colonial regime-the bureaucracy, the 
judiciary, the police, Rule of Law. He then went on to express 
gratitude for the gift of the English language-the language that 
separates India's elite from its fellow countrymen and binds its 
imagination to the western world. Macaulay couldn't have asked for a 
more dedicated disciple.

The only people who might have a valid reason to view the British 
Empire with less anger than the rest of us are Dalits. Since to the 
white man all of us were just natives, Dalits were not especially 
singled out for the bestial treatment meted out to them by caste 
Hindus.

But somehow, I can't imagine Manmohan Singh bringing a Dalit 
perspective to colonialism while receiving an honorary PhD in Oxford.

You once said that on several issues-Babri, N-bombs, big dams, 
privatisation-the Congress sowed and the BJP swept in to reap a 
hideous harvest. With the Congress at the helm, what has 
fundamentally changed?

I'll be honest. When the BJP lost the elections, in spite of my 
intellectual analysis of the situation that nothing was going to 
change economically, I certainly feel less hunted.This is a totally 
selfish point.I think this incredible communal churning has ceased.

The BJP has a far more vicious way of implementing the same policies. 
I don't think we can deny that.

What is the future of the BJP?
It's different in the Centre and the states (like Rajasthan, Gujarat 
and MP).If you look at the number of seats it won and its voteshare, 
it does not indicate that it should have fallen apart like it has.
It seems to have been held together by the glue of power. And when 
that went, it fell apart. I am not mourning this. They seem to have 
exhausted this Ramjanmabhoomi agenda totally. But we also need to 
have a strong Opposition in this country....

The BJP doesn't seem to have the time for that. But the Left thinks 
it is playing opposition.
I think the Communist parties run the risk of making themselves 
ridiculous by contesting everything initially and then caving in 
eventually. They are playing the role of a 'virtual opposition'. This 
Left-Congress combine could well become the secular version of the 
parivar.
All the arguments are reduced to being family squabbles.

What does it mean to be independent today? Has Independence Day 
become a mere annual ritual? As corporatisation and privatisation 
proceed APACE and more and more people are rendered jobless, 
homeless, and have no access to natural resources, anger and unrest 
will build. The
central function of the State will increasingly be to oversee the 
repression of an unemployed, dispossessed population on behalf of the 
corporates. The State will have to evolve into an elaborate tyranny 
which retains all the rhetoric of democracy. Look at what's happening 
in Orissa-the new crucible of corporate globalisation. Multinational 
mining companies-Sterlite, Vedanta, Alcan-are devastating Orissa's 
hills and forests for bauxite. They say Kashmir is like Palestine. 
True. But Orissa is getting there too. Orissa is a police state now. 
For some years now, there has been a resilient, feisty, anti-mining 
movement in Kashipur. You ask what independence means to most 
Indians-visit Kuchaipadar, the extraordinary little Adivasi village 
at the heart of the Kashipur struggle, and you will have your answer. 
Kuchaipadar is surrounded by police. People cannot move from one 
village to the next. Cannot hold meetings, rallies or protests. Over 
the last two years, they have been shot, beaten, lathicharged, jailed 
and several have been killed. Last year, on Independence Day, 
Kuchaipadar's villagers hoisted a black flag. That's what 
independence means to them. Oh, and who's on the board of directors 
of Vedanta, one of the biggest mining companies prospecting in 
Orissa? P. Chidambaram, who resigned on the day he was appointed FM; 
David Gore-Booth, former UK high commissioner in India; Naresh 
Chandra, former cabinet secretary and ex-Indian ambassador to the US, 
and former chairman of the Foreign Investment Promotion Bureau. It's 
a bedroom farce with blood on the tracks.

There's been an outsourcing boom. The Indian IT and IT-enabled 
services industry business touched $17.2 billion in 2004-05. Fifty 
per cent of Fortune 500 companies are clients of Indian IT firms. 
Surely, some people are benefiting?
Of course, some people benefit.

Otherwise there wouldn't be the kind of vocal support that it does 
have among sections of the people and the national media.The 
outsourcing industry has created thousands of jobs, mostly in urban 
areas, and in India that small percentage amounts to a huge number of 
people.But in return, there is a larger section that gets 
disempowered, dispossessed.The point, as always, is: who pays, who 
profits? This section that benefits is full of the joy of having 
cars, mobile phones, lifestyles that they could not even have dreamt 
of a few years ago.They control the media, television, they make the 
movies, they fund them, act in them, distribute them.

They form a little universe of their own, sending each other signals 
of light. For the rest, the darkness deepens. However, be assured: if 
at any point outsourcing begins to cost America, if it begins to 
affect their population seriously, outsourcing operations will be 
shut down in a flash.We live on sufferance. And that's not a safe 
place to build a home.
While the UPA government initially promised to ensure some kind of 
affirmative action in the private sector, 21 leading industrialists 
led by Ratan Tata have pronounced the entire generation of Dalit/ 
tribal people with degrees from Indian institutions "unemployable". 
They have decided to create a new generation of Dalits/Adivasis 
through "skill upgradation".
When it appears that Dalits and other backward classes are getting 
represented suddenly in our democracy, people in power will find ways 
of undermining this process. That's what privatisation and 
corporatisation is about.
Dalits, Adivasis and other dispossessed people should realise that 
they can't bank on the politics of compassion. Because there is none 
left, and they have no leverage on Ratan Tata.

Dalit spokespersons such as Chandrabhan Prasad have been arguing that 
if US corporates can employ blacks under the policy of diversity, 
can't Ford and GE do similar social engineering here?
It was not an act of compassion on the part of Ford and GE. At the 
time in the US, the black civil rights movement was an international 
force to be reckoned with. So some negotiation had to happen. Power 
concedes nothing unless it is forced to. No one knew that better than 
Ambedkar. It was at the centre of his brilliant demolition of 
Gandhi's argument in 'Annihilation of Caste'. Right now, the Dalits 
have no leverage. Today, the Dalit movement is fractured and 
scattered. We need a strong Dalit movement. Unfortunately, it is not 
a movement that anyone has to negotiate with, least of all India Inc.

The UN this April appointed two special rapporteurs to investigate 
and find solutions for caste-based discrimination in India. Can 
something come out of this internationalisation of the Dalit issue?
The UN is such a shaky organisation. It has not been able to bring 
any kind of authority to international issues of late, as we have 
seen from what happened in Iraq. The UN was used to disarm Iraq 
before the attack, and then was just kicked aside. Maybe their (the 
UN rapporteurs') coming is a good thing. But I'll believe it when I 
see something really happening. Because today India is a market. All 
the major corporations are looking at India with greedy, greedy 
little eyes. Whether it is the genocide that took place in Gujarat, 
or whether it is everyday discrimination against Dalits, I don't see 
any of this being allowed to come in the way of Thomas Friedman's 
dreamland project. The treatment of Dalits in India is by no means 
any less grotesque than the treatment of women by the Taliban. But is 
any of the violence against Dalits in the Indian or international 
mainstream press? But if you are a willing and open market, will they 
bomb the caste system out of India, like they wanted to bomb feminism 
into Afghanistan? I am not a believer in these UN-driven 
institutional therapies.
  You have to wage your struggles, you have to put your foot in the door.

That brings us to Friedman's dreamland, New Gurgaon, an outsourcing 
hub.The Congress harped on the 'aam aadmi' before the election.But 
the aam aadmi got pulped in Gurgaon.What lessons do we learn?
Unfortunately, underpaid as they are, and humiliated as they have 
been, the Honda workers are not aam aadmi. They're supposed to be the 
real beneficiaries of globalisation.At least they have work. Far from 
the glare of TV cameras, the aam aadmi has been facing not just the 
lathi, but also goli-in Orissa, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, 
Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala.The atrocity on the Honda 
workers happened at the heart of corporate paradise. In Thomas 
Friedman land. Trouble broke out in the bubble.Gurgaon is one of 
three New Economic Zones where existing labour laws have never really 
applied.In the race to the bottom-cheaper labour, longer hours, more 
'efficiency'-the company's labour contractors, like all labour 
contractors, hired 'trainees' and paid them stipends, not salaries. 
When their 'training' was through, they fired them in order to hire 
more 'trainees'.

The TV coverage cuts both ways-it can either frighten people or 
enrage them. I think the police was given instructions to be so 
brutal and repressive in order to make an example of workers so that 
others would not dare to do this again anywhere. But the uproar that 
has ensued and the fact that Honda has been forced to reinstate those 
who it sacked could mean that workers realise that when they act 
together they do become a force to reckon with.

Doesn't the Indian elite and the middle class conveniently vent its 
anger on the political class and yet align with the state on most 
issues?
This is again about the hollowing out of democracy. Even as we sell 
our credentials on the international stage as a democracy, even if 
there's democracy at the level of panchayati raj or Laloo and 
Mayawati, there's a certain amount of fear in the Indian elite that 
the underclasses are being elected. How do you undermine that? You 
undermine it by corporatisation, by creating a situation in which the 
politicians may hold the theatre and the audience, but the real 
economic power has shifted from their hands. The elite in Pakistan 
has seen so little democracy. So, strangely enough, they know the 
difference between themselves and the state. Najam Sethi can be 
rounded up, beaten up and put in jail. People tell me: if you had 
been in Pakistan, you would have been shot by now. But whoever comes 
to power (in India), the chances of that happening to N. Ram or Vinod 
Mehta are still quite remote. The Indian elite is fused with the 
state in many ways. We think like the state. We're all wannabe 
policymakers. No one's just a citizen.

What do you think of India's new role as a US ally?
The Indian government should seriously study the history and fate of 
former and present US allies-the world is littered with the carcasses 
of their people. Only a few years ago, they were shaking hands with 
Saddam Hussein, and a little before that they were doing it with the 
mujahideen. Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Chile, 
other countries in Latin America and Africa. Look what happened to 
Argentina. And the former USSR. We are tying ourselves into an 
intricate economic and strategic web. Once we're in, there's no out. 
We're in the belly of the beast. Once you're there, you eat 
predigested pap. You behave. You do what you're told, buy what you're 
sold. If you disobey, you're in trouble. Already, you can see the 
signs. Condoleezza Rice says the oil pipeline deal with Iran will be 
a bad idea.

Manmohan, on cue, promptly declares to the Washington Post that he 
thinks it will be very hard to raise money for the project. What's 
that supposed to mean?

But experts say the nuclear deal with the US puts India in a 
'win-win' situation.
If a swordfish signs a deal with a crocodile, can it be a win-win 
deal? Right now, it's strategically important for the US to allow us 
to believe our own publicity about being a superpower. India is not a 
superpower.It's just super-poor. It's not enough to discuss the 
nuclear 'deal' as an issue about nuclear energy and nuclear 
bombs-though that's important too.Where are the studies that show 
that the right kind of energy for India is nuclear energy? Have we 
seriously explored alternative forms of energy? Why has the debate 
been posited as one solely between nuclear energy and fossil fuels? 
What are the pros and cons of nuclear energy versus energy from 
fossil fuels? Why has there been no public debate about these things? 
But the real issue is not about whether India has escaped nuclear 
isolation.It's not about whether the government has capped its 
nuclear programme. It's about whether it has capped its imagination. 
It's about whether it has restricted its room to manoeuvre 
politically, economically and morally. Has it imbricated itself 
intimately into an embrace it can never escape?

But both Gen Musharraf and Manmohan Singh want to be Bushies.
We have two begums competing for the attention of Sheikh Bush. Both 
of them are fighting for attention and are jealous of each other.

Edward Said would have perhaps approved of this interesting 
Orientalist metaphor. But seriously, what should be the terms of the 
nuclear debate?
Actually, it is Orientalist and sexist. I shouldn't have said 
it...anyway. For all these experts appearing to debate and disagree 
on the nuclear issue, these are matters of state and foreign policy 
which are not to be debated in terms of morality and principles, 
because that's not how foreign policy works. It's about 'strategy'. I 
know that. But I don't want to think like the state. As a human 
being, I ask: is it alright for our prime minister, on behalf of all 
of us, to dine at the high table and wave from the balcony arm-in-arm 
with a liar and a butcher called President George Bush? A man who has 
lied about WMDs in Iraq, whose lies have been exposed, whose military 
cowardly killed 1,00,000 Iraqis after getting the UN to disarm Iraq, 
and killed 25,000 more subsequently? It's worth keeping in mind that 
collaboration in wars against sovereign nations is a war crime. And 
also, if Bush is so acceptable to them (the Congress), why lose sleep 
over Modi, our own overseer of mass murder? We are told it's a 
strategic alliance with the US, and morality doesn't apply. But why 
is it that every time a government goes to war, the only reasons 
offered are moral reasons? "To spread democracy, freedom, feminism, 
to rid the world of evil-doers?" Why is it that states expect 
morality of us, but we as individuals can't debate an issue in moral 
terms? I don't understand.

You've travelled in Kashmir...
It's impossible to pronounce knowledgeably on Kashmir after just a 
few short trips. But some things are not a mystery. Hundreds of 
thousands have lost their lives in this conflict. Both Pakistan and 
India have played a horrible, venal role in Kashmir. But among 
ordinary Kashmiri people, Pakistan still remains an unknown 
entity-and for that reason it's become an attractive idea, an ideal 
even, conflated by many with the yearning for 'azaadi'. It's ironic 
that a country that is a military dictatorship should be associated 
with the notion of liberation.

The ugly reality of Pakistan is not something that most Kashmiris 
have experienced.The reality of India, however, to every ordinary 
Kashmiri, is an ugly, vicious reality they encounter every day, every 
ten steps at every checkpost, during every humiliating search.And so 
India stands morally isolated-it has completely lost the confidence 
of ordinary people.According to the Indian army, there are never at 
any time more than 3,000-4,000 militants operating in the Valley. But 
there are between 5,00,000-8,00,000 Indian soldiers there.An armed 
soldier for every 10-15 people. By way of comparison, there are 
1,60,000 US soldiers in Iraq.Clearly, the Indian army is not in 
Kashmir to control militants, it is there only to control the 
Kashmiri people. It is an army of occupation the Indian media-and 
here I include the film industry-has played a pretty unforgivable 
part in. In totally misrepresenting the truth of what's really going 
on. How can we even talk of 'solutions' when we simply deny the 
reality?

State repression, religious fundamentalism and corporate 
globalisation seem interconnected. But hasn't resistance to this 
nexus become symbolic, tokenist, NGO-ised and even a career for some 
professionals, including some would say for you?
It's true.Sometimes NGOs wreck real political resistance more 
effectively than outright repression does. And yes, it could be 
argued that I'm yet another commodity on the shelves of the Empire's 
supermarket, along with Chinese cabbages and freeze-dried prawns. Buy 
Roy, get two human rights free! But between the NGOs and Al 
Qaeda-frankly, I'm with the many millions who are looking for the 
Third Way.


And the prognosis for the War on Terror?
Clearly, it's spreading. Empire is overstretched. The Iraqis have 
actually managed to mire the US army in what looks like endless, 
bloody combat. More and more US soldiers are refusing to fight. More 
and more young people are refusing to join the army. Manpower in the 
armed forces is becoming a real problem. In a recent article, the 
remarkable un-embedded journalist Dahr Jamail interviews several 
American marines who served in Iraq. Asked what he would do if he met 
Bush, one of them says: "It would be two hits-me hitting him and him 
hitting the floor." It's for this reason that the US is looking for 
allies-preferably low-cost allies with low-cost lives. Because the 
media is completely controlled, no real news makes it out of Iraq. 
But last month, I was on the jury of the World Tribunal on Iraq in 
Istanbul. We heard 54 horrifying testimonies about what is going on 
there, including from Iraqis who had risked their lives to make it to 
the tribunal. The world knows only a fraction of what's going on. The 
anger emanating out of Iraq and Afghanistan is spreading wider and 
wider.... It's a deep, uncontrollable rage that you cannot put a PR 
spin on. America isn't going to win this war.

It has been eight years since 'The God of Small Things'. Is there a 
second novel in you or has too much politics meant the end of 
Arundhati Roy's imagination? You have also been talking of 
disengaging from political writing?
All writing is political. Fiction is especially subversive. But it's 
time for me to change gear. I am sort of up for anything right now, 
which is exciting. Let's see what happens.

Any positive thoughts to end this dark conversation?
Let me share a sweet little thing. I saw a news report about two 
Adivasi girls getting married to each other. And the whole village 
was saying: if that's what they want, it's fine. They had this 
ceremony, with all the rituals and customs, and they let them get 
married. That's a moment of magic. It reveals their level of 
modernity, of their sophistication. Of their beauty.


______


[2]  [ India : Anti Sikh riots of 1984 riots and the endless wait for justice ]

(i)

Outlook Magazine
Aug 22, 2005

VICTORY TO THE MOB
THE NANAVATI REPORT IS UTTER GARBAGE. ALL THE KILLERS ARE ROAMING FREELY.
by Khushwant Singh

I have only two words for Justice G.T. Nanavati's inquiry report on 
the butchery of Sikhs 21 years ago: utter garbage. I have the report 
in hand, all 349 pages, plus the Action Taken Report presented by 
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government in Parliament on August 8. 
I thought it would take a whole day or two to go through it. It took 
only a couple of hours because it is largely based on what transpired 
in zones of different police stations and long lists of names which 
meant nothing to me. There are broad hints about the involvement of 
Congress leaders like H.K.L. Bhagat, Jagdish Tytler, Dharam Dass 
Shastri and Sajjan Kumar. He gives them the benefit of the doubt and 
suggests yet another inquiry commission to look into the charges 
against them. Yet another commission? For God's sake, is he serious? 
To say the least, I was deeply disappointed with the whole thing. But 
the game of shirking responsibility was to attain higher levels!

First, the government took its own sweet time to put the report on 
the table of the House, waiting till the last day allotted to it for 
doing so. Union home minister Shivraj Patil had assured the House 
when the report had been submitted to him six months ago that the 
government had nothing to hide. However, he hid it till he could hide 
it no more. That shows the government's mala fide intent in the whole 
business. Even the Action Taken Report makes sorry reading. Most of 
it is aimed at the policemen now retired from service and hence no 
longer liable for disciplinary action. Any wonder why, despite 
monetary compensation, the sense of outrage among families of victims 
has not diminished by the passage of years.
About 21 years ago, northern India down to Karnataka witnessed a 
bloodbath the likes of which the country had not experienced since 
Independence nor after. In Delhi, over 3,000 Sikhs were murdered, 
their wives and daughters gangraped, their properties looted, 72 
gurudwaras burnt down. The all-India total of casualties was close to 
10,000, the loss of property over thousands of crores. What triggered 
off the holocaust was the assassination of Prime Minister Indira 
Gandhi. On the morning of October 31, 1984, she was assassinated by 
two of her Sikh security guards. As the news of her death spread, 
rampaging mobs of Hindus shouting khoon ka badla khoon se lenge (we 
will avenge blood with blood), armed with cans of petrol, matchboxes 
and lathis set upon Sikhs they met on the roads-easily identifiable 
because of their distinct appearance-and set them on fire. Sikh-owned 
shops and homes were attacked and looted. Most of this mayhem and 
murder took place in Congress-ruled states. Word had gone round, 
"Teach the Sikhs a lesson"; the police was instructed not to 
intervene. It was then people realised how much ill-will Sikhs had 
earned because of the hate-filled utterances of Bhindranwale against 
Hindus and the years of killings carried out by his hoodlums in 
Punjab. No Sikh leader, neither Congress nor Akali, had raised his 
voice in protest. Consequently, when Mrs Gandhi ordered the army to 
enter the Golden Temple to get Bhindranwale dead or alive, no Hindu 
condemned the action as unwarranted. Sikhs were deeply hurt by 
Operation Blue Star and ultimately two of them decided to murder Mrs 
Gandhi. What followed was largely condoned by Hindus and the 
Hindu-owned media. Girilal Jain, editor of the Times of India, wrote 
that Sikhs should have been aware of what lay in store for them. N.C. 
Menon, editor of the Hindustan Times, wrote that they had "clawed 
their way to prosperity" and deserved what they got. There were few 
people left to share their pain. It must be acknowledged that some 
leaders of the Sangh parivar and the RSS, including A.B.Vajpayee, 
went out of their way to help the Sikhs.So did men like Ram 
Jethmalani, Soli Sorabjee and a few others.

It was evident that the central government had abdicated its 
authority. President Giani Zail Singh, who returned from a foreign 
tour, called at the AIIMS and after paying homage to Mrs Gandhi's 
body returned to Rashtrapati Bhavan. His car was stoned on its way. 
Thereafter, he refused to entertain phone calls. When I rang him up 
for help as a mob was reported to be on its way to my flat, his 
secretary Tarlochan Singh (now an MP and chairman of the Minorities 
Commission) told me that Gianiji was of the opinion that I should 
move into the house of a Hindu friend. No more. And when a group led 
by I.K. Gujral and General J.S. Arora and Patwant Singh muscled their 
way into Rashtrapati Bhavan, he assured them he was doing everything 
he could. He had done the same kind of thing earlier: Operation Blue 
Star took place without his knowing anything about it till he learnt 
about it from the media. Then he made noises
in strict privacy but did not resign. Nor did he when fellow Sikhs 
were being butchered. He brought the prestige of the President of the 
Republic to an all-time low.
Rajiv Gandhi, who flew in from Calcutta with his cousin and confidant 
Arun Nehru, was quickly sworn in as prime minister by Zail Singh 
without consulting other ministers or chief ministers of states. 
Rajiv was busy receiving foreign dignitaries coming to attend his 
mother's funeral. Days later, in his first public speech, he 
exonerated the murderers: "When a big tree falls, the earth beneath 
it is bound to shake." He meant to take no action in the matter and 
retained men named as leaders of mobs in his cabinet. Home minister 
Narasimha Rao did not stir out of his house. When a few eminent Sikhs 
approached him, he listened to them in studied silence. He remained, 
as he always was, the paradigm of masterly inactivity. With the three 
men at the top refusing to do their duty, little could be expected 
from the Lt Governor of Delhi or the police commissioner. Section 144 
of the ipc, forbidding gatherings of more than five people, was not 
promulgated or enforced; no curfew was imposed, no shoot-at-sight 
order given. A unit of the army was brought in from Meerut but when 
it was discovered that they were Sikhs, it was ordered to stay in the 
cantonment and not meddle with the civic unrest. The only word I 
could think of using for the way the authorities carried out its 
duties? Downright disgusting. It was like spitting in the face of all 
democratic institutions.
However, there were citizens' organisations which refused to allow a 
crime of this magnitude to go uninvestigated and unpunished. Leading 
them were Dr Rajni Kothari and Justice (retd) V.M. Tarkunde. 
Kothari's report, Who Are the Guilty, named men like H.K.L. Bhagat, 
Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar, Dharam Dass Shastri-all MPs and leaders 
of the Delhi municipality amongst leaders of goonda gangs. None of 
those named took these men or organisations to court for criminal 
libel. When Jagdish Tytler claimed that none of the commissions of 
inquiry implicated him in the anti-Sikh violence, he was lying. You 
can see it in the smirk on his satanic face. Only sarkari commissions 
let him off the hook.
More important than Kothari and Tarkunde's findings were those of the 
non-official commission of inquiry set up under retired chief justice 
of the Supreme Court, S.M. Sikri. Comprising retired ambassadors, 
governors and senior civil servants (none of them a Sikh), the 
commission castigated the government in no uncertain terms.

The government could not ignore its verdict.Ultimately, Rajiv Gandhi 
took the Sikh problem in his own hands. He appointed Arjun Singh 
governor of Punjab to make contacts with Akali leaders in jails.They 
were released in small batches to create a favourable 
atmosphere.Secret negotiations with Sant Harchand Singh Longowal were 
started. Zail Singh, Buta Singh and others were kept in the dark. On 
July 24, 1985, the Rajiv-Longowal Accord was signed. Amongst other 
items, it provided for an inquiry commission into the incidents of 
violence of November 1984. Justice Ranganath Mishra of the Supreme 
Court was appointed as a one-man commission.

'Operation Whitewash' had begun. Before Mishra was half-way through, 
the panel of lawyers representing victims of the holocaust led by 
Soli Sorabjee expressed its lack of confidence in the learned judge's 
impartiality and withdrew from the commission. Mishra went ahead and 
submitted his findings to the government.
As expected, he held the Lt Governor and the police commissioner of 
Delhi guilty of dereliction of duty. It must have occurred to him 
that neither of the two could have acted the way they did without the 
instructions of higher-ups, including the prime minister or someone 
acting on his behalf or the home minister. I doubt if Mishra can look 
at his own face in a mirror.
I don't think Rajiv Gandhi was himself a party to the anti-Sikh 
pogrom. If he was guilty of anything, it was allowing it to go on for 
two days and nights till his mother's funeral was over. Behind it all 
was his eminence grise who sent out the message: "Teach the Sikhs a 
lesson". No commission of inquiry, official or non-official, has 
looked into the role of this sinister character, although he is still 
very much alive and around in Delhi's political circuit. Nor, 
unfortunately, can I look into it at this stage.
After the Mishra Commission, nine others were instituted by the 
government. Their terms of reference were restricted. Nothing much 
came out of their findings as most of them focused on the 
shortcomings of the Delhi police in handling the crisis. Resentment 
against the government continued to simmer. Ultimately, in May 2000, 
the government set up yet another commission of inquiry under Justice 
G.T. Nanavati. He was to submit his report in six months. At the 
leisurely pace he heard evidence tendered, it took him five years to 
do so. I did not expect very much from him. But H.S. Phoolka, who had 
taken charge of presenting victims' grievances, persuaded me to file 
an affidavit and appear before him. I did so, but the way the inquiry 
commission functioned didn't inspire much confidence. It was less 
like a court dealing with criminal charges and more like a tea party 
with lawyers on both sides exchanging pleasantries. I told the 
commission what I had seen with my own eyes taking place around where 
I live: burning of Sikh-owned taxi cabs and the desecration of a 
gurudwara behind my flat, looting of Sikh-owned shops in Khan 
Market-all in full view of dozens of policemen armed with lathis 
lined along the road but doing nothing. I also told him of my futile 
attempts to get President Zail Singh on the phone.
There is no doubt about it: the November 1984 anti-Sikh violence will 
remain a blot on the face of our country for times to come. No one 
will take the findings of these sarkari commissions of inquiry 
seriously. It will be left to historians to chronicle events that led 
to this tragedy and the miscarriage of justice that followed.

A few salutary lessons that the experience has taught us should be 
kept in mind by our leaders.The most important is to understand that 
crimes unpunished breed criminals.Another equally important thing to 
bear in mind is that the State must never abdicate its monopoly of 
punishing criminals, if it overlooks its duty or delays dispensing 
justice beyond limits of endurance, it encourages aggrieved parties 
to take the law in their own hands and settle scores with those who 
wronged them.If we do not learn these lessons now, we will have more 
holocausts in the years to come.

o o o o

(ii)

www.sacw.net
August 13, 2005

INDIA: A MISFIRED APOLOGY
by Sangeeta Mall

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's speech in the Rajya Sabha on August 
11, 2005, apologizing for the trauma caused to the Sikhs in 1984 is 
late by about 21 years. The apology was required on November 5, 1984, 
when the massacre of the Sikhs abated somewhat, rather than now, when 
people have other and fresher issues to agonise over. At the very 
least it should have been delivered six months ago, when the Nanavati 
Commission submitted its report. If there is anything the Prime 
Minister should apologise for now, it is the fact that his party and 
his government pulled out all stops to prevent the report from being 
tabled at all, and did so at absolutely the last moment when there 
was no other choice left. We must thank the Prime Minister for 
removing at least the Union Minister for NRI Affairs, Mr. Jagdish 
Tytler, a man with an infamous record that goes back to the hooligan 
days of Sanjay Gandhi, from the Government. We must also thank him 
for his speech in Parliament, albeit a shamelessly belated one, which 
reflects a genuine sense of anguish. But we, the citizens of India, 
must point out to Dr. Manamohan Singh why his speech is all wrong [. 
.. ] .

http://www.sacw.net/DC/CommunalismCollection/ArticlesArchive/SangeetaMall13082005.html

o o o o

>Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 13:52:02 -0700
>Subject: ENSAAF Update: Response to 1984 Report & Other News
>From: Ensaaf <ensaaf at ensaaf.org>
>
>August 8, 2005
>
>GOVERNMENT RELEASES REPORT by
>COMMISSION on 1984 MASSACRES
>
>(New Delhi, India)  The Indian government tabled the 339-page
>final report of the Nanavati Commission, established to investigate
>the 1984 pogroms of Sikhs.  The government also tabled its Action
>Taken Report, in which it culled and responded to ten recommendations
>from the Commission's report. Please read ENSAAF's response at:
>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jaskaran/2005/08/08#a475 .
>
>Twenty-one years after the brutal massacres of Sikhs, organized by
>state and political institutions such as the Congress Party and Delhi
>Police, survivors are left grasping at fleeting dreams of justice.  Once
>again, through yet another commission, the government has strengthened
>impunity for perpetrators of mass murder and stonewalled justice.
>Hundreds of victims took to the streets in New Delhi in protest.  Gujjar
>Singh, who lost his father in the violence, said: "The mob entered our
>home in east Delhi and dragged my father out and cut him to pieces....
>You cannot understand how I have been living since then....Just give us
>justice."
>
>Other News:
>
>* Read a review of ENSAAF's report Twenty Years of Impunity,
>published in the Harvard Human Rights Journal at
>http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/hrj/iss18/marwaha.shtml
>
>* Outlook India has published a detailed story on the Punjab
>illegal cremations matter pending before the Indian National
Human Rights Commission at:  http://tinyurl.com/a988f


______


[3]      Condolence Letter following assassination of Lakshman Kadirgamar

13 Aug 2005

I am deeply shocked and grieved at the dastardly assassination of 
Hon. Lakshman Kadirgamar, chairman of the Sri lankan chapter of South 
Asia Foundation; from its very inception, he played a leading role in 
promoting regional cooperation and peace in South Asia. His death is 
an irreparable loss to SAF and  extremely painful to me personally as 
he was a friend, guide and advisor. On behalf of all the SAF 
chairpersons, I convey with a heavy heart our heartfelt condolences 
to Mrs. Suganthi Kadirgamar and their family.

Madanjeet Singh
Founder, South Asia Foundation
UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador

______


[4]

Daily Times
August 14, 2005

JAC plans joint Indo-Pak celebrations

LAHORE: The Joint Action Committee (JAC) for Peoples Rights, an 
alliance of over 30 civil-society groups and non-governmental 
organisations (NGOs), and Indian human rights and peace activists 
plan to jointly celebrate Indo-Pak independence at the Wagah-Attari 
border on August 14. The caravan led by JAC Convenor Shah Taj 
Qizilbash. staff report

_____




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Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on matters of peace 
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necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.