Devangshu Datta: Repeating the mistake of 1984

Thirty years ago, India lost its moral compass. Or rather the Aam Indian deliberately abandoned this abstraction. The events of October 31, 1984 and the next week were horrifying in themselves. What occurred in the subsequent general elections was perhaps even worse.

On October 31, 1984, two men murdered a woman they had sworn to protect. In retaliation, mobs led by the woman's family retainers murdered thousands of innocents. Senseless violence of this nature is not unusual, but it was the first time that it was carried out with apparent state connivance. The mass murderers used electoral rolls and precise local intelligence to target victims. The police and army did not intervene for days.

In December 1984, the murdered woman's son received an overwhelming mandate in the general elections. The Congress won 414 seats and 52 per cent of the vote in the constituencies it contested. Despite the state's control of electronic media, the details of the massacres were well known by that time. Everyone who voted for the Congress in 1984 essentially condoned mass murder.

The son of the murdered woman was nicknamed "Mr Clean" (and "Computerji" as well). He was given a free pass whenever the anti-Sikh pogroms entered public discourse, despite his coinage of an infamous metaphor involving falling trees. His honesty was highlighted, along with his fascination with technology and his determination to project India as a regional power. Those who voted Congress told themselves that honesty, a techno-savvy attitude and a focus on national pride outweighed 3,000-odd murders.

In 1984, the senior bureaucracy enabled those killings through inaction in the absence of orders from the political establishment. The lack of moral fibre in the bureaucracy continued to show after the Eighth Lok Sabha convened. In 1772, the chief justice of the Marathas, Ram Shastri, had thrown away his career and risked his life when he passed a death sentence on the ruling Peshwa, Raghunath Rao, for the murder of Rao's nephew. There were no Ram Shastris in 1984.

The nation has paid multiple times over for the condoning of the mass murders in 1984. People voted for a clean, honest and dynamic administration that they believed would aggressively promote India's interests abroad; they voted in sympathy for a bereaved family; they chose to overlook the murders of thousands.

It didn't work out the way voters wanted. Mr Clean ended up irretrievably tainted by rumours about the Bofors deal and his family connections to "Mr Q". The flexing of India's muscles led to the insanity of the Indian Peace Keeping Force's intervention in Sri Lanka and that, in turn, led to many deaths, including that of Mr Clean himself. By 1991, India was also on the edge of external default.

In many ways, 1984 did set the template for 2002. The targeted slaughter of one community; the scripted tardiness of administrative response; the assumption of political immunity and benefits accruing to killers - all these are familiar riffs on the same theme. So too is the current election campaign presenting one candidate as a Mr Clean with the implicit suggestion that this outweighs any possible complicity in the mass murders of 2002.

There are differences too. The electronic media is not state-controlled now and nobody controls social media. There were Ram Shastris in 2002. Many brave bureaucrats risked their careers to stop the violence, and then to get evidence into public domain. Multiple murderers have been jailed for 2002. Several sting operations have since embarrassed the state administration.

Will the differences count for more than the similarities? Can India's electorate retrieve the moral values that were abandoned in 1984? I voted legally for the first time in 1984. I'm ashamed of the choices the majority of my age-cohort made in that election. Perhaps some of the 140 million debutant voters of 2014 will look back in 2044 and wonder if they collectively did the right thing.