[First published in YouthKiAwaaz]
Trigger warning: Mentions of communal violence, gender based violence
When one thinks of the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984, one thinks of the bearded and turbaned men who were systematically massacred, many of them burnt alive with rubber tyres around their necks. What is spoken about much less is what the women went through (and continue to go through). All of then lived in fear of violent death, most were forced to witness the murder of their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons. They faced apathy from the officials who were supposed to protect them many were themselves victims of sexual violence. In the years following the violence, they struggled to rebuild their lives, and even today, none of them is able to put the horror of 1984 behind them.
Born seven years after Operation Bluestar and the anti-Sikhs violence, Sanam Sutirath Wazir was a researcher with Amnesty International when he started documenting the stories of the women of 1984. As he spoke to the women who lived through those turbulent times, he unearthed stories of sexual, physical and psychological violence which had never been documented systematically, much less pursued legally. “Main chauraasi ki ladki hun (I am a woman who has survived 1984),” is how one Sikh woman described herself to him- the term spoke of a woman who had been raped multiple times, but who had never officially spoken about it because of the stigma involved.
The book seeks to document the voices of the women who were victims in 1984
As he kept hearing these stories, the author wanted to document these supressed voices in a book, but worried if his gender would preclude him from doing so. His mother convinced him that his gender should be the last thing he should worry about while documenting the stories of rape, murder and trauma inflicted on women during Operation Bluestar and the Anti-Sikh genocide of 1984.
“Kaurs of 1984 — the untold, unheard stories of Sikh women”, published by HarperCollins, is his effort to document what the victims of 1984 went through and their subsequent struggle to rebuild their lives. The book has oral histories of over 40 women who lived through the horror of 1984. Many choose to remain anonymous, others fought publicly for justice and a few even took up arms themselves to protest against the injustice. Each story needs to be told, if only to understand and acknowledge the level of violence that normal human beings are capable of inflicting on their fellow human beings.
The stories of two women who lived through 1984 will give an indication of the nature of trauma inflicted by the events of 1984.
Nirmal Kaur and her sister were given shelter by their neighbours in Mukherjee Nagar. She witnessed the mob come to their house and demand that her parents be handed over to them, and remembers the fear of knowing her parents might be massacred. Though she didn’t lose anyone dear to her in 1984, Nirmal Kaur eyes still well with tears when she recalls those days. They didn’t lose money or property, ‘but they did lose hope in a system that should have been on their side.’
Nirpreet Kaur’s father ran a taxi business and her family was like any other middle class family in Delhi till the assassination of Indira Gandhi. On November 1, 1984, she saw people she knew garlanding her father with a burning rubber tyre, and helplessly witnessed the immolation of her father. Though her family shifted to Punjab and she enrolled in college there, Nirpreet could never forget what the mob had done to her father, and against her mother’s wishes, she joined a militant outfit to seek vengeance. In the years to follow, her (militant) husband will killed, she faced unspeakable atrocities in the hands of the police and she struggled to start life anew, yet, her loss of confidence in the official system is so great that she never regrets joining the militant movement.
The book has stories of loss, betrayal and hardship
These are just two of the many stories in the book, each of which talks of loss, betrayal and untold hardships. Reading the book, one is reminded of the stories in Urvashi Bhutalia’s ‘The Other Side of Silence: Voices from and the Partition of India’. Like during Partition, in 1984 too, though men lost their lives to violence, women paid a price that was never even documented. Women paid a huge price during the violence and the aftermath of the violence, and they continued to pay the price in the years that followed. Even when they tried to rebuild their lives after the loss of their husbands and fathers, they continued being victims of patriarchy with fathers and fathers-in-law conspiring to deny them their just share of the compensation. This book is the story of those women. women who were victims of physical, sexual and psychological violence; women who are still fighting for justice.
The book seeks to document the extreme wrong that was inflicted on women
In an interview, the author said, “The Kaurs of 1984 weaves together scattered stories of grief, betrayal, and loss,” Wazir says, adding that “this book is not about who was right or wrong during that period, but the extreme wrongs that we did to the women who were helpless and unheard”. It is important to read this book because it is only by understanding and acknowledging how quickly neighbours can turn into a mob and inflict immense violence on people they knew that we can work towards to curtailing such violence in future.
The trauma of 1984 is nowhere close to healing. To quote from the epilogue:
‘If anything, the trauma has descended through succeeding generations, with the children of survivors suffering the untold consequences of the violence wreaked upon their elders.’
‘they are seeking… a ‘closure’ that will help them go on with their lives. Not that they seek to forget what transpired or to stop grieving, ,but for the past thirty-nine years they have remained frozen in an unbearably horrific moment, and wish to find closely through the punishment of the perpetrators of 1984.’
While the victims and their families wait for closure, this book documents the suffering of the “Kaurs of 1984”.
[I received a review copy from Harper Collins. The views are my own.]
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