Thirty four new years later...

I was 11 years old when my grandparents sold their house in Jabalpur and came to live with us. The place had been their home for 39 years. After retiring from the Signals Training Centre there, my grandfather had chosen to live on in Madhya Pradesh instead of returning to his village in Punjab. “I have not seen a place where people are this secure,” he would often say. Farmers would leave their tools behind in the fields at night and people didn’t bother locking their homes.

 

My grandparents’ house was on a small hill on the edge of the city. There weren’t many Sikh families in Jabalpur back then, and certainly none eccentric enough to live alone on a hill, surrounded by wilderness. But it was a life they loved: pleasantly isolated, yet close to civilisation — and secure.

 

That changed in 1984, when anti-Sikh violence broke out after Indira Gandhi’s death. My grandfather was in Shillong when their house was attacked. Warned in time by Puran, the house help, my grandmother and uncle had by then fled to a safer place. Hira, my grandparents’ terrifying German Shepherd, put up a brave fight but the mob was too big. It looted the house and destroyed whatever it could.

 

Hira did not come with them when my grandparents left Jabalpur for good. He was far too ferocious and wild for a city house. He was another part of their life that they left behind.

 

Sometimes, when I talked to my grandfather about that house on the hill, he would say, “Don’t go back; keep the image you have of it in your mind.” But I did go back, in 2012, with my mother and daughter.

 

How the hill had changed! The gentle green slope was now cemented and had haphazardly built houses on both sides. We walked past them, dreading what we’d find on top. I heard my mother sigh with relief as the hill opened up. Apart from a school on one side, the hilltop was barren. Our house was gone, but no other building had replaced it, and we were thankful for that. A cemented slab that used to be the kitchen floor was all that had survived. We stood on it and took pictures. I felt the breeze on my face. It was as pleasant as it used to be on those perfect evenings when I would sit on a custard apple tree by the house, watching the sun go down and listening to the music from the village below. We lingered to recreate what was lost forever. Then my mother took one last look at what used to be her home and we walked back.

 

With the memories of 1984 rekindled by developments of the last few weeks, this year comes to end on a mixed note. A once-powerful politician has been handed a life in jail for the bloodbath on Delhi’s streets after a wait of 34 years. Yet, it is painful to see the Congress reward a leader whose name has frequently cropped up in connection with the anti-Sikh pogrom with the chief minister’s chair in Madhya Pradesh. Had it not been for 1984 and the impunity the perpetrators from the ruling class enjoyed, perhaps there would not have been a 2002. Had it not been for 1984, my grandparents would have probably lived and died in Jabalpur — the city of their choice — and not Chandigarh. Somewhere deep inside they carried the scars of the forced displacement they suffered for being the minority.

 

That was an insecure time for the community. One relative of ours who was travelling when the riots broke out never reached home. No one knows what became of him. Even today, after all these years, 1984 is the reference point for us whenever we speak about that family. In Delhi, former prime minister Manmohan Singh’s home was also attacked. And three years later, he bought a house in Chandigarh.

 

What the Sikhs felt in 1984, the Muslims say they feel today. It is no different from what the Hindus felt in Punjab in the aftermath of 1984 — when violence gripped the state for a decade — or perhaps the Kashmiri Pandits did when they were forced to flee their homes in the Valley. It could be another community, another geography, tomorrow. This vicious cycle can be unending.

 

So when a Naseeruddin Shah articulates this fear and says he feels anxious for his children, it is time for us to listen through him to those who do not have the privilege of an audience — and not turn on him, the way some BJP members have done. A professed secular democracy where ruling parties themselves target the vulnerable is failing to live up to the promise made to its people. It will be a new year only when this changes.

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veenu.sandhu@bsmail.in