Heart-breaking and disturbing

 

Captions: Book cover; Author Sanam Sutirath Wazir

Sanam Sutirath Wazir’s ‘The Kaurs of 1984 — the Untold, Unheard Stories of Sikh Women’ is a razor-sharp look at the extraordinary devastation that women suffered after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984

By Shevlin Sebastian

On June 4, 1984, Rachpal Singh, the secretary of militant leader Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, was in a room in the Golden Temple. He was with his wife Pritam and their 18-day-old son. The Army was shooting into the Temple during Operation Bluestar. 

Pritam said, “A flash of light would come in from the space below the doors and blind us for a few seconds, followed by the deafening sounds of bombs. I could hear the sound of tank treads moving outside our room, proceeding towards the Akal Takht (the chief centre of religious authority among the Sikhs).”  

At 12.15 am on June 6, a bullet hit her baby’s back before hitting Pritam on the chest. As Rachpal bent over his wife and son, a bullet hit him on the head. He died instantly. Pritam lay in a pool of blood, with her dead husband beside her and her dead son lying on her chest. 

Manjeet Singh, the then press secretary of the Akali Dal, saw a young man and his infant son killed. The mother picked up the son and placed him on his father’s chest. “It’s been more than three decades now, but whenever I close my eyes, that scene comes back to me,” said Manjeet.  

Author Sanam Sutirath Wazir focuses on the suffering of Sikh women in the book, ‘The Kaurs of 1984 - the untold, unheard stories of Sikh women’. Many of whom were rape victims during the 1984 cataclysm that shook Punjab, and the riots that took place in Delhi and other places. 

The Sikh psyche was shattered because of the army’s widespread damage to the Golden Temple. ‘Over 350 bullets riddled the dome of the Golden Temple,’ wrote Wazir. ‘One bullet pierced the cushion on which the Guru Granth Sahib was placed, pushing through as many as eighty-two pages of the book itself. Most of the items in the toshakhana (a storehouse for valuables) were destroyed….all the handwritten hukamnamas (orders), penned by different Sikh gurus across the ages, were lost as well.’ 

Wazir writes with painstaking details about the damage to the Golden Temple and the human rights violations by the Army and the security agencies that took place thereafter. Even women and children were not spared. 

No surprises, there was a blowback. On October 31, 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot dead by her Sikh guards, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh. Immediately, in Delhi, mobs, mainly orchestrated by the Congress Party, laid siege to the Sikh community. 

At Block 32 in Trilokpuri, East Delhi, local leader Rampal Saroj, accompanied by a group of men, asked resident Darshan Kaur where her husband Ram Singh was. She said he had gone out with his brother. 

The men did not believe her. They broke down the main door and barged into the house. Ram Singh was hiding in the kitchen. ‘They dragged him out by his hair,’ wrote Wazir. ‘They placed a quilt and tyre over his head, doused him in oil and then set him ablaze. Ram Singh was nearly burnt to death; he later succumbed to his injuries.’ In the end, all the Sikh men who were present in Block 32 on that day were killed. There were 275 widows across 180 homes.  

The men committed rape against elderly, middle-aged women, and teenage girls. Darshan said a young girl of 15 returned, naked and bruised. She had been raped many times, by some as old as her grandfather.  

Chapter by chapter Wazir tells harrowing tales about what happened to the Sikh women, in places like Sultanpuri, Raj Nagar and Mukherjee Nagar. Their lives were destroyed. Very few have recovered. As one woman, Satwant Kaur, said, “Those monsters had scarred me for life.”

Astoundingly, many women recalled that the rioters used white powder on the victims. Wazir said that it could have been white phosphorus. The powder burns human flesh and catches fire when exposed to the air.

The violence spread beyond Delhi. In Hondh Chillar, in the Rewari district in Haryana, a mass grave of Sikhs was discovered in 2010. 

However, India has not stepped back from this destructive route. Since 1984, according to a Google search, there have been over 70 riots in different parts of India. The latest was the Haldwani riots in Uttarakhand on February 9, 2024. 

Wazir also focuses on women who became militants and became part of pro-Khalistan groups as well as the lives of widows in refugee camps. 

This book is a very valuable document. It heightens awareness of the suffering that takes place. Or as feminist publisher Urvashi Butalia said on the cover, the book is ‘graphic, disturbing and searing.’ 

We need to read it, get appalled and vow to ourselves that as a people, we should never allow such events to happen again.

(An edited version was published in The Sunday Magazine, The New Indian Express, South India and Delhi)