Today is October 03, 2024, and all the newspapers, TV media, in India and around the world carried news of your birthday celebrations from yesterday. In India, you being the father of the nation, it was a national holiday where your lasting legacy of “Ahimsa” meaning nonviolence was recalled. In fact, now your birthday is celebrated as the International Day of Non-Violence. Even The Wall Street Journal, out of New York carried a picture of your birthday celebration in India on the front page. In the picture a child was attired like you, in a gesture of refreshing your core message of “Ahimsa.”
Suddenly, my thoughts flashed to forty years ago. It was the last day of the month of your birth in 1984, and by evening in the capital of India the air was filled with smoke billowing all around, and an eerie silence gripping the capital. There were targeted killings, burning properties and vehicles, looting, raping, burning by pouring kerosine and petrol. The police had suddenly disappeared from the scenes of crime, and if they happened to be there they either turned a blind eye or rooted for the perpetuators. What was being unleashed was unbelievable, and even the media coverage of such incidents was totally blacked out. Your message of “Ahimsa” was being replaced with violence “Hinsa” in the capital as well as other major cities of the nation. The trains, airports, roads were not safe for venturing out. The houses, shops and businesses owned by Sikhs were being selectively burned and goods looted. The mobs had voters list where the faith of residents were available to target. With that information the houses of Sikhs were identified and marked with ‘X’ for killing, loot and plunder. Any attempts to stop the attackers was not just futile but dangerous, as it made the person attempting vulnerable to mob attack. The Sikhs, lauded as warriors, and protectors of the nation, had been reduced to victims, despised second class citizens, worthy of elimination.
Your promise of February 21, 1931, to the Sikh community at Gurdwara Sis Ganj in Delhi had been very conveniently forgotten after August 15, 1947, but today they had become pariah in the month of your birth plus following month. You had assured Sikhs that their rights would be respected, and their aspirations would find fulfillment in an independent India, but on that day and days that followed over three thousand Sikhs lost their lives in Delhi. It was an open Sikh genocide with slogans filling the air “Khoon Ka Badla Khoon.” Where you are the father of the nation, the violence, killing, raping, looting, pillaging were just not sanctioned, but also officially abetted. The pride of Sikh, the turban had become their own privation. The widows who lost their husbands, the kids who were orphaned during this carnage, are still languishing after 40 years, and paying the price. Till date these sufferers have not been able to rebuild their lives.
Forty years after the tragic event, there is no official apology, or an attempt to find the underlying cause of it, or punishment of the perpetuators has not been initiated. Even the complicity of the police in the atrocities, which is a grave issue, has also not received adequate investigation or punishments for dereliction of duties. Even the issue of Sikhs in the police forces being sent home from their duties has not been dealt with adequately. Many enquiry commissions have been appointed not to catch the perpetuators, but to wash those and give clean chit to elected and government officials glossing over their acts of omission. The call for reconciliation has fallen on deaf ears. The state machinery was unleashed not against an enemy in times of war, but against the citizens, duly abetted by elected officials.
Gandhi Ji! The father of the nation! Tell me how this could take place in your nation? You are the revered figure of the nation, where hardly any city exists without any street or road named after you plus with your statue on a pedestal greeting the visitors on the street. Your legacy has inspired others as Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, and many others, but in that country is your legacy for lip service and show alone? That aspect bothers me even today. Additionally, there are numerous museums in India and even outside of India that promote your legacy, yet after 105 years of your birth anniversary, what we saw was an unbelievable trauma being unleashed, together with collective consciousness amnesia from the leaders professing to be following your teaching.
I am writing this letter to you Gandhi Ji to plead with you about the need of a museum to showcase, share the tragic stories and voices of these unfortunate victims. So that in future a carnage, a genocide of this nature and scale will not be perpetuated. In fact, this should be the place where we share how when the mockery of the lofty principles is made through their use for solely political gains, the results will be disastrous. This museum will become an essential extension to share the results of perpetuating “Hinsa” in the name of “Ahimsa.” Let us create such a legacy so that these brazen acts don’t get repeated.
