It is perhaps fitting that this Tenth Anniversary issue of Sikh Formations is devoted to ongoing reflections on the 1984 tragedy. In June 1984 the Golden Temple, which Sikhs regard as their holiest shrine, was invaded by the Indian Army in an operation codenamed ‘Blue Star’. The operation was ordered by then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi in an effort to purge the Golden Temple complex of militant Sikhs led by Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, head of the Damdami Taksaal. The operation began on 5 June, as Sikhs were celebrating the martyrdom day of their fifth Guru, Arjan. It lasted several days and resulted in the destruction of the Akal Takht building and the loss of several thousand lives. A few months later in November 1984 the Indian prime minister was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards as revenge for Operation Blue Star. Over a period of three days following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, Sikhs in the capital New Delhi and in other cities around India were brutally massacred, many burned alive, in a series of orgies of state-sponsored violence. This series of events in 1984 spawned a fiercely militant nationalist movement which pursued a guerilla war against the Indian state that lasted until 1992 and resulted in the loss of at least eighty thousand lives. In addition to those who were killed by the state police, many more thousands of Sikhs were subjected to torture, falsely incarcerated and killed in fake police encounters. This was surely one of the darkest episodes in post-independence India, and one that many Sikhs still find difficult both to remember and to forget.
In the decade following 1984, scholarly research on the events of 1984 was sporadic at best, heavily scrutinized, and at times censored by state agencies and institutions including universities. After 1992, with the militant movement having been crushed by the Punjab police, a sense of ‘normalcy’ appeared to have returned, and scholars, teachers and human rights activists began to probe the situation in greater depth. Conferences, books, articles, tracts and legal reports began to appear on a more regular basis and there is now a growing literature on 1984 and related issues.
Sikh Formations has been publishing articles on this topic since its inaugural issue back in 2005. Some of the articles the articles in this volume are drawn from a series of conferences and workshops that have looked closely at topics such as the politics of memorialization, the rise and fall of Sikh ethno-nationalism, and contemporary politics in Punjab and the Sikh diaspora. Others were specially commissioned for this issue. The title of this issue After 1984? is suggestive of the fact that ‘1984’ is not a past event but an event per se. As an event it is not beholden to a past that has now gone, but rather a past that is in some sense very much alive and continues to diffuse into the present to keep the future uncertain. In other words the conditions that gave birth to the actual events of 1984 continue to seep into our present and haunt the future. Thus ‘1984’ exceeds the actual event that happened on a certain date in the sense that it will continue to be a topic of future reflection ten years from now, twenty years from now.
The volume consists of eight major essays. It opens with two essays in the area of political science and international relations that provide somewhat dissonant perspectives on the question of Sikh nationalism. In their jointly written paper, “Rethinking Sikh Nationalism in the Twenty-First Century”, Gurharpal Singh and Giorgio Shani, provide an overview of Sikh nationalism to the present and draw attention to some of the issues and challenges that prevent a better understanding of this topic. In contradistinction from those who have been predicting the imminent demise of Sikh nationalism, Singh and Shani point to its enduring appeal in the current era and urge scholars in Sikh and South Asian studies to adopt a more nuanced approach to the subject. This includes the need to rethink the debate about the formation of religious boundaries. Sikh nationalism didn't just emerge out of thin air as many card-carrying leftists seem to think. Rather, if a cohesive Sikh identity existed prior to the Singh Sabha period, a better way of thinking about this is to ask how the logic and articulation of Sikh identity [was] altered in the colonial period and what were the continuities between modern Sikh identity and the Khalsa”. Furthermore, they argue that scholars need to rethink conventional ideas about the role of Sikh diaspora in fomenting Sikh ethno-nationalism, and also to frame the structural elements of Sikh nationalism within a more comparative South Asian context where similar developments are happening.
Jugdep Chima's article “The Sikh ‘Political Prisoner’ Issue and Hunger Strikes” looks at some of the reasons for the decline of Sikh ethno-nationalism and why it has been unable to sustain itself as a coherent movement. Chima explains this decline by arguing that for any sustained mass community mobilization to take place it is necessary to have the active support of the institutionalized “Sikh political system” vis-à-vis the Akali Dal, SGPC and Akal Takht. For the past two decades the main political machine of the Sikhs has been dominated and manipulated by the Badal dynasty. Although this ruling family has made an outward show of being committed to what Chima describes as a “politics of moderation and non-confrontation with the central state”, opponents and critics of the Badal regime point out that such moderation is really a sign of subservience to the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP with whom the Akalis have been in alliance since 1997. Chima illustrates this with a close analysis of the issue of ‘political prisoners’ and hunger strikes by Sikh activist Gurbaksh Singh Khalsa.
The next three papers in the volume provide renewed perspectives on the aftermath of Operation Blue Star and the anti-Sikh Delhi pogroms on the Sikh psyche and the efforts of Sikhs to memorialize this event. Radkhika Chopra's thoughtful and moving photo-essay “Disinterred Memories” connects multiple threads of the post-1984 saga. Chopra's essay opens with a reflection on the Operational Plan for Blue Star drawn up by General Sunderji (the Indian army's head of Western Command in 1984 and subsequently Chief of Army Staff) which shows the various entry points of the army into the Darbar Sahib complex. Other images show the anxiety of local Sikhs and Sikh pilgrims racing towards the Golden Temple immediately after it was reopened following Operation Blue Star, as well as a variety of photos that capture the way in which Sikhs have tried to memorialize the event through singing of heroic ballads, or through ardas performed at the Akal Takht. The arc of Chopra visual tour takes us to works of protest art displayed at commemorative rallies in London.
Darshan Tatla's essay “The Third Ghallughara” is a soul-searching but searing analysis of the community's pain that continues to be felt by many Sikhs more than three decades after the Indian army's invasion of the Sikhs’ most sacred shrine. Tatla shows how the community's psyche was shattered by the resulting trauma, how it reacted initially in anger and eventually with remorse and extended mourning which for many continues unabated. At the same time, Tatla reminds us that the community also cocooned itself with myths and memories of genocide survival from past traumatic events which at the same time accentuated its bitterness and at times removed it from a sense of political reality – the depiction of “Third Ghallughara” being a case in point. In the first two decades following 1984 Sikhs have been deprived of any honorable means of remembering and forgetting the “critical event” as the discourse about 1984 has been heavily censored by the Indian state. The only recourse as Tatla states is “perhaps a cry in the wilderness over the lost ideals of a faith”.
While much has been written about the psychological effects of 1984 on the broader Sikh community, studies of the effects on Sikh women continue to be marginal at best. To remedy this lack Anshu Saluja's paper “Engaging With Womens’ Words and Their Silences” looks at the womens’ voices in the aftermath of the Delhi pogroms, especially those women from the poorer localities of New Delhi. Saluja examines one particular sector Tilak Vihar in West Delhi where a large proportion of the victims were resettled. In this paper Saluja assesses how women survivors of the 1984 pogrom managed to cope with their sense of trauma and hurt, and tried to negotiate everyday life. In the processes of mapping and documenting the difficult experiences of trauma survivors, Saluja tries to take into account the gaps in their speech which often remain unnoticed and unexplained, arguing that the gaps are often as important as the speech of the victims. Such gaps point to the fact that women survivors of 1984 are often unable to articulate their own agency. Gauging a sense of the gaps in their speech requires “going beyond the words that are spoken and attempting, even if tentatively, to unravel and interpret the silences”.
The last three papers in the volume comprise a combination of film and literary analysis to look at the legacies of 1984. Parvinder Mehta's essay “Repressive Silences and Whispers of History” provides a close analysis of Shonali Bose's probing emotional drama Amu (2007) to look at the anti-Sikh violence of 1984. Though it was released almost a quarter of a century after 1984, Amu was deemed to be politically problematic by the Indian film censors and was therefore banned from television and censored by the Indian Government. Mehta's article, while in broad consonance with the film's theme, nevertheless casts a critical eye on the film's narrative, exposing some of the flaws that dog much of the extant fictional and creative representations of 1984. Mehta's critique is underpinned partly by the fact that she was direct witness to the horrors of the anti-Sikh violence in Delhi. Her paper expresses ethical concerns about the representation of history even in sympathetic films such as Amu. Mehta proposes that the film's critical lens reflects the complexities and dilemmas of Sikh subjectivity that is unable or simply barred from acquiring full agency in the film's narrative. This “passivity’ of the narrator is not dissimilar to popular perceptions about the event leading up to and around 1984.
Unlike the vast majority of writing around the theme of 1984 which has relied either on Punjabi or English language archives, Himadree Banerjee's paper “1984 Tragedy in Hindi Literary Archives” turns to the Hindi archive to review four Hindi literary works on the Punjab crisis. Two of Banerjee's chosen works are authored by Sikhs, while the other two are by non-Sikh authors living outside Punjab. All of these authors, as Banerjee illustrates, have different social backgrounds, religious beliefs and are located in disparate regions of India. Several interesting observations can be gleaned from a focus on Hindi materials. First, it shows that authors residing outside Punjab were not only able to memorialize their experiences of 1984, but also to show how this experience touched the lives of non-Punjabis. Second, not all Sikhs residing outside Punjab responded to the 1984 tragedy “in the same voice”. Thirdly the experiences and portrayals of Punjab by these authors can be “credited with carving out a distinct space for Sikhs in Hindi literary archives”. The Hindi materials thus provide an interesting opportunity for scholars to reflect on notion that Sikh diasporas also exist within India.
The final paper in this volume is written in Punjabi. By publishing this piece Sikh Formations affirms its commitment to publishing articles of a critical nature in the Punjabi language and to the importance of maintaining Sikh Formations as a bilingual space that retains the ability to resist the dominance of conceptual formations in the global Anglophone consciousness. This particular article is again a film analysis. In “Representations of the 1984 Tragedy in Punjabi Cinema” Gurmukh Singh provides an extended critical overview of Indian cinema's portrayal of 1984 and its aftermath. Gurmukh Singh analyses two Hindi films Maachis and Hawayein and three Punjabi films Des Hoya Pardes, Sadda Haq and Punjab 1984. These are films that have been analyzed separately in previous issues of Sikh Formations, but almost never in the comparative framework that Gurmukh Singh deploys and definitely not in Punjabi language, which lends its own aesthetic and psychological appeal to the analytic process, particularly in critiquing Hindi cinema. Using the framework of cultural politics Singh examines the basic ideology, screen techniques and narrative construction of 1984 event in these films. In doing so the author is able to highlight an important, though not unexpected, disjuncture between Hindi and Punjabi cinema. This disjuncture is perhaps exemplified by the way in which a Hindu majoritarian ethos has deeply affected the ethos and expression of Punjab films.