1984 In memory and imagination- Personal Essays and Stories on the 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots: Review
Author: Vikram Kapur
Manjul Publishing Pvt Ltrd, New Delhi 2016
Pages 229
Rs.350
Joan Baez sang that song way back in 1967, but the question was, and still remains, unanswered:we are still engaged in horrendous forms of mutual annihilation. The air is vibrating with hatred, says Pratyaksha(short-story writer, poet and painter) in her story which is featured in the book under review, as she describes a Sikh mother trying to locate her son …
“And then the crowd moved back. A clearing sprung up in the centre and you could see the dance of fire, the dance of death, gruesome, macabre, brutal.”
History has been witness to genocides of various persuasions. Genghis Khan, Timur, Nadir Shah, and the Huns were plunderers for whom the ruthless killing of large anonymous crowds was incidental to their exploits. But, this massacre of targeted communities is the modern and “civilised” means of systematic annihilation of humankind –Nazis/Jews, the Spanish Inquisition, the 30 Years’ War in Europe, the Partition ofour own subcontinent, McCarthyism and the witch-hunt for ‘Commies’…when good neighbours turned into unrecognisable monsters. Like Vikram Kapur, most people who lived through persecutions had “no idea what it means to wake up one morning and find yourself cast as the other”.Perhaps M. A. Jinnah has not been give adequate credit for his fears of the “brute majority”.
Conflict results in the sharpening of the separateness, continues Kapur; everything thereafter is looked at in terms of what happened when the chips were down. Worse still, the perpetrators take the conflict and its outcome as an affirmation of their primacy, not unlike the spoils of war. You could see it in the arrogant demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, in the nonchalant brutality of the Staines’ killingin 1999, and in the repeated shameful atrocities towards the Dalits elsewhere in India. Kapur says that Sikhs, after November 1984, developed a deeper insight into the problems faced by minorities in a polity that was fast losing its historical and constitutionally mandated secular character. “Losing” or lost is a question of perspective…
The book has two sections: ‘In Memory’ with seven essays and ‘In Imagination’ with seven fictional accounts. The first essay is a fairly dispassionate overview (by the Director-General of Police posted in Punjab just after Operation Blue Star) of the entire situation right from the raising of Bhindranwale to the “abrasive conduct of the army” and the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi.
In her emotion packed article, Ajeet Cour (Padma Shri, Sahitya Akademi Awardee, and the ‘1000 Women Peace Crusaders Across the Globe’ for the Collective Nobel Peace Prize) says that while Genghis Khan and others of his ilk were fired by personal ambitions of conquest and glory, “these attacks [against unarmed and innocent Sikhs] merely displayed naked savagery.”In this context, it is shocking to know of the role played by Justice Ranganath Misra who, says novelist Hartosh Singh Bal (in ‘House of Lies’), violated “every due procedure that was necessary in such an enquiry.” One is reminded of the miserable statement of LK Advani with reference to the Press during the emergency: you were asked to bend but you began to crawl. Hartosh informs us that Misra was later made Chairman of the NHRC and member of the Rajya Sabha.
Literary-agent and independent-editor, Preeti Gill in‘A Question of Identity’raises a very disturbing point: Is it that easy to jettison the familiarity and trust of long years of association and friendship?This is a question that will ring in the mind of everyone who stands on the “other side”.Rana Chinnaof the Indian Air Force,rationalises and hopes in ‘When Steel Entered My Soul’ that what happened was “nothing but an orchestrated aberration of the worst kind”, but laments,with reference to Gujarat,that “we have not yet learnt our lessons …”
The section titled IN IMAGINATION starts with a rather nondescript, unconvincing story of a Christian convent harbouring a Sikh woman. The remaining six stories contain graphic, disturbing, frightening images of Sikhs murdered in broad daylight where the police and the army reach too late. Jaspreet Singh (novelist, short-story writer and essayist) describes a murder on a railway platform while Mridula Garg’s (anotherSahityaAkademi awardee) ends her story with the death of a Hindu woman who at that last moment of her consciousness sees her elder son on the outer fringe of the murderous crowd: an iron rod splits her head as she goes to save an old Sikh. Aptly called,‘The Morning After’, it speaks of the dark period when the nation was plunged into diabolic revelry–a morning after with a shameful hangover.
Kapur himself writes of a Muslim whose guilt and shame are only surpassed by his confusion over his nebulous principles; his vague fears push him into silence when his evidence could have brought a politician to justice.The last story is titled Karmabut the three preceding stories also speak of karmic retribution, of an ingenuous hope for poetic justice:perpetrators of the crimes and people who betrayed long-standing friendships meet with violent deaths. Understandable, since they are written by people who have been scarred and whose cries for justice will not be stilled.All told, the book, sharing its name with the Orwellian nightmare, is a harsh reminder of the disastrous eruptions that have arisen and can arise in future over our deepening fault lines.
