 Hello and welcome to Newsclick. Today we are going to discuss the 1984 riots that took place against the Sikhs in Delhi and other parts of the country. We have with us Uma Chakravarti who was involved in the Nagarika Ekta Munch with the aftermath of the riots. The history of 1984 has been discussed a number of times but the wounds still remain and we as a society or as a nation have not really addressed the mass crimes that were committed at the time against the Sikh community. Yeah absolutely but actually more than the Nagarika Ekta Munch I was involved with the PUDR because I was a member of the PUDR and it's in that capacity that I first went out into the camps and you know to Sultanpuri. We that's how some of that early evidence around the complicity of the state in the in the carnage began to come out and as you might recall it's led to the publication of the famous booklet the black book called Who Are The Guilty and that was the work of the PUDR and I would like to emphasize that because at this point of time civil rights organizations, democratic rights organizations are all being treated as you know in a sense almost anti-national because they they are uncomfortable for the state but in reality we are the conscience keepers of the of our nation and our people so that's a record I'd like to put down there and that I think leads us to the wounds are wounds are particularly raw because justice has never been done and the whole search for justice which is actually if you look at the report that we put out it was an attempt to try and show you that they that commission of inquiry would should be appointed to examine what actually had gone wrong and in a sense fixed responsibility fixed responsibility of how the carnage could take place for those number of days with no intervention so in that sense I think the rawness of the wounds has remained because justice has not been done to the community as a whole and so this the sense of and I must say that this justice the search for justice then takes a long convoluted history because it's not only that there was a demand for commission of inquiry and there were twists and turns you know PUDR and other organizations actually went to court asking for a commission of inquiry that PUCL and PUDR that was the bench was actually changed Rajendra Sachar was the one hearing that petition he was changed at the last minute so that you wouldn't get a progressive you wouldn't get an admission of the of the case and it took its own so many commissions of inquiry including the including on the police so six police officials for instance were indicted by the kusumlata they appointed the commission and the kusumlata it'll actually indicted six police policemen but nothing happened to them so in a sense the wounds which were raw in 84 began to congeal because justice was denied so in a sense it was the first big massacre in which impunity was in you know in a sense the state created this system of impunity by refusing to concede the basics that any civilized constitutionally governed society should have you know there is an attempt to make this what about trees if you take 2002 Gujarat riots there there is a section the ruling party today will refer to 1984 but the reality of it is that 2002 1984 all of these are blots on our nation yeah and we need to fight all of them absolutely and I am incredibly tired and offended by the fact that you use one to cancel out the other now the entire political rhetoric right from the time of well it it didn't start in 84 because in 84 they were simply stonewalling the justice but once 2002 happened 84 became the the reason for why you would dismiss the call for justice in 2002 so the infamous debate in parliament in which George Fernandez actually made some very irresponsible remarks about so what's new about rapes you know it's it's existed they had to be even excised from the from the records because it was so offensive but using 2000 1984 to cancel out the responsibility for 2002 this rhetoric between and the this conversation that goes on between these two governments is denies the fact that there is a large number of us who have stood against any form of denial of justice and we have stood for the constitutional values for the rights of Indian citizens to live in their society safely so at the end of the day to make it a slanging match between these two governments is the most offensive thing that I can think of you know and it's something that we have to resist you see it even in TV debates the other day there's discussion of the RBI and institutional failure this is on the 31st evening and it has no connection even but the BGP immediately says who's responsible for institutional failure the congress and 84 so 84 five days ten days around 30 around 31st to the third becomes simply a slanging match and more than that it becomes a license to commit any number of crimes today that seems to be more than absolutely absolutely and the impunity just gets worse and worse because at the end of the day who who I want to actually bring up here one of the interviews that we had done for this book that Nandita Haksar and I compiled which is an oral history of 1984 called the Delhi Rats three days in the life of a nation it's a it's one of the interviews was with this man called Pandas Singh Pandas Singh was a Labanya Sikh and Labanya Sikhs were the ones who got really slaughtered in in Delhi because they lived in the resettlement colonies the poor the poor and they were actually not from Punjab at all they were Sindhi Sindhi migrants from Sindh into and he told his story like this you know that is displacement displacement so in 1947 they come from Sindh there's no trouble in Sindh but they come because you know there's been this exchange of populations as it were they try they come to Bombay then they come to Rajasthan and finally they come to Delhi and here they move around till they get these bits of land 25 acres 25 sorry 25 yards where they built their little juggies and square yards where they and they thought that now they had settled and actually with very movingly he described how it is mrs. Indira Gandhi who gave his treats it as mrs. Gandhi Panditain ne humko zameen the and they thought this is the end for us and that's the place so they were congress voters you know they had nothing to do with they are the ones who got targeted he lost two of his sons he at the end of the day he actually he and yet this is a man who made two observations which are very powerful as far as I'm concerned and I would like future generations to know this there was this usual you know sort of rumor or attribution of guilt to particular communities so there was this thing and Pandas Singh said something I've never forgotten he said so he actually distributed the guilt onto he was not going to go into the sectarian stuff and the other thing that he said very powerfully was that I don't I don't believe in retaliation I do not believe in revenge so the transistor bombs had were had taken place at that time he said this is not the way to go I want justice from the courts Kanuni star pehame Nyai mele that's what we're looking for we will get closure only if you get the law gives you justice so that is the question today I mean is the law going to give justice to people or is it instead going to you know sort of facilitate a process of impunity which means that the guilty will never get punished and particularly today yeah when we are seeing lynchings happen at the scale yeah we are also seeing that if irs are being launched launched against the victims and their families absolutely and they even if people have been taken to court on some of these cases they are garlanded when they are court and court set free by the court yeah because no evidence has been provided by the police yeah and this particular UP today yeah where just in the recent incident you had 200 people uh FIRs against 200 uh of the yeah community which has been attacked yeah and no FIR against the people who have attacked the community yeah so this is the kind of well actually tragically uh what we are being reminded of is that state power determines whether action is going to be taken or not and it will be taken against whom it is going to be taken and our struggle really has to be to put uh you know sort of democratic secular opinion in place or or uh you know uh enable that enable that process to complete because uh this the state must be accountable to its people and we must stand for all sections of those who are being targeted some of us actually have to carry the responsibility more than anybody else because otherwise where are these people going to go looking for justice so it is the most depressing time when you find that uh people are being lynched and they get away and at the end of the day here are these women you know and across the I'm reminded of the the widows in 1984 I'm reminded of the women in and what they suffered in 2002 and I'm now looking at these women who are now left to hold their uh somehow keep their families going and it's the struggle to survive and to seek justice it's a terrible and it's in that context that I believe that the the recent judgment on Hashem Pura is such an important judgment so at the end of the day 31 years it's a huge amount of time but at least today Asya Begum can feel that the state gave her justice and I I can't tell you how significant that judgment is in terms of making us feel that yes when the wheels of law can work and they uh they can they do provide us with the hope that hopefully we can all create a world in which that justice that they are entitled to will come to them and extend to also the powerful people who shielded a lot of these criminals from 1984 or today absolutely absolutely thank you very much for being with us hope that we can you know discuss this and other issues in the future this is all the time we have for news click today do keep watching news click and do visit our youtube channel