Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

The Sikh male identity — which included the wearing of a beard, and the carrying of the sword (or, in a different context, the Kalashnikov) — thus brought him naturally into conflict with the Indian state and, ultimately, to the assassination of its female leader. But for many Hindus, the idea of the supreme mother was paramount, and Indira Gandhi’s death was immediately seen as an obscene assault on their idea of the Indian ‘family’. Leaping as outraged sons to avenge her death was a clear duty: “Indira Gandhi is our mother and these people have killed her,” yelled the Hindu crowds.

It should be evident that, for both sides, this crisis of 1984 had everything to do with the unfinished business of Partition, which had done so much to call into question the masculine credentials of both siblings, Hinduism and Sikhism. It was thirty-seven years since Partition, and many of those involved in the present atrocities, on both sides, were seeing these scenes for the second times in their lives. Sikhs who had spent that time rebuilding their lives found themselves subjected to rape and murder all over again; once again they lost their homes and livelihoods. Hindus who had mulled for decades on the ignominy of their flight from West Punjab found themselves taking frenzied revenge on their one-time fellow refugees. The violence which began on 1 November 1984 was fuelled by paranoid rumours, some of which drew explicitly on the unresolved nightmares of 1947: trainloads of dead Hindus, it was said, were arriving from Punjab, where Sikhs had unleashed a campaign of annihilation. It was also rumoured that Sikh militants had poisoned the Delhi water supply, and there was a crisis of drinking water in the city; people travelled far to regions they thought unaffected to collect water for their families.

For four days the violence raged. Mobs patrolled the city with knives, guns and tanks of kerosene, which they used to incinerate people, houses and shops. It is not known how many people were killed; estimates range between 3,000 and 10,000. What was clear to all, however, was that the organs of the state were conspicuously lax in trying to quell the reprisals. It is all but certain, in fact, that members of the Congress Party sponsored the entire episode, handing out weapons and liquor to Hindu avengers and promising them rewards for murders. Congress MPs who owned gas stations provided kerosene for their operations, and in some cases sent vehicles stocked with kerosene to accompany them on their forays. Congress Party officials handed out lists of addresses of Sikh families so that they could be targeted systematically. Rather than acting to control Hindu mobs, the police further incited them with rumours that Sikhs were plotting to bring down the state. Hospitals refused to treat Sikh victims and police stations refused to file reports of crimes against Sikhs.

Indira’s surviving son, Rajiv, who was sworn in as prime minister on the night of her death, gave his own infamous — and indifferent — explanation of this violence: “When a great tree falls, the earth shakes.”

For the city of Delhi, the ‘Sikh riots’ turned ‘the law’ into an obscene nonsense. One commentator relates an incident in the west-Delhi neighbourhood of Sultanpuri, one of the areas where violence was at its most intense, where a Sikh community leader and his two sons were set on fire. The three men were shrieking for someone to bring water. Observing all this, the police inspector shouted that no one should think of coming to their assistance, but he said it in these terms: “if anyone dare[s] to come out and interfere with the law ( kanoon ke khilaf kisi ne hath uthaya — literally, raise their hand against the law) he [will] be shot dead.” The Hindu mob had become the law, the kerosene fire had become the law. Another policeman went around announcing by megaphone that any Hindus who were caught hiding Sikhs from the mob would have their houses burned down because it was illegal to do so. 45

The discrediting of the law was complete. For people in Delhi, whatever other reason there might be to comply with the law, it could no longer be a moral one, for the law had no moral content whatsoever. This impression was only strengthened as successive investigations of the massacre failed to find significant evidence of wrongdoing in the Congress establishment: to this day, no one has been held accountable for what happened. The official response has been a thirty-year-long shrug. The law has no comment.

Delhi was corrupt anyway. But the riots now sent a definitive message that the law was a degenerate part of Indian social life and one’s only moral duty was to oneself. One had to look after oneself, since no one else would do it, and now there were no legal constraints on how one should go about it. It is from this date that the ‘compound’ feel of Delhi’s residential neighbourhoods dates. No more those gentle practices of the past — those middle-class boys who took beds down to the street to sleep incautiously in the open air on hot nights. Such trust of the outsider and the street was put away, and middle-class families replaced their thigh-high walls with ten-foot spiked steel gates. The subsequent boom in private electricity generators has to do not only with the erratic nature of Delhi’s power supply but also with the mentality of self-reliance: no one else should be able to interfere with one’s electricity. The same goes for private wells. The rumour of poison in the municipal water was only that, but its effects persist.

The riots were a breaking point for many. Many Sikh families left Delhi for ever after 1984. But for those that remained, and indeed for Hindus, Delhi would never feel the same again. For many of my generation, who were children or teenagers in 1984, the Sikh riots were the foundational coming-of-age experience, revealing, as they seemed to do, the deep truth of Delhi’s social relations. Bloodshed, it seemed, had not ended with Indian independence. This time it could not be blamed on the British, or on Pakistan, or on the insider within. It was eternally inherent to the city.

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Jaswant is a member of Delhi’s Sikh aristocracy, the descendant of one of the contractors who built the 1911 city. In his early seventies, he has a rakish flair about him: he wears a floppy hat and carries sunglasses in his shirt pocket.

“In the 1970s, this lurking sense that the elite could do what the hell they wanted turned into a syndrome. People became giddy with power. They sucked up to Indira Gandhi, and Congress made sure they did well. So many of Delhi’s big businessmen got their start during the Emergency, when those who supported Indira got big breaks and favours.”

Jaswant is horrified by the Delhi elite of which he is a part, and his comportment is deliberately calculated, in part, to irritate and offend this class. Other members of his circle dislike him intensely. “He is mad,” they say. “He does crazy things. In a party he just unzips his thing and starts pissing in the bushes in front of everyone. He dresses in a crazy way, talks in a crazier way. He has crazy parties.”

Jaswant is indeed eccentric. His life has been full of turbulent, ambiguous relationships and immense private tragedies, and he has emerged from all of this more headstrong and contrary than ever. But among all the people I speak to about Delhi, he is unique in his readiness to speak about the violence and exclusion to which so many of them are immune because of their class. And in this respect his eccentricity seems well directed.

“Look at this Delhi culture. The refugees from West Punjab came to Delhi and they became cart pushers. They showed astonishing enterprise and they have amazing stories. But now they’re filthy rich and they have no social conscience at all. They’re racists, they’ve totally forgotten their own origins. They were refugees themselves but they have no care for the millions of refugees who are in Delhi today. Our north-eastern people who come to Delhi to work are molested and raped every day. It’s horrible. I mean, my blood boils. I don’t know how I stop myself from going out and throwing stones.