Reality, one bite at a time

Searing indictment of RSS, BJP, but action to be taken: Nothing

2009-11-24T22:05:00.004+05:30

Hard conclusions, soft recommendations let sangh parivar, Centre off the hook

25 November 2009
The Hindu

NEWS ANALYSIS
Searing indictment of RSS, BJP, but action to be taken: Nothing

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: There is a phrase in Hindustani – khoda pahad, nikli chuhiya – to describe the underwhelming outcome of an exercise over which one has laboured long and hard.

Justice M.S. Liberhan worked diligently for 17 years through more than 40 extensions of his initial three-month brief to produce a 1029 page report full of facts and details about the events and circumstances leading up to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. His conclusion is unsurprising but unequivocal and bold: the demolition was part of a well-thought out plan -- a “joint common enterprise” -- hatched by the top leadership of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Shiv Sena and Bharatiya Janata Party, the last organisation correctly described as a “front organisation” of the RSS.

Unfortunately, the recommendations which emerge out of his daring excavations are so mousy that they bear no resemblance whatsoever to the forthright conclusions which precede them. After having indicted 68 individuals for bringing the country to the brink of communal disaster, Mr. Liberhan doesn’t call for the filing of charges against those that have escaped being arraigned so far in the demolition case, nor does he speak of expedited criminal proceedings.

This is surprising given his repeated use of the phrase “joint common enterprise” to describe the conspiracy. Ever since the 1999 Tadic judgment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, international criminal law has developed the notion of ascribing liability for mass crimes to those who might not have been direct participants but who willingly facilitated the commission of criminal acts through the positions they occupied in the hierarchy of the organisation involved.

Had Mr. Liberhan developed the concept in his recommendations and pushed for an end to the pervasive impunity enjoyed by politicians, police officers and bureaucrats, he would have earned the gratitude of the nation. But he has done nothing of the sort. Other than calling for the separation of religion and politics and making some other tepid suggestions, the report steers clear of recommending either short-term steps to ensure justice in the demolition case or long-term measures to protect the country from a repeat of the tragedy.

Perhaps the fault lies not so much with Mr. Liberhan and his commission but with the inability of the police and justice delivery system in India to reach the same conclusions he did and then to act upon them with speed and impartiality.

In Chapter 10, Justice Liberhan makes a definitive statement about culpability: “It stood established before me beyond reasonable doubt that the Joint Common Enterprise was a preplanned act for demolition under the immediate leadership of Vinay Katiyar, Paramhans Ramchander Dass, Ashok Singhal, Champat Rai, Swami Chinmayanand, S.C. Dixit, B.P> Singhal and Acharya Giriraj. They were the local leaders on the spot and the executors of the plan conceived by the RSS. The other leaders [L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and others] cannot be absolved of their vicarious liability and were willing collaborators playing the roles assigned to them by the RSS. Their informed support for the Ayodhya campaign, fortified by their physical presence during the grand finale of the prolonged campaign is irrefutably established.

“I conclude that the RSS, BJP, VHP, Shiv Sena and their office bearers as named in this report, in connivance with Kalyan Singh, the then Chief Minister of UP, entered into a Joint Common Enterprise for the purpose of demolition of the disputed structure and the construction of the temple in its place. They practiced intermingling of religion with politics as a well thought out act to subvert democracy.”

The demolition of the mosque was the “zenith of a concerted and well laid-out plan which encompasses an entire pantheon of religious, political and mob leadership”. Justice Liberhan noted, correctly, that “some leaders were consciously kept out of the operational area or planning in order to protect them and preserve their secular credentials for later political use”. Mr. Advani and Mr. Joshi may have been part of the second tier in this joint common enterprise but they cannot escape political or legal liability despite the “plausible deniability” the sangh parivar gave them as a shield.

Seventeen years later, many of the criminals involved in this joint common enterprise are dead. But many flourished, secure in the knowledge that they were above the law. No matter how much the country will now vilify Mr. Liberhan for the little mouse he has produced by way of recommendations, the body of his report provides a wealth of material that any investigating agency worth its name ought to be able to spin a water-tight conspiracy case out of it. Many of the dramatis personae who had memory lapses before the commission would find it harder to resist the interrogation techniques our police force now excels in, including narco analysis. If the UPA government is serious, it can do no better than to file supplementary chargesheets and fast-track the Babri Masjid demolition case so that justice is finally done.

Proof of planning, conspiracy a big blow to BJP, RSS

2009-11-24T01:50:00.002+05:30

Forget the question of who leaked what, let's concentrate on the Liberhan report's findings...

24 November 2009
The Hindu

NEWS ANALYSIS
Proof of planning, conspiracy a big blow to BJP, RSS

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: Once the dust from the unnecessary debate over who leaked the Liberhan Commission’s findings settles down, the country will be in a better position to reflect upon the political consequences of the enquiry report into one of independent India’s most sinister mass crimes: the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya on December 6, 1992.

Though it is not yet clear whether Mr. Liberhan has fixed criminal or merely political responsibility on top Bharatiya Janata party leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, the commission report seems to have concluded that the demolition was no act of spontaneous vandalism but a pre-planned conspiracy. The circle of conspirators may well have been small but it is impossible to imagine leaders like Mr. Advani were completely unaware of what was underfoot. Either way, the Manmohan Singh government is duty-bound to get to the bottom of the matter and to do so without any further delay.

For years, the BJP walked a fine line on the demolition. Senior leaders like Advani sought to avoid direct culpability for what was, after all, a criminal act, while also exploiting the communal polarisation the masjid/mandir issue caused for political gain. The strategy worked fine at first. The demolition was used by the BJP, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Vishwa Hindu Parishad to spread the sangh parivar’s influence beyond the Gangetic plains and into Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat. By the time the BJP come to power in Delhi as part of the National Democratic Alliance, however, the signs of mandir fatigue were already apparent, especially in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. As the communal virus of the 1990s slowly exhausted itself and robbed Ayodhya of its political potency, the BJP moved on to other issues. With Mr. Liberhan content to drag out his enquiry, the legal fall-out from the demolition was managed by petty clerical fiddles at the Central Bureau of Investigation and U.P. bureaucracy. The end result: many senior leaders of the party, including Mr. Advani, extricated themselves from the demolition cases which were, in any case, progressing at a snail’s pace.

Two-fold problem

The problem for the BJP today is two-fold: First, that Mr. Liberhan chose to complete his labours and that too during the tenure of a Congress-led government; and second, that the scope for whipping up religious sentiments and rallying Hindus around the prospective martyrdom of leaders like Mr. Advani is extremely limited. Indeed, ordinary Hindus know that the Babri Masjid’s demolition, like the Gujarat massacres of 2002, is part of the backstory of urban terrorism, including the rise of homegrown terrorist outfits like the Indian Mujahideen. They also know instinctively that religious polarisation of the kind the sangh parivar has sought to engineer has made India a more dangerous and violent place. Any campaign the BJP mounts now will be marked by the desperate search for legal loopholes, alibis and fixes, not defiance and bravado in the service of Lord Rama.

Ironically, the best hope for the BJP lies in the Congress’s reluctance to press ahead its political advantage. At the best of times, the party has never been too enthusiastic about ensuring the punishment of those involved in communal crimes. The findings of the Srikrishna Commission of Enquiry into the 1992-1993 communal killings in Bombay, for example, have remained largely unimplemented. Going by the law of probability — since the probability of law is so low — there are good reasons to believe the Liberhan findings will also meet the same fate.

Iran wants nuclear fuel swap to take place on its own soil

2009-11-17T03:08:00.003+05:30

In the first official confirmation that Iran is leaning towards accepting some version of the US-backed proposal for a nuclear fuel swap, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told The Hindu the proposed exchange of low enriched uranium would have to take place inside Iran, meaning the Islamic Republic will make no prior shipment of 3.5 per cent LEU to Russia before some part of the 20 per cent LEU needed for the Tehran Research Reactor lands on its own territory...

17 November 2009
The Hindu

Iran wants nuclear fuel swap to take place on its own soil

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: In the clearest statement to date of Tehran’s attitude to the U.S.-backed proposal for a nuclear fuel swap as a step towards building trust with Washington, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has said his government takes a positive view of the plan provided the exchange of enriched uranium takes place inside Iran.

Mr. Mottaki told The Hindu in an exclusive interview on Monday that Iran is not keen to send its own nuclear fuel out of the country before the fuel it is to receive for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) arrives on its territory.

Under the original proposal made last month by the U.S. and its partners, Iran is supposed to ship 1200 kg of 3.5 per cent low enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia, where it would be further enriched to 20 per cent. The 20 per cent LEU would then be sent to France for fabrication into fuel rods. Eventually, the rods would be shipped to Iran for use in the TRR, which produces medical isotopes.

Mr. Mottaki said Iran and was in the process of sending and receiving suggestions to the other side. With a positive view regarding the essence and nature of the proposal, we are reviewing the possibility of exchanging this fuel inside Iran.

Asked whether the insistence on exchange inside Iran meant the TRR fuel must come first, Mr. Mottaki replied: Well, if there is going to be any exchange of fuel inside Iran, this must mean one side of the fuel exists in Iran and the other side should come, the 20 per cent.

The U.S. says its main interest in the original proposal of Iran shipping out virtually its entire stockpile of LEU is to buy time, since the fuel would no longer be available for weaponisation should Tehran choose to break out of the NPT.

Interview: ‘Iran hopes President Obama can deliver on his promises’

2009-11-17T03:02:00.002+05:30

If diplomacy continues, it is possible to reach an agreement on the U.S.-led proposal for the exchange of nuclear fuel, says Iran’s Foreign Minister...

17 November 2009
The Hindu

‘Iran hopes President Obama can deliver on his promises’

Siddharth Varadarajan

In an exclusive interview to The Hindu during a two-day visit to Delhi, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki talks about the latest western proposal on the nuclear issue, the reasons behind the recent disclosure of a new enrichment facility at Fardoo and the current state of Indo-Iranian relations. Excerpts.

Iran has yet to respond to the proposal of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany (the P5+1) for fuelling the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR). The proposal, which involves Iran shipping out some of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) in return for 20 per cent enriched uranium, seems good for both sides. It shows the P5+1 is dropping its insistence on Iran suspending all enrichment, and also allows Tehran to build confidence with the U.S. and its allies. What will Iran’s stand be?

In order to provide fuel for the TRR, there are three options in front of us. The first is producing the fuel ourselves, i.e. enriching LEU up to 20 per cent; second, purchasing the fuel from other countries as in the past; or third, considering the proposal which has been made by the other side. And we have taken this proposal into consideration and provided an initial response - that we are ready to discuss that option. We have some technical and economical observations here but in principle, this option could be taken into consideration and put on the agenda. We believe that with the continuation of the diplomacy going on now, it is possible to reach an agreement and compromise. Complementary suggestions and proposals are being sent and received by both sides, and by [International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohammed] ElBaradei.

One of the proposals is to involve Turkey as a staging post for the swap, or for Iran to buy half its requirement for the TRR and export only half of its own LEU. Are these some of the ideas being actively considered by your government?

One part of the discussion is the exchange of Iran’s 3.5 per cent LEU with 20 per cent enriched uranium of the other side. There’s some talk regarding the exchange of these two fuels inside Iran. With a positive view regarding the essence and nature of the proposal, we are reviewing the possibility of exchanging this fuel inside Iran. We have studied this proposal in order to open a new door for the other side. And the truth of the matter is their interaction could somehow build confidence among the Iranians.

When you say “exchange inside Iran”, are you saying the 20 per cent enriched fuel for the TRR must come first?

Well, if there is going to be any exchange of fuel inside Iran, this must mean one side of the fuel exists in Iran and the other side should come, the 20 per cent.

Is it that Iran doesn’t trust some of the countries involved? Are you afraid, for example, that the French may cheat you?

That is not what we are saying. We need fuel for the TRR. May be in exchange for one portion of this fuel, we hand over some of our fuel. Therefore, it is quite natural to see this happen inside Iran.

From what I gather, you are looking to modify the basic P5+1 proposal but U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said this is a ‘take it or leave it’ offer.

In diplomacy, we do not have zero or hundred. Therefore, flexibility is considered the essence of diplomacy. I believe this, and I guess the American side will understand this point as well…. Earlier, when they wanted to talk to us, they put some preconditions [like suspension of enrichment].But today they are talking and participating in talks without any preconditions.

The IAEA has now visited the proposed nuclear facility you recently declared at Fardoo near Qom. What is the purpose of the facility and why did Iran inform the agency about it only recently?

The reason for nuclear activity in Iran is producing fuel for generating power. The Fardoo facility is a site designed to take into account the use of new and updated centrifuges and the [need for] security. According to the laws we have ratified in Iran, we had to inform the IAEA only18 months before injecting fuel into the centrifuges. But we have done so before that time.

The U.S. claims Iran told the IAEA about Fardoo because it realised the CIA knew about the site and was likely to go public. Is this true?

Whenever they have any information, they highlight it ten times more for the benefit of the world’s public. So how come the CIA was so humble that it did not announce this site to the public! No matter when we announced it, they were going to say something else.

Do you feel President Obama is sincere when he says he wants to build new relations with Iran? Do you feel he represents a change from George W. Bush?

We consider the new administration different from the earlier one, which was a total warmonger administration that sullied the reputation of the U.S. The failure of the Bush policies has been confirmed by the American people, who showed this with their votes in the presidential election. Today, everyone around the world knows Obama is a chance for the U.S. And the experts there should not allow this opportunity to lead to failure. We want to believe what President Obama is saying. We hope he can operationalise what he says. To the extent to which President Obama is serious in his approach, Iran is ready to help.

There is a feeling in the aftermath of your recent presidential election that divisions within the Iranian establishment might make it hard for Tehran to take advantage of the opportunities for dialogue presented by Mr. Obama and the latest P5+1 proposal.

The incidents after the elections ended a long time ago. It was a miscalculation by those who lost. I think the presidential election strengthened the capability of Iran. It was unique in our history that the difference between the president and his nearest rival was 11 million votes. Therefore, the decision-makers of the Islamic Republic of Iran are moving forward with more energy and power. We have received the messages of President Obama and are studying those messages. When we assess that the administration’s actions and deeds go along with one another, certainly they are going to have our help.

Indian officials say they are keen to expand relations with Iran. What are the specific areas of cooperation you discussed with External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna?

In my meetings with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Mr. Krishna, we reviewed all dimensions of our relations. I agree they are interested and keen on developing and enhancing relations with Iran. We found our Indian friends serious and believe a new chapter has been opened for cooperation.

But the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline remains dead?

We voiced our full readiness that after finalisation of the issue by the Indian side we can add India to the project. Both the EAM and PM reiterated and raised this issue.

Among well-wishers of Iran in India, there is concern about the recent secret trial of the Iranian scholar, Kian Tajbakhsh, for his alleged involvement in the post-election protests. Now he has been sentenced to 12-15 years. We hope his case can be reviewed because he is a scholar and not someone involved in subversion.

All judicial verdicts can be reviewed and the opportunity of appeal is there for him. I am not aware of the details of his case. But our great effort is to see that those entering court can use all their rights, including appeal or using the capacity and potentiality of pardon.

India after Indira, 25 years on

2009-11-01T11:12:00.004+05:30

She didn't have time to learn from our mistakes. What's our excuse?...

1 November 2009
The Hindu

India after Indira, 25 years on

Siddharth Varadarajan

Indira Gandhi was not responsible for the massacre of some 4,000 Sikhs in Delhi, Kanpur, Bokaro and other Indian cities which began on this day 25 years ago. But the fact that the influential culprits were able to get away with mass murder — and to get away with it in style, despite several changes of government at the Centre since then — is an indivisible part of the complex legacy she left behind.

A legacy of a strong nation unbroken by ‘fissiparous’ tendencies despite the dire predictions of foreign observers; a nation armed with nuclear weapons and missiles; a nation with the ability to assert an independent foreign policy and independent path of capitalist development, in the main, fully capable of holding its head high in the international community and world economic stage. But her bequest is also a nation with a democratic culture built on the proliferating quicksand of personalised, dynastic politics and money power, of weak and ineffective institutions easily subverted by the individuals carefully chosen to lead them. A nation where the rule of law is a plastic, contingent concept which rarely makes demands on those in authority.

Earlier this year, it took an act of individual caprice — the hurling, in desperate anger, of a shoe at the Home Minister — to effect a small but symbolic dent in the edifice of impunity that all Indians now take for granted. The Congress (Indira) finally decided not to allow Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler to contest the elections on a party ticket.

But even this concession came infected with a pathology caused by decades of valueless machine politics: one of the two tainted politicians was able to dictate that his brother replaces him as candidate.

What is it that allowed a local-level leader to wield such embarrassing influence on a national party? The Congress was not always like this. In a remarkably perceptive assessment of Indira Gandhi’s career as Prime Minister penned barely two years after death, Sudipta Kaviraj traced the decline of ideology and of a robust party apparatus within the Congress to the populistic transformation of party politics. That, in turn, was the product of Indira’s need to overwhelm established party interests, especially at the State level, with top-down campaigns centred around her own personality and the loyalty of a new breed of politicians who could use “resources” rather than “arguments” to deliver votes. “People who were pressed into political service were more in the nature of political contractors who were willing to go to any length to dragoon votes, systematically replacing discursive techniques with money and subtle forms of coercion. Thus, out of the logic of the technique Indira Gandhi brought in, Congress started becoming gradually depoliticised. Even earlier, people had regretted that arguments were being replaced by resources as the primary political asset; now the only arguments used were resources.” (‘Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics’, Economic and Political Weekly, September 20-27, 1986).

Political contractors

Kaviraj does not say so but when Indira Gandhi died, it was these ‘political contractors’ who got mobilised to deliver a headcount of a different kind. And they went about their task with great efficiency.

Their success, however, depended on another factor, which Indira’s India was particularly well-equipped to deliver: the willingness of the police and administration to turn a blind eye to the arson and murder which was taking place. The last essential ingredient in the production of the 1984 massacres was the ability to manage the aftermath by ensuring impunity for the guilty. A sitting judge of the Supreme Court, Ranganath Mishra, was handpicked to head a commission of inquiry which, predictably, found no systemic lapses and assigned no culpability to the ruling establishment. In the best tradition of suborned institutions, Mishra went on to become the first head of the National Human Rights Commission when it was set up and, later, a member of the Rajya Sabha. Proof of the commitment with which he went about his initial brief is provided by the fact that another commission established 15 years later managed to unearth far more details about the violence than he had.

Market economies need institutions in order to function in a stable, predictable and rational manner. Robust institutions function well regardless of the individuals in them; in India, everything hinges on the choice of the individual. Mishra delivered a vapid report but he did so with speed. Others labour for years to produce a similar outcome. When a rare individual like Justice Srikrishna produces a report which indicts the system, as he did in the case of the 1993 Bombay riots, the same system has a hundred ways of consigning his recommendations to the dustbin.

The reality

It is tempting to link this very Indian disregard for the norms of ‘bourgeois’ democracy to the residual pull of feudal impulses in our political and social life. But the reality is that the consolidation of capitalism and the growing power of industrial, trading and mining elites have not led to any emphasis on institution building. If anything, the situation might actually be getting worse.

Indeed, over time, the style of politics the Congress adopted during Indira Gandhi’s time has become the norm for virtually all parties, right down to the induction of sons, daughters, wives and brothers at every level of political power. With the growing salience of ‘resources’ in elections, it was only a matter of time before the alliance between party leaders, kinsmen and affluent regional elites got transformed into the rise of the Seriously Wealthy Politician — leaders like the late Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy and his son, Jaganmohan, Sharad Pawar and the BJP’s ‘Bellary Brothers’ in Karnataka.

‘Fissiparousness’, in the final analysis, even in the Punjab, was ended not by the security forces but by letting a hundred sons bloom.

And yet, it would be unfair to lay the blame for the current decline of politics and institutions and the rule of law entirely at the door of Indira Gandhi, even if the trend began with her. But the responsibility for fixing things lies with the present. Just as one sin, if unrepented, begets the next, 1984 led ineluctably to the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat. And there will be future killings too, unless the system is overhauled and impunity ended. Indira Gandhi made her mistakes — the Emergency, the opportunistic fomenting of religious extremism for electoral gains in Punjab — and some would argue she paid with her life for them. Had she lived, she might have chosen to chart a different course, though we owe the formal rise of dynasticism and the top-down politics of ‘nomination’ by supreme leaders and high commands to the last phase of her political career. Ironic, then, that the only politician today who seems to have grasped the corrosive nature of this aspect of her legacy is her grandson, Rahul Gandhi, with his emphasis on grass-root level elections in the Youth Congress — an organisation that, in the darkest days of the Emergency, was a metaphor for the worst possible values in politics.

1984: Who are the Guilty?

2009-10-31T20:20:00.001+05:30

The report which blew the lid off the role Congress leaders played in the anti-Sikh massacres...

Citizens Report

Who Are The Guilty?

Report of a joint inquiry into the causes and impact of the riots in Delhi from 31 October to 10 November 1984

People's Union For Democratic Rights (PUDR)
People's Union For Civil Liberties (PUCL)
1984

Published jointly by

Gobinda Mukhoty
President, PUDR
213, Jor Bagh
New Delhi- 110003

Rajni Kothari
President, PUCL
1, Court Road
Delhi - 110054

Printed at: Sunny Graphics, Rohtas Nagar, Shahadara, Delhi

Price: Rs 3
November 1984

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The People's Union For Democratic Rights and the People's Union For Civil Liberties would like to place on record their gratitude for the valuable information given by the survivors of the carnage at tremendous risk to their lives, the volunteers of Magrik Ekta Manch and many others who by their dedicated work made possible the investigation and publication of this report

1. INTRODUCTION

A fact-finding team jointly organised by one People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) and people's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) in the course of investigations from November 1 to November 10, has come to the conclusion that the attacks on members of the Sikh Community in Delhi and its suburbs during the period, far from being a spontaneous expression of "madness" and of popular "grief and anger" at Mrs. Gandhi's assassination as made out to be by the authorities, were the outcome of a well organised plan marked by acts of both deliberate commissions and omissions by important politicians of the Congress (I) at the top and by authorities in the administration. Although there was indeed popular shock, grief and anger, the violence that followed was the handiwork of a determined group which was inspired by different sentiments altogether.

Experience of individual members of the team as well as their extensive interviews with the (i) victims of the riots (ii) police officers who were expected to suppress the riots, (iii) neighbours of the victims who tried to protect them, (iv) army personnel and v) political leaders, suggest that the attacks on the Sikhs followed a common pattern, whether they took place in Munirka in the South, or Mangolpuri in the West, or Trilokpuri in the east. The uniformity in the sequences of events at every spot in such far-flung places proves beyond doubt that the attack were master minded by some powerful organised groups. As a senior army officer deployed in Delhi during the recent riots said : "This arson is the work of an expert". Newspaper reports suggest that this pattern is similar in all Congress (I) ruled states.

There was also a definite pattern discernible in the choice of the victims made by the assailants. According to the 1971 census figure Sikh males in the age group of 20-50 number approximately , 1,00,000. The Sikhs who were killed in the recent riots largely belonged to this age group. The official estimate of only 325 killed (including 46 Hindus) till November 7 (The Hindustan Times, November 11) sounds ridiculously low compared to the magnitude of arson, lynching and burning alive of people in the resettlement colonies alone. On the bases of information gathered from various sources, including eyewitnesses, survivors and relatives of the dead, the team estimates that the member of those killed is more than a thousand.

From our talks with the victims and their neighbours in almost every riot hit spot, we could reconstruct the sequence of events, which followed a stereotyped pattern everywhere.

The first phase was marked by the floating of a set of rumours on the evening of October 31, following the announcement of Mrs.Gandhi's Death. The rumours were three. First, Sikhs were distributing sweets and lighting lamps to celebrate Mrs. Gandhi's death. (Later during our investigation when we asked the residents of the affected localities whether anyone from among them had actually seen such things, almost everyone admitted that they had not personally witnessed it, but had heard from someone else. We did however come across a few people who while expressing revulsion at the incidents of assaults on the Sikhs, added that they had seen in some places some Sikhs expressing their glee at Mrs. Gandhi's death by demonstrative gestures. We have reports that some isolated groups of non Sikhs also exhibited similar behaviour. From the information that we have gathered from various sources, our impression is that such cases were few and isolated). The Second rumours was that train-loads of hundreds of Hindu dead bodies had arrived at Old Delhi Station from Punjab.Third, water was poisoned by the Sikhs, As for the two latter rumors, we came across evidence of policemen in van touring certain localities and announcing through loudspeakers the arrival of the train and the poisoning of water. In certain areas, we heard that police officials had rung up residents advising them not to drink water. These rumours (the last two were officially repudiated later) contributed to the shaping of a public mind that acquiesced in the attack and murders that took place soon after.

The second phase began with the arrival of groups of armed young people in tempo vans, scooters, motor cycles or trucks from the night of October 31 and morning of November 1 at various places like Munirka, Saket, South Extension, Lajpat Nagar, Bhogal, Jangpura and Ashram in the south and south-east the connaught Circus shopping area in the centre and later the trans Jamuna colonies and resettlement colonies in other areas in the north. With cans of petrol they went round the localities and systematically set fire to Sikh houses, shops and gurudwaras. We were told by the local eye witnesses in all the area we visited, that well know Congress (I) leaders and workers (their names are to be found in Annexure-I) led and directed the arsonists and that local cadres of the Congress (I) identified the Sikh houses and shops. A senior police official who for understandable reasons does not want to be named. Pointed out : "The shop signs are either in Hindi or English. How do you expect the illiterate arsonists to know whether these shops belonged to Hindus or Sikhs. unless they were identified to them by some one .who is either educated or a local person ? " In some areas, like Trilokpuri, Mangolpuri and the trans-Jamuna colonies, the arsonists consisted of Gujjar or Jat farmers from neighbouring villages, and were accompanied by local residents, some of whom again were congress (I) activists. In these areas, we were told, Congress (I) followers of the Bhangi caste (belonging to the scheduled caste community) took part in the looting. In South Delhi, buses of the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) were used by the miscreants to move from place to place in their murderous journey. How could the DTC allow the buses to be used by criminals ?

The attacks in the resettlement colonies (e.g. Trilokpuri in the trans-Jamuna area and Mangalpuri in the west, where the maximum number of murders took place, again displayed the same pattern. The targets were primarily young Sikhs. They were dragged out, beaten up and then burnt alive. While old men, women and children were generally allowed to escape, their houses were set on fire after looting of valuables. Documents pertaining to their legal possession of the houses were also burnt. In some area of Mangolpuri we heard from the survivors that even children were not spared. We also came across reports of gang rape of women.The orgy of destruction embraced a variety of property ranging from shops, factories, houses to gurudwaras and schools belonging to the Sikhs. In all the affected spots, a calculated assailants to burn alive the Sikhs on public roads. Even five days after the incidents, on November , in the courses of one our regular visits to Mangolpuri we found that although the ashes had been cleared, the pavement in front of the Congress (I) office was still blotched with burnt patches, which the local people had earlier pointed out to us as spots where four Sikhs were burnt alive.

II Socio-Economic Composition Of The Assailants

In the area which were most affected, such as Trilokpuri, Mangolpuri and Sultanpuri, the mobs were led by local Congress (I) politicians and hoodlums of that locality

The team members on the basis of extensive interview in different parts of the city were able to piece together the characteristics of the mobs that were responsible for the looting, arson and killings.

In some cases the mobs were brought from outside the locality (where they were set loose by local political leaders) and Jats and Gujjars from neighbouring villages. They were transported in vehicles. A large number of Scheduled Castes people were also a part of the mob.

More important; in the area which were most affected, such as Trilokpuri, Mangolpuri and Sultanpuri, the mobs were led by local Congress (I) politicians and hoodlums of that locality. These areas, it will be recalled , were setup in the urban resettlement drive initiated by the Congress (I), and have since been active support bases of the Congress (I). These areas have also in the recent past provided the Congress (I) rallies in the city substantial numerical support. In other words, there exists in such areas an established organisational network through which masses are mobilised for demonstration of Congress (I)'s ostensible popular support. A veteran politician based in Delhi put in very crisply when he said that these resettlement colonies "are the kept (rakhel) of the Congress (I)".

The participations of the Jats and Gujjars from the so-called "urban villages" of Delhi played a very strong role in adding to the numbers of rioters and in aiding to the numbers of rioters and in aiding the riots, murders and looting. They were particularly dominant in West and South Delhi. Most of the these villagers who once owned land in Ber Serai, Munirka and Mohammadpur, for instance made a tidy sum of money after their land was taken away for the urban expansion of New Delhi. The land owned by these villagers was generally of a very poor quality with no irrigational facilities. For this reason the villagers in these areas had to augment their resources through non-agricultural means, not least of them being brigandage. After their lands were acquired by the government they suddenly became prosperous and began to exert themselves politically as well. It is a known fact that if one is to make any headway in an election the Gujjars and Jats of these areas have to be one's side. Unfortunately, much of the police force which is stationed in this area and around is drawn from these communities. For this reason, on various occasions there had been a noticeable complicity in these areas between the criminals and the police. This truth was brought home starkly during the recent riots.

As for the Scheduled Caste communities who were displaced due to the acquistion of land for urban expansion those from the Valmiki community utilised the benefits of the reservation policy and came into the city where they found jobs in the policies, UPSC etc. The Bhangis went into the Corporation, while the third-major group, the Dhanaks, considered the lowest caste, are engaged in a variety of odd jobs. Among the Scheduled Caste communities living in the resettlement colonies, the Valmikis are pre-dominantly supporters of Jagjivan Ram, while the Bhangis are solid supporters of Congress (I), Information gathered by us from the trouble areas suggests that the Bhangis many of them working as a corporation - comprised the bulk of the local miscreants the Sikhs.

A few words on the composition of Delhi's population may be relevant at this point. Hindus comprise 83 percent of Delhi's population. The present Sikh population is around 7.5 percent ( an estimated 500,000 people) . A majority of them settled in Delhi after the partition, before which their population was only 1.2 percent of the total population of the city.

III. ROLE OF POLICE

All through the period from October 31 to November 4 - the heights of the riots - the police all over the city uniformly betrayed a common behavioural pattern marked by (i) total absence from the scene; or (ii) a role of passive spectators or (iii) direct participation or abetment in the orgy of violence against the Sikhs.

On November 1, when we toured the Lajpat Nagar area we found the police conspicuous by their absence while Sikh's shop were being set on fire and looted. Young people armed with swords, daggers, spears, steel trishuls and iron rods were ruling the roads. The only sign of police presence was a police jeep, which obstructed a peace procession brought out a few concerned citizens (who later organised themselves into the Nagarik Ekta manch) on the evening of November 1, When the procession was on its way to the Lajpat Nagar main market, a police inspector from the van stopped the procession, warned it not to proceed reminding its members that the city was under curfew and Section 144. When leaders of the procession wanted to know from the police inspector why the arsonists and rioters were not being dispersed if curfew was on, he gave no reply and warned instead that the processionists could go to the Lajpat Nagar market at their own risk. At the Lajpat Nagar market, leaders of the procession sought to pacify the mob by pointing out that innocent Sikhs were not responsible for Mrs. Gandhi's assassination and should be protected from the attacks. They raised the slogan : " Hindu-Sikh bhai bhai " As the crowd began to listen to the speeches made by the procession leaders, organised attempts were made by certain groups from among them to shout down the speakers, by raising the slogans :- "Indira Gandhi Zindabad", "Hindi Hindi bhai bhai". It is significant that wherever we went, we did not find any sign of mourning or grief on the faces of those who were participating in the looting and burning. Attempts of pacify them by the peace marchers were met with derisive laughter. Listening to their raucous exultation and looking at their gleeful faces, one would have thought it was a festival, but for the arson and loot that was going on.

In the resettlement colonies, the police came out from their passive role and directly participated in the violence against the Sikhs. We were told by survivors that at the first signs of tension those who felt threatened personally went to the nearby police stations to seek their intervention. But the police did not respond. In Trilokpuri, the police reportedly accompanied the arsonists and provided them with diesel from their jeeps. The Station Hours Officer (SHO) of Kalyanpuri police station under which Trilokpuri falls, withdrew the constables who were on duty there when action against the SHO and his two colleagues by suspending and arresting them for a criminal negligence of duties. In Sultanpuri, the SHO, one Bhatti, is alleged to have killed two Sikhs and helped the mob in disarming those Sikhs who tried to resist the mob.

Several residents of Loni Road in the trans-Jamuna area, who were camping at Shakarpur when we interviewed them on November 7, told us that the police announced on loudspeakers two or three times at night on November 1 that they would not be responsible for the safety of the Sikhs and that the latter must look after themselves. One women from the same area said she had seen a police jeep full of men and that the stoning of Sikh shops was conducted from the jeep. Another resident from the same road said that the police had incited the looting of a watch shop before it was burnt.

In Kotla Mubarkpur, a domestic worker told our team members that the police had encouraged the looting. Later they were reported to have said to the looters; " We gave you 36 hours.Had we given the Sikhs that amount of time, they would have killed every Hindu".

In the Kingsway Camp, residents claimed that seventy percent of the loot was to be found in the police lines, suggesting that the police took a leading role in the plundering.

When after this destruction and murders, people went to complain and file FIR's the police in many areas refused to record their complaints, according to information gathered from the Hindu neighbours of the victims. A respected Sikh professional whose house was burned on 1st November was not able to register an F.I.R. despite all efforts. In Mangolpuri we were told, a police officer asked the Hindu complainants why they were protecting Sikhs and advised them to look after safety of Hindus. Typical was the experience of Dharam Raj Pawar and Rajvir Pawar - two residents of Ber Sarai - who on November 1, went to the sector IV R.K. Puram Police station to ask for protection of Sikh family (which till then was being sheltered by Hindu neighbours from impending attack by a mob led by a Congress-I man, Jagdish Tokas) The officer in charge of the police station reportedly told them that he could not offer any help. Two constables later said to them, " You being Jats should have killed those Sikhs. What are you doing here ? Don't you know a train has arrived from Punjab carrying bodies of massacred Hindus ?"

A few individual police officials who did try to intervene and stop the riots found their efforts frustrated primarily through lack of co-operation from the top. One senior officer told us that when on October 31 and November 1 be received reports about some 3000 to 3000 people moving around the city in scooters and motorcycles without helmets, he contacted the CID seeking information from them regarding the identity of these people. Till November 7, when we met him, he had not received any report from the CID.

While analysing the role of the police during the crucial period we can not afford to ignore the responsibility of those in position of authority at the top, namely the Home Ministry. The Home Minister, Mr. Narasimha Rao who was inducted in the new Cabinet by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi soon after Mrs. Gandhi's death, was enpowered in his capacity as a Home Minister to deploy the para-military forces ( if the Delhi Police force was found to be inadequate or inefficient) to quell the violence that erupted following the announcement of Mrs. Gandhi's death. Mr Rao is not a new incumbent who is unaware of the procedural technicalities. We are left with the question : why did Mr. Rao, with his past experience as a Home Minister in the previous cabinet, fail to take the necessary steps and summon the forces available to him to nip in the bud the communal elements that organised the riots?

IV. ROLE OF THE ADMINISTRATION

Men at the top in the administration and the ruling party displayed repeatedly a curious lack of concern often bordering on deliberate negligence of duty and responsibility throughout the period of October 31 to November 4. From our talks with various Opposition Party leaders and prominent citizens we found that many among them had got in touch with senior Ministers as well as people in the Delhi Administration on October 31 itself, warning of impending troubles following the announcement of Mrs. Gandhi's assassination. The newly sworn in Home Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao was said to have assured the BJP leader Atal Behari Vajpayee on October 31 evening that "everything would be brought under control within a couple of hours" (The Stateman, November 10, 1984). Yet at the same time on the same day, Cautam Kaul, Additional Commissioner of Police in front of the All India Medical Institute, referring to the disturbances which were just breaking out, said: " We cannot deal with the situation of this nature". (Indian Express, November 1, 1984) Strangely enough, even after this, Mr. Kaul has been made Additional Commissioner, Security. Inspite of such warnings given well in advance, those in positions of authority did not seem to bother to take any firm step. (See Annexure 3).

Soon after the assassination (October 31), we heard from a reliable source, a meeting was held at 1 Safdarjung Road, the Prime Minister's official residence where the then Lt. Governor P.G. Gaval, a Congress (I) leader M.L. Fotedar and the Police Commissioner among others, met. A senior police officer present at the meeting expressed the view that the army should be called as otherwise there would be a holocaust. No attention was paid to the view.

On November 1, when almost all of Delhi was aflame, an opposition MP rang up Mr. Shiv Shankar, a Minister in Rajiv Gandhi's new cabinet, and the Home Minister, Narasimha Rao, to inform them about the situation in the city and the need for army action. The Ministers were reported to have assured him that the army was about to be called and curfew would be imposed. (Several citizens including some senior government officials went to the President of India on the afternoon of November 1, and they told that the Government was still considering whether to call out the army.)

But our experience on November 1 tells a different story. As already mentioned earlier, till late night there were no signs of either curfew or army, while miscreants were on the rampage in front of the police. In the hearts of the city - Connaught Circus - Sikh owned shops were being set on fire right under the nose of heavy para-military and police pickets. We later heard that the DC of Faridabad has asked for army on November 1, but troops arrived only on November 3.

On November 2, although the newspaper that day announced three official measures (i) clamping of an indefinite curfew; (ii) shoot at sight orders; and (iii) deployment of army since 2 p.m. the previous day. When we went around South Delhi in the afternoon of November 2, we found that the miscreants were not only at large, but had swelled in numbers and had become more defiant.

In the Lajpat Nagar market, while police pickets sat by idly, hundreds of young men, armed with swords, trishuls and iron rods, blocked the main road. Around 3 p.m. an army convey passed through the road. The miscreants did not scamper or panic. They merely made way for the convey to pass by temporarily retreating to the by lanes, and regrouped themselves as soon as the convey left and began intimidating a peace march that had arrived on the spot.

On the morning of November 3, 8.30 a.m. onwards two opposition M.Ps repeatedly requested both Mr. Narsimha Rao and Shiv Shankar to provide army protection to trains carrying Sikh passengers arriving from Punjab.No troops were sent, with the result that every train was left at the mercy of gangsters who dragged out Sikhs from the incoming train compartments lynched them, their bodies on the platforms or the railway tracks and many were set on fire. Newspaper report that 43 persons were killed. This was denied by Doordarshan in the evening. Visiting the Tughlakabad station around 3.30 p.m., the Statesman reporters saw "two bodies still smouldering on the platforms across the tracks". (November 3, 1984). The troops had either arrived after the incident, or the incident took place in front of the troops who did not intervene.

While analysing the role of the administration, we cannot remain content to blame the Delhi administration and the bureaucrats only. The Lt. Governor Mr. Gaval, who was in charge of administration of Delhi during the period under review and who has been replaced now, could not have acted on his own - whether they were acts of commission or omission. Both the Delhi administration and the Union Cabinet Ministers, including the Home Minister, were well-informed of the sequence of events beginning from the evening of October 31, (as evident from the report of communications between the opposition leaders and the Cabinet Ministers are recorded earlier in this report). We are left wondering whether the Union Ministers direct and the Lt. Governor to take action. Or did the Ministers direct and the Lt. Governor refuse to abide by their directive ? In that case, should not the Union Ministry punish the Lt. Governor ? But we were merely told on November 4 that Mr. Gaval had "proceeded on leave" and that Mr. M.M.K. Wali had taken over.

What int rigues us further is the appointment of Mr. Wali as the Lt. Governor Mr. Wali was the Home Secretary before his new appointment.

The record of what happened in Delhi from October 31 to November 3 (the eve of Mr. Wali's appointment) is sufficient to prove the failure of the Home Ministry administrative machinery in suppressing riots. We wonder why the former Home Secretary, inspite of the proved failure of an administration of which he was a leading component, has been appointed the Lt. Governor As evident from our review of official relief operations, (Chaper III), Mr. Wali's administration seems to continue the same policy of callousness and inefficiency towards the refugees as was demonstrated in the recent past towards the Sikh victims during the riots in Delhi.

V. ROLE OF ARMY

Our enquires made at various quarters ranging from the affected localities to army sources led us to two questions. First, why was there a delay in calling out the troops? Second, even when the army was called in, why were they not effective in imposing a curfew and curbing the violence?

The authorities at the top, including the four Ministers and senior officials of the Delhi Adminstration were repeatedly informed about the exact situation in the city and its outskirts from the evening of October 31st. prominent citizens, VIP's and members of the Opposition parties and people from affected localities both phoned and personally went and informed these authorities. Yet during seven valuable hours, between the time of the assassination and the time of the news of the death was made public, no security measures were taken.

As a senior government servant put it there are standing instructions on dealing with such situations. The SP and DC's have powers under the Criminal Procedure Code (Section 130-131) to call in the armed forces in aid to civil power. Further, the para-military troops, including the Delhi Armed Force CRPF are always available for such a situation. According to our information one brigade was available at Delhi which could have been requisitioned immediately.

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WHO CAN CALL IN THE ARMY ?

Section 130. Use of armed forces to disperse assembly:

(1) If any such assembly cannot be otherwise dispersed, and if it is necessary for the public security that it should be dispersed, the Executive Magistrate of the highest rank who is present may cause it to be dispersed by the armed forces.

(2) Such Magistrate may require any officer in command of any group of persons belonging to the armed forces to disperse the assembly with the help of the armed forces under his command, and to arrest and confine such persons forming part of it as the Magistrate may direct, or as it may be necessary to arrest and confine in order to disperse the assembly or to have them punished according to law.

(3) Every such officer of the armed forces shall obey such requisition in such manner as he thinks fit, but in so doing he shall use as little force, and do as little injury to person and property, as may be consistent with dispersing the assembly and arresting and detaining such persons.

Section 131. Power of certain armed forces officers to disperse assembly. When the public security is manifestly endangered by any such assembly and no Executive Magistrate can be communicated with, any commissioned or gazetted officer of the armed forces under his command, and many arrest and confine any person forming part of it, in order to disperse such assembly or that they may be punished according to law; but if, while he is acting under this section, it becomes practicable for him to communicate with an Executive Magistrate, he shall do so, and shall thenceforward obey the instructions of the Magistrate, as to whether he shall or shall not continue such action.

--The Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973

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The troops were alerted on the afternoon of the 31st. This means that within a few hours brigades from Meerut and Agra could have arrived at Delhi by the night of the 31st. As senior army officers put it, it is not the numerical strength of troops that is the crucial factor for imposing curfew. The crucial factor is clarity of intent and firm and clear instructions.

Despite announcements in the papers, AIR and Doordarshan about shoot at sight orders and imposition of curfew the troops were left without specific information from the police on the exact locations of the riots.No joint control from was set up.

In contrast, only a few days later, the authorities did not find any difficulty in moving a full brigade of the Indian Army consisting of 3000 men and another 1000 personnel from the Navy and the Air Force to line up the route if Mrs. Gandhi's funeral. The procedure to call in troops is simple. The Lt. Governor has to inform the Home Minister (Mr. Narasimha Rao) of the law and order situation and the later informs the Defence Minister (the Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was holding this portfolio) who gets in touch with the Army to call in the troops.

An essential ingredient for successful joint army-civilian administration operation is the setting up of a joint control room. During 1947 riots, when Lord Mountbatten was requested by Jawaharlal Nehru to control the communal situation, the former set up a joint control room at Rashtrapati Bhavan in order to coordinate the efforts of the civil administration and the armed forces. This precedent was quoted to Narasimha Rao - by an elderly resident of Delhi, who is well-versed in army operations.

Yet from October 31 to November 4 (the peak period of the riots which according to old timers were reminiscent of the 1947 riots in Delhi) no effort was made to set up a joint control room. The Commissioner of Police was operating from his office at ITO Police headquarters. The Army area commander was at the Dhaula Kuan cantonment, and the Lt. Governor was at Raj Nivas. As a result, even after the deployment of troops, army people constantly complained about lack of information and cooperation from the police regarding the areas of tension. Even with the imposition of curfew, there were no authorities to implement it. An army major complained to a Delhi news reporter on November 4 that his men were not only getting no cooperation from the Shakarpur police station, but were often being deliberately misled by the police. The same reporter during a tour of the city of November 2, came across army personnel ranging from JCOs to majors, roaming around pathetically, after having lost touch either with headquarters or with their formations.

Army officers complained that they were not provided with scouts by the police to lead them to the trouble spots. In one instance a major who was asking for directions was carrying a map dated 1974, where the resettlement colonies (where the violence reached its peak during the period under survey) did not figure.

One army source told our team members that the deployment of troops followed a strange pattern. They were deployed by the civil authorities in stages, and in almost every case they were deployed after houses in the trouble spots had been burnt to cinders and the massacre was over. This explains the limited number of army figures (12) and casualities from army firings (2 deaths and 4 injured) during the entire period. (re: Major Gen. J.S. Jamwal's statement of November 7, Indian Express November 8) The deployment reached full strength only after the 3,000 troops and vehicles reserved for the funeral were made available to curb the violence.

The entire nature of using the army as revealed from the above sequence of events compels us to suspect whether or not a deliberate design to keep the army ineffective even after it was called in - and that too following a long interval during which the arson, looting and massacre were allowed to continue sometimes with the direct connivance of the local police Force.
Whatever might have been the motive for such a curious manner of utilising the army and whoever might have been responsible for reducing it to an important observer, the effects of such a policy have been quite disastrous for the morale of the army. Every army person we talked to expressed anger over the way that the army's authority was being undermined.The 6th report of the National Police Commission has stated: "We note with concern the growing tendency on the part of the district authorities to seek instructions from higher quarters where none are necessary." It appears that the civilian administrators in Delhi although armed adequately with powers under the law to use the army to suppress disturbances, did not care to use those powers. The omission stands out in sharp contrast with their use of the army in coping with Hindu-Muslim riots or insurgency in the north-east.

The question that needs to be probed into is: why did the civil administration betray a set pattern of acts of omission, marked by a consistent failure to take steps against erring policemen and a stubborn refusal to deploy the army properly? Further an analysis of the role of the army during the period under survey leaves us with a few questions that need to be answered by the people in positions of authority. According to the procedure laid down under the law, the Lt. Governor can request the Home Minister who in turn can ask the Defence Minister for army deployment. On October 31, the new cabinet had already been sworn in with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi himself in charge of Defence and Narasimha Rao, as the Home Minister. We want to know whether, with the growing deterioration in the law and order situation in Delhi, when by November 1 the local police machinery had proved its failure to control the situation - either through negligence or connivance with the rioters - the Lt. Governor requested the Home Ministry for army aid. Even if he did not was it not his responsibility to deploy the army as soon as he realised that the police bad failed (which was quite evident by November 1)? By removing a few civilian administrators (like Mr. Gavai) or police officers (like the Delhi Police Commissioner, Mr. Subhash Tandon) how can the government at the centre absolve itself if the blame of neglecting its obligations to the citizens and its responsibility to maintain law and order - and this, inspite of several warnings to the effect that a Hindu-Sikh riot bound to take place?

The experience of our team members gives rise to the suspicion that both the administration and the Cabinet might have abdicated their responsibility and that extra-administrative forces were steering the deployment and operation of troops. On November 3, a group of concerned citizens visited Trilokpuri where they were requested by panic-stricken survivors of a widespread holocaust (described later) to intervene on their behalf and seek army protection. They tried to get in touch with various people both in the administration and the Cabinet to convey to them the request of the Trilokpuri victims. No one was available, either in their offices or homes.

Hoping that Opposition MPs might have a better access to the authorities the group approached Mr. Biju Patnaik, Mr. George Fernandes, Mr. Chandra Shekhar and Mr. Madhu Dandavate among others - all of whom told them that their repeated attempts to contact Ministers and officials have yielded no results. In a final desperate move accompanied by Mr. Dandavate, they went to 1, Safdarjung Road, the Prime Minister's official residence, and managed to meet a Congress (I) MP - Mr. Arun Nehru. When the group conveyed to him the request of the Trilokpuri residents, he said that he would sent a "wireless message" for army deployment. Only after this, were troops sent to Trilokpuri - but that also again merely for patrolling.

VI. ROLE OF CONGRESS(I)

Our surmise that during the period under survey the legitimate authorities were superseded and decision-making powers were assumed by a few individual Congress (I) leaders, is confirmed not only by the above mentioned incident, but also the experience of residents in the riot hit areas. We were told both by Hindus and Sikhs - many among the latter Congress (I) supporters - that certain Congress (I) leaders played a decisive role in organising the riots. Residents of Mangolpuri told us they saw Mr. Ishwar Singh, a Congress (I) Corporator among many others (their names are given in Annexure - 4) actively participating in the orgy of violence. All these people were described by the local residents as lieutenants of the Congress (I) MP from the area- Sajjan Kumar. Similarly in Anand Parbat, Congress (I) councillors like Bhairava, Mahendra and Mangat Ram, considered to be loyal followers of the Congress (I) MP Mr. Dharamdas Shastri, were named as the main culprits. In Prakash Nagar, Congress (I) people were found carrying voter's lists to identify Sikh households. In the Gandhinagar area again, a local Congress (I) Councillor Sukhanlal was identified by the victims as the main leader of the assailants. Escapees from the area who we met at the Shakarpur relief camp on November 6 blamed the Congress (I) MP from the area Mr. H.K.L. Bhagat for having masterminded the riots. On November 1, Satbir Singh (Jat) a Youth Congress (I) leader brought buses filled with people from Ber Sarai to the Sri Guru Harikishan Public School at Munirka and burnt the school building and buses and continued looting and assaults on Sikhs the whole night. Another group of Miscreants led by Jagdish Tokas, a Congress (I) corporator joined the above group on looting and assaults. In the Safdarjung - Kidwai Nagar area of South Delhi, eye witness accounts by those who stood in front of All India Medical Institute from where Mrs. Gandhi's body was taken out in procession in the evening of October 31, confirmed the presence of the Congress (I) Councillor of the area, Arjan Dass at the time when attacks on Sikh pedestrains, bus drivers and conductors began (Annexure 2).

The allegations against these individuals repeatedly voiced by the residents of the respective localities which we visited, connot be dismissed as politically motivated propaganda, since many among the Sikhs who accused them of complicity in the riots, had been traditionally Congress (I) voters. Sufferers from Trilokpuri and Mangolpuri resettlement colonies whom we met looked dazed and uncomprehending when they said to us: "We were allotted these houses here by Indiraji. We have always voted for her party. Why were we attacked ?"

Additional indications of the involvement of the above mentioned Congress (I) leaders in the riots was provided later when we heard that the Congress (I) MPs from the respective areas were putting pressure on the local police station to release the culprits who had been rounded up on ¾ November. On November 5, Mr. Dharmadas Shastri went to the Karol Bagh police station to protest against police "misbehaviour" with those who were found in possession of looted property. (Indian Express, November 6, 1984). Mr. Shastri however dismissed the report as false. At about the same time H.K.L. Bhagat, another Congress (I) MP was reported to be trying to secure the release of several criminal who had been arrested by the Gandhinagar police station. Describing the dilemma before the police, a senior police official said to our team members: "Sher pinjre se nikal diya: phir kahte hain pakad ke le ao!" (First the tigers are let loose from their cages and then we are ordered to round them up). When asked who was releasing them, he gave a knowing smile.

The same official told us that when some Congress (I) leaders came to a police station seeking the release of their followers, they were asked to accompany a police party in a raid on some houses for recovery of looted property. But these leaders refused when they were told that they would have to be witnesses.

We also heard of cases where even Sikhs close to the Congress (I) leaders were not spared. In Sajjan Kumar's house at Paschimpuri on November 6, we were introduced to an elderly Sikh gentlemen who claimed to be an old Congressman whose shop was burnt by miscreants. He said that he knew who the culprits were. When our team members asked him why he did not file a complaint with the police, he said he would do it at the right time. Mr. Sajjan Kumar's secretary drew us aside and dropped a hint that the RSS workers had been behind the arson. He however could not name any particular RSS leader or activist. Mr. Charanjit Singh, a Sikh Congress (I) MP from Delhi suffered a loss of Rs. 10 crores when his Pure Drinks factories were burnt down. Narrating his experience Mr. Singh said: "I telephoned the Lt. Governor and the Police several times, telling them that mobs were burning our factories. I was told that the force would be arriving but that never happened". He added that he had been a "failure" to his constituents, since all assistance "was denied to him". (The Statesman, November 10, 1984).

The administration appears to have been persuaded by the decision makers at the top to treat the alleged criminals with kid gloves. Inquiries at some of the police stations in the affected are as revealed that the police had announced that those in possession of looted property should submit them within a stipulated time period and would be let off if they did so. A senior Police Officer simply described this to us as a "Voluntary disclosure Scheme". We feel that this is a strange way of dispensing justice. Restoration of the booty by the looters is no substitute for their punishment. In the absence of any convincing explanation on the part of the authorities for this extraordinarily queer way of dealing with criminals, we are left with the suspicion that there is a calculated design by some influential forces to protect them.

The Congress (I) High Command's reluctance to probe into the allegations against their own councillors and other leaders further ends credence to the suspicious voiced above. Even Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi seems to dismiss the serious charges being levelled against his party men. On November 6, when Charan Singh who accompanied a team of Opposition leaders in a deputation to Mr. Gandhi, drew his ttention to the reports of Congress (I) men pressurising the police to get their followers released, which appeared in the Indian Express some days ago, Mr. Gandhi said that he had heard about it and then reported that the Indian Express is the opposition's paper just as the National Herald is Congress I's. The next day the AICC-I headquarters came out with a statement saying that the allegations were utterly malicious. On November 8 however, Mr. Gandhi asked his senior party colleagues to probe into every allegation of Congress-I worker's involvement in the violent incidents. But till today no one knows what will be the nature of the "probe".

In fact Mr. G.K. Moopanar, who is in charge of the organisation in the AICC(I) told newsmen on November 9 that the had not received any intimation for any such inquiry so far.

It is difficult to believe that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, was unaware of the activities if important and well known members of his party for full five days (from October 31 to November 5). Mr. Gandhi had been the General Secretary of AICC(I) since 1982 and in charge of reorganising his party. He had been presiding over training camps for Congress (I) workers at various places.We wonder how after all these training programmes the cadres of Mrs. Gandhi's party could go on such a murderous rampage.

VII. ROLE OF MEDIA AND OPPOSITION

Although we do not intend at this stage to go into the role of the media during the riots, a few words in this connection may not be out of place. The first day's evening bulletins (October 31) brought out by different newspaper establishments stated that there were "two Sikhs and one clean shaven Sikh" among the assailants. The reporters did not clarify whether the news was from official or unofficial sources. Nor was it clear how a "clean shaven Sikh" could be identified as a Sikh. In later reports the next day and the following days, we were told that only two assailants - both Sikhs - were involved. What happened to the earlier reported third one? No newspaper has yet followed up the discrepancy.

But what is of immediate relevance is the question: should the media have described the assailants immediately as Sikhs? Given the background of the Punjab situation, such mentioning of a community by name was bound to excite communal passions and inflame communal hatred. It may be worthwhile in this context to refer to a recommendation made at a seminar on communal writings held in New Delhi in November 1970 under the joint auspices of the Press Institute of India and the Press Information Bureau of the Government of India. It was suggested that certain facts which may aggravate the situation if published straight away should be printed after a stipulated period.

We were also intrigued to find Doordarshan allowing the broadcast of highly provocative slogans like 'khoon ka badla khoon' (blood for blood) by some members from the mourning crowd at Teen Murti.

There was a tendency among many reporters to concentrate on the names of important politicians instead of on earnest efforts made by a group of concerned citizens in South Delhi on November 2, which was joined by the Janata leader Mr. Chandrasekhar and some of his followers, some newspapers the next day described it as a Janata Party march. This created temporary misunderstanding and hampered the efforts of the non-party group to bring together all citizens, many of whom did not want to identify themselves with any particular political party. The need to keep party politics out of ventures like peace marches to put down riots, is yet to be recognised by our media people who seem to remain obsessed with names of political personalities.

This brings us to the role of Opposition political leaders. We regret to say that by and large, they failed to rise to the occasion during the crucial days of October 31 to November 5. Although news of arson and carnage was pouring into the offices of the political parties every hour, they hardly made any effort to rush to the spot with their cadres, stop the violence and organise peace committees in the localities, and remained content with issuing a joint statement with the Prime Minister on November 1 pleading for peace and amity.

On November 3, when following the carnage at Trilokpuri, the group of concerned citizens went to the Opposition party leaders (referred to earlier), some among the former appealed to the Janata Party leader Chandrasekhar to lead them in a deputation to Teen Murti and appeal to the Prime Minister. Mr. Chandrasekhar rose, folded his hands and pleaded: "I cannot do it. I don't want to be accused of ruining the late Prime Minister funeral'.

VIII. ROLE OF THE PUBLIC

While the disturbances that shook Delhi from October 31 to November 5 could be described as an 'organised disorder' with signs of meticulous planning by certain groups in some areas, deliberate laxity on the part of the administration in other areas and wilful relinquishment of responsibility of senior Ministers as well as opposition parties on a wider scale, we cannot at the same time rule out the existence of hostility and suspicion among large sections of the Hindu population against the Sikhs because of the happenings in Punjab during the last two years.

By not solving the outstanding economic and political issues in Punjab, by allowing Sikh extremism and Hindu communalism to feed on each other leading to the army raid in the Golden Temple and antagonising thereby large sections of the Sikh community, the ruling party at the centre had sown the seeds of communal division between Hindus and Sikhs.

As a result, when from October 31, organised assaults on the Sikhs began (as distinct from a spontaneous mass upsurge against Sikhs which some observers are trying to make it out to be), the Hindu public by and large appeared to be in a mood that sanctioned such assaults. Comments by responsible Hindu citizens in Delhi indicate to some extent the popular psyche. An officer belonging to the IPS was heard to comment that the government was not preventing the violence so that people could let off steam and the Sikhs in Punjab would be 'taught a lesson'. An Indian who works for the UNO in Geneva who flew to Delhi for Mrs. Gandhi's funeral, told a member of our team that the orgy of violence had been allowed to 'teach the Sikhs a lesson'. When asked about the suffering that this was causing the common people, he said: 'Who is suffering?'. The long record of uninterrupted depredations by the Sikh extremists in Punjab had possibly created a desire for retaliation that blinded even those who are regarded as responsible people among the Hindus.

How did the Sikh victims view this attitude of their Hindu neighbours ? Victims in Gurgaon said : "People stood on their rooftops watching our houses burning, just, as they do when observing the Republic Day Parade".

It was this mood again that allowed the Hindu public to believe all sorts of rumours ranging from the story of poisoning drinking water to that of armed Sikhs prowling the streets to attack Hindus. The next step from such belief in rumours is acquiescence in the rampage that had started from the evening of October 31 and even active participation by the younger and more aggressive Hindus in some cases.

The anti-Sikh communal partisan feelings had penetrated the lower ranks of the administration also, a evident from the behaviour of the police force, who were given the reins for three or four days by their superior officers.

Given this mood of vicarious exultation at the plight of the Sikhs among the public, it was easy for an organised group enjoying the patronage of the rating party to carry out the plan of systematic destruction and killings.

The anti-Sikh sentiments in some areas were also stoked by some isolated expressions of happiness at Mrs. Gandhi's death among some Sikhs, and of bravado and attempts at resistance could have been taken as a challenge by the marauding hordes who were sure of getting police protection at every step. We came across reports, corroborated by some responsible residents of a few neighbourhoods, of Sikhs dancing the 'bhangra' on the night of October 31. Such incidents reinforced the simmering hostility against the Sikhs.

But these stray incidents were marginal and do not explain the wide scale explosion of indiscriminate violence against all Sikhs throughout India on the same date and the same time, which could be the result of only a well designed strategy.

The only signs of courage and initiative in an otherwise ominous landscape were demonstrated by those Hindu and Muslim neighbours who helped Sikh families in the affected areas. We came across a large number of Sikh inmates in the relief Camps who told us repeatedly that but for these neighbours they would have been butchered.

In a makeshift camp opposite the Kalyanpuri police station on November 3, we met a Hindu family, whose house was burnt down by the miscreants because he had given shelter to his Sikh neighbours.

A postal employee living in Bhopal told us how his house was damaged and partly burnt because he helped two Sikhs. With army assistance he moved the Sikhs to his village in Faridabad.

Members of a voluntary organisation traced two Sikh families who were given shelter by Hindus in Khichripur on November 3. Defying a belligerent mob that stood at the entrance of the lanes, a local Hindu youth led the members to the house and rescued the families who were being sheltered by a poor Hindu family. The next day, the volunteers following a request by a mother in a relief camp went to trace her daughter in Trilokpuri who was being looked after by a Hindu family. The latter restored the daughter to the volunteers, kept with them two other Sikh children whose parents were still traced.
"It is our responsibility to look after them", they said.

Near Azadpur, a Hindu factory owner hid a Sikh inside the factory premises. When the Hindus surrounded the factory demanding that the Sikh be handed over to them, the factory owner persuaded the Sikh to shave his hair and beard have him a cycle which helped him to pass through the crowd and escape.

On the GT-Karnal Road, Hindus saved a Gurudwara and a Sikh doctor's clinic from being burnt down. In the same area, from November 1 to 5, Delhi University teachers and students kept vigil around the entry point to lances where Sikhs lived.

Hindus from Munirka village and residing in Munirka colony provided protection in their own homes to ten Sikh families.

Thirty Sikh families residing in Mayur Vihar were guarded all through the period by young Hindi neighbours who resisted attempts by outsiders to raid the compound.

According to a rough estimate based on information gathered from different sources, at least 600 Sikhs were saved by Hindus of Trilokpuri. According to an army officer posted in Shahadara, of the Sikh families he rescued from different parts of the area, at least 70% were sheltered by Hindus.

It is these acts of courage, however, few they may be, which reassure us that sanity still prevails in our country.

IX. CASE STUDIES: 1. SULTANPURI

The resettlement colony of Sultanpuri has a mixed population of Hindus and Sikhs employed in various occupations. Many of the Hindus belong to the lower castes and are employed in various bodies as safai karamcharis. Among the Sikhs are Sikligars (who specialise in preparing metal gratings for building construction), charpoy weavers from Alwar, scooter rickshaw owners, TV mechanics, electricians, and shop keepers. Some also work as scooter rickshaw drivers, rickshaw pullers, vendors and labourers.

It is significant that the members of the two communities lived in perfect harmony prior to the riots. This was testified to by the Sikhs in the various relief camps. On no occasion in the past had there been any evidence of tensions between them.

The Sikh residents of the colony were taken by surprise when in the late hours of Thursday (November 1) the were suddenly attacked by violent mobs. According to eye witnesses the mob consisted of local people and of outsiders believed to be Jats of neighbouring villages (Mundka is one such village). The attacks were directed at the men folk and a large number of Sikh males were killed. Some of the survivors were able to identify these who played a leading role in the attack. The leaders include local politicians, the police and some local people.

In trying to identify and understand the assailants and arsonists it seems indubitable that sweeper urchins, beggars, mechanics, drivers, vegetable sellers, etc. from the local areas were involved. But it was not entirely on their own initiative. Most of the killers in Sultanpuri were led by Pradhans, who were at the base of the political hierarchy. It was they who incited the mobs against the Sikhs and helped to identify Sikh houses and establishments. The Pradhans were in turn linked to the local Congress M. P. Some of the Pradhans who were repeatedly held responsible by the survivors for acts of incitement and for aiding and abetting the rioters were Mr. Chauhan, Mr. Bagri and Mr. Gupta, The M. P. who was most common held responsible for the attacks was Mr. Sajjan Kumar of the Congress (I).

Police connivance with the rioters in Sultanpuri is indicated by the fact that the SHO by the name of Mr. Bhatti reportedly not only killed a couple of Sikhs, but also helped the mob to disarm the Sikhs. The police involvement may be summed up in words of one survivor "Khud mara hai, miley huey the" (they themselves killed : they were in complicity).

Almost every refugee we spoke to gave an identical version. Also involved in the Carnage in Sultanpuri were kerosene suppliers Brahmanand Gupta, Verenand, Master and Ved Prakash who provided the fuel for the Sikh funeral as also a Jat doctor Changa.

Others actively participating were the owner of the Hanuman ration shop, Gajanand, godown owner, Gulab Singh and an auto rickshaw driver Omi. All these criminals supervised the carnage.

The attacks which began on the Sikh residents on Thursday night went on relentlessly till Friday afternoon (November 1-2). Among the directions heard being shouted to the mob were "kill men, rape women". The mobs were equipped with lathis, iron rods and other weapons and carried kerosene with them.

Many Hindu neighbours had sheltered Sikh families and locked them up in different houses. Unfortunately this did not save them from the looting, arson, lynching, and killing that followed. Houses were being identified, set on fire, and Sikh males killed, women were seen carrying away loot from the houses of better off Sikhs : gold jewellery , TV sets and other things were carried off. A lot of property including means of livelihood such has handcarts and rickshaws were systematically destroyed.

The killings were brutal, One Sikh was pushed into a car, which was then set a blaze.Others were hit, thrown on the ground, doused with kerosene and set on fire.

A pregnant women was stabbed by the rioters and some women are reported to have been raped. A graphic account is available with certain members of our team who visited the relief camp at Shakurpur (Pant Bagh).

In a large hail of Shakurpur Camp housing the Sultanpuri victims of the carriage sit a row of women and children huddled together with shock and grief inscribed on every part of their beings. There is not a single boy of over ten years in the group and boys are rare. Each group consists of a women of the older generation, three or four young widows, a few adolescent girls and the rest are children, ranging from ten years to nursing infants. One such household consists of 18 people rendered absolutely destitute with not a single earning member left; all four adult males have been murdered. Two of the younger women have new born babies, one six day old (it was born day before the killings) and another 10 days old. They stared blankly into space holding the babies in their arms too dazed to speak or even mourn. But the older women who had lost her husband and three sons gave vent to her grief bitterly "ab to sabse accha yeh hoga ki aap ham sab ko jahar dila dain; ab ham ji nahin sakte ; kaise jiyenge, kis ke liye jiyenge?" (It would be best to give us all poison, how will we live and for whom?).

She was voicing the sentiment of many of the women present, all of whom had watched their men folk being attacked and cut down, then doused with kerosene and set ablaze. Not one of these were willing to consider returning to their original homes after the brutal massacre they had lived through. How can they even think of it unless the guilty are identified and punished ?.

The blocks most badly affected were A4 (65 killed, 15 missing), P1, 2 and 3 (31 killed and 5 missing) and C3 and C4. From an enumeration done in Camp II (housing about 2000-survivors mainly from Sultanpuri) the figures are 157 dead, 25 injured and 52 missing from this group alone. This means that on an average every second family suffered at least at least one family member dead. According to an expert it is curious that the number of injured is so few compared to the number of dead. In cases of looting and killing due to mob frenzy, the number injured is usually much higher. This implies that the attackers were not disorderly.

Matters did not end with the events of November 1 and 2. During the next two days, Saturday and Sunday (November 3 and 4) the SHO is reported to have got a barber brought to a hall where the Sikhs were herded together (prior to evacuation) and made to pay Rs. 21 each to get themselves shaved. They were threatened that they would get shot if they did not comply. It was reported that the barber made Rs. 500.

Around 5000 Sikhs were herded together till the army evacuated them three days later. Some 800 are still in Sultanpuri under Army protection. Attempts at adequate arrangements for their food were still being made by the army on Thursday, November 8, a whole week after the terror started.

The survivors at Camp II with a few exceptions do not want to go back. Reportedly only 100 from the 2000 in this camp went back. But 20 had returned by November 9th. Even within the camp they are feeling insecure.

The same sweepers who only a few days ago looted their houses and killed their husbands and sons have managed to sneak into the camps for the ostensible purpose of doing the sanitation work. These people are regularly keeping watch on them and spying on their movements.

IX. CASE STUDIES: 2. MANGOLPURI

The centre of the holocaust was the jhuggi and jhopri colony (JJ Colony) at Mangolpuri in West Delhi where a large number of Sikhs are concentrated in certain blocks.

The disturbances started on November 1 evening after a police van had come to the G Block and announced that water had been poisoned. The other two rumours - that Sikhs were celebrating Mrs. Gandhi's death by distributing sweets and that Hindu corpses had arrived in trains from Punjab - were also soon making the rounds.

Apprehending trouble, several Sikhs from different blocks approached the police for help. One woman survivor whom we met later at the Shakurpur relief camp on November 5 told us that when she want to the police station for protection, the police said "We cannot do anything- you are now on your own". Later, during the riots, the miscreants were seen using diesel from police vans to set fire to the houses of the Sikhs. One group of survivors from Block X told us that the police took them out from their houses on the plea of rescuing them and then turned them over to the mob waiting outside.

According to information gathered from the survivors, the assailants were from the nearby Jat villages and were accompanied by local Schedule Caste people- the same composition of the mob which we found in Trilokpuri. Hovering around the arsonists were local Congress (I) leaders and followers in jeeps and other vehicles. The survivors identified Mala Ram, a local Congress (I) leader, who came with about 300 people and personally supervised the arson, looting and murders. Ishwar Singh, Salim Querishi and Shaukeen (Congress (I) workers belonging to the Waqf Club). Rajinder Singh all well known Congress (I) activists were found going around instructing the mob, providing kerosene and providing out Sikh homes.

One single name which cropped up wherever we went interviewing the residents of Mangolpuri was that of Sajjan Kumar, the Congress (I) MP of the area. Almost in one voice, they alleged that Sajjan Kumar had masterminded the violence. Some people accused him of having paid Rs. 100 and a bottle of liquor to each person taking part in the may-hem. The extent of hatred towards him among the Sikh survivors of Mangolpuri was evident when Sajjan Kumar visited the Mangolpuri police station on November 4 where the survivors were waiting to be transported to a refugee camp. Members of our team were witness to a scene where the Sikhs abused him openly and held him responsible for the carnage. The Congress (I) MP tried to pacify them by pleading his innocence. "Why should my party kill you who are Congress (I) supporters?" he said, and laid the blame on the Lt. Governor who had been replaced the previous day by a new successor. A little later when the team visited the Punjabi Bagh camp where some among the Mangolpuri refugees had arrived, the team was told that the hungry refugees had refused to touch the foodstuff brought earlier by sajjan Kumar.

The violence indulged in by the mob was marked by the most brutal atrocities. Women survivors told us how their children were ripped apart, their husbands and sons made to cut off their hair, beaten up with iron rods and then burnt alive. Almost all the Sikh houses in the 26 blocks of Mangolpuri were attacked and destroyed and the main targets of murderous assault were the young male members of the households. Official attempts to underestimate the extent of killings by giving out the Delhi State Committee of the CPI (M) which from a house-to-house survey in a few blocks alone found at least 51 killed.

When we visited Mangolpuri on November 5 we were shown spots were the bodies were burnt and we were taken to a 'nallah' between Mangolpuri and Sultanpuri where we were told several hundred bodies were dumped.

It was only on the evening of November 3 that the army arrived at Mangolpuri.Narrating the event, one Sikh whom we met at the Shakurpur relief camp where he was staying with other refugees, told us that they were taken out by the mob, made to stand in a park and when they were about to be set on fire, the troops arrived and saved them.

Before the arrival of troops, the few sources of protection available to the sufferers of Mongolpuri were the Hindu and Muslim neighbours who at tremendous risk to their lives gave shelter to the Sikhs. They hid them in their homes and shops and resisted attempts by the mob to trace them out. A Muslim young man in Nangloi told us how his family saved a number of Sikh men, women and children and secretly transported them to the relief. The experience of a Hindu, C. Lal of Mangolpuri is revealing. He passed through the days of the 1947 partition, when he crossed over from Sialkot to India. He relived the same days during the first week of November when his brother's shop was looted and burnt, because he gave shelter to several Sikh families and formed a peace committee in his locality to protect the Sikhs.

IX. CASE STUDIES: 3. TRILOKPURI

The happenings in Trilokpuri, a trans-Jamuna resettlement colony in the east of Delhi, between October 31 and November 2 were a gruesome picture of the intensity of the butchery. Within just 48 hours, at least 400 Sikhs, mainly young men were burnt alive, with the connivance of the local police machinery and active participation of an organised group of miscreants led by a Congress (I) Councillor.

As in other areas, here also the carnage was preceded by the usual floating of the familiar rumour that Sikhs had distributed sweets to 'celebrate' Mrs. Gandhi's assassination on October 31. The other version which we heard when we visited Trilokpuri three days later was that a Hindu mob had come to attack the Gurudwara on October 31, and the Sikhs resisted by waving their swords, when the mob attacked the 'Gurudwara' stones were hurled from the top of the temple, and the rampage began. In the course of our investigation however we could not find any single person who could claim that he had personally seen the Sikhs distributing sweets. Some people however corroborated the report about the Sikhs waving swords from the Gurudwara when the Hindu mob came to attack it.

From accounts related to us by the survivors, by the Hindu neighbours and by some reporters who visited the spot soon the incident on November 2, we could reconstruct the grisly sequence of events.

The beginning of the tragedy could be traced to the night of October 31 when reportedly the Congress (I) Councillor Ashok Kumar, a doctor who runs a clinic in Kalyanpuri, one kilometre from Trilokpuri, held a meeting at the latter place. The violence that broke out immediately following the meeting reached its climax the next morning, when Gujar farmers from the neighbouring village of Chilla landed at Trilokpuri, and accompanied by a group of local inhabitants (described by the residents as scheduled Caste people) raided Blocks 28, 32, 33 and 34 and systematically attacked the Sikh houses, dragged out the young men, killed and burnt them and set the houses on fire. In some cases, the assailants hit the victims with iron rods on their heads before pouring kerosene on them.

Between Blocks 32 and 31 there are large open spaces where over 50 Sikh families were living in jhuggies and jhopries. These hutments were burnt down and the menfolk were killed.

A study of the list of those who were alleged to have taken part in the loot and killings reveals that a large number of them were notorious anti-social elements well known in the area. One of them, Somnath of House 90, Block 32, was responsible for the murder of several Sikhs including Hoshiyar Singh, son of Milap Singh and three other young men he locked up in a house and later killed them with the help of others.

(A detailed list of the alleged criminals and the nature of their crimes of Trilokpuri during the period under survey is given in Annexure 1).

Some of the participants were keepers who supplied kerosene to the arsonists. Some other among the neighbours of the victims were petty traders like milkmen, mechanics or dealers in cement. The majority of the victims were poor Sikhs-mechanics, artisans and daily wage labourers.

The role of the police was on the same lines as found elsewhere in Delhi during the period. The sanctioned strength of the police in the Kalyanpuri police station, under which Trilokpuri falls is 113, including one inspector (who is the Station House Officer) and around 2.30 p. m. on November 1 when the plunder and killings were taking place. The first the spot, allowing the criminals to escape whatever little detection there was possible. It was a continuous spree of arson, rape and murders after that, Later enquiries conducted by a senior police official revealed that at least four women, their ages ranging from 14 to 50 were gang raped.Later seven cases of rape from Trilokpuri were officially reported by the J. P. Narayan Hospital, Delhi.

During the height of the killings however, there was little effort on the part of the police either to stop the orgy or to check the figures of casualties. On November 2, at around 5.30 p. m. Nikhil Kumar, ACP of the police received information that 'Block 32 mei mar kat ho rahi hai" (Murders are taking place in Block 32). The police control room curiously enough recorded that only three people entire rows of houses in several blocks of Trilokpuri were burning and their inmates killed.

A reporter of a Delhi based newspaper who reached Trilokpuri at about 2 p.m. on November 2 was greeted by a belligerent mob in Block 28 which threatened him and stoned his car. When he went back to the Kalyanpuri police station, the SHO Survir Singh told him that 'total peace' was reigning in the area. He however spotted a truck outside the station with four bodies inside, one of them still alive. When the reporter, out of despair, turned back to contact the police headquarters, on his ways he came across about 70 Sikh women and children walking along the told the road under Nizamuddin bridge. They told him that all their menfolk had been killed in Trilokpuri, and that they were fleeing for their lives. The reporters attempts to seek help from several army personnel on the road elicited little response, since most of the latter had been either lost touch with their respective headquarters, or had no specific orders.

Finally, reaching the police headquarters at ITO, he met the ACP, Nikhil Kumar, who told him that he could not do anything and could only pass his message to the control room. He described his rule as that of a 'guest artist'.

The reporter revisited Trilokpuri in the evening of the same day and found the remains of the carnage-burnt house, dead bodies and the SHO with two constables walking around. The SHO told him that he did not have any knowledge of what had happened. When later in the evening the reporter visited the police headquarters, he was told by another ACP that according to the latter's information there was 'peace' in Trilokpuri. The reporter pointed out that at least 300 people had been burnt and that the police were only counting dead bodies that were still recognizable ignoring those which had been reduced to cinders.

It was only around 7 p.m. on November 2 that senior police officials reached Trilokpuri. Personnel of the Central Reserve police force were deployed them, and the survivors were rescued from the affected blocks.

When members of our team reached Trilokpuri at about 7 a.m. on November 3 we found the survivors-old men, women and children, some of them with severe burns, huddling together in the open in the main road. Weeping women narrated to the how their menfolk were slaughtered and alleged that in some cases the police directed the attacks. Many among the survivors told us that Dr. Ashok Kumar the local Congress (I) Councillor had instigated the mob. The entire Sikh community in the area, they said, was left at the mercy of the mob for two full days till arrival of the CRP.

As soon as we entered Block 32, we were greeted by a strong stench of burnt bodies which were still rotting inside some of the houses. The entire lane was littered with burnt pieces of furniture, papers, scooters and piles if ash in the shape of human bodies the unmistakable signs of burnt human beings. Dogs were on the prowl. Rats were nibbling at the still recognizable remains of a few bodies.

As we watched the scene, we remembered what we had just read in the morning newspapers that day. Describing the situation in Delhi on the previous day-November 2, when the carnage was continuing at Trilokpuri the Lt. Governor Mr. Gavai had said that the situation in the capital was 'under control' .From what we witnessed at Trilokpuri, it was evident that the situation there on November 2 was indeed 'under control', but the 'control' was wielded by a powerful group on influential persons who could mobilise the local police to help them in the may-hem and immobilise the entire administration for more than 48 hours to enable them to carry out meticulously their plans of murder and destruction.

The first relief to be given to the Trilokpuri victims was not by the authorities but by a voluntary group of over two dozen who brought them food, medical care and concern. Even though a women had given birth to a child among the victims, the authorities had not even arranged for medical care for her or the other persons seriously injured more than a day earlier. Members of this voluntary team rescued Sikh families who were hiding in Hindu homes as late as 7.30 in the evening. These rescues were made in the presence of the District Commissioner who had to be cajoled into helping. The authorities assured the victims that they will be given all help and things like blankets though they had none on hand. In fact the authorities have been using the Farash Bazaar Camp (where Trilokpuri victims were sent ) to show their efficiency whereas a great deal of the work there has been done by voluntary agencies.

X. RELIEF AND REHABILITATION

Taking into consideration the extent of violence and arson in the night of the 31st October it would be reasonable to expect that the Delhi Administration would have anticipated the need to set up relief camps. Neither the Government nor the Administration seemed to be concerned with the problem and their attitude of deliberate inaction seems to be a continuation of their stance during the carnage.

The authorities have refused to make realistic estimates of the number of people killed, the injured, the number of widows and orphans, or the extent of damage to property. Further, the Administration to date refuses to recognise most of the people who have taken refuge in the Gurudwaras as displaced persons entitled to relief and compensation. The Administration recognises only ten camps whereas a voluntary organisation, Nagrik-Ekta Manch has identified at least 18 others within Delhi and several on the outskirts. The list of these camps is given in Annexure V. According to the Government there are about 20,000 displaced persons. In fact there are at least 50,000.

The Administration has tried to manipulate figures and thus gloss over the enormity of the problem. For instance the former Police Commissioner, Shri Subhash Tandon, at a Press Conference on November 2nd said that the number of dead was between 15 and 20. To this the then Lt. Governor Gavai added "things are under control" (Indian Express November 3, 1984). The official death toll is now 613 when eye witness accounts speak of hundreds of bodies lying at Trilokpuri alone.

There was no attempt to do any relief work till November 2nd. On that day for the first time the Administration with the help of the Army evacuated people to the police thana or to school buildings. After that there was no sign of the Administration despite various pious announcements in the media, by the new Lt. Governor Mr. Wali about giving blankets and mattresses to the refugees for comfort.

Thousands went hungry and had to urinate and defecate in the corridors of the school building. The injured lay in the rooms without any medical treatment. There was no one to share the horror or the anguish of widows, to say a word to them. The first initiative for relief came from local communities, mostly Hindus and from Gurudwaras who brought the first meal and organised langars. For instance at Farash Bazaar the people from Jhilmil colony brought their own utensils and organised a langar in the face of threats from the mobs.

The local initiative was followed by the efforts of the voluntary groups and individuals. Hundreds of students, housewifes, teachers, doctors and many prominent citizens organised relief camps and collected supplies. The Administration was nowhere to be seen.

The Delhi Administration appointed a Relief Commissioner to deal with the crisis on November 4, 1984. On November 6, the Delhi Administration announced a scheme for rehabilitation and Joint Secretaries from various Ministries were put in charge of various camps in which a compensation of Rs. 10,000 was to be given to the next of kin for each dead. Five thousand was to be given to each seriously injured and a thousand for those who sustained minor injuries. The same amounts were to be given to those who had suffered damage to their property. On November 7 the Prime Minister announced that he was releasing a sum of Rs. 40 lakhs for relief work for the Union Territory of Delhi from the Prime Minister's Relief fund.

The question that arises is where did the money go, for it has not reached the people at the camps. There is no scheme made for the implementation of the relief scheme and no agency has been created for this purpose. The joint control room at Raj Nivas for relief does not seem to have even got information about the number of camps in the city.

When the government did move in, they were met with hostility from the people and atleast on one occasion the people refused to accept the food brought by a M.P. because the people felt that he was involved in the carnage. In fact the arrival of the VIPs was often a hinderance to the relief work being carried out.

The plight of the displaced persons was pathetic. The army had clear instructions not to allow anyone to photograph the camps. A member of our team was roughed up by the army and his film snatched away at the Shakurpur camp when he took a photograph of the people in the camp.

No attempt has been made to take a census of the people at the camps and estimate the number of men, women and children. None of these people have been given identify cards on which basis they could claim the compensation and now they will get entangled in red tapes and possible litigation.

According to Press reports more than two crores of looted property has been recovered but no attempt has been made to arrest the looters who if arrested are released on the intervention of the local leaders.

Further there is no system worked out by which the recovered property will be returned to us rightful owners. Already VCRs are finding their way to the market at a ridiculous price.

Within a week the Administration started to forcibly evacuate the displaced persons and sending them back to what used to be their homes, which are now cinders and ashes. Their houses destroyed, their property looted, and the murderers and looters wandering free the people are terrified of returning to the areas which are full of memories of murder and arson. Officially there have been 2,960 arrests but hundreds of these people have been released either on intervention of local politicians or are on ball.

The Government and the Administration have in a ruthless manner got DTC buses to pack off the people, given them Rs. 50 per family and some times a bundle of bedding and sent them back without making appropriate arrangements for their security. No attempt has been made to create an atmosphere of trust and security. Despite the presence of the army it was reported to us that stray incidents of looting and murder continue.

The Government did not mobilise all the resources at its command (e.g. the army) to provide medical care and sanitation, nor did it print enough forms for compensation claims. A voluntary agency had to have thousands of forms printed for the camps in their care. The government's callousness towards the problem of relief and rehabilitation is in consonance with its earlier policy of calculated inaction during the carnage. How could the government not have anticipated the need for an effective machine for relief and rehabilitation ? Further, how was it that just at the time the government was announcing the setting up of a Relief Commissioner the forcible evacuations of the people started without any assurance to them of their future security ?

X. CONCLUSION

The social and political consequences of the Government's stance during the carnage, its deliberate inaction and its callousness towards relief and rehabilitation are far reaching. It is indeed a matter of grave concern that the government has made no serious inquiries into the entire tragic episode which seems to be so well planned and designed.

It is curious that for the seven hours that the government had between the time of Mrs. Gandhi's assassination and official announcement of her death, no security arrangements were made for the victims.

The dubious role of the politicians belonging to the ruling party has been highlighted in various press reports. The government, under pressure, has changed a few faces by transfer and suspension of Junior Officers.

It is important that we do not fall for this ploy, for our investigation reveals that these are only scapegoats.

The riots were well organised and were of unprecedented brutality. Several very disturbing questions arise that must be answered:

1. What was the government and the administration doing for seven hours between the time of the assassination and the announcement of Mrs. Gandhi's death?

2. Why did the government refuse to take cognisance of the reports of the looting and murders and call in the troops even after alerting them?

3. Why have a few Individual Congress (I) leaders close to the Prime Minister been allowed to arrogate to themselves powers belonging to ministers and officials?

4. Why was there no joint control room set up and who was responsible for not giving clear and specific instructions to the army on curbing violence and imposing curfew?

5. Who was responsible for the planned and deliberate police inaction and often active role in inciting the murder and loot?

6. Who was responsible for the planned and directed arson?

7. Why were highly provocative slogans (Khun ka badla khun - blood for blood) allowed to be broadcast by Doordarshan during the recording of the mourning crowed at Teen Murti?

8. Why has the Congress (I) not set up an inquiry into the role of its members in the arson and looting?

DEMANDS

1. A public high level inquiry into the role of government and the ruling party in planning, instigating and executing the riots between October 31 and November first week, and immediate publication of the report of inquiry.

2. Exemplary punishment of those found guilty by the inquiry committee, according to the law.

3. A well formulated and clear cut policy on relief and rehabilitation and effective machinery for its immediate implementation.

ANNEXURE I: CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

OCTOBER 31

09.40 Mrs. Indira Gandhi assassinated
10.00 All senior defence officers informed and apprehension of trouble.
10.30 Meeting at PM's house where security discussed and suggestion for calling out the army given. Among those present: Commissioner Police, Lt. Governor of Delhi and M.L Fotedar.
11.00 AIR announces attempt on PM's life
12.00 AIR announces PM in hospital
13.30 Radio Australia announces Mrs. Gandhi dead
14.00 Spotnews in front of newspaper offices announces Mrs. Gandhi dead Special one page editions of dailies announce Mrs. Gandhi's assailants as two Sikhs and one clean shaven Sikh.
16.00 Violence starts outside AIIMS. Unarmed persons beat up Sikhs and burn their turbans in the presence of a large number of armed forces.
18.00 AIR announces Mrs. Gandhi dead, and soon after swearing in of Mr.Rajiv Gandhi as MP along with three cabinet ministers.
22.00 Violence and burning in many parts of Delhi.
23.00 Senior MP phones Home Minister and informs him of situation in Delhi. Home Minister reportedly said that everything was under control
Sometime late at night: A top level review of law and order situation by PM's Secretariat and late at Home Ministry.
night

In the day Army alerted (around 14.00)

NOVEMBER 1
Violence, burning, killing and looting in all parts of Delhi all day and night. Mourners visit Teen Murti all day.

Morning Mr. Shiv Shankar, Mr. Narsimha Rao and Lt. Governor and President contacted by many MPs and prominent citizens including those with armed forces background report on the situation in Delhi and the need to call out the army. Home Minister informed that army will need clear cut instructions and need for joint centre of operation to coordinate army and civilian authorities. Killing starts in places like Trilokpuri.

14.00 army called out
14.30 Shiv Shankar in contact with Gavai; Gavai informs that curfew being considered.
16.00 Charan Singh meets President to brief him about events and need for army protection.
18.00 Indefinite curfew imposed
18.30 An M.P contracts Home Minister to inform of the situation in Delhi and that troops were not around
20.00 PM informs leaders of opposition that there are not enough troops in Delhi

Night Large scale killing of Sikhs. Not one round fired by the army and no flag marches
Rumour that water supply poisoned all over Delhi and rumour supported by many police station.

NOVEMBER 2
The body of PM lies in state. Curfew and shoot at sight orders all day. Looting and killing continues all day. All Delhi bound trains cancelled. Mourners visit Teen Murti House all day.

08.30 A senior MP phones Home Minister regarding the danger to incoming trains
10.15 An M. P contacts Shiv Shankar and asks that protection be given to trains Note: No army protection given and 43 trains passengers reported killed in Delhi (Times of India November 3, 1984)
13.30 A M.P contacts Shri Shiv Shankar and informs him about the situation in the city. Mr. Shiv Shankar tries to contact the Home Minister, Lt. Governor, Krishanaswamy Rao Saheb and Wali but none available.

Afternoon Killings continue in areas like Sultanpuri, Mangolpuri. Few peace marches in the city. Gangs roaming certain areas with iron rods and trishuls in presence of armed forces.
Evening PM makes appeals for peace and states that he cannot and will not allow violence
Night Killing and violence continue in some parts of the city. Some victims collect at police thanas.Army did not fire a single round or conduct flag marches all day.

NOVEMBER 3
Curfew relaxed from 09.00 to 20.00. Sporadic violence around city all day.

Morning Oppositions parties and Congress (I) MPs contacted by many citizens about the extent of the problem and killings in Delhi.
12.30 Funeral procession starts from Teen Murti
Afternoon Terror stricken victims of violence collect in thanas and Gurudwaras
16.00 Funeral pyre lit at Shanti Van
23.30 Lt. Governor P. G. Gavai proceeds on leave
Mr. M. M. K. Wali appointed Lt. Governor

NOVEMBER 4
Curfew continues in city
Super Bazaar in West Patel Nagar looted. Stabbing incidence in Shandara , Badarpur and Anand Prabat.
Cabinet expanded
Approximately 50, 000 Sikhs in relief camps
Most of the relief organised by voluntary agencies.

NOVEMBER 5
Curfew relaxed from 05.00 to 21.00
Exchange of fire in Chuna Mandi
Two persons burnt alive in Nathu Chowk
Conditions in most relief camps still chaotic

NOVEMBER 6
Curfew relaxed from 05.00 to 21.00
Joint Secretaries put in charge of camps. Civil Administration takes over from the army the charge of running camps.
Relief Schemes announced (but enough forms not available with
government on November 11, forms printed privately by voluntary agencies)

ANNEXURE-II
Eye-Witness Accounts

Dev Dutt, Journalist
Dipankar Gupta, Assistant Professor, JNU
Prof. Ashwini Ray, Head of Department of Political Science, JNU
Swapan Lahiri, Engineer
Sudip Mazumdar, Journalist
Rahul Kuldip Bedi, Journalist
Ms. Kamini Jaiswal, Advocate, Supreme Court of India

Dev Dutt, Journalist
By 4.30 p.m. on 31st October, a crowd of about 3,000 to 4,000 had gathered around the AIIMS in front of the main entrance gate of that institution. There were slogans mostly in praise of Mrs. Gandhi, and a few slogans threatening revenge. But there was no tension. There were a number of Sikhs in the crowd. Their faces showed no fear or apprehension, although everyone knew that a Sikh had assassinated the P.M. We talked to some of them in order to gauge their state of mind. The Sikhs seemed to be supremely confident about the goodwill of their Hindu brethren. It seems they nursed no suspicions against the Hindus. They did not show any traces of nervousness of any kind. The non Sikhs in the crowd did not seem even to notice the presence of Sikhs and took their presence as normal.

While this crowd waited patiently for the dead body of the PM to be brought out, the flow of traffic and business in the kiosks around along the wall of the Safdarjung Hospital went on as usual.

I was standing near the crossing in front of the AIIMS when 30-40 young men emerged out of the crowd and formed a neat column three or four men deep and ran towards the crossing near the traffic island. Then the group moved towards INA market. They caught hold of a scooter and set it on fire. There was a traffic jam near the petrol pump adjoining the INA market. The group turned back and moved towards Safdarjung Hospital on Ring Road and moved towards Sarojini Nagar. They began to pull Sikhs out of buses and remove their turbans and maltreat them. I saw five turbans burning in a row on the Ring Road.

There was no police in the area. The group had a free hand. After some time say 20 minutes or so, a group of khaki clad men arrived and began to chase away the miscreants.

It is difficult to explain the sudden eruption of violence in the AIIMS area on the evening of October 31, 1984. Perhaps the unusual normalcy in that area provoked a section of the people assembled there who were deeply moved by the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi. But the question is: Who were these people who came out of the crowd and went on a rampage ?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dipankar Gupta, Assistant Professor, JNU

On November 1 at 11.00 a.m. I was coming by the Vasant Vihar Gurudwara (Priya Cinema) where I saw a group of young men (about 60) attacking the Gurudwara. There were four policemen with guns slung on their shoulders who at that point turned away from the Gurudwara and began walking towards the Cinema complex.

On the same day at 9.20 a.m. I was at the JNU (New Campus) gate, where I found that a number of young men were energetically spreading the rumour that a band of Sikhs shoot down Hindus and that there were three bodies lying between the old and the new camps of JNU. When some students and teachers offered to go down with him to verify his allegation, he disappeared.

Between 9.20 and 10.30 p.m. on November 1, a Haryana Pradesh Congress Committee (I) car kept making the rounds of the campus. I do not know if the occupants of the car included JNU students, but on two occasions I noticed that the occupants of the car conversed at length with those who were spreading the rumour that Sikhs with sten guns were out to kill Hindus. At 10.40 a green Ambassador car with a West Bengal number plate stopped at the gate and three well-to-do-people got off. They were in the age group of 40-45. One of them went up to the students and teachers manning the gate and said, "I must warn you that Sikhs with nothing in their heads and with sten guns in hand are indiscriminately killing Hindus. You should all go home or you might get hurt.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Prof. Ashwini Ray, Head of Department of Political Science, JNU
November1, 1984 at 10 a.m. onwards: There was a police vehicle with about four policemen in Bhogal market. I came out of the house and was smoke billowing out. Heard the sound of a big type burst and suddenly saw the police vehicle come out of the Bhogal market, part at Mathura Road, to make way for a truck put on fire and being driven by one of the arsonists himself. The arsonist jumped out, and the truck bumped into a railing within 15 metres of the police car on the opposite side of the road. Policemen were reading newspapers and drinking tea inside the car while the arson was going on all around. I went to the police car to ask why they were not stopping the arson and was told to mind my own business. Already 70-80 trucks were burning in Bhogal and the smoke billowing out.

A short while later, I saw a Texla TV Service Centre on fire, radio sets and TVs being carried off right in front of the parked police vehicle. Some policemen in the vehicle asked the people to hurry with the loot.

By the time I found an armed mob and a group of Sikhs confronting each other close to my house. I rushed home to ring up the police but simply could not get through to the Control Room (100).

Within half an hour of this I saw the ghastly sight of about 80 Sikhs of all ages - from toddlers to 80 year olds, including women and children, crowded on the back verandah of the second floor of a corner house, some of whom were attempting to jump out. I found to my horror that many of the houses in this row had been set on fire, with the mob waiting in front with sticks and weapons for the occupants to emerge out of the houses. Some citizens managed to help the beseiged Sikhs and give them shelter.

The citizens organised a defence committee. In all this only once at night, around 10 p.m. a CRPF patrol marched into the locality and disappeared after giving instructions to keep within doors and keep the lights off. Though it had been agreed by the citizens vigilance committee that some lights should be kept on, the whole locality obeyed the CRPF which never visited the area again.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Swapan Lahiri, Engineer

On November 1, at around 1.30 p.m. I followed from a distance a group of 50 to 60 people, wielding sticks and iron rods from Parliament Street to Raisina Road. There, they tried to get into the house of the BJP MP Atal B. Vajpayee, which was protected by the police and some other men. The mob abused Vajpayee, and moved towards the Press Club taxi stand, where some DLY car and taxis were burnt. When some foreign TV cameramen tried to take pictures, they were prevented.

The mob then moved to the Congress (I) office on Raisina Road, where they regrouped themselves. A part of the mob moved out from the office premises towards Janpath crossing. There they entered the CPI office and began breaking doors and windows with iron rods.

I saw a taxi coming. The mob stopped it and broke its windowscreen. The driver pleaded that he was a Hindu, but the mob did not stop. Soon a jeep with a Congress (I) flag came and a man got down. He gave some instructions to the mob and left the scene. The mob then began moving in another direction, and I left.
During all these incidents, I saw the police standing and watching without intervening at any stage.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sudip Mazumdar, Journalist
The police Commissioner, S.C. Tandon was briefing the press (about 10 Indian reporters and five foreign journalists) in his office on November 6, 5 p.m. A reporter asked him to comment on the large number of complaints about local Congress MPs and light weights trying to pressure the police to get their men released. The police commissioner totally denied the allegation and when questioned further the categorically started that he has never received any calls or visits by any Congress for that matter, any political leader trying to influence him or his force. Just as he finished uttering these words, Jagdish Tytler, Congress MP from Sadar Constituency, barged of into the PC's office along with three other followers and on the top of his voice demanded from the PC "What is this Mr. Tandon? You still have not done what I asked you to do? "

The reporters were amused, the Police Commissioner embarassed. Tytler kept on shouting and a reporter asked the PC to ask that 'shouting man' to wait outside since a press conference was on. Tytler shouted at the reporter :'this is more important'. However the reporter told the PC that if Tytler wanted to sit in the office he would be welcome, but a lot of questions regarding his involvement would also be asked and he was welcome to hear them. Tytler was fuming. Perhaps realising the faux pas he sat down and said: 'By holding my men you are hampering relief work'. Then he boasted to some foreign reporters that 'There is not a single refugee in any camp in my constituency. I have made sure that they are given protection and sent back home'. However the incident left the PC speechless and the reporters convinced about the Congress (I) interference in police work.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rahul Kuldip Bedi
C/o Indian Express
Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg
New Delhi -110 002.

5 November 1984
The Lt. Governor
Delhi.

Dear Sir,
I am enclosing a complaint against three senior Delhi Police Officers where through sheer apathy and dereliction of duty became accessories to one of the most gruesome massacres in post independent India.
I sincerely hope that you will take necessary action.

Yours truly,-
RAHUL KULDIP SINGH

cc: Union Minister (Home)
Home Secretary, Govt . of India
Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat
Chief Security Advisor, Cabinet Secretariat
UNI
P.T.I.
Statesman/ Times of India/ Hindustan Times/ Janasatta/ Patriot/ Dainik Samachar/ Navbharat Times / Telegraph / free Press/ Hindu / All major newspaper and magazines.

***

C/o Indian Express
Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg
New Delhi -110 002.

November 5, 1984.
To : The Police Commissioner
Delhi Police
Delhi.

Dear Sir,

Following our meeting in your room at the Police Headquarters on Sunday, November 4, I wish to register a complaint of criminal negligence against Mr. H. C. Jatav, IPS, Additional Commissioner of Police, Delhi, Mr. Nikhil Kumar, IPS, Additional Commissioner of Police, Delhi and Mr. Seva Das IPS, Deputy Commissioner of Police, East District, for being responsible through their apathy and severe dereliction of duty for the massacre in Trilokpuri where over 350 persons were slaughtered in a carnage lasting over 30 hours, ending on the evening of November 2. You agreed to look into the matter.

The official figure of the number dead is 95 in Trilokpuri. The following are the details of the negligence:

1. On learning of the massacre on November 2 morning, I along with Mr.Joseph Maliakan, reporters, Indian Express newspaper, rushed to Trilokpuri at 2 p.m. Around 500 metres away from Block 32 we met a police rider and a constable coming from the block where the killing were still taking place.

Stopping the rider and asking him as to what was going on inside the block, he told us that the situation was quiet. Only two people had been killed, he said.

2. On going further, our car was blocked by angry mob stoned us and told us to leave or face the consequences. Block 32, they said was out of bounds.

3. We went to the local Kalyanpuri Police Station, looking after Trilokpuri and asked the Sub Inspector on duty for help in getting into the beleagured block around 3.30 p.m. The Police Officer said that all was quiet to Trilokpuri as his rider had reported the same to him. Besides, he said, he was a short of men.

4. After seeking army patrols in vain, we arrived at the Police Headquarters at 5 p.m. Mr. Nikhil Kumar, manning the telephones in your room, was told of the situation. He called the central control room, two floors above: Mr. Nikhil Kumar did nothing to ensure that a force had been sent other than make the telephone call to the control room. He asked the control room to inform the captain on duty inside the control room.

5. On reaching Trilokpuri at 06.05 p.m. we found the Kalyanpuri Station House Officer (SHO) Mr. S. V. Singh accompanied by two constables arriving in a Matador van; Mr. S. V. Singh said that he had radioed his senior officers, specially his DCP, Seva Das. The DCP was nowhere in sight till after 7 p.m.

6. On returning to the police headquarters, we were told by Mr. Nikhil Kumar that he had done his job by informing the control room.

Meanwhile Mr. Jatav, returning from a tour of the trans Jamuna areas, including Klayanpuri police station area (which includes Trilokpuri) arrived in your room and declared that 'calm' prevailed in his area. His DCP, Seva Das, he said, confirmed this.

7. When we stressed the urgency of the situation Mr. Jatav inquired from Mr. Nikhil Kumar as to why he had not been told of the emergency as he was in his office a floor above at 5 p.m., when the latter had merely called the control room, Mr. Nikhil Kumar, had no answer, other than parroting the fact that he had led the control room.

8. Mr. Jatav arrived at the spot around 7.45 p.m. over 30 hours after the killing began on November 1 around 10 a.m.

I hope suitable action is taken against these police office who through dereliction on duty became assesses to the butchering.
Sd/- Joseph Maliakan
Sd/-Rahul Kuldip Bedi

Copy received by Subhash Tandon on 5.11.1984

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ms. Kamini Jaiswal, Advocate, Supreme Court of India

On our visit to Pandunagar Gurudwara on November 3, we saw Mr. Padam Sharma who identified himself as the DPCC(I) President. He tried to send us, back saying 'nothing is wrong'. 'Everything is alright here'. But since we had been to the Gurudwara a day earlier and wanted t see the people who were hiding in the place, we insisted on going to the Gurudwara. When reached the Gurudwara, there were a large number of people some of relatives were stranded in the colony across the road in South Ganesh Nagar, and they were anxious that these people should be rescued. We volunteered to rescue these people should be rescued. We volunteered to rescue these people from South Ganesh Nagar. But on our return the same crowd that had earlier guided us to the Gurudwara turned violent am attacked the car with stones and roads. They said that we were trying to fortify the Gurudwara and disturb the balance; this was not going to be tolerated. This group was led by Mr. Padam Sharma. Later a person from the crowd told us that Mr. Padam Sharma was organising everything there as this was his constituency and that he did not like any interference in his area.
ANNEXURE - III
Official Pronouncements And News Reports On The Events

Official Pronouncements Report on Events

Wednesday, 31st October '84
Orders were issued late on Wednesday evening for heavy police patrolling all over the city. Section 144 extended to the entire Union Territory…Three companies of the Delhi Armed Police have been sent to each of the six police districts for round the clock patrolling.

According to the notification issued by the police these arrangements will be in force till further orders.

-- Staff Reporter,
The Statesmen
November 1, 1984. Five department personnel, like the citizens, received no assistance from the police who were not in evidence in any of the trouble spots in the city. Distress calls to emergency numbers (100) were either not answered or callers were given the stock reply that no help could be proffered.

-- Express News Service, The Indian Express
November 2, 1984

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Government late on Wednesday night alerted the army and called out the Border Security Force as the local police failed to control the widespread rioting and arson in different parts of the capital following the assassination of Indira Gandhi.
A top-level review of the law and order situation, involving the Prime Minister's Secretariat and Home Ministry continued till late Wednesday night to decide on steps to arrest the spread of sporadic violence in the wake of Mrs. Gandhi's assassination.

--Times of India, news service, November 1, 1984.

Even the "deployment" of paramilitary forces of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the Border Security Force (BSF), announced by the Government on Wednesday evening, was no where to be seen. "I have called CRPF and BSF control rooms every ten minutes" said a deputy officer at the Nizammudin Police Station, 'but each time I am told that there is nothing that can be done".

--Express News Service, Indian Express, November 2, 1984.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thursday, November 1, 1984
The Army was called out, indefinite curfew clamped in the city except in the New Delhi Police district and shoot-at-sight orders were issued on Thursday evening after 60 people were killed and 1000 injured in communal violence following the assassination of Indira Gandhi.

-- Express News Service, Indian Express, November 2, 1984.
Higher direction of the law enforcement machinery was clearly lacking and the police was a mute spectator to the mass violence….
The Lt. Governor did not call out the Army on Wednesday even through the situation showed every sign of going out of control. He took full 24 hours before doing so and clamping curfew in some areas.

When the decision to call the Army was taken on Thursday, the force made available was only adequate for a token presence. Reinforcement were brought in on Friday and Saturday. Meanwhile, looting and arson continued.

--Devsagar Singh, Indian Express, November 4, 1984.
Mr. P.P. Srivastav, the Delhi Municipal Corporation Commissioner said on Thursday that tap water in the capital "is absolutely safe for consumption".
--PTI, Indian Express, November 2, 1984.
Local leaders tin several areas went around on Thursday night warning people over loud speakers, not to drink water from municipal taps.

--The Statesman, November 3, 1984.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Friday, November 2, 1984
Fiddling with figures while the city burnt, the Police Commissioner, Mr. Subhash Tandon said at the end of the day that "Fifteen may be 20 people have died in violence during the day "To this Lt. Governor (Gavai) added "Things are under control".

--Express News Service, Indian Express, November 3, 1984. Murders led to massacres in the capital on Friday, one of the bloodiest days in the history of Delhi. Hundreds were killed.
There was no count.

The population of whole colonies was wiped out. At least 500 persons were killed in East Delhi alone, the bloodiest place on the day of senseless slaughter.

About 200 bodies were lying in the police mortuary at Tis Hazari.

Reporters saw at least 350 bodies on one street in Trilokpuri.

There were occasional signs of important Army officers without any sanction to check the violence all around them. The Army have no authority to open fire.

-- Express News Service, Indian Express, November 3, 1984.

Policemen criticised the role of politicians too. Several councillors the alleged, interceded on behalf of violent mobs when policemen tried to stop arson. Officers wondered what Mr. Kamal Nath was doing at Rakabganj.
Besides non-imposition of curfew, there was criticism of the of the lack of crisp commands from the top. "Senior officers only asked what was wrong over the wireless without once suggesting what could be done", one officer said.

--The Statesman, November 3, 1984.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Saturday, November 3, 1984
The curfew imposed in five of the six districts of Delhi on November 1 night was relaxed from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. today

-- The Times of India, November 4, 1984.
The Army had moved into most parts of Delhi by last evening; but the deploment reached full strength only after the 3,000 troops and the vehicles reserved for the funeral were made available for controlling the communal violence.

-The Telegraph, Seema Mustafa, November 4, 1984.

The Executive Magistrates have been empowered to order shooting if necessary

-The Economic Times, Staff Reporter, November 4, 1984.

The Police Commissioner, S.C. Tandon claimed that there was an improvement in the overall situation

-The Economic Times, Staff Reporter, November 4, 1984

The Police Commissioner, Mr. S.C. Tandon, today ordered an enquiry into reports of large number of deaths in Mangolpuri in mob violence since yesterday. The enquiry will be conducted by an officer of the rank of a deputy commissioner said that efforts were being made to verify the claims of the residents that the violence in these areas was 'organised and followed a set pattern".

-- The Times of India, Staff Reporter, November 4, 1984
A visit to Mangolpuri on Saturday afternoon showed armed groups of people moving about …Statesman reporters saw people carrying away the corpse of a child in the area. On the main street in the Colony, a corpse could be seen burning on the footpath…

A reconstruction of what happened in Mangolpuri would suggest that police, despite being present at a checkpost on one end of the colony and in the lines of the 9th battalions of the Delhi Armed Police on the oter, could not summon up the nerve to go inside the colony…When Statesman reporters visited the Bhogal area (South Delhi) on Saturday afternoon, smoke could be seen being looted a few yards ahead.

Here (Bhogal) and elsewhere, people of all communities agreed that there had been amity between all through and that organised gangs of criminals from neighbouring colonies and elsewhere had indulged in violence…in Bhogal, two sub-ordinate police officers were said to have instigated rioters.

-- The Statesman, Staff Reporter, November 4, 1984

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Sunday November 4, 1984
In a swift and sudden move following large-scale violence in the capital, the Union Government last night announced Mr. Wali's appointment in place of Mr. P.G. Gavai, who has proceeded on leave

-PTI, the Economic Times, November 5, 1984.

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Monday, November 5, 1984
The Lt. Governor Mr. M.M.K. Wali, in his first meeting with the pressmen after assuming charge earlier in the day said "no measure will be harsh enough" to prevent fresh trouble.

…Mr. Wali said that 1,809 people had been arrested on charges of arson, rioting and some for breach of the prohibitory orders.

-- The Economic Times, November 5, 1984.

Mr. Wali said; about 20,000 people had been given shelters in five relief camps and the administration was providing free cooked food and medical aid.

-- The Economic Times, November 5, 1984.
Arrangements to provide cooked food to the people in the relief camps and rescue homes have been made. They would also be provided blankets and mattresses to spend the night in some comfort. Medical relief was also being provided to people living in the relief and rescue camps.

-- The Times of India, Staff Reporter, November 5, 1984.

Over 300 people suspected to have looted property have been rounded up by the Central districts police. The Congress-I leaders including the local M.P., Mr. Dharam Das Shastri, came to the Karo Bagh Police Station to protest against the police action.
Mr. Dharam Das Shastri just said "Let them take away recovered property, but there is no need to arrest. These people are not criminals".

-- Express News Service, Indian Express, November 6, 1984.

Seven trans-Jamuna refugee camps overflowed with around 25,000 Sikhs from East Delhi on Monday.

The Administration which has not opened even one relief camp in the worst affected area in the city was moving ponderously, providing minimal aid. Voluntary agencies were, however, operating in full swing.
-- Express News Service, Indian Express, November 6, 1984.

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Tuesday, November 6, 1984
A total of 2,517 arrests had been made. He (Wali) was unable to give the number of people who had since been released on; bail but pointed out that bail was a right of every citizen in particular cases.

The police "had denied" that political pressure was being brought upon them as far as making recoveries was concerned, he added.

-- The Statesman, Staff Reporter, November 7, 1984.

Talking to newsmen on Tuesday, the Lt. Governor of Delhi, Mr. Madan Mohan Kishan Wali said that a scheme has been drawn up for relief and rehabilitation… Mr. Wali said the compensation was only a token but most of the houses destroyed
or damaged were in resettlement colonies and outlying areas and this amount would at least enable the people to put up liveable structures.

-- Express News Service, Indian Express, November 7, 1984 Many police officials complained that this drive was not moving into top gear because of political pressure. When the Commissioner of Police was talking to the Press, a local MP barged in and started shouting something about his "instructions being ignored"

-- The Statesman, Staff Reporter, November 7, 1984.

Until Tuesday night, there was no sign of the Government's presence at the Tilak Nagar Gurudwara which is sheltering over 1,000 people from Uttam Nagar, Nangloi, Najafgarh, Govindpuri, and Mangolpuri….

The Gurudwara, however, is unable to cope with this sudden influx of people and as in most other such camps, the sanitation is particularly inadequate.
-- Express News Service, Indian Express, November 7, 1984

List Of People Identified By Survivors

Annexure IV: H.K.L. Bhagat, Babu Ram Sharma, Sajjan Kumar, Lalit Makan, Dharam Das Shastri, Jagdish Tytler, Mahendra, Mangat Ram Singal, Dr. Ashok Kumar, Sukhan Lal Sood, Jagdish Chander Tokas -- all Congress politicians to police big wigs and others

I. POLITICIANS

The following is the list of those alleged to have instigated violence and/or protected alleged criminals.

1. Mr. H.K.L. Bhagat, Minister of state (Information and Broadcasting). On November 5, reported to have intervened to get miscreants released who were held in Shahdara Thana.

2. Babu Ram Sharma, Member, Municipal Corporation (Ward No. 58) reported to be the right-hand man of H. K. L. Bhagat. Reportedly responsible for loot, arson and murder in trance-Yamuna areas-Babarpur, Chajupur Colony, Maujpur, Gonda. Allegedly led people on motor cycle with megaphone.

3. Sajjan Kumar, Cong. (I) M.P. from Mangolpuri. Reported to have paid Rs. 100 and a bottle of liquor to each person involved in the killing.

4. Lalit Makan, Cong. (I) Trade Union Leader and Metropolitan Councillor. Reportedly paid to mob Rs. 100 each plus a bottle of liquor. A white ambassador car reportedly belonging to him came 4 times to the G.T. Road area near Azadpur. Instructions to mobs indulging in arson were given from inside the car.

5. Dharam Das Shastri, Cong. (I) M. P. from Karol Bagh. Reported to becarrying voters list with him at Prakash Nagar for identification of Sikhs. On November 5, according to newspaper reports, he along with other Congress-I leaders tried to pressurize the SHO of Karol Bagh Police Station to release the persons who arrested during the police raids to recover looted property.

6. Jagdish Tytler, Cong.(I) M. P. from Sadar Constitutency. On 6th November 5 p.m. he barged into a press conference that the Police Commissioner S. C. Tandon was holding. A journalist reports that he told the Police Commissioner that "by holding my men you are hampering the relief work".

7. Mahendra, Metropolitan Councillor. Reported to have accompanied Dharam Das Shastri with voters lists at Prakash Nagar.

8. Mangat Ram Singal, Member of Municipal Corporation (Ward No. 32) was reportedly with Dharam Das Shastri and Mahendra at Prakash Nagar.

9. Dr. Ashok Kumar, Member of Municipal Corporation, Kalyanpuri. Reportedly held a meeting in Kalyanpuri, following which violence broke out immediately. According to many eye witnesses he led mobs which indulged in loot, murder, arson and rape.

10. Sukhan Lal Sood, Metropolitan Councillor. According to eye witnesses was seen leading mobs, which indulged in loot, murder, arson and rape. He had come with petrol and serial lists and addressess of Sikhs in the locality. The women refugees, recognized him and drove him out.

11. Jagdish Chander Tokas, Member of Municipal Corporation Munirka (Ward No. 14) reportedly led a mob to R.K. Puram Sector IV and V.

12. Ishwar Singh, Member, Municipal Corporation, Mangolpuri (Ward No. 37). Allegedly led the mobs that indulged in looting, burning, rape and murder in Mangolpuri area.

13. Balwant Khokhar, Youth Congress-I Leader, Delhi, Identified as one of the persons responsible for instigating looting and arson in Palam Colony area.

14. Faiz Mohammad, Youth Congress-I Leader, Delhi, named by refugees in Shakurpur camp and in Mangolpuri for being a part of the mob indulging in looting, arson and murder.

15. Ratan, Youth Congress-I Leader, Delhi, named as having taken part in violence and looting in Palam Colony area.

16. Satbir Singh, Youth Congress-I. He allegedly brought bus loads of people from Ber Sarai to Sri Guru Harkrishan Public School (Munirka). They burnt school buses and parts of the school building. He was reportedly involved in looting and beating of Sikhs which carried on throughout the night on November 1.

II. POLICE

The following is the list of police officials allegedly responsible for negligence of duty and more abetment of /participation in violence :
.
1.Malhotra, ACP, East Districts at Shakarpur (under Shakarpur P. S.) Reported to have invited mobs. Heard to say "You should have blown up the Gurudwaras in addition to killing Bhatia (Congress-I worker, Trilochan Singh Bhatia ) of M. Block, Shakarpur. Mob was accompanied by Malhotra, who moved with one jeep, station-wagon, two men with sten-guns and revolvers, petrol-cans and stones. He supplied weapons to the mob, according to eve-witness accounts. Reportedly incited mobs at Laxmi Nagar, Gurunangal Nagar (under Shahdara P. S. )

2. Jai Singh, S.H.O., Allegedly told mobs in troubled area that they could do what they wanted for three days.

3. Rao Ram Mehar, S.H.O. at Shakarpur reportedly pointed out Shik shops and houses to the mob.

4. Hari Ram Bhatti, S.H.O. Sultanpuri P. S. reported to have helped the mob by disarming the Sikhs. On November 1 and 2 it is alleged that he himself killed them. On 3 and 4 reported to have had the Sikhs shaven at gun point.

5. Ravtas Singh, S.H.O. Sadar Thana. Reportedly broke into houses and indulged in arson.

6. Survir Singh, S.H.O. Kalyanpuri, P. S. He reported reached Trilokpuri (under Kalyanpuri P. S.) at 2.30 p.m. On November 1, when plunder and killing were going on. He immediately removed head constable and another constable from the spot, thereby giving the mob full licence to indulge in arson, rape and killing.

7. R. D. Singh, S.I. Information from refugees at Durgapuri Gurudwara, Loni Road that he abetted mobs and personally beat up and killed people.

8. S.H.O. and Constables. R. K. Puram Sector IV P. S. According to eye witness account when appealed to by two residents of Ber Sarai to project a Sikh family being attacked by a mob in Sector IV they categorically refused. Furhter, they are reported to have declared that Sikhs should be killed.

The following are the names of other police officials reported to have abetted / participated in violence in the mentioned areas :

9. Tyagi, S.H.O. in Trilokpuri.

10. Rana, Inspector-in-Trilokpuri.

11. Moolchand, S. I. In Shakarpur.

12. Bakshi, A.S.I. in Trilokpuri.

13. Rajvir Singh, Head Constable, Kalyanpuri, P. S. in Trilokpuri.

III OTHERS INVOLVED

The following is the list of persons allegedly involved in looting, arson and other criminal activities:

TRILOKPURI:

BLOCK -5
1. Papita, one of the ring leaders allegdly involved in murder.

BLOCK-12 :
2. Brahmani (Misrani) Shastri.

BLOCK-14 :
3. Baleshwar Bhargi alias Bhalu.
4. Bal Kishan

BLOCK-21 :
5. Bihari Dhobi.

BLOCK-25
6. B. D. Sharma.

BLOCK-27 :
7. Israi Ali (alias Chunnu).
8. Salim, Well known goonda, allegedly involved in murder.
9. Massa, opium dealer.

BLOCK-28 :
10. Dr. Yahya Siddiqi, Clinic at Main Road, Block -27, reportedly led the mob.11. Manu Singh, shop-keeper.
12. Soni, Railway Worker.
13. Mukesh, reportedly involved in loot and murder.

BLOCK-29 :
14. Mukri Master, Tailor, allegedly involved in murder.

BLOCK-30 :
15. Om Prakash (Omi), Mason, allegedly involved in murder.
16. Ved Prakash (Brother if Om Prakash), Handpump Mistri, allegedly involved in murder and rape.
17. Nur Jahan, reported to have incited Muslims by spreading the rumours that mosques have been burnt by Sikhs.
18. Keramat, Dealer in Cement.
19. Shabnam, TV shop owner.
20. Damesh
21. Punju
. 22. Salim allegedly involved in murder.
23.Abbas Son-in-law (see Abbas in Block 32).
24. Mukri, Video shop owner.
25. Hasin.

BLOCK-31 :
26. Kamaruddin, Atta-Chakki shop owner, and Furniture dealer.
27. Niyamat Ali.
28. Ninav, Tea shop owner.
29. Dr. V. P. Singh.
30. Duli Chand, Local Leader.

BLOCK-32:
31. Rampal Saroj, Pradhan and Congress -I worker. Allegedly responsible for killing of Gopal Singh, Ranjha Singh, Mekal Singh. Other charges against him are instigation, rape and burning.
32. Kishori lal and his four brothers, Shrawan, Sbrlya, Chhote, Kamal, own a Meat shop. Allegedly responsible for killing of HuRum Singh, Tirath, Sajjan Singh, Soma Singh, Tara Singh.
33. Jagga Sansi and wife Draupadi, allegedly responsible for burning, murder and rape.
34. Khadak Singh Pradhan.
35. Gaffar Khan, Businessman dealing in Cement.
36. Babu Khan, owns a dairy.
37. Manu Sansi
38. Aasim.
39. Somnath, allegedly responsible for killing of several persons including Hoshiar Singh S/o Milap Singh and 3 young men whom he locked in the house and killed later with other people.
40. Ajit.
41. Kadir.
42. Monga.
43. Sati.
44. Tello Sansi (Draupadi's sister)
45. Ruplal, allegedly responsible for killing of Labh Singh, r/o 32/121.
46. Omi Chamar, Shoemaker.
47. Morari, owns grocery shop in Block-31.
48. Pahelwan (Brother of Rashid).
49. Bachchan.
50. Aziz.
51. Ansar.
52. Kallo Khan, Dhaba owner.
53. Abbas, owns cloth and chappal shop in Block-27.
54. Dr. Lambo.
55. Bhallo, Sells liquors.
56. Kayamat Ali.
57. Raju (Bhangi), Sweeper.
58. Jaggi.
59. Bhaya.
60. Murli Khan.
61. Sher Khan.
62. Raja Ram, Rickshaw Driver.
63. Bethis Ramesh.
64. Bedhu Ram, allegedly responsible for killing in 32/99 and 32/97.

BLOCK -33:
65. Pappu, allegedly responsible for murder.
66. Bhum, local goonda.
67. Gyano, student.
68. Mohammad, Cycle shop owner.
69. Birju.
70. Zakir.
71. Kamal Singh, Rickshaw owner.
72. Munshi.
73. Rashid, Cycle Rickshaw repair shop in Block-32, allegedly involved in murder.

BLOCK- 34:
74. Mahendru.
75. Ratan (brother of Mahendru).
76. Behem Sharma.
77. Mahendra Pal.
78. Sher Singh, Shop keeper.

BLOCK- 35:
79. Jeevan.

BLOCK- 36:
80. B. B. Pandoy.

OTHER BLOCKS:

81. D. R. Lakhani, Youth Congress-I.
82. Abdulla.
83. Two sons of Sitaram, Milkman.
84. A.Mulla, lives near Mosque in Trilokpuri, teaches children in Mosque. Allegedly incited Muslims to go to burn two Gurudwaras of the locality.
85. Lakhan.
86. Rohtas, Land owner and Goala.
87. Rishi, Land owner and Goala.
88. Kripal, Land owner and Goala.
89. Brahrn (Tea shop owner in Trilokpuri).
90. Chabban & Munim, Cloth and Tailoring Shop near Mosque. Allegedly responsible for the death of Duleep Singh.
91. Babu Sharma.

SULTANPURI:

BLOCK- A- 4:
92. A. Bagri, Pradhan.
93. Brahmanand Gupta, Pradhan.
94. Nathu Pradhan, Sweeper.
95. Udal Jat.
96. Owner of Hanuman Ration shop.
97. Gayanand, Shop owner.
98. Ganpat, Shop owner.
99. Piria (Gujrati).
100. Gurbat Brothers.
101. Islam.
102. Rao.
103. Changa, Doctor.
104. Omi, auto-rickshaw driver.
105. Garib Das.
106. Vermanand, Kerosene seller.

BLOCK A-5:
107. Hasla Ram.
108. Mangla.
109. Satbir.
110. Salam.

BLOCK B-1:
111. Pal Brahman.
112. Samthu.
113. Khismvia.
114. Kumar.

BLOCK- 3:
115. Gopal & Brothers
116. Babbar & Father
117. Tiwari
118. Raghubir,Sweeper
119.Pratap,Sweeper
120. Wajiz

BLOCK- C- 4:
121. Barjilal & Sons.
122. Kalaram and 2 sons
123. Prem Singh alias Prem Muchiwal, Property dealer
124.Jai Kishan, Sweeper
125.Danny
126. Pappu
127. Raju
128. Ravikaran, Tailor
129. Kannaram.
130. Mohan Lal s/o Thekeda Komal

BLOCK P-3:
131. Tara Chand, Carpenter.
132. Master, Kerosene seller
133. Radhe Shyam, Mechanie
134. Babu Lal, Vegetable seller
135. The brother of Sikandar
136. Gulab Singh, owner of Godown

MONGOLPURl:

137. Hardwari Lal, Mandal President
138. Narendar Singh, Congress-I Worker
139. Salim Qureshi, Congress-I worker, belongs to Waqf Club
140. Shawkeen, Congress- I Worker, belong to Waqf Club
141. Malaram, Congress- I worker
142. Rajendar of New Star Club
143. Shiv Charan

MAUJPUR: GONDA:

144. Bhisno Joginder, Kerosene seller
145. Trilok, Flour Mill owner
146. Gupta, Paper seller
147. Delu Ram, Tailor's Apprentice
148. Ram Kishan, Tailor's Apprentice
149. Bhola, MilLman I
150. Balbir, Milkman s son
151. Prem, Barber
152. Gyan Malwai
153. Narain's son
154. Brahm

SHAKARPUR:

155. Bhatia, Congress - I Worker
156. Dogra, Congress-I worker
157. Mr. Singh, Congress-I worker
158. Lakshmi Dhoban, Mahila Samiti, allegedly instigated mobs to burns Sikhs alive.
159. Mr. Ashwini, BJP worker
160. Satpal, owner of 3-star hotel on main Shakarpur highway.
161. Ashok Kumar, owns a flour mill in Shakarpur.
162. Ram Niwas Sharma
163. Rohtas Singh, Shakarpur Village.

KHAJURI KHAS:

164. Kadam Singh, Panchayat Sarpanch
165. Nephews of Kadam Singh
166. Nambat Singh, owns Ration shop in the area.
167. Shyam Lal, Retired ASI.
168. Jai Singh, Kerosene seller
169. Jugnu.
170. Parsa

JANAKPURI:

171. Pratap, Pradhan of Sagarpur, allegedly responsible for killing 22 members of the family of Budh Singh of Sagarpur near Janakpuri.

BLOCK C:
172. Dablu, Sweeper
173. Kalia, Sweeper
174. Upli, Sweeper
175. Son Sasi
176. Mohan Sasi
177. Bhana Sasi
178. Raju, Sweeper
179. Malaram, allegedly distributed free kerosene

MANDAVALI: UNCHPUR

180. Sachdeva, property dealer
181. Raj Kalia, Cement dealer
182. Gupta, alias Chakki, owns Grocery store
183. Ram Prakash, works in Khadi Bhawan
184. Dr. Babbar
185. Dharam Pal
186. Kishan Dutt
187. Babu Ram
188.Lal Bahadur Mishra
189. Joshi

RAJNAGAR:

190. Balwan Khokkar
191. Mohinder Singh Bargdola
192. Pandit Tara Chand
193. Ishwar Chand Verma
194. Pandit Ram Niwas

SADAR BAZAAR:

195. Kamal, Dhobi
196. David, Dhobi's son
197. Vinayak Family

AZADPUR INDUSTRIAL AREA:

198. T. S. Bedi, Factory owner. On Nov. 1 he is reported to have organized mobs from early morning which became active later. While his own factory was left untouched, the neighbouring Crown Motors factory belonging to Sardar Pyare Singh was gutted the same day.

List of Relief Camps Recognised by Delhi Administraion

Ludlow Castle: 4,000; Shahdara: 8,000; Shakarpur; 2000; Farash Bazar: 2,000, Gandhi Nagar: 1,000

ANNEXURE V

LIST OF RELIEF CENTRES RECOGNISED BY DELHI ADMINISTRATION

1) Govt. Model School No. I & 2, Ludlow Castle, Alipur Road, Population: 4,000
2) Govt. Boys Hr. Sec. School, (Near Shyam Lal College) Shahdara, Population: 8, 000.
3) Police Station Farash Bazaar, Population: 2, 000
4) Police Station Gandhi Nagar, Population: 1,000
5) Sr. Boys Sec. School, Opposite Radhu Palace Cinema, P. S. Shakurpur, Population: 1, 200
6) Bhai Mota Singh School "A" Block, Janakpuri, Population: 1,200
7) Govt. Boys Hr. Sec. School, Shakarpur, Rani Bagh, Population: 3, 000
8) Govt. Girls Hr. Sec. School, Shakurpur, Population: 2,000
9) P. S. Subzi Mandi, Population: 100
10) P. S. Sadar Bazaar, Population: 100

LIST OF CAMPS NOT RECOGNISED BY THE DELHI ADMINISTRATION

1) Balasaheb Gurudwara, Population: 5,000
2) Nanaksar Ashram, Population: 3, 000
3) Durgapuri Gurudwara, Population: 2,000
4) Jyoti Nagar Gurudwara, Population: N. A.
5) Baba-Banda Bahadur Singh Gurudwara Mehrauli, Population: 20
6) Teliwara Gurudwara, Population: N.A.
7) Harinagar Gurudwara, Population: 500
8) Fatehnagar Gurudwara, Population: 500
9) Air Force Station Gurudwara Subroto Park, Population: N. A.
10) Sadar Bazaar Gurudwara, Delhi Cantonment, Population: N.A.
11) Gurudwara Singh Sahiban, Jangpura Extension Population: N.A.
12) Panchaheel Park Gurudwara, Population N. A.
13) Peshwani Gurudwara, Tilak Nagar Population: 1,800
14) Panda Nagar Gurudwara, Population: 1,500
15) Open Sultanpuri Camp, Population: 1,000
16) Vinodnagar area Patpar Ganj, Population: 128
17) Hans Raj Model School Camp, Krishna Nagar, Population: 126
18) Kalyanpuri Block 13, Population: 300

Outside Delhi:

19) Shanbhu Dayal College, Ghaziabad, Population:260
20) Singh Sabha Gurdwara, Gurgaon, Population : N.A

Manmohan ready to move on ‘humanitarian’ talks agenda

2009-10-28T21:21:00.002+05:30

At Anantnag, Prime Minister makes fresh peace with pitch for Pakistan...

29 October 2009
The Hindu

Manmohan ready to move on ‘humanitarian’ talks agenda

Siddharth Varadarajan

In signalling his government’s readiness to discuss initiatives to strengthen people-to-people interaction across the Line of Control, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may just have hit upon a magic formula that could potentially advance the peace process with Pakistan and make life easier for the beleaguered people of Jammu and Kashmir. Without diluting New Delhi’s key demand that Islamabad act to eliminate the threat that Pakistan-based terrorist groups pose to India.

It has taken Dr. Singh three months to put the ghost of the Sharm el-Sheikh controversy behind him and he did so in a way that political India could best understand: his latest peace overture was made from a public platform in the Valley with the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, on the dais beside him.

Considerable care seems to have gone in to the structure of the Prime Minister’s speech. He first noted the advances that were made bilaterally on all issues, including on a permanent resolution of Kashmir, between 2004 and 2007. This was a time when militancy and violence began to decline. Trade with Pakistan went up three times but, more importantly for Kashmir, trade between the two sides of the divided state began. Since then, however, terrorist activities increased, eventually bringing a halt to this process of constructive engagement.

Next, the Prime Minister pointed out that existing cross-LoC initiatives are not as people-friendly as they could be. “Trade facilities at the border are inadequate. There are no banking channels. Customs facilities need to be strengthened. There are no trade fairs. The lists of tradable commodities need to be increased. Clearances for travel take time. Prisoners of India and Pakistan are languishing in each other’s jails even after completing their sentences”.

In sum, “these are humanitarian issues whose resolution requires the cooperation of Pakistan”, he said, adding that India is “ready to discuss these and other issues with the Government of Pakistan. I hope that as a result things will be made easier for our traders, divided families, prisoners and travellers”. He added that for a “productive dialogue” it is “essential that terrorism must be brought under control”.

What the Prime Minister has essentially done is to separate out the strands of the dialogue process as it existed prior its suspension following the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 2008 and raised the possibility of forward movement on the “humanitarian” strands even as substantive political engagement, or “productive dialogue”, must await the action that India has asked Pakistan to take against the camps and infrastructure of terrorist groups and other hostile non-state actors on its territory.

In re-examining India’s options in this manner, Dr. Singh is responding to the demands of various stakeholders in Jammu and Kashmir who have been arguing for some time that trade and other forms of cross-LoC interaction should not be held hostage to the activities of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and other extremist organisations. The Jammu Traders Association, for example, would like the current weight restriction on trucks involved in cross-LoC trade to be increased from 1.5 tonnes to 10 tonnes. There have also been demands for the two governments to work out arrangements so that Letters of Credit could be used for two-way trade.

Apart from this instrumental distinction between “humanitarian” and political issues as far as the dialogue process is concerned, Dr. Singh’s speech was also significant for the absence of accusatory language and a hectoring tone. Instead, the Prime Minister gently reminded Pakistan of the consequences of compromising with terrorism ---“Eventually they turn against you and bring only death and destruction. The real face of the terrorists is clear for the people of Pakistan to see with their own eyes”.

For years, the Pakistani military has backed extremist groups in the hope that they would weaken India’s hold over Jammu and Kashmir and force New Delhi to reach a negotiated territorial settlement. Not only was that strategy a failure as far as the India front was concerned, the growing number of terrorist attacks within Pakistan is proof that the blowback from this policy has been extremely costly. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has sought to assure Pakistan that if it takes its “ongoing actions against the terrorist groups to their logical conclusion [and] destroy these groups wherever they are operating and for whatever misguided purpose”, India will not be found wanting in its response. The fact is that the “intensive dialogue” on Kashmir between 2004 and 2007 that Dr. Singh referred to did more to address Pakistan’s core concerns than two decades of terrorist violence.

If Pakistan acts against these groups now, there is no reason why the threads of that process cannot be picked up. And in the interim, as a demonstration of the two countries’ stated commitment to the welfare of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, discussions on making existing cross-LoC initiatives more “people friendly” can begin more or less immediately.

For the Prime Minister's latest initiative on Pakistan to work, it is essential that all players on the Indian side stick closely to the line and length he has now set. Senior ministers and officials, in particular, need to be on message, neither adding nor subtracting words, sentences and colour to Dr. Singh's formulations. Deviations will only generate confusion or, worse, retaliatory rhetoric from Islamabad, triggering yet another counterproductive spin cycle from which the relationship only emerges shaken and bruised.

Modi's 'action-reaction' quote

2009-10-27T15:14:00.006+05:30

After taking on some apologists for Narendra Modi on Twitter, I realised the limitation of the 140 character limit for responses. These guys will probably never be satisfied... As I tweeted, Modi apologists are like Holocaust deniers, who say Hitler didn't kill the Jews but they sure deserved to die. For the Modi apologists, their hero didn't say the post-Godhra massacres were a 'reaction' but they believe the Muslims who got killed in 'reaction' had it coming anyway.

Anyhow, for what it's worth, I am posting an excerpt from my 2002 book where the action-reaction quote is given. As a bonus, I am including the section on Atal Bihari Vajpayee's appalling Goa speech that year, also the subject of disinformation and redaction by embarrassed BJP sympathisers...

Except from Chapter 1, ‘Chronicle of a Tragedy Foretold’ by Siddharth Varadarajan. In Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy, ed. Siddharth Varadarajan (Penguin, 2002)

From Golwalkar to Newton

When one examines the politics of the RSS and BJP today, it is striking to see the manner in which the arguments of Golwalkar and Savarkar about Muslims and Christians as ‘foreigners’ and ‘enemies’ resonate in the pronouncements and activities of these organizations. There is a clear line which connects the founding principles of the RSS to the mass killing of Muslims in Gujarat. Golwalkar’s obsession with a purely Hindu nation in which non-Hindus would have no rights, the ‘Newtonian’ rationalizations of genocidal violence provided by Narendra Modi, and Prime Minister Vajpayee’s sweeping attack on Muslims in his speech to a BJP meeting in Goa in April are all part of the same chauvinist discourse.

At its Akhil Bharatiya Karykari Mandal meeting in Bangalore in mid-March, 2002, the RSS adopted a controversial resolution titled ‘Godhra and After’ in which Muslims were cautioned that they would only be safe in India if they won the ‘goodwill’ of Hindus. By ‘Hindus’, of course, was meant the RSS. ‘Let Muslims realise that their real safety lies in the goodwill of the majority’, the resolution stated. It added, ‘The reaction of this murderous incident in Gujarat was natural and spontaneous. The entire Hindu society cutting across all divisions of party, caste and social status reacted.’56 Elaborating on the resolution, RSS joint general secretary Madan Das Devi told the press, ‘Hindus live and let live. This does not mean Hindus can tolerate insults. They (Muslims) are safe if they win our goodwill . . . respect us and we will respect you.’ Asked to explain the real meaning of what he was trying to say, Devi said, ‘Any killing is unjustifiable but at the same time there will be reaction to any action.’57 In similar vein, BJP president Jana Krishnamurthy told the press during the party conclave in Goa, ‘In any communal strife, there is always one who provokes and another (who is) provoked.’ Strongly implying that the attacks on Muslims were provoked, he criticized the media and others for ‘advising and attacking the provoked. This has given rise to a psychology amidst the provoked that it is the victim in every sense’.58

The first use of this morally perverse ‘Newtonian’ logic of action and reaction to justify the killing of Muslims after Godhra was made by Modi in an interview to Zee Television on 1 March, even as the violence was at its peak. And ironically, it wasn’t so much a reference to the burning of the Sabarmati Express as to press reports that former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri—who was lynched by a Sangh Parivar-led mob at his residence in Chamanpura, Ahmedabad on 28 February—had fired at the mob in order to try and disperse them. Modi said that Jafri’s ‘action’ of firing had infuriated the mob and that the massacre which followed was a ‘reaction’. Since his remark generated a huge controversy59 and led the Gujarat information department to deny that he had said any such thing, it is worth reproducing his exact quote: ‘Kriya pratikriya ki chain chal rahi hai. Hum chahate hain ki na kriya ho aur na pratikriya. (What is happening is a chain of action and reaction. What I want is that there should be no action and no reaction).’ Asked about the violence which erupted throughout Gujarat on the day of the VHP-sponsored bandh, he said:

Godhra mein jo parson hua, jahan par chalees mahilaon aur bacchon ko zinda jala diya, is mein desh mein aur videsh mein sadma pahunchna swabhavik tha. Godhra ke is ilake ke logon ki criminal tendencies rahi hain. In logon ne pahele mahila teachers ka khoon kiya. Aur ab yeh jaghanya apraadh kiya hai jiski pratikria ho rahi hai. (It is natural that what happened in Godhra day before yesterday, where forty women and children were burnt alive, has shocked the country and the world. The people in that part of Godhra have had criminal tendencies. Earlier, these people had murdered women teachers. And now they have done this terrible crime for which a reaction is going on).60

Apart from being a crude attempt to deflect criticism of his failures as chief minister, Modi’s ‘action-reaction’ theory is also morally repugnant. As Vir Sanghvi has argued, ‘What Mr Modi and his ilk are really saying is this: Because the riots were a response to a horrific and immoral act at Godhra, they are somehow less morally reprehensible . . . But cause-and-effect cannot be a moral philosophy. You cannot whitewash an event, wipe away somebody’s guilt or provide moral justification by pointing to the cause of their behaviour.’61

Steeped in the RSS teachings of historical enmity between Hindus and Muslims and unencumbered by the formal trappings of political office, VHP leader Ashok Singhal took Modi’s Newtonian logic one step further. For him, the situation in Gujarat was ‘a matter of pride.’ ‘It is a befitting reply to what has been perpetrated on the Hindus in the last 1,000 years . . . Gujarat has shown the way and our journey of victory will begin and end on the same path.’62 The VHP’s Pravin Togadia held out another direct threat. ‘Wherever there is Godhra, there will be Gujarat’, he said. ‘In Gujarat, for the first time there has been a Hindu awakening and Muslims have been turned into refugees. This is a welcome sign and Gujarat has shown the way to the country.’63 Togadia’s inflammatory statement was formalized by the VHP later in a resolution adopted at a conference in Hardwar at the end of June where Muslims throughout India were warned that Gujarat could be repeated and that they could all be driven into refugee camps.64

In 1939, Golwalkar had argued that ‘only those movements are truly “National” as aim at re-building, revitalising and emancipating from its present stupor, the Hindu Nation. Those only are nationalist patriots, who, with the aspiration to glorify the Hindu race and Nation next to their heart, are prompted into activity and strive to achieve that goal. All others are either traitors and enemies to the national cause, or, to take a charitable view, idiots.’65 It was left for senior BJP leader and spokesman J.P. Mathur to take this logic forward and describe the killing of Muslims in Gujarat as a ‘patriotic reaction’ to what happened at Godhra. ‘I don’t know why the people and the media have been calling the violence in Gujarat riots. These are not riots, but the reaction of nationalist forces to the Godhra carnage . . . The so-called secular leaders like I. K. Gujral, Chandrashekhar, Sonia Gandhi, Mulayam Singh Yadav are also in league with the anti-national forces. Whenever nationalist forces come out to challenge the anti-national elements, these people come to the rescue of the Muslims,’ Mathur said.66 There is no ambiguity in Mathur’s statement, nothing is left to chance: Muslims are anti-national, those who attack them are nationalists.

When the Mask Slipped

Perhaps the most significant elaboration of the Golwalkar-Savarkar thesis of India as a Hindu nation beset by Muslim trouble-makers in recent times was that provided by Prime Minister Vajpayee in his speech to the BJP national executive meeting in Goa on 12 April 2002.67 The speech is remarkable for the manner in which it attempts to justify the murder of Muslim citizens in Gujarat by referring to Godhra and contrasting the supposed ‘traditional tolerance’ of Hindus with the alleged ‘intolerance’ of Muslims.

Like Golwalkar, who believed only Hindus were true Indians, Vajpayee uses ‘us’, ‘our’, ‘Hindus’ and ‘Indians’ interchangeably throughout his speech. He begins by making an observation about Hindu kingdoms in ancient Cambodia. ‘No king destroyed a temple or damaged the deities’ idols at the time of attacking another king. This is our culture. This is our outlook, which treats all faiths equally.’ India, he said, was secular before Muslims and Christians set foot on her soil. Once they came, they had freedom of worship. ‘No one thought of converting them with force, because this is not practiced in our religion; and in our culture, there is no use for it.’ Here, the Prime Minister was trying to contrast the ‘tolerance’ of Hindus and Hinduism, which he described as ‘our religion’, with the supposed intolerance of Muslims and Christians. The reference to the destruction of idols and conversion ‘with force’ is a standard part of the RSS arsenal. At the root of major incidents of violence, he said, was ‘growing intolerance’. Since Hindus are, by definition, tolerant, the obvious inference is that this ‘growing intolerance’ is on the part of the Muslims. Turning immediately to the burning issue of the day, he asked:

What happened in Gujarat? If a conspiracy had not been hatched to burn alive the innocent passengers of the Sabarmati Express, then the subsequent tragedy in Gujarat could have been averted. But this did not happen. People were torched alive. Who were those culprits? The government is investigating into this. Intelligence agencies are collecting all the information. But we should not forget how the tragedy of Gujarat started. The subsequent developments were no doubt condemnable, but who lit the fire? How did the fire spread?

Here, in as unsophisticated a fashion as Modi had stated it, we find Vajpayee presenting his own version of Newton’s Third Law. There is no remorse about the killing of hundreds of innocent people, no apologies for the failure of the government to protect its citizens. He makes no attempt to distinguish between the criminal perpetrators of the Godhra attack and the innocent victims of the ‘subsequent tragedy in Gujarat’. For him, Muslims are an amorphous, undifferentiated lot who collectively ‘lit the fire’. They were to blame, not his party men who took part in the ‘subsequent developments’.

Going from the specific to the general, Vajpayee then launched a frontal attack on Muslims. He asserts that ‘For us, the soil of India from Goa to Guwahati is the same, all the people living on this land are the same. We do not believe in religious extremism. Today, the threat to our nation comes from terrorism’. Who is this we and where exactly does this ‘threat to our nation’ come from? The Hindi text provides a clue. Vajpayee deliberately uses the Urdu word mazhabi for ‘religious’ (rather than the Hindi word dharmik) when he says ‘religious extremism’.68 We do not believe in religious extremism; it is the Muslims. And terrorism, of course, is synonymous with Islam, or ‘militant Islam’, as Vajpayee chose to put it. But having first made a distinction between militant Islam and tolerant Islam, he then makes a sweeping generalization about all Muslims:

Wherever Muslims live, they don’t like to live in co-existence with others, they don’t like to mingle with others; and instead of propagating their ideas in a peaceful manner, they want to spread their faith by resorting to terror and threats. The world has become alert to this danger.

The statement is classic hate speech, but after it generated a huge controversy, Vajpayee claimed his remarks were aimed not at all Muslims but only ‘militant Muslims’. The Prime Minister’s Office subsequently issued a doctored version of the speech in which the word ‘such’ was inserted between ‘Wherever’ and ‘Muslims live’. Many newspapers subsequently printed this version. It was not until a privilege motion was raised in Parliament—for Vajpayee had made the mistake of claiming on the floor of the House on May 1 that the doctored version of the speech was the true version—that he was forced to admit the word ‘such’ had been deliberately interpolated. However, he reiterated that ‘no one who reads my entire speech and takes note of the tribute I have paid to the tolerant and compassionate teachings of Islam, can be in any doubt that my reference . . . is only to the followers of militant Islam’.69

The allegation of Muslims not living in co-existence with others and not mingling with others is such a standard trope in RSS propaganda that Vajpayee’s claim of intending to refer only to militant Muslims does not seem very convincing. Earlier in his speech, he had equated militant Islam with terrorism. ‘Not mingling with others’ is a peculiar charge to level against terrorists. In any case, it was a bit odd for the prime minister to talk about terrorism and militancy as if they were the preserve of the adherents of Islam—especially at a time when his own Sangh Parivar was heavily involved in acts of terror in Gujarat. But there was a deeper level of dishonesty in the charge against Muslims, for it is precisely the policy of the RSS to ghettoize and isolate the Muslim community. As sociologist Dhirubhai Sheth has argued, it was not accidental that the Muslims who bore the brunt of the Sangh Parivar’s violence in Gujarat were those who chose to live in Hindu-majority areas. The communal killings in the state, he says, have exposed the dishonesty of the ‘Hindutvavadis’ who reproach Muslims for not entering the ‘national mainstream’ but then beat them back into their ghettos whenever they do emerge.70

In another attempt to soften the impact of his Goa remarks, Vajpayee told Parliament that he was as opposed to militant Hinduism as he was to militant Islam. ‘I accept the Hindutva of Swami Vivekananda but the type of Hindutva being propagated now is wrong and one should be wary of it.’ Having said this, however, he went back to square one by adding that although there were laws to deal with such an eventuality, he was confident no Hindu organization would become a danger to the country’s unity.71 In other words, only Muslim (or Christian or Sikh) organizations have the potential of endangering the country’s unity. After maligning Vivekananda—who never spoke of Hindutva but of Hinduism—Vajpayee went straight back to the teachings of Golwalkar and Savarkar.

Apart from reverting to the usual chauvinist line of the Sangh Parivar, Vajpayee was also diverting the debate into a dead end. The issue is not whether he personally opposes militant Islam or Hinduism but whether, as prime minister, he is prepared to defend the constitutional rights of all Indians. Regardless of his own views and beliefs, a prime minister cannot speak for only a section of citizens. Do the Muslims of Gujarat have the right to physical security? Is he prepared to punish those who have committed crimes regardless of their political or ideological affiliation? Rather than dealing with these questions, Vajpayee is trying to cover up his own political failure and culpability.

It is remarkable that Vajpayee’s first televised address to the country was only on 2 March—after the seventy-two hours of apparent freedom enjoyed by the Sangh Parivar in Gujarat expired—and even then, all he could do was appeal for calm and tolerance.72 In fact, his attempt to blame the ordinary people of Gujarat—and their supposed lack of ‘harmony’—for the mass killings in their state was a disingenuous manoeuvre aimed at absolving himself, his party colleagues and the state machinery they control, of any responsibility for the crimes. Like Rajiv Gandhi in November 1984 and Narasimha Rao in January 1993, Vajpayee will go down in history as a prime minister who preached the virtues of tolerance even as he turned a blind eye to the massacre of innocent citizens. Instead of using national television to tell the people of Gujarat that the genocidal mobs would be put down with a firm hand—and that policemen failing to protect the life and liberty of all would be punished—Vajpayee delivered a sermon on the need for religious sadbhavna.

There was little passion or feeling in what he said, no words of succour for the victims, no anger or opprobrium for the killers. He said the violence was a ‘black mark on the nation’s forehead’ but he couldn’t bring himself to say that retaliatory attacks on Muslims for what happened at Godhra would attract the same punishment as the burning of the train. Here was a violent disturbance that had made a mockery of State power as it is supposed to operate yet the prime minister issued no dire warnings to those who were challenging his authority and power as chief executive. In the US, President George W. Bush and his senior aides publicly warned citizens against attacking Muslims, Arabs and other immigrants following the World Trade Centre terrorist strike. In less than a year since 9/11, a man in Texas has been sentenced to death for the ‘retaliatory’ murder of a Sikh immigrant. To date, however, Vajpayee has yet to even publicly acknowledge that Muslim citizens of India were victimized in Gujarat or to threaten the attackers with the severest consequences.

Indeed, Vajpayee was later to demonstrate that he was so loyal to his party and Parivar that he didn’t mind undermining the majesty of the State and his own office. On 17 April, he said that if only Parliament had condemned Godhra, the subsequent massacres would not have happened. The fact is that he is leader of the House and could have ordered a discussion and condemnation of Godhra on the day it happened—instead of the scheduled presentation of the Budget. In early May, he made another curious statement, this time on the floor of the Rajya Sabha: That he had decided to remove Modi in April but didn’t act fearing a backlash in Gujarat. ‘I had gone to Goa making up my mind on changing the ruler in Gujarat but according to my own assessment, I felt that the change in leadership will only worsen the situation.’73 At the time, the only people opposed to a change in leadership were the RSS and VHP. Removing Modi may or may not have provided temporary relief for Gujarat’s beleaguered Muslims but it was odd for the prime minister to admit being held hostage to the threats of criminals and goons. ‘Vajpayee,’ wrote B.G. Verghese, ‘placed the diktat of the mob above his oath of office . . . the emperor has no clothes, stripped of the last shred of moral authority.’74

ENDNOTES
56 The full text of the resolution may be accessed at www.rss.org/reso2002.htm
57 ‘RSS asks Muslims to shun extremist leaders,’ Hindu, 18 March 2002; ‘Hindu goodwill key to Muslims’ safety: RSS,’ Hindustan Times, 18 March 2002.
58 Smruti Koppikar, ‘BJP chief reads riot act to Muslims,’ Indian Express, 13 April 2002.
59 ‘Blame it on Newton’s Law: Modi,’ Times of India, 3 March 2002.
60 Interview by Sudhir Choudhury, Zee TV, 1 March, 2002. Reproduced as Annexure 4A in the Editors Guild Report, p. 38. The denial issued by the Gujarat Government’s Directorate of Information on 3 March 2002 states, ‘The Chief Minister has never mentioned such Newton’s (sic) third law,’ and is reproduced in the Editors Guild report, pp. 73-4. But though Modi did not himself invoke Newton’s name when he spoke of action and reaction, his reference to the law was obvious.
61 Vir Sanghvi, ‘Gujarat: Cause and Effect,’ Hindustan Times, 21 April 2002.
62 ‘ISI hand in Godhra incident: Singhal,’ Hindustan Times, 6 May 2002.
63 Amita Verma, ‘VHP to test war on jihad in UP,’ Asian Age, 7 June 2002.
64 Hindu, 24 June 2002; Amar Ujala (Dehra Doon edition), 24 June 2002.
65 In We, or Our Nationhood Defined. p 44.
66 Onkar Singh, ‘Gujarat violence is patriots’ reaction to Godhra: Mathur,’ rediff.com, 3 May 2002. http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/may/03train.htm (Accessed on 20 June 2002)
67 The speech is reproduced unedited in the Appendix.
68 His exact words were ‘Hum mazhabi kattarta mein vishwas nahin karte’. The fact that mazhabi is the only Urdu word used in the sentence is not accidental. In Sangh Parivar literature and propaganda, whenever a positive reference to religion is made, the word used tends to be dharm, implying Hinduism; when the reference is negative, the word used tends to be mazhab. See M. Zeyaul Haque, ‘The Language of Hate,’ Milli Gazette, 1 June 2001.
69 The ruling by Lok Sabha Speaker Manohar Joshi on a privilege motion moved by Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi on 9 May, 2002, quotes the PM as admitting that the ‘video tape of his speech at Goa did not contain the word “such”.’ ‘Privilege motion against PM rejected,’ Hindu, 17 May 2002.
70 Dhirubhai Sheth, ‘Is dangey ko samajhne ke liye…,’ Rashtriya Sahara, 9 March 2002.
71 ‘PM wanted to sack Modi but feared reaction,’ Times of India, 7 May 2002.
72 ‘It’s a black mark, says PM,’ Hindu, 3 March 2002.
73 ‘PM wanted to sack Modi but feared reaction, Times of India, 7 May 2002. His remark in Parliament condemning Godhra was made at a public function to felicitate former PM Chandrashekhar. ‘A lesson or two for his teacher,’ Hindu, 18 April 2002.
74 B.G. Verghese, ‘Farewell to Rajdharma,’ Times of India, 23 May 2002

'Going to the media accentuates India, China differences'

2009-10-25T18:16:00.001+05:30

The following is a partial, rush transcript of the part of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s press conference in Hua Hin, Thailand on Sunday dealing with India-China relations. The transcript was prepared by The Hindu's correspondent, Siddharth Varadarajan.

'Going to the media accentuates India, China differences'

The following is a partial, rush transcript of the part of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s press conference in Hua Hin, Thailand on Sunday dealing with India-China relations. The transcript was prepared by our correspondent, Siddharth Varadarajan.

Q: Did you raise the issue of Chinese incursions with Premier Wen?

Manmohan Singh: I had a frank and constructive exchange of views with Premier Wen, both during our formal meetings and during the gala dinner last night. We discussed all these issues and agreed that existing mechanisms for bilateral cooperation should be used to resolve all issues amicably in the spirit of the SCP. As you know, the Chinese foreign minister will be visiting India and the two foreign ministers will have an opportunity to discuss all issues which have bearing on our relationship.

The Premier and I reaffirmed the need to maintain peace and tranquility on the border pending a resolution of the boundary question. Both of us agreed that we should continue and strengthen efforts to build political trust and understanding.

Question: Will the Dalai Lama’s proposed visit to Arunachal Pradesh complicate India-China relations and make resolution of the boundary issue more difficult?

Manmohan Singh: Well, all I can say is that I explained to Premier Wen that the Dalai Lama is our honoured guest, he is a religious leader. We do not allow the Tibetan refugees to indulge in political activities, and that as proof of that, last year, we took resolute action at the time of Olympics when there were reports that some Tibetan refugees might disrupt the process. And that’s the position that I explained to Premier Wen.

Question: At the banquet last night?

Manmohan Singh: Yes.

Question: Were the Chinese convinced of your explanation on the Dalai Lama? is there any change in his plans to travel to Arunachal Pradesh?

Manmohan Singh: I am not aware of the plans of the Dalai Lama. I have explained this position to the Chinese leadership. We have also agreed that whatever outstanding issues there may be between us -- and there is the complex boundary question which cannot be wished away -- there are established government channels to exchange views on all these issues and one doesn’t have to, therefore, go to the media to accentuate or exaggerate the amount of differences that prevail. We both agreed that the boundary question is a complex question, that pending resolution of the boundary question we both have an obligation to maintain peace and tranquility along the border.

Question: I am from Assam and there is a lot of concern about Chinese river projects. Did you raise this issue with Premier Wen?

Manmohan Singh: Well, I did raise this issue of Premier Wen Jiabao yesterday. I conveyed to him that cooperation in the areas of transborder rivers is of mutual benefit. Premier Wen said that keeping in mind the overall friendly relations and humanitarian aspects, the Chinese side has been providing hydrological data during the flood season. He said the relevant discussions on transborder river issues could be held through the Expert Level Mechanism that we have constituted.

Question: The Chinese have started issuing different visas for Kashmiris. Did you raise this issue?

Manmohan Singh: There was a general discussion on all bilateral issues. I did not specifically raise this issue because I thought that the position is quite clear as far as we are concerned, whether it is Arunachal Pradesh or Jammu and Kashmir, they are integral parts of our country. I didn’t raise this and it was not raised on their side.

Question: India has objected to China building infrastructure in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. Did this matter come up?

Manmohan Singh: I did not raise this specific issue but we both agreed that whatever issues are outstanding, they should be discussed two days later when the foreign ministers of our two countries are going to meet. As you know, the Chinese foreign minister will be coming [for the Russia-India-China trilateral]. So there will be opportunities for the two foreign ministers to discuss views on all outstanding issues.

India, China agree to disagree on border, not peace

2009-10-25T10:34:00.003+05:30

Contentious issues like the boundary and water projects were discussed but not the Dalai Lama's proposed visit to Arunachal Pradesh. Premier wen agreed that technical experts could discuss Indian concerns about Chinese water projects ...

25 October 2009
The Hindu

India, China reaffirm need to keep border peaceful

Siddharth Varadarajan

Hua Hin, Thailand: Despite handing over a démarche, or formal protest, to India the previous night over the Dalai Lama’s plans to visit Arunachal Pradesh, China on Saturday chose not to raise the matter during the keenly watched meeting here between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Premier Wen Jiabao.

With the world and their own publics riveted by the heightened bilateral rhetoric of the past few weeks, the two leaders sought to dispel the gathering clouds of tension by focussing on the positives in the relationship. Each side acknowledged their differences but agreed not to let these come in the way, a senior Indian official, N. Ravi, told reporters after the meeting ended.

Mr. Ravi’s briefing points avoided any specific mention of contentious issues. “The Prime Minister stressed that neither side should let our differences act as an impediment to the growth of functional cooperation between the two countries,” he quoted Dr. Singh as saying. He added that Premier Wen “concurred … that issues that may arise in the course of our bilateral relations should be properly handled through discussions and they should not become an impediment in the development of our friendly relations.”

But senior officials told The Hindu on condition of anonymity that difficult issues were raised and discussed, especially the recent tension over the boundary question and lingering uncertainties about upstream water projects on the Yaluzangbu, as the Brahmaputra is known on the Chinese side.

In a reference to the growing assertiveness of Chinese border patrols along the Line of Actual Control separating the two countries, Dr. Singh reminded Mr. Wen of the understanding that peace and tranquillity would be maintained at the LAC even as the Special Representatives sought to find a solution to the boundary question. According to Indian officials, the Chinese premier reaffirmed this understanding twice. He said the border dispute was “complicated and difficult” and that both sides must have “courage, vision and patience” in order to reach a settlement that was “fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable.” He also noted that in 2,000 years of shared historical and civilisational ties, India and China had been through a “very difficult period” just once.

Without making specific reference to any upper riparian projects, Prime Minister Singh conveyed in his opening remarks India’s concerns about the need for relevant information and data sharing. Premier Wen said some data had been shared in the past but agreed that a proposed meeting of technical experts — the joint expert-level mechanism on trans-border rivers is supposed to meet annually but has been delayed this year — could take the issue up.

On Friday night, the Chinese embassy in Delhi asked the Ministry of External Affairs to prevent the Dalai Lama from visiting Arunachal Pradesh, senior officials told The Hindu. But even though the boundary issue figured in the Manmohan-Wen talks, the Tibetan spiritual leader was not mentioned directly or indirectly by either side.

“I guess there was no need to”, said an Indian official. “Their démarche, and yesterday’s attack on the Dalai Lama in Peoples’ Daily, said it all”.

World big enough for India and China, says Wen Jiabao

2009-10-25T10:29:00.002+05:30

Echoing the words of Manmohan Singh from a few years back, China also tries to focus on cooperation rather than conflict...

25 October 2009
The Hindu

World big enough for India and China, says Wen Jiabao

Siddharth Varadarajan

Hua Hin, Thailand: India and China on Friday confounded the dire predictions being made of renewed rivalry and distrust by reaffirming their intention to work closely together on a wide range of issues and to not let differences over the border become an impediment to future cooperation.

In his opening remarks at delegation-level talks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the sidelines of the 15th Asean summit here, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said strengthened bilateral relations served the interests of the two countries, the region and world. He later recalled Dr. Singh’s oft-quoted remark about there being enough space for both India and China to develop, adding that there was “still more space in the world” for the two countries to grow together. If the “Asian Century” is to become a reality, he added, it was important for India and China to live in harmony and friendship and enjoy prosperity, a senior Indian official who was present in the meeting told reporters later.

Dr. Singh warmed to this theme, reiterating India’s willingness to cooperate with China on global issues like climate change, world trade and the financial crisis. Providing an account of the talks, N. Ravi, Secretary (East) in the Ministry of External Affairs, said the Prime Minister described economic and trade relations between the two sides as “a vital pillar” of the relationship despite the payments imbalance, a point Premier Wen responded to by promising to work with India to handle the growing trade deficit. He also said China encouraged its companies to invest in India and welcomed Indian investments in China. The two leaders then agreed to take steps to ensure bilateral trade reached the $ 60 billion annual target by 2010.

According to Mr. Ravi, Dr. Singh said both sides needed to build better understanding and trust at the political level so that bilateral relations remained strong despite existing differences. He spoke of growing exchanges in the defence field and proposed that India and China observe the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations “in a fitting manner.” Among the options proposed was a cultural festival.

Premier Wen responded to the suggestion by saying both sides should seize the opportunities provided by the 60th anniversary “to heighten our bilateral relationship.”

On December 30, 1949, Jawaharlal Nehru sent a telegram to Zhou Enlai, who was China’s Foreign Minister at the time, informing him of India’s decision to recognise the People’s Republic of China. Following talks in Beijing, formal diplomatic relations were established on April 1, 1950.

Dateline Hua Hin: No Asia without us, India reminds Asean, Japan

2009-10-25T10:11:00.009+05:30

In back to back meetings with Hatoyama and the Asean X, Manmohan stresses one big point...

25 October 2009
The Hindu

No Asia without us, India reminds Asean, Japan

Siddharth Varadarajan

Seeking to up the level of engagement with Asean, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday proposed the establishment of a joint task force that could ensure a “substantive outcome” for India’s 10th summit with the South-east Asian grouping in 2012 and also offered to play host to the bilateral gathering that year.

In a further reminder of the centrality of India to the emerging institutional arrangements in Asia, he also urged Japan’s new Prime Minister, Yukio Hatayama, whom he met on the sidelines of the Asean summit, to use the existing East Asia Summit platform — which includes India — as the building block for his proposed East Asian Community.

According to a senior Indian official, Dr. Singh and Mr. Hatoyama had “a good discussion on the future of the East Asia Summit process and on the importance of evolving an open and transparent regional economic arrangement.” The official said the two leaders agreed that this regional architecture needs to be based on the new opportunities that India and Japan, as important economies, present to the region. He added that the Japanese Prime Minister noted India’s importance to the EAS process.

Declaring cooperation with Asean to be “an article of faith,” Dr. Singh told the 10 regional leaders gathered here for the 7th bilateral summit with India that he was keen to strengthen links with the region, including by quickly concluding negotiations on the Trade-in-Services and Investment Agreement which could complement the free trade agreement in goods concluded in August this year.

In keeping with the theme of this year’s Asean summit — ‘enhancing connectivity, empowering peoples’ — Dr. Singh proposed the establishment of an India-Asean Round Table that could provide policy inputs on future areas of collaboration, and enhanced cooperation in agriculture, food security and the application of space technologies.

He also made an off-beat suggestion: that India and Asean jointly consider organising a “commemorative ship expedition” in 2011-12 on the sea routes developed during the 10th to 12th centuries linking India with South-East Asia and East Asia.

Though India has been engaging Asean since 1992, the level of its engagement is still much less than that of other powers. Beijing recently announced a $10 billion China-Asean Fund on Investment Cooperation and $15 billion worth of commercial credit to support infrastructure development in the Asean region. And in November, the U.S. will hold a long-awaited summit with the grouping, close on the heels of its accession to Asean’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation.
Asean sees ‘connectivity’ as central to cementing its role as the primary driver of regional integration. In a statement issued on Friday, Asean leaders described the group as located at the crossroads of a region bounded by India in the west, China, Japan and Korea in the Northeast, and Australia and New Zealand in the south. “Asean thus has the potential to physically anchor itself as the transportation, ICT and tourism hub of this region.”

Despite marking the western boundaries of the region, India is still not seen as central to community building in East Asia. The leaders of Asean, China, Japan and South Korea issued a separate statement Friday reaffirming their commitment to the Asean+3 process as “a main vehicle towards the long-term goal of building an East Asian community with Asean as the driving force”. India’s preference would for Asean+6 to be designated the “main vehicle” since it has a guaranteed seat on that ride

Manmohan to seek end to verbal sparring with China

2009-10-24T13:55:00.003+05:30

India is aware of the political complexities of the Dalai Lama's proposed visit to Arunachal Pradesh...

24 October 2009
The Hindu

Manmohan to seek end to verbal sparring with China

Siddharth Varadarajan

Hua Hin: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao will meet here on the sidelines of the 15th Asean summit on Saturday morning in an attempt to put an end to the infelicitous and even sharp exchange of words between the two sides in recent weeks.

Beginning with exaggerated Indian media reports of an alleged increase in Chinese incursions along the undemarcated Line of Actual Control, the rhetoric has now taken on a life of its own with government-run newspapers in Beijing accusing India of “hegemony,” Indian analysts making dire predictions of conflict, and senior Chinese officials making repeated public demarches about Arunachal Pradesh as part of their claim that the Indian state is actually a part of Tibet.

Although the immediate focus of China’s assertive pronouncements and actions is apparently Arunachal and also Jammu and Kashmir – the Chinese embassy in Delhi recently began issuing visas to the state’s residents on a separate sheet of paper rather than stamping their Indian passports – the war of words has cast a shadow over not just the ongoing boundary negotiations but also the positive long-term trend in bilateral relations between the two countries.

Indian officials say the Prime Minister is keen to continue the positive momentum and work with China to give greater depth to the ‘strategic and economic partnership’ and that he hopes Premier Wen will agree that the two countries need to find ways of preventing differences over the boundary from spilling into other areas.

At the heart of the recent deterioration in optics is the proposed visit to Arunachal Pradesh by the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of the Tibetan Buddhists and a man Beijing reviles as a separatist bent on pushing for the independence of the Autonomous Region.

The Indian side has said repeatedly and publicly that the Dalai Lama is a guest and is free to visit any part of the country he wishes.

Though there is no indication that New Delhi will rethink its position, senior officials say the intention is not to score points over China or to use the visit in order to underline the status of Arunachal Pradesh as an integral part of India.

Indeed, one official told The Hindu that the wider politics of the Dalai Lama’s visit to Tawang were complicated. China, after all, cites the monastic connection between Tawang and Tibet as the basis for its claim to the town and state, a connection that would be reinforced by the Dalai Lama’s coming visit. During his visit to the monastery there in 2003, the Dalai Lama had in fact said he believed Tawang was a part of Tibet. Since then, the Tibetan spiritual leader has said he accepts the McMahon line, which forms the basis for the Indian demarcation of the Sino-Indian border, much to the consternation of Beijing. Some officials believe the Chinese fear is that the Dalai Lama may use the occasion of his visit to Tawang to tell mediapersons the district is an integral part of India.

People’s Daily on Friday published a commentary, ‘Dalai Lama goes further down traitorous road’ in which it accused the “Dalai Lama clique” of “[cooperating] closely with India whenever Sino-Indian border negotiations are being held or the Indian side is maliciously speculating over a border dispute.”

As matters stand, it is not clear when the Dalai Lama will make the journey or whether he has applied for and received an inner line permit that all foreigners in India need to visit Arunachal Pradesh. His advisers initially said the Tibetan spiritual leader would travel to the State on November 8 but now maintain the dates have not yet been finalised.

Dateline Hua Hin: India looks east amidst changing Asian equations

2009-10-24T13:51:00.003+05:30

Manmohan Singh in Thailand for Asean, East Asia Summits ...

24 October 2009
The Hindu

India looks east amidst changing Asian equations

Siddharth Varadarajan

Hua Hin, Thailand: As a renewed debate rages on the future structure of cooperation in East Asia, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh arrived at this beach resort on the Gulf of Siam Friday for back to back regional summits carrying one big message: the evolving Asian economic community should be based on “an open and inclusive regional architecture”.

But in a part of the world where China has risen, India is rising, Japan has declined and the United States is looking to reprise its Cold War role as a leading ‘Asian’ power, everything hinges on the question: how open should open be? As of now, there is little clarity on the matter.

The East Asian Summit, which will meet here on October 25, brings the 10 nations of ASEAN together with China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. The United States is excluded, a prospect Washington has been prepared to live with till now since the EAS is so loosely structured. But America’s patience is wearing thin, now that the recent parliamentary elections in Japan have turned the terms of the strategic game in Asia upside down.

Prime Minister Yukio Hatayama and the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) have announced their intention of pushing for an East Asian Community modelled on the European Union with an ambitious future agenda for cooperation in economic and political spheres. There is even talk of an Asian currency to reduce the region’s reliance on the dollar. The Japanese and Chinese are divided on whether the EAS platform should serve as the springboard for the EAC or whether the community should begin with ‘ASEAN+3’ (i.e. Japan, China and Korea). But even if Tokyo and Beijing don’t see eye to eye on India, both agree that the U.S. need not be included.

As Japan pushes for a more independent foreign and even security policy, it sees less need for the U.S. to play the role of an off-shore balancer, a position at least one influential ASEAN country, Singapore, has publicly questioned.

At Hua Hin, Dr. Singh will find the EAS states gingerly feeling their way around these prickly questions. Even before the Japanese rediscovery of Asia, the EAS had decided officially to discuss the formation of a Comprehensive Economic Partnership in East Asia (CEPEA) to facilitate and expand trade. But now the potential agenda could widen. The Prime Minister acknowledged this when he noted that the EAS meeting “will provide an opportunity to discuss … [the] future direction for community building and cooperation”.

According to Indian officials, India’s ‘right’ to be part of any future arrangement springs not just from its regional heft but the extent of its economic engagement with ASEAN, which is likely to remain the formal driver of integration even if bigger players like China and Japan are the anchors.

On Saturday, Prime Minister Singh will attend the seventh Indo-ASEAN summit here at a time when bilateral trade is around $48 billion and a Free Trade Agreement in goods has just been signed between the two sides. In a statement on Friday, he said that India’s enhanced engagement with the ASEAN was at the heart of its ‘Look East’ Policy. “The conclusion of the India-ASEAN Trade-in-Goods Agreement in August 2009 is a major first step in our objective of creating an India-ASEAN Regional Trade and Investment Area.”

Apart from meeting Chinese premier Wen Jiabao on Saturday morning, Dr. Singh will hold a separate bilateral meeting with Mr. Hatoyama, who has already conveyed to the Indian side his willingness to travel to Delhi before the end of the year for the annual India-Japan summit. The Prime Minister will also meet President Nguyen Minh Triet of Viet Nam, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva of Thailand and Hun Sen of Cambodia, the last two of whom are locked in a war of words over Phnom Penh’s decision to play host to Thaksin Shinawatra, the fugitive former Prime Minister of Thailand.

Climate change lessons from a Nobel prize winner

2009-10-14T01:10:00.000+05:30

Averting the tragedy of the atmospheric commons will require binding, equitable arrangements between countries, big and small. If only this year’s Peace prize winner listens to Elinor Olstrom...

14 October 2009
The Hindu

Climate change lessons from a Nobel prize winner

Siddharth Varadarajan

One of the winners of the Nobel prize for economics this year, Elinor Olstrom, is a pioneer in the study of the economics of the ‘commons’ — common property resources which, by virtue of being available to everyone free of cost, tend to be over-exploited. Thus, fish stocks may be over-harvested, meadows overgrazed, rivers polluted, the ozone layer depleted. All are examples of resources where ‘market’ mechanisms like ‘price’ do not operate to restrain consumption by individuals.

Given the focus of neoclassical economics on the optimal allocation of scarce resources, it is perhaps not surprising that the commons became a distinct field of study within the academic discipline only in the late 1960s, following Garret Hardin’s seminal 1968 article in Science, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons.’

Hardin argued that freedom in a commons brings ruin to all, whether one is speaking of simple herdsmen grazing cattle on a meadow or factories emitting effluents or smoke into a river or the skies. “The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them,” he wrote. “Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of ‘fouling our own nest,’ so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free enterprisers.”

The implications of Hardin’s work were politically controversial. Anthropologists argued that the problem, though cast in the framework of the rural or pastoral economy, was actually a manifestation of modernity and industrial capitalism. That the tragedy was not of the ‘commons’ but of the ‘moderns,’ who did not respect traditionally evolved norms that allowed for the maintenance of harmony between human beings and the environment. However, economists and governments were quick to seize on the implications of Hardin’s work; devising rules and institutions to limit the overconsumption of common resources became something of a cottage industry. Most argued, like Hardin, in favour of privatisation and the assignment of property rights; others made a case for nationalisation or the use of taxation. But most academic approaches to the commons dealt with the problem as a local one with a limited number of essentially homogeneous players.

Prof. Olstrom was perhaps the first economist to seek to harmonise this field of study and to emphasise that there was no “single, best way” of preventing the inevitability of the ‘tragedy.’ She also insisted on the study of commons problems where the number of actors is scaled up and their nature is heterogeneous. She demonstrated theoretically and empirically that privatisation or government regulation or management of common property resources often produced outcomes inferior to locally managed, self-regulated common property regimes. She then abstracted a set of design principles necessary for such arrangements to work.

But while compact communities and states have had reasonable success in finding solutions within their jurisdiction, the international community is not very well-equipped to deal with its single biggest resource problem today: the future of our atmospheric commons.

As Prof. Olstrom put it in a 2008 article co-authored with other economists, emitters have every incentive to overuse the atmospheric commons as a repository for the wastes associated with burning fossil fuels since the immediate cost to them of this factor of production is zero and the long-term, marginal cost is also less than what an emitter might have to spend by himself to use a different production technique that limits his greenhouse gas emissions. This is, of course, the classic Hardin problem. “But the present and future costs to society of this practice are enormous. Estimates of these costs vary. But there is compelling evidence that the eventual costs will exceed the cost of changing our current practices to limit emissions of greenhouse gases by a large margin.”

No clear predictions

With a national regulator, it is not difficult to devise rules of the road to deal with this problem, or even to enforce the ‘national’ share of an internationally agreed solution as conceived by the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. But in a world marked by the unequal distribution of power, reaching an agreement internationally is proving difficult. “One of the problems we face when we move up to the global level is that unanimity is required for most international treaties,” Prof. Olstrom wrote in a 2002 journal article. “While we have all sorts of chances to learn from experiments in local commons, we have only one globe and the risks of experimentation are much greater.” In sum, she concluded rather pessimistically, “we do not have clear predictions for beating the tragedy of the commons at a global level.”

When it comes to the atmospheric commons, the problem of regulation is compounded by the heterogeneity of the international system. The benefits and costs of either maintaining the ‘business as usual’ status quo or aggressively reducing GHG emissions are unevenly distributed across nations. By a quirk of geography and economics, those countries least responsible for climate change have the most to lose from it — tiny Maldives is all set to disappear as sea levels rise because of global warming — while the biggest culprits have the least incentive to do anything about it. A case in point being the United States, which refused to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol and even today is trying its best to avoid shouldering its historic responsibility to cut its GHG emissions.

“The bad news,” Prof. Elstrom wrote, “is that when users cannot communicate, don’t have trust, can’t build it, and don’t have rules, we have to expect the tragedy of the commons to occur.” This is the fate which awaits the world if the forthcoming U.N. conference on climate change in Copenhagen ends without the world’s major emitters of greenhouse gases agreeing to significant cuts in their emissions.

But if diplomats can engage in direct discussion and — crucially, have the autonomy to change some of their own national rules — “they may be able to organise and overcome the tragedy,” Prof. Olstrom concluded. With seven weeks to go before Copenhagen, the signs are not looking good. The Bangkok climate change talks which ended on October 9 saw the developed countries advocating the U.S. model of watered down domestic targets rather than the kind of internationally binding GHG reduction targets embodied in the U.N. process so far. Without which the tragedy of the atmospheric commons will never be averted.

Afghan message to India: Do not be deterred

2009-10-12T01:12:00.002+05:30

Kabul, Delhi to tell U.S that Pakistan cannot have veto on bilateral ties

12 October 2009
The Hindu

Afghan message to India: Do not be deterred

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: Afghanistan has told India at the highest level that the most fitting response to last week’s terrorist attack on its embassy compound in Kabul would be for the Indian government to step up its ongoing efforts to strengthen the development and security capabilities of the Afghan authorities through infrastructure projects, police and human resource training.

The Obama administration told Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last month that it did not see India’s assistance in Afghanistan as a source of “regional tension” — a charge laid recently by the senior most U.S. military officer there in a confidential report. Nevertheless, Indian and Afghan officials recognise the need for both countries to tell the American side that Pakistan cannot have a veto over the kind of relationship Kabul wishes to build with New Delhi.

U.S. Under Secretary of State William Burns will be in Delhi for routine foreign office consultations on October 16 and India’s views on the matter will be conveyed to him.

Though the Indian side has been careful not to accuse any group or country of being behind Wednesday’s suicide attack, Afghan officials have pointed the finger at Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate.

Asked for their view of the Afghan assessment, senior Indian officials told The Hindu that New Delhi was waiting to see what Afghan investigators and the intelligence agencies of other friendly countries are able to turn up.

The bomb itself, involving 150 kilos of plastic explosives, was highly sophisticated and more powerful than the device which was used in the July 2008 attack on the embassy.

Closed-circuit television had captured clear images of the Toyota vehicle used by the terrorist.

Although the Taliban officially claimed responsibility for the attack on October 8 by posting a statement in Pashto on its website (shahamat.org), the statement was subsequently deleted from the site.

Why the Taliban or their advisers would have second thoughts about this claim is a question Afghan and Indian investigators are likely to be asking themselves.

Of some concern to Indian and Afghan officials was the ease with which the vehicle was able to enter the high security street where the Indian chancery is located. Other important offices, like the Afghan interior ministry, are also located there.

Afghan agencies are now likely to examine the possibility of the Taliban or Gulbuddin Hikmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami infiltrating a section of the Kabul security establishment.

Although India has no intention whatsoever of getting involved in Afghanistan militarily, officials here say India and like-minded countries in the region need to prepare themselves for the day that the U.S. withdraws from the country. In practical terms, this means working to strengthen the capabilities of the Afghan security forces — something U.S. President Barack Obama’s AfPak policy neglects — as well as greater consultation and cooperation with Afghanistan’s neighbours like Iran, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and Russia and China.

The officials said India’s participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting on Afghanistan in March and Dr. Singh’s decision to attend the SCO summit in Yekaterinburg in June had to be seen in this wider context.

Prime Minister’s delegation subjected to American profiling

2009-10-10T00:45:00.002+05:30

U.S. rejection of visas for Muslim journalists nearly derailed Manmohan’s visit to G20...

10 October 2009
The Hindu

Prime Minister’s delegation subjected to American profiling

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: A potential crisis in bilateral relations with Washington was averted at the eleventh hour last month when the United States reversed a decision to deny visas to all Muslim journalists who were part of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s official media delegation to the G20 summit in Pittsburgh.

The visas, which were denied pending “additional administrative processing,” were only granted one day before the Prime Minister’s departure following a demarche – or diplomatic request — from the highest levels of government.

None of the Indian officials involved in the process wished to speak on record about the incident, which they said was a clear case of religious “profiling” by the U.S. embassy in Delhi.

As always happens during Prime Ministerial visits, the passports of the accompanying official media delegation were sent a few days in advance to the U.S. embassy for the necessary visas to be stamped. But when the passports were returned, three journalists – all of them Muslim – were handed yellow visa denial slips stating that they had been found “ineligible to receive a visa under Section 221(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.”

The yellow slips said their application required “additional administrative processing before a final decision can be made.” But there was no indication of how long this could take. The embassy note tersely stated that applicants would be contacted “once this administrative processing has been completed.” U.S. diplomats informally said this process could take anywhere from four to eight weeks or longer.

With the Prime Minister set to fly out in less than two days, this ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’ message sent alarm bells ringing in South Block. Officials were quick to realise the political consequences of the American side essentially disallowing the only Muslims in the Prime Minister’s delegation from travelling with him to Pittsburgh.

The three individuals concerned were senior and respected journalists who, like other members of the delegation, had been security cleared. One was an editor of a popular regional daily and two of them had travelled abroad with the Prime Minister before.

“No discrimination”

U.S. officials informally told this reporter that the names of three men had triggered a computerised alert for additional verification. But when The Hindu formally asked the U.S. embassy in Delhi whether it was a coincidence that all the Muslims in the delegation were so selected for additional visa screening and that none of the non-Muslims were, embassy officials said “the U.S. Government does not discriminate on the basis of race or religion.”

They added: “Since many applicants are subject to additional administrative processing, the U.S. Government urges all visa applicants to apply for visas as far in advance of the trip as possible. We also routinely expedite cases in which individuals require to travel urgently.”

Asked whether it was U.S. policy to subject visa requests by Indian Muslims to a lengthier process of background checking, they said consular officers “review each application and make a determination regarding whether an applicant … needs additional processing. These decisions are based on the review of each individual’s case.”

With Dr. Singh set to travel again to Washington on an official visit this November, The Hindu asked whether Muslim members of his official delegation could again experience delays in their visa applications. The embassy officials replied: “This question should be directed to the Government of India. They know the dates of the visit and who will be travelling with the Prime Minister. Have they already applied for visas?”

The Nobel and the audacity of hope-giving

2009-10-09T21:41:00.006+05:30

The world is so accustomed to American presidents waging war that the first incumbent to promise diplomacy gets to win the Nobel peace prize regardless of what he does...

10 October 2009
The Hindu

The Nobel and the audacity of hope-giving

Siddharth Varadarajan

Whether it was a naïve, Nordic leap of faith in Obamamania or the burning desire to pre-empt the betrayal of hopes that the new U.S. president has aroused, the Nobel committee’s decision to give its coveted peace prize to Barack Obama is likely to leave the world at large – not to speak of the American people -- puzzled, bemused and more than a little sore.

The reason for this is not because the world dislikes or distrusts Mr. Obama. Many may or do, but global sentiment towards the new president of the United States still runs largely positive. What is upsetting, however, is the intellectual laziness and political timidity with which the Nobel committee appears to have gone about its exertions.

After eight years of George W. Bush as American president, the victory of Mr. Obama was widely welcomed across the world. And so far, he has done well to talk the right talk on virtually every major issue of war and peace. He has said he will shut down the notorious U.S. detention centre at Guantanamo, end the practice of torture and bring the war in Iraq to an end as soon as possible. On Iran, he has reiterated his campaign promise of dialogue and diplomacy and even followed through by authorising his officials to interact with their Iranian counterparts in Geneva earlier this month. He made a stirring speech in Cairo on the need for justice in the Middle East and another at Prague on a nuclear weapon free world. He is, of course, threatening to ramp up the Afghan war but his generals have said they will use force in a more intelligent way than the U.S. has so far done in that country.

Had Mr. Obama delivered on even a quarter of these promissory notes, the Nobel peace prize would have justly been his. But all the Norwegian committee seems to have gone by is the down payment of words. Nominations for this year’s prize apparently closed on the 12th day of Mr. Obama’s presidency. Those who nominated him clearly couldn’t be bothered to wait and see whether he came good. But the Nobel committee, in reaching its decision, should at least have factored in those elements of actual presidential policy that run counter to his stated agenda.

Take peace in the Middle East, for example. The Israeli government spared Mr. Obama the embarrassment of having to endorse its aggression in Gaza by ending the war just before the new president’s inauguration. This was a war in which the Israeli military and political leadership committed war crimes, according to the authoritative investigative report by Judge Richard Goldstone for the United Nations. But for Mr. Obama and his team, the report is irrelevant. Early in his presidency, Mr. Obama told the Israelis they would have to stop their illegal policy of expanding the presence of Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian territory. But when Tel Aviv rejected the demand, our Nobel peace prize winner quietly went along.

On Iran, it is far from clear that Obama’s Washington has foreclosed the so-called military option. The Geneva meeting between Iran and the P5+1 went well, producing an interim confidence building measure that belies the Western hype about the imminence of Tehran’s nuclear threat. But the preparations for war are proceeding side by side. The administration has quietly sought and received funding for the proposed massive ordnance penetrator – the so-called ‘bunker buster’ that the Pentagon says it needs to destroy Iranian nuclear sites which have been buried underground.

As for the vital global issue of climate change where Mr. Obama promised radically to depart from the Bush administration’s ostrich-like approach, it is becoming increasingly clear that diplomatic engagement is merely a different means to achieving the same end: evasion of America’s historical responsibility drastically to cut its emission of greenhouse gases.

The problem with the Nobel committee awarding Mr. Obama the peace prize is that it sends out an entirely negative signal: that it is all right for a U.S. president to ignore global concerns on the environment, take the side of a regime like Israel that is accused of serious war crimes or to consider coercive or even military means for the resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue.

Mr. Obama still has time to come around to a more “pacific” course on these and other issues. The urge to live up to the international recognition he has received might be an incentive. But with the Nobel peace prize already under his belt and the weight of well-entrenched lobbies, interests and policies bearing down on his worthy shoulders, the chances of him actually doing so probably just got narrower.

A harsh reminder of India’s burden and stake in Afghanistan

2009-10-09T01:50:00.003+05:30

With the Indian embassy being targeted for the second time despite India playing no role in the war in Afghanistan, it is clear that geopolitics rather than the aspiration of "freedom-loving nationalist and Islamist forces" (as the Taliban call themselves) is the driving force...

8 October 2009
The Hindu

NEWS ANALYSIS
A harsh reminder of India’s burden - and stake - in Afghanistan

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: The suicide attack on the Indian embassy compound in Kabul underlines a curious irony about the situation in Afghanistan: Despite playing no direct role in the American-led war against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, India is rapidly becoming one of the most highly favoured targets of terrorists in that country.

In 2008, a suicide bomber believed to be linked to the Haqqani network blew himself up outside the embassy, killing 58 people, including three Indian officials. And workers and engineers on Indian-led projects have been kidnapped and killed by the Taliban in the past, forcing India to limit its assistance to projects not involving its own manpower.

Barely 24 hours before Thursday’s deadly attack in Kabul, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao had expressed her government’s frustration at the “sense of defeatism” which has begun to overwhelm international public opinion about the situation in Afghanistan and which serves no purpose other than to encourage insurgent groups to step up their activities. She also warned against “facile attempts to strike Faustian bargains with terrorists,” a thinly veiled message to those in the United States who might find a quick pullout linked to a Pakistani-brokered political settlement with the Taliban a viable or tempting option.

The timing of the embassy bombing was obviously a coincidence but the Taliban – which has claimed responsibility in a statement on its website, shahamat.org – would like nothing better than to have the same defeatist spirit take hold of New Delhi, one of the largest providers of development assistance to the Afghan government.

Last year, India was told by U.S. officials that the embassy bombing had been sanctioned at the highest levels of the Pakistani intelligence establishment. This time, too, the Indian government is likely to conclude the suicide attack was scripted in Rawalpindi, presumably as a part of the “countermeasures” America’s top military commander in Afghanistan recently warned India about.

General Stanley A. McChrystal’s assessment, contained in an official report prepared by him a month ago, was schizophrenic. He said India was “exacerbating regional tensions” and encouraging “Pakistani countermeasures” by its increasing political and economic influence in the beleaguered country. But he also said Indian activities “largely benefit the Afghan people.”

At the root of this American ambiguity about the Indian role in Afghanistan is the division within Washington about virtually every aspect of the Obama administration’s AfPak policy. Should more U.S. soldiers be sent to Afghanistan, as Gen. McChrystal has demanded, or not? Should the war be expanded to Pakistani territory or not? Is it possible to reach an understanding with the Taliban if the latter breaks its ties with the Al-Qaeda? Is the Pakistani military part of the problem or the solution?

On the last question, Gen. McChrystal minced his words. Senator John Kerry was a little more direct, noting in Senate hearings earlier this month that “it has been difficult to build trust with Pakistan’s military and intelligence services over the years because our interests have not always been aligned and because ties between the ISI and Taliban remain troubling.”

Ms. Rao drew attention to those ties when she told a seminar here on Wednesday that the international community needs to put “effective pressure on Pakistan to implement its stated commitment to deal with terrorist groups within its territory, including the members of the Al-Qaeda, Taliban’s Quetta Shura, Hizb-e-Islami, Lashkar-e-Taiba and other like-minded terrorist groups.” Without this, she said, it would be “difficult to forestall the restoration of status quo ante, to a situation similar to what prevailed prior to 11 September 2001.”

Unfortunately for India, none of the options currently being considered by the U.S. is very palatable. Much as New Delhi fears American defeatism, it also knows any expansion in U.S. military operations in Afghanistan will likely make the situation worse, not better. Both scenarios, in any case, will increase American dependence on the Pakistani military, something India sees as fundamentally wrong-headed.

Preoccupied with finding the optimal military strategy, President Obama has done little to take forward his promise of seeking a regional solution. As a target of terror in Afghanistan, India has a right and an obligation to be more assertive in the quest for a more rational approach to the Afghan problem.

ElBaradei: The reality is that India will remain outside the NPT

2009-10-07T08:35:00.002+05:30

Nuclear weapon states must recognise the inextricable link between nonproliferation and disarmament, says IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei...

7 October 2009
The Hindu

'The reality is that India will remain outside the NPT'

Siddharth Varadarajan

In the second and concluding part of his interview to The Hindu , International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei speaks about the prospects for nuclear disarmament and the logic behind the international community’s decision to lift restrictions on nuclear sales to India.

The recent U.N. Security Council resolution on nonproliferation (UNSCR 1887) is being seen as a new commitment by the nuclear weapons states (NWS) to disarm. But while the text talks of ridding the world of nuclear weapons, it is short on the specific steps needed to get there — like no first use, and a Convention prohibiting the use of such weapons. In your opinion, how genuine a step forward is it?

I think there is definitely a new environment that dawned with President Obama coming to power. He has made it clear that his major commitment is to see that we start working towards a world free of nuclear weapons. This is a new environment, but it is coming after two wasted decades when the NWS made no significant effort to move towards nuclear disarmament in fulfilment of their [commitment] under the NPT.

There are obviously still a lot of questions, different approaches. I am not sure all the weapon states have the same view of how to go about it. You are right, how exactly we go about it is not yet [clear]. Do we start with a convention, with no first use, or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) or the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT)? There are lots of different approaches. And of course, each NWS sees things from its own strategic perspective. But one this is clear. The U.S. and Russia, which have 95 per cent of the nuclear weapons in the world, have committed to slash their arsenal by at least a third and hopefully that will come before December, before the START treaty lapses. There is also an agreement that the FMCT will be negotiated in Geneva. There is a commitment by Obama that he will take the CTBT to Congress for ratification, and again the hope that once the Americans join or ratify, the rest of the world will follow. All this would be a significant step in the right direction. That’s not the end of the road by any chance. There are a lot of confidence-building measures no first-use is one. I think a Convention will obviously come at the end, when we are really clear what kind of security system we will have. That remains a major challenge. We can still go to hundreds of weapons, but once we decide to go to zero, we have to have in place a new security system that assures every country its security is not diminished, that it is protected and that it has built in a very strong mechanism for detecting and deterring any country that might think of violating that. That’s why I continue to argue that we need to start working on that alternative security system in parallel now. That obviously requires a different Security Council, a different security paradigm, a very robust verification system, a very transparent international community in so far as making sure they are in full compliance. It is a lot of work. But hopefully the new resolution ushers in a new era. How fast we go, how committed the weapons states are we will have to see in the next few months.

The NPT’s core bargain was that the NWS are obliged to disarm. Yet, the latest resolution seems to present that obligation as a trade-off for the non-nuclear states conceding even more. Do you think they will succeed in this?

I don’t think they can. Quite frankly, the NNWS are also alert, are aware of the bargain that was struck in the NPT. The fact that the NWS did not really make good on their commitment by significantly moving to nuclear disarmament does not mean we need to have a new bargain. The bargain is there. They have to accelerate the implementation of their commitment. It has to be a parallel process. I don’t think the NNWS will move forward very much to tighten the nonproliferation regime except in sync with the NWS making good on their commitments. Only if the weapon states demonstrate that they are moving irreversibly towards disarmament through concrete [steps] can they have the moral authority to call on the rest of the world to tighten the nonproliferation regime. The shortcomings in the system will not be [remedied] unless the NWS understand the inextricable link between disarmament and non-proliferation.

As a strong backer of the India-U.S. nuclear agreement and the exception India won from some of the restrictions of the nonproliferation regime last year, do you feel there is a disconnect between the IAEA and NSG decisions on India and the latest U.N. resolution which essentially calls on India to sign the NPT?

I am not sure there is a disconnect. There are three countries outside the NPT. In the Middle East, Israel is the only country with nuclear weapons, the rest are all in the NPT, and there is a perception of security imbalance there. India and Pakistan are different because both possess nuclear weapons and there is a balance of power if you like. There are countries very insistent that Israel should join the NPT and there is lot of frustration in the Middle East as the result of what they perceive to be a security imbalance. Now, whether the UNSC language was targeting the three or just the one, in reality I don’t see them joining the NPT any time soon. India and Pakistan have said a number of times that they can only come into the arms control system in the context of global nuclear arms control agreement. And as much as the region wants Israel to join NPT, I can see the realistic possibility of that happening [only] in the context of a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East and the context of peace and security.

So as DG, IAEA, your stand would be that this resolution really has no bearing on the obligations that India and IAEA have entered into.

I believe so. These are two different things. The India-U.S. deal did not make any judgment nor has the IAEA made any judgment they neither blessed nor condemned India being outside the NPT or having nuclear weapons. They accepted as a reality for the time being that India is outside the NPT and has its military nuclear component but the deal in my view has been much more forward looking, much more strategic ... It brought India as a partner in the whole nuclear order, and was the only way to bring India on board in preparation for nuclear disarmament — you cannot think of nuclear arms control agreement without India being part of it. The agreement also does not add or diminish from the fact that India has military components for its programme but it focuses on how much this nuclear trade will help India’s development and energy needs. And I am very glad the NSG accepted this and India has already started to make use of this, signing agreements with Russia, France, Namibia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia.

And, of course, India is also looking at nuclear exports.

Yes, looking at India’s fantastic base of scientists, R&D in the nuclear field, India could be a hub for support to all developing countries that are looking for nuclear power for development.

Do you think at some point in the future, once Pakistan allays the international community’s concerns about its proliferation record, the world may have to find some way of bringing Pakistan in to the regime?

Pakistan has been frustrated that India got a nuclear deal while it did not and in the beginning they were opposed to it. My advice to them was that you really need to support the deal because it creates a good precedent for you, that once you put your nuclear activities in order — particularly in the aftermath of the AQ Khan network and all that — you should be able to get a similar deal and I would support a similar deal for Pakistan under appropriate circumstances because again Pakistan needs energy. Sometimes, the international community needs to be pragmatic. It is ideal that we have the NPT universalised but we know this won’t happen. These three countries have a complex security perception and we should not just stick to ideology but see how pragmatically we can move step by step.

( The first part of this interview appeared on October 3.)

The road ahead for India and Pakistan

2009-10-05T06:39:00.002+05:30

If terrorism will not compel India to settle outstanding disputes with Pakistan, keeping the dialogue process suspended indefinitely is not going to force Islamabad to be more mindful of New Delhi's concerns either. Both strategies have failed; it is time the two countries moved beyond them ...

5 October 2009
The Hindu

The road ahead for India and Pakistan

Siddharth Varadarajan

There is a story senior journalist A.S. Panneerselvan tells of the experience of the first group of Tamil Tigers who were brought to a remote camp in Uttar Pradesh for arms training by the Indian government in the early 1980s. Every evening, the camp’s Tibetan cook would look at the group of Sri Lankan Tamils and start laughing. Eventually, one of the Tamils learnt enough Hindi to ask the cook what was so funny. “Thirty years ago,” the old man said, “I was in this camp with other Tibetans getting trained and there was somebody else to cook for us. Now you are here and I am cooking for you!” “That may be so,” the LTTE man said, “but I still don’t see what’s so funny.” Prompt came the reply: “You see, I’m wondering who you will be cooking for 20 years from now ? I think it may be the Chakmas!”

Unfortunately for the Indian establishment, the LTTE story did not end so tamely, over cooking pots and a camp fire. Well before the terrorist group eventually met its end in the Vanni earlier this year, the Tigers assassinated a former Prime Minister of India and were responsible for the death of countless Indian soldiers.

I am recalling this story in an article about India and Pakistan because it reminds us of three processes that are an essential part of modern South Asian statecraft and which help define the contours of the current crisis in the bilateral relationship. First, that every state in the region has, at one time or another, patronised extremist groups or tolerated their violent activities in order to advance its domestic political or regional strategic interests. Second, the activities of these groups invariably “overshoot” their target and begin to undermine the core interests of their original patrons. Third, there comes a time in the life of all such groups when the nature and extent of their violence reach a “tipping point” as far as the same state is concerned.

A mature, well-developed state is one which is able to read the early warning signs and effect a course correction in official policy well before that tipping point is reached. In the absence of this maturity, states respond in one of two ways. States with a tendency to stability are at least able to recognise when a tipping point has been reached and act accordingly. But states which are unable to recognise either the early warning signs or the tipping point itself and which continue to pretend that the non-state actors they have patronised can be subordinated to an official command structure despite evidence to the contrary run the risk of destabilising themselves.

The Congress party leader in Bombay, S.K. Patil, encouraged the rise of the Shiv Sena in the 1960s in order to undermine the city’s communist-led trade union movement. The Sena overshot its target and eventually became a political rival to the Congress. By the time the Sena revealed its true self in the communal violence it helped orchestrate in Bombay in 1992, it was too late for anyone to act against it. The Sena had already become a part of the establishment, its violence normalised, its leaders insulated from police action and proper judicial sanction.

A second example of the same phenomenon, but with a different ending, emerged in Punjab in the 1980s. Indira Gandhi welcomed the rise of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his extremist politics because she saw in him an effective counter to the Akali Dal in Punjab. The Khalistani ideologue’s violence was tolerated for some time; the tipping point for the establishment should arguably have come when a senior police officer, A.S. Atwal, was gunned down by Bhindranwale’s men in April 1983. But New Delhi waited and waited, acting against the ‘Sant’ only in June 1984.

The trouble with acting against extremist groups after the tipping point is reached is that the process can be long drawn out and costly, especially in terms of human life. Successive governments at the Centre pacified Punjab but not before nearly 20,000 people lost their lives in Operation Bluestar, the November 1984 massacres, and the brutal police campaigns in the Punjab.

In Pakistan, the military-cum-intelligence establishment has had a long-term policy of creating, cultivating and using extremist groups both as a lever against mainstream political parties within the country and as a tool of foreign and military policy against India and Afghanistan. Some of these groups very rapidly ‘overshot’ their initial targets, especially domestically. The state responded by targeting particularly wayward terrorist leaders but did not abandon the overall structures of official permissiveness. External pressure following 9/11 led to the temporary course correction of abandoning the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Lal Masjid situation in Islamabad was another potential tipping point but its lessons were ignored, leading to the growth of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. Then came Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, but the nexus between extremism and a military establishment keen to subvert the return of democracy muddied the waters. Sufi Mohammad’s folly in openly defying the Pakistani state soon after the Nizam-e-Adl fiasco in Swat brought about a more decisive point of inflection, which is today still being played out in the Malakand division.

But even if the Pakistani army has joined the battle against terrorism in the frontier regions bordering Afghanistan in earnest, there is no question of the military establishment recognising the danger that anti-India terrorist groups have started to pose to Pakistan itself. A section of the Pakistani political leadership saw in the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November 2008 the grave threat that groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba pose to the stability of the region. Nudged along by the United States and by a non-confrontationist Indian approach, an unprecedented criminal investigation was launched against a section of LeT operatives. Since the LeT has never launched a terrorist attack inside Pakistan, however, it is easy for sceptics there to argue that the group does not pose a threat. That is why the establishment there is reluctant to act against Lashkar chief Hafiz Saeed. But wise statecraft is about recognising the early warning signs, not waiting for the tipping point. Imtiaz Gul’s book, The Al-Qaeda Connection, provides plenty of evidence on the deep links which exist between the LeT, the Jaish-e-Mohammed and even the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, on the one hand, and the TTP in Pakistan’s tribal areas, on the other.

Given these political realities, what can India do to encourage Pakistan to recognise that the terrorist groups operating on its soil are an undifferentiated syndicate and pose a common threat to both countries? Of all the forms of encouragement, refusing to talk is the least effective. It is not a coincidence that those sections of the Pakistani establishment which continue to see the jihadi terror groups as future assets are the very sections least anxious to see the resumption of the bilateral dialogue. Exchanging rhetoric and putting pressure via public statements are also not likely to pay dividends. Nor is there any point in messing up the strong case India has in Mumbai with overkill. Pakistani officials have pointed out, for example, that the salutation “Major General sahab” — one of the co-conspirators allegedly identified by Ajmal ‘Kasab’ and seen by the Indians as proof of Islamabad’s official complicity in 26/11 — is never used in the subcontinent; the preferred greeting is ‘General sahab’.

At a recent Track-II meeting of Indian and Pakistani analysts, former ambassadors, military officers and intelligence chiefs organised by the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in Bangkok, there was consensus on the grave threat terrorism poses to Pakistan and to India. Specifically, the need for India and Pakistan to open a back channel on counter-terrorism was recognised, with the participation of intelligence agencies from the two countries. This would supplement the back channel on Jammu and Kashmir which worked effectively till 2006 and which, the Track-II meeting felt, needs to be revived at an early date. The Composite Dialogue process, too, was seen as having served a useful purpose in the past.

With last month’s meeting in New York between the Foreign Ministers of India and Pakistan yielding little in terms of forward movement by either side, there is a danger of the bilateral relationship getting stuck into one of those ruts that finally require the mediation of extra hands in order to be rescued. Rather than wait for that, the first available improvement in optics — the start of the Mumbai trial in Pakistan, for example — should be seized upon to move ahead on the back channel, with the front channel being revived in a calibrated manner as confidence increases. Indefinitely postponing talks will not help protect India from future terrorist attacks. And talking will not make it more vulnerable. India should stop confusing hard line diplomatic strategy for effective counter-terrorism.

If terrorism will not compel India to settle outstanding disputes with Pakistan, keeping the dialogue process suspended indefinitely is not going to force Islamabad to be more mindful of New Delhi’s concerns either. Both strategies have failed; it is time the two countries moved beyond them.

The ElBaradei interview: ‘Language of force is not helpful on Iran issue’

2009-10-03T16:23:00.004+05:30

Tehran should be more transparent but its nuclear programme does not pose a threat that is imminent, says IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei....

3 October 2009
The Hindu

‘Language of force is not helpful on Iran issue’

Siddharth Varadarajan

As Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei is the world’s top nuclear policeman as well as its most valuable diplomatic asset in the struggle for disarmament and nonproliferation. A voice of sanity in a field otherwise dominated by irrational and sometimes violent rhetoric, Dr. ElBaradei strongly backed the lifting of nuclear sanctions on India and has helped prevent the escalation of the Iran nuclear crisis. In an interview with The Hindu during a visit to New Delhi this week, he spoke at length about the Iranian issue.Excerpts:

What do you think prompted the Iranian authorities to make the declaration on September 21 about a new enrichment facility?

I don’t know. We are yet to go and inspect and verify that new facility. The western countries say this was meant to be a secret facility, that it was declared by Tehran because it was compromised and the Iranians knew they would be discovered. The Iranians insist this is not the case, that they had to delay informing the agency because they wanted to build the facility underground to protect their technology in case of an attack on their nuclear facility. And they have been hearing about the threat of attacks over the past four or five years. Nonetheless, Iran, of course, has not complied with the requirement of the IAEA that they should have told us once they decided to construct the facility. I understand they have been working on it for a number of years.

How many years? What has the U.S. told the IAEA about it?

I think they said the work has been on since about 2005 and we have to go to Iran and verify but Iran should have informed us. This is clearly a setback because we have been trying to get Iran to be more transparent and cooperate more with the IAEA to clarify the issues that are still remaining for us to be able to verify the peaceful nature of the programme. But I also call on those who continue to say that we should use force, to attack Iran — that this is absolutely counterproductive. We need to create a different environment based not on confrontation but cooperation. For the first time, there is hope this could happen with Barack Obama talking about engaging Iran without preconditions, unlike the previous administration. Even after discovery of the [new] facility, he repeated that they are willing to engage Iran and I hope Iran will respond to that offer and I am not sure that offer is going to last forever. They better make use of that offer. It is only through engagement that we can verify the past and present Iranian nuclear activities. In the past, there were some claims that had done some military studies…

In fact, I want to come specifically to that. Your report as DG, on the basis of which the IAEA Board voted in September 2005 to find Iran in non-compliance, listed a set of outstanding issues. All of those issues have since been clarified. In some sense, isn’t that proof of considerable progress?

There is no question we have made considerable progress. At the time Iran was referred to the Security Council, the major concern was about the nature of its enrichment programme and that has been clarified. That is a major achievement. People seem to forget we have through systematic inspection made a considerable advance in understanding the nature of the Iranian programme. Then came these alleged studies.

Now, the first time the U.S. spoke of these alleged military studies was in the summer of 2005, when they briefed the IAEA and some countries about the contents of a laptop computer. Yet, this issue never figured in your September 2005 report.

Information about the alleged studies came over time to the agency. Iran says this information is fake. U.S. intelligence says Iran had weaponisation studies that stopped in 2003, other [Western agencies] claim Iran continued after that. Obviously, this is not very helpful — all agencies should get their act together and come to one conclusion. The IAEA is not making any judgment at all whether Iran even had weaponisation studies before because there is a major question of authenticity of the documents.

But clearly there were enough doubts in 2005 that you did not mention it then.

If I recall, the issue had not yet materialised in 2005.

No sir, the U.S. had done a briefing in the summer of 2005 with the so-called laptop. Your reports begin to flag alleged studies only in 2006. But not in 2005 when Iran was found in non-compliance.

Probably because in 2005, we did not go through the vetting process. We receive information all the time. It is not automatically referred to in our reports. Information continued to come to us. As I have said, if this information is correct, there is a strong likelihood that Iran has engaged in weaponisation studies. But if authentic. And I underlined if three times! That’s why I continue to urge Iran, they are the ones who continue to say it is fake….

But how does Iran prove a negative? This is like the run up to Iraq war, when Baghdad was asked to prove it did not have WMD. Iran says the documents are fake, they have no markings, no seals. The U.S. says they are genuine but the supposed originals are not being given, which you said should be.

Sure.

So how does one square the circle? It seems impossible to resolve.

Well, there is a lot of information in these documents that Iran said is authentic, but in different contexts, done for non-nuclear activities, while some of it is fake. What we want is for Iran to engage in substantive discussions with us, tell us what is authentic, what is not. We need to talk to some of the scientists involved. But I agree with you – this is one of the most difficult questions to deal with. We are very good when we are dealing with nuclear material, we can take measurements and do environmental sampling. When we work with papers, it very difficult because it is one’s word against the other. That is why I continue to call on those who supplied us the information to give us the originals, some copies, to be able to move the discussion with Iran. And I call on Iran to help us clarify the wheat from the chaff. And that’s not happening. And that is why we have this issue still hanging.

But your reports say there has been no use of nuclear material connected with these studies.

That’s right.

Surely this reduces the gravity of the issue. Clearly Iran has not diverted nuclear material for prohibited purposes.

The only time we found Iran in breach of its obligations not to use undeclared nuclear material was when they had experimented in 2003 and 2004 at Kalaye. Those were experiments. And I have been making it very clear that with regard to these alleged studies, we have not seen any use of nuclear material, we have not received any information that Iran has manufactured any part of a nuclear weapon or component. That’s why I say, to present the Iran threat as imminent is hype.

In a sense, this one outstanding issue is far less serious than the issues which prompted Iran’s referral to the Security Council!

It is a serious concern but I am not going to panic, to say it is an imminent threat that we are going to wake up and see Iran with nuclear weapons. Our job is to make sure we do not overstate or understate a case. There are enough people around to use or abuse what we say. The judgment call is very difficult, but based on what we have seen so far — we are concerned, we need to clarify this issue, we need to build confidence in the peaceful nature of Iran’s programme, we need Iran to adhere to the Additional Protocol because that will help me build confidence. But I am not going to sound an alarm and say that Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons.

You are right that the Security Council referral was based on issues that have since been settled. So if Iran were to continue to cooperate with us, help us to clarify these alleged studies and also if the suppliers [of the documents] should help in that process, we would move quite forward.

Has the world benefited from the Iran file being referred to the Security Council? Or have the costs outweighed the benefits? We’ve lost Iran’s adherence to the Additional Protocol, to the latest Subsidiary Arrangements, it hasn’t stopped enrichment.

The IAEA remains seized of the matter but the Security Council referral was to get Iran to suspend enrichment and apply sanctions. I leave it to those who decided to refer them to make that judgment. I always believe the more we use carrots rather than sticks in such complex situations, the better is the prospect of finding a solution. As you can see now, after three or four years of referral, the focus is not on the Security Council but on engaging Iran! So the focus right now is on dialogue, engagement, incentives and not on the stick. The stick is always there, you can always use it. But first exhaust every possibility of trying to understand where the other party is coming from.

Coming back to Iran’s latest disclosure, the IAEA legal adviser has acknowledged there is a grey area in the implementation of the Subsidiary Arrangements.

Subsidiary Arrangements are a technical requirement but the more important issue is transparency and confidence and Iran lost on confidence with this action, no matter what they said about the need to protect their technology, human resources, passive security. I don’t look only at the legal issue but the political implication.

Even if Tehran failed to report to you on time, don’t you think it was reasonable for them to be secretive given the open threats Israel and the U.S. have made of a military attack on their nuclear facilities?

That’s why I said using the language of force is not helpful. It leads to confrontation, to the other country taking counteraction. It is better to forget the language of coercion and focus on trying to engage in dialogue.

Delhi upset over separate Chinese visas for Kashmiris

2009-10-01T08:08:00.002+05:30

The message as seen by the Indian side: China does not believe Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India and is, in a sense, reiterating its intent to make territorial claims there...

30 September 2009
The Hindu

Delhi upset over separate Chinese visas for Kashmiris

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: In a move that has puzzled and annoyed South Block, the Chinese embassy in New Delhi has begun issuing visas to Indian passport holders from Jammu and Kashmir on a separate sheet of paper rather than stamping them in their passports as is the norm with other Indian citizens. Though it is not clear when the new Chinese policy started or what prompted Beijing to adopt it, immigration authorities at Delhi airport first started noticing the standalone visas a few weeks ago. The Bureau of Immigration, which is run by the Ministry of Home Affairs, initially assumed these visas to be fake and turned the unfortunate travellers – all of them Kashmiri students or businessmen – away. But when some of them returned with letters from the Chinese embassy declaring the visas to be genuine, the matter was referred to the Ministry of External Affairs.

With the Chinese issuing “stapled visas” to the handful of Indian passport holders from Arunachal Pradesh who have travelled to China since 2007, the MEA saw in Beijing’s latest move an attempt to question the status of Jammu and Kashmir. The immigration authorities were told to treat any visa that is not stamped on a passport as invalid for the purposes of travel. Simultaneously, the issue was taken up with the Chinese authorities, MEA officials told The Hindu.

Although the People’s Republic of China embassy in Delhi said it would not officially comment on the matter, Chinese diplomats told The Hindu that the practice of issuing visas on a separate piece of paper is not new. “This kind of visa is one category of Chinese visa. It is valid. This has been practised for many years. Upon the implementation of this, a note was sent to your immigration authorities. All the visa holders of this kind have not met any problem in the past in your custom/border control,” an embassy official said on condition of anonymity.

The MEA denies the contention that India has only now started objecting to some pre-existing Chinese practice of issuing Kashmiri domicile passport holders visas on a separate sheet of paper. “What the Chinese are doing is definitely new and we have taken a serious view of it,” an MEA official said.

Visa standoff leaves Kashmiri students in limbo

2009-10-01T06:19:00.000+05:30

India will not accept China travel document that is not stamped in passport ...

30 September 2009
The Hindu

Visa standoff leaves Kashmiri students in limbo

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: Chinese diplomats may insist their policy of issuing a loose visa to Indian passport holders from Kashmir is not new but the fact is that scores of Kashmiris have travelled to China before on visas that were stamped in their passports rather than stapled to it. “I have travelled to China three times,” the former Water Resources Minister Saifuddin Soz told The Hindu. “My passport shows my address in Baramulla, Kashmir but each time I have travelled with a visa stamped inside.” Mr. Soz said the new policy of issuing Chinese visas on a separate sheet was “completely unacceptable.”

“We knew they were doing this for passport holders from Arunachal Pradesh but until recently, Kashmiris, like other Indians travelling to China, were always issued regular visas stamped on a passport page,” a senior official from the Ministry of External Affairs said. “That now appears to have changed.”

At the same time, the Chinese embassy appears to be correct in noting that travellers with a stapled rather than stamped visa sheet have not been stopped in the past, though the number of such travellers — presumably all of them from Arunachal Pradesh — was itself very small. In 2007, Professor Marpe Sora from Itanagar, apparently the first Arunachali to visit China, did so with a visa that was not stamped in his passport. He was not stopped by airport authorities in India.

The issue has cropped up now, a Chinese diplomat told The Hindu, “purely because of the change of mind of your authorities. They know much better than anybody else.”

Indian officials deny this. “If an Indian citizen left the country in the past with a loose leaf visa, this has more to do with our lax border control systems. That doesn’t mean the Government of India has accepted the validity of this kind of visa.” Until recently, the number of people from Arunachal Pradesh or Jammu and Kashmir visiting China was very low. So it was possible such Chinese visas passed under the radar, the officials said. “But now that this has been brought to our notice, we cannot accept it.”

Whatever the compulsions of grand strategy and politics, however, the new visa policy has been a calamity for those Kashmiri students who were hoping to go to China for higher education, many of them on full scholarships. In the case of one Srinagar-based student, who sought The Hindu’s assistance in the matter after being turned back from Delhi airport twice, the Chinese university where he was to be enrolled informed him that it could no longer hold his place and that he would have to re-apply for admission again next year.

Though several Kashmiris have been stranded as a result, the new Chinese policy is not without its wrinkles. A Kashmiri student domiciled in Srinagar, who applied for a visa to study at the same university as his friend who had received a stapled visa three days earlier, was given a stamped visa. Asked about this and other examples from the past of Kashmiris receiving stamped visas, the Chinese diplomat said this was “not possible.”

In the case of Arunachalis, too, there are idiosyncrasies. A former Member of Parliament from Arunachal Pradesh, Kiran Rijju, got a visa to visit China in 2008 after he surrendered his diplomatic visa for a normal Indian one. His visa was stamped inside his passport, perhaps because it gave a Delhi permanent address and his birthplace was listed only as ‘Nakhu, A.P.’ “I think the fact that the State’s name was left abbreviated may have made the granting of the visa easier,” Mr. Rijju told The Hindu.

In the case of three Kashmiri students, whose story was reported recently in the Srinagar-based Greater Kashmir, two received loose visas and were not allowed to leave Delhi while a third got a stamped visa because he was settled in Delhi. “When we have the same Indian passport, why [is] a different visa issued to other Indian citizens?,” one of the students who was unable to fly was quoted as saying.

While the new visa policy has left dozens of Kashmiri students in India frustrated, there is worry about what will happen to those already pursuing their studies in Chinese universities. Though all of them are on stamped visas, many fear being given a loose visa when they return home and apply for their annual extension, thereby getting stranded mid-course.

Countries issue separate paper visas for one reason alone: so that no trace of the traveller having visited is left behind. Sometimes, as in the case of Israel, this is done to protect the traveller from being denied entry to a country which regards a prior visit to the Zionist state as a disqualification. But the absence of an official seal in a passport also helps one country with a territorial claim or dispute on another to avoid extending legal recognition to the latter’s possession of the territory under question.

India pleased as G20 summit scales new height

2009-09-27T09:51:00.001+05:30

A 23 page Leaders' Statement shows the enormous ground the world's leading economies have covered ... Genuine forward movement on several key issues, says Manmohan Singh...

27 September 2009
The Hindu

India pleased as G20 summit scales new height

Siddharth Varadarajan

Pittsburgh: The G20 inverted an apparently iron law of multilateral summitry — that the significance of a final statement is inversely related to its length — by turning in a bulky communiqué at the end of its summit here on Friday whose genuine heft is likely to be felt in the global economy for years to come.

Whether the new frameworks of oversight, regulation, decision-making and accountability envisaged finally get implemented or not, this much is clear: the world’s leading economies appear to recognise that any reversion to the ‘business as usual, banking as usual’ model of global capitalism which existed prior to last year’s financial meltdown will only perpetuate the current crisis and help trigger fresh instability in the international system.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy described the agreement as a “revolution.” Speaking to reporters at the end of the G20 summit, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was more guarded. But he highlighted several key issues on which, he said, genuine forward movement had taken place.

Of these, he said, the most important was the designation of the G20 as the “premier forum” for future discussion of international economic issues. “This is an important development broadening the international governance structure,” he said. The change will kick in immediately.

Next year’s G20 summit will take place in Canada, alongside the summit of the G8 whose deliberations will, presumably, be confined to non-economic matters and be far less crucial than the larger, more representative forum.

In line with this diffusion of power, the G20 also agreed to effect a 5 per cent shift in the IMF quota share — used to allocate voting rights — from over-represented countries to dynamic emerging markets and developing countries which are currently under-represented, by early 2011. Dr. Singh told reporters India had wanted more. “As of now, the developing countries quota is about 43 per cent. The four BRIC countries had suggested a rebalancing to the extent of 7 per cent, in which case the developing countries would have more than 50 per cent or nearly that.” But this was not acceptable to the West, which today has a majority quota share.

A further levelling of existing power relations could potentially be ushered in by the G20 decision to set up a mechanism for peer review of each other’s policy frameworks and performance. Much will depend on how the IMF implements its mandate to analyse “in a candid, even-handed and balanced” manner whether policies pursued by individual G20 countries “are collectively consistent with more sustainable and balanced trajectories for the global economy.” But this process will allow for the macroprudential and regulatory policies in the rich countries — which failed to prevent, and even encouraged, the rise of destabilising credit and asset price bubbles — to be the target for international scrutiny in much the same way that developing country fiscal, monetary, trade and structural policies have been for decades. This was a positive development, Prime Minister Singh told reporters, rejecting the suggestion that the autonomy of policymaking in India would be affected. “As far as our domestic policy is concerned, the IMF already reviews it … so I don’t see what more can be done as far as Indian policy is concerned. But the policies of major developed countries within the framework of review by the G20 will give us an opportunity to pick holes in the functioning of their economies.”