A forgotten anniversary
In the midst of all this D-Day celebration and continuous coverage of that on TV (note the bitterness- they cut me off in the middle of the French Open men's final...and I thought only DD went off for the news at matchpoint!), few people remember that it was around this time, two decades ago that Operation Bluestar took place. An event that was to shake India to the very core of its secular foundations. My own personal memories of that day are very limited. I was not yet four, and a trifle excited by the police presence in the city, all this talk of curfew and so on. It would take another eight years, and the events of 6 December, 1992, for me to experience that again.
The BBC has been trying to recapture the events of Operation Bluestar, through a series of columns and articles that are well worth reading. What is particularly telling are the comments in the 'Have Your Say' section. So many people want to forget, often I suspect for reasons of conscience. Just as many ordinary Delhiites showed incredible courage in saving their Sikh neighbours, an equal number stood by and watched in silence. A friend of mine told me yesterday that she wanted to work on rape as an instrument of power during the Gujarat riots, and it occurred to me that the story of how women were treated during the 1984 riots is very poorly documented indeed. Urvashi Butalia has done some excellent work on women and Partition, I'm not sure if she's written anything about the '84 riots. As most of those women are still alive, I suspect that bringing up '84, in an era when Jagdish Tytler gets re-elected and when we have a Sikh PM, is almost poor ettiquette. But these stories must be told, and if you know of a book that does look at this aspect, do contact me.
I don't know whether the mere presence of a Sikh PM will heal the wounds of what happened all those years ago. I would argue that it wouldn't..and that the Congress will remain forever tainted by that one action, that finally brought the carefully constructed Nehruvian secular consensus, however flawed, crashing down.
2 Comments:
Indian Express was covering the Bluestar anniversary by interviewing people who had lost their loved ones during the operation and in the insurgency that followed thereafter. But apart from this and the BBC documentary I haven't seen anything else on BlueStar. I think maybe Tehelka has some stuff on it in this week's issue.
Would you know of a good account of Blue Star that I could buy ?
Deepan
I don't think Operation Bluestar by itself was reprehensible. It was a justified act and necessary to preserve the integrity of the Indian republic. What is reprehensible was the sort of politics that
lead to the rise of Mr Bhindranwale, his release from prison by the Indian government when he was serving a sentence for murder. What is much worse is the massacre of Sikhs that took place in Delhi after Indira Gandhi's assasination.
Incidentally, I think India runs and has always run on a "secular consensus" that predates Mr Nehru. The only realistic secular consensus that the state can implement and guard is that dictated by the constitution. And no government in India has done a proper job of guarding this consensus, so I suspect that the "Nehruvian consensus" was always a sham in reality.
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