I N D E X
Truth about Delhi Violence : Report
to the Nation
Citizens for Democracy
This report came out after the
Congress party’s landslide victory in the Lok Sabha election held within
two months of the carnage. It was brought out in January 1985 by a
relatively low profile human rights group called Citizens for Democracy (CFD).
In his foreword to the report, Justice V.M. Tarkunde, president of CFD and
doyen of the human rights movement in the country, said that “it has the
advantage of being prepared when passions have cooled down and when the
events could be considered in retrospect.”
The distance does seem to have
helped as CFD’s report was the first one to discern and declare
categorically that the holocaust of November 1984 could hardly be
described as a communal riot. The report showed that the killing were a
one-sided affair in which Sikhs did not play an aggressive role at all.
Neither could the violence be attributed, it said, to emotions generated
by Indira Gandhi’s assassination by two Sikh guards.
The report sought to rebut certain
falsehoods propagated by the Congress camp:
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That the violence was purely communal i.e. a Hindu vs Sikh affair.
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That it was a spontaneous outburst of popular anger against Sikhs.
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That the killing of Sikhs began on the very day of the assassination.
The report brought out accounts of
witnesses alleging that in the late hours of October 31, 1984, local
Congress (I) leaders held several meetings all over Delhi to make plans to
kill Sikhs. It also revealed that there was “not a single known
known incident of any Sikh having been killed or burnt” on October 31.
Whatever disturbances took place on October 31 appear
to have been “isolated, sporadic and emotional in nature” and
the violence that started the next morning was “systematic, planned and
organised in character, and based on cold political considerations.”
The conclusions of CFD’s “Report
to the Nation” are:
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The violence was not spontaneous but organised by members of the Congress (I) party.
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It was not a communal riot although it endangered communal harmony in its aftermath.
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It was meant primarily to arouse passions within the majority community – Hindu chauvinism – in order to consolidate Hindu votes in the election held on December 27, 1984.
