Shashi Tharoor - Riot

For two years after Atwal’s murder — a time when she would have found no shortage of Sikhs from the police and the army ready to volunteer to go in and arrest the murderers — Mrs. Gandhi did bugger-all. She was too busy playing politics, while Bhindranwale and his sisterloving goons continued on their rampage. Then, in 1984, she finally did something. Indira bloody Gandhi, the only man in the cabinet, sent the army into the Golden Temple. She could have besieged the place, cut off the water supply, prevented food from reaching the terrorists, starved them into surrender. But no, she sent in the frigging army and tried to — what’s the bullshit word they used? — to extirpate the terrorists from there. That was the term of art. Extirpation. Isn’t it wonderful how the English language manages to bureaucratize the savagery out of bloody human violence? And the army did extirpate the terrorists — at a price. Say what you like about that madman Bhindranwale, and I’ve said a few things myself, but he was a proud Sikh and he wasn’t going to cave in at the first whiff of grapeshot. They had to pound the place with artillery. Hundreds of innocent Sikhs, pilgrims, ordinary frigging worshippers, who happened to be in the temple at the time, lost their lives. Bhindranwale fought back like all hell; he and his people went down in the finest bloody Sikh tradition, all guns blazing. And at the end of the army assault the temple stood pockmarked and bloodied, many of its priceless treasures damaged or destroyed, Sikh pride in ruins.

Yes, man, our pride. It wasn’t just the masonry of the temple that was shattered that day by the assault they called Operation Bluestar. It was unbearable even for those Sikhs who had despised Bhindranwale and all his works. I mean, if some Mafia gang had taken shelter in the Vatican, would anyone have aimed howitzers at Saint Peter’s bloody Cathedral? We felt personally, intimately violated. The same Khushwant Singh who had been so critical of the Khalistanis that he was on the terrorists’ hit list himself, Khushwant Singh returned his civilian honors to the government in protest. If he felt that way, you can imagine what the rest of the buggered Sikh community was going through.

No, I didn’t immediately think of doing anything similar, resigning or anything. Not at that time. Because I told myself I was on the side of the law enforcers. And the government had made an honest bloody mistake. They had done the right frigging thing in the wrong way — they had ended the Bhindranwale terror, but they had done too much damned damage in the process. It was unjustifiable, but excusable. They had to be forgiven. That was my view, and that of others like me, educated Sikhs, people in the establishment. But feelings were running bloody high in the Sikh community generally, even though the president of India, Giani Zail Singh, was himself a Sikh, and he went on television to explain what the government had had to do and why. The preening bastard had had a hand himself in spawning the frigging Frankenstein’s monster that Bhindranwale became, but that’s another story.

Anyway, the end of Bhindranwale did bugger-all to end the terrorism — in fact it simply worsened it. A whole new bunch of angry Sikhs were recruited by the motherloving thugs as a result of the Golden Temple tragedy. And a lot of Sikhs vowed revenge on those who had done this, this thing, to their holiest of holies. The prime minister, Mrs. Indira bloody Gandhi, was their primary target.

Now, I was no great fan of Mrs. G, I can tell you, but I’ll grant her one thing — she didn’t have a bigoted bone in her body. She’d married a Parsi, and her daughters-in-law were an Italian Catholic and a Sikh. So when people told her she should remove the Sikhs from her security detail, she dismissed them with a glare. She had this patrician Kashmiri glare that instantly shriveled your balls, so they didn’t dare suggest it again. “Remove my Sikh security men? Nonsense!” She believed in the pissing professionalism of her protectors, and she thought anyway that she had not acted against Sikhs, just against terrorists, so she had nothing to fear. Unfortunately for her, some Sikhs saw it differently. So one cold morning she was walking briskly in her own back garden, heading for a TV interview with Peter bloody Ustinov, when two of her fucking Sikh bodyguards opened fire on her. A dozen bullets each, I’ve heard it said; some say they emptied their magazines into her, this sixty-seven-year-old woman they had taken an oath to protect. She died instantly, riddled with the exit wounds of their maddened rage. One of her killers was mown down instantly by the other security fuckers, and the other bugger was overpowered, but they’d had their revenge. Sikh honor had been restored.

Hmph. What do they know of honor who have to kill an old widow to restore it?

Unfortunately, revenge is a game any number can play. The reprisals started the same pissing day: some innocent Sikh bugger standing in the crowd outside a newspaper office when the news about Mrs. G was announced — some poor idiot who didn’t see any difference between himself and any of his fellow Indians in the same throng, equally shocked by the headlines — well, this poor idiot got beaten up, his shirt ripped, just for being Sikh. He was the first victim of the backlash to the assassination, but he survived with a few bruises. There were similar incidents here and there in scattered parts of Delhi. Spontaneous bursts of anger directed at the most obvious target, the first available bloody Sikh. And initially, that was all. Until the evil bastards took over.

There were enough of those around, man. The thugs, the odious enforcers, the petty motherlovers of Congress Party politics, Indira’s fucking foot soldiers, the rent-a-mob sloganeers who had shouted, “India is Indira and Indira is India.” They’d been kept under control so far, but this was their chance to have a go. They too had a thirst for revenge. Only Sikh blood could slake it.

Even I cannot describe to you the full horror of what happened thereafter, Randy. I’ve been trained to deal with riots, but this was mass bloody murder in the nation’s capital. The frigging bastards organized mobs of violent lumpens and set them loose on Delhi’s Sikhs. There was an orgy of slaughter, of arson, of looting. Sikh neighborhoods were destroyed, families butchered, homes torched. Some of the mobs had lists of addresses showing which homes and businesses were owned by Sikhs. Can you imagine? In other parts of town, any Sikh unlucky enough to be in the wrong fucking street at the wrong fucking time was killed in the most merciless way possible.

I’ll tell you something I haven’t talked about in years. I had a ten- year-old nephew, my sister’s son, Navjyot. He was returning home from a cricket match with his father. He was a great Gavaskar fan, but Gavaskar was playing in Pakistan at the time. Anyway, what could be more bloody bourgeois, more fucking normal, than a man and his son at a game of cricket on a sunlit October in Delhi? They were driving back home in the family’s Ambassador car, the frigging epitome of solid Indian middle-class respectability, when they ran into a mob looking for Sikh blood to spill.

The bastards surrounded the car, howling and baying their hate for the assassins of the prime minister. “Khoon ka badla khoon,” they chanted. “Blood in revenge for blood.”

My brother-in-law quickly rolled up the windows and locked the doors from the inside. What could he do? There were no bloody police in sight: it was as if they had taken a pissing holiday when they were most needed. He had no means to call for help, no CB radio like some of you Yankee buggers have in your cars. I’m sorry; I know I’m shouting. Randy, I try not to think of my little nephew, his mind still full of cricket, suddenly seized with an unutterable panic at a mob of grown motherfucking men trying to hurt him.