The anti-Sikh violence in Delhi that followed the assassination of the then PM Indira Gandhi on 31 October 1984, resulted officially in 2733 persons murdered though unofficial figures were much higher. It lasted between 31 November and 10 November, 1984, with the period between 1-4 November 1984 seeing the most violent attacks. Reports in the press, and by civil society groups – including PUDR-PUCL’s fact finding report ‘Who are the Guilty?’ (released on 17 November 1984) revealed from the outset that there was substantial evidence to show that this was planned and organized – by local leaders, political leaders associated with the ruling party, and by state agencies. In terms of both magnitude and intensity, it came to be widely accepted as a major incident of state organized and targeted violence against an ethnic group in India.
This organized anti-Sikh violence took place over a few days but it has had a long aftermath that is continuing till date. This report is about this aftermath – and in order to write it, the PUDR team sought to examine court cases, reports of Commissions and Committees, conducted detailed interviews with members of the families of victims (particularly in Tilak Vihar in Delhi but also in other areas of Delhi and other cities where they now live), spoke extensively to lawyers, and civil society activists. The report still remains necessarily illustrative rather than comprehensive, owing to the difficulty of getting documents or even listing comprehensively numbers of ongoing cases, for instance. Despite these limitations, it is an attempt to bear witness to this long aftermath of 1984 and its three key dimensions – the four decades of Commissions of Inquiry and Committees and SITs; the role of the police and judiciary and the entire criminal justice system – in and since 1984; and finally, the report focuses on recording the journeys and lives of the women survivors of 1984 – as victims, witnesses and also as feisty survivors, their struggles for justice, the human cost of these struggles, and what carrying the burden of 1984 every single day has actually meant.
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Delhi 1984 The-Long-Aftermath
