1984: What the women remember

Sanam Sutirath Wazir's The Kaurs of 1984 brings alive the stories of Sikh women caught in the spiral of politics and violence that engulfed Punjab and spread to Sikhs outside state that bloody year

The Kaurs of 1984 – The Untold, Unheard Stories of Sikh Women

Author: Sanam Sutirath Wazir

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 231 + xxiii

Price: Rs 399

In November 1984, when a mob attacked my grandparents’ house, which was on a hill in Jabalpur, my grandmother recognised two of the attackers. They were men my grandfather, who was out of the city that day and hence saved, would sometimes help with money and odd jobs. When he later confronted them, they said they had been paid to attack and loot homes of Sikhs to avenge Indira Gandhi’s assassination.

My grandparents were shocked. They had lived in Jabalpur for nearly 40 years, choosing this city in Madhya Pradesh over their ancestral home in Punjab for its gentle, peace-loving people. In the months that followed the attack, they sold the hill house, bid goodbye to the wonderful wilderness that surrounded it, and came to live with us in our army accommodation in Meerut Cantonment. My grandfather, who was quite a storyteller, would sometimes speak of that house. My grandmother, a loving but stoic woman who could aim a rifle in self-defence if needed and whose black-and-white picture in breeches from the 1950s is etched in my mind, wouldn’t talk about it. She believed in moving on, and in letting my grandfather hold the stage.

 

But what if I had prodded her to tell me about the attack in her own words, about how she coped with life after it and what she felt? These questions flooded my head as I read Sanam Sutirath Wazir’s The Kaurs of 1984  — the stories of Sikh women caught in the spiral of politics and violence that engulfed Punjab and spread to Sikh families outside the state that bloody year.

Several books have been written on the 1984 nightmare. Among them is Manoj Mitta and H S Phoolka’s When A Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage And Its Aftermath, which delves deep into the evidence that emerged from the proceedings of the Nanavati Commission to unravel the truth. There’s Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay’s powerful account in Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984 , and the late Jarnail Singh’s I Accuse . William Dalrymple’s travelogue, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, too, has a vivid account of the national capital after the pogrom.

Mr Wazir’s book adds to this body of work by bringing out the untold accounts of Sikh women. It emerges from a task assigned to him by Amnesty International in 2014, when the human rights body still had a country unit in India (its operations were halted in 2020). His research through books and judicial reports on the 1984 riots revealed a gap— the voices of women were missing from the narrative.

Through interviews with survivors and activists across various districts of Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, he presents these oral accounts, some of which are so disturbing that one is compelled to put the book down and take a break to settle the mind. A few of the accounts have been reproduced from the affidavits the women filed with the commissions investigating the massacre.

Some interviews were conducted over a span of a few years since the women took time to open up about their trauma. When they did, they wanted to tell all — the horror of seeing the mobs, instigated by the police and the political leaders who are named in this book, burning alive their fathers, husbands and sons; of seeing their homes looted and torched; and of being raped or seeing the young girls they knew being publicly raped.

The chapter “Chaurasi ki Na Insafi” (The Injustice of 1984) brings one such chilling account of Darshan Kaur, a resident of Block 32, Trilokpuri, a neighbourhood of disadvantaged people in East Delhi who were settled here after Sanjay Gandhi’s city beautification drive during the Emergency in 1976.

The book isn’t just about women who suffered during the anti-Sikh riots. It is also about those who got drawn into the politico-religious movement as it unfolded in 1984 before Indira Gandhi’s assassination. There are stories of women who turned militant; of a policeman father who got converted and encouraged his daughter to join “the cause”; of women who were raped and rejected by their families; of women who were raped but told never to speak about it for the sake of the family honour.

The Kaurs … is not a dispassionately written book. Mr Wazir is more than an observer, interviewer and researcher. As a Sikh from Jammu & Kashmir and a human rights activist, he is very much a part of the book, allowing the reader to be privy to his own anguish as he narrates the stories.

The book, however, is more than a series of accounts. The author offers some historical context in the first chapter, “Saka Neela Tara – Operation Blue Star, where he takes the reader into the Golden Temple to those June days when the military operation unfolded, throughout referring to Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale as sant (saint). What transpired inside the holiest gurdwara of the Sikhs; the mood inside as the army was called in a day after Indira Gandhi’s appeal for peace through All India Radio and Doordarshan; the people who got caught in it, how they had ended up in the temple, what they talked about — he reproduces it in such detail that you would think he was there, witnessing it all.