If there has been one day that has most affected my outlook and views on just about everything, it is June 4th, 1984. I was sixteen at the time, and the events of that day and the next few days are still amongst my most vivid memories.

Our family was awakened around 4am with a phone call. My mother was already in tears before we learned what it was about, and it did not require many words to understand the import of what was happening. The Indian State had just launched a full-scale attack on the nexus of the Sikh faith, and by doing so, had effectively declared war on the Sikh faith itself.

As in all wars, the real tragedy was not borne by the combatants (on the Sikh side, these numbered no more than a few hundred, fighting against one of the largest armies in the world) but rather by the non-combatants. For its part, the Indian state was fully capable of but not willing to distinguish between them.

Between June 4th and 6th, five to ten thousand innocent Sikhs lost their lives at the hands of the Indian state; 'collateral damage' in an assault intended to demoralize a population highly sympathetic to the cause espoused by Baba Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.

On the weekend following June 4th, we drove to Vancouver and joined in what may well have been the largest Sikh demonstration ever in North America. It was certainly the most emotional one that I have ever attended, and I have participated in many demonstrations since then. Forty thousand Sikhs, most dressed in black, their anguish etched deeply into their faces, burning effigies of Indira Gandhi and shouting slogans demanding justice. The memories of that day still send shivers down my spine.

'Indira kuti, hai hai' (Indira the Bitch), shouted tens of thousands, including otherwise gentle old men and women who had probably never before used such language in their lives, overwhelmed by the sheer callousness of Indira Gandhi's and India's war against its own citizens. 'Jailu kuta ...' (Zailu the Dog), Zail Singh, President of India, the armed forces entirely within his jurisdiction to rein in, a slave to the Indian state to his death. 'Indira Gandhi murdabad' (Death to Indira Gandhi), a prophesy that would take only months to fulfill with yet even more tragic consequences for the ten thousand or so more innocent Sikhs that would be slaughtered in that aftermath, 'Bhindranwale sant sipahi, jina ne suti kaum jagayee' (Hail Bhindranwale the Saint-Soldier, who has awakened a sleeping nation). Much of the anger in those slogans all but faded away in the years that followed, but this last one captured the entire essence of June 1984, captured virtually all of it in the space of just eight words. In that demonstration, it must have been shouted thousands of times, until by the end most could barely talk.

But how the Sikh nation had been sleeping! Proudly singing the national anthem of a country that did not even recognize them as Sikhs in its constitution. Publicly and privately defending the honor of the country's 'ruling' family that had dishonored them countless times in the decades prior to and following 1947.

The 'Mahatma', the elder Gandhi, related only in name, coerced them into submission with his lies and false promises of freedom in the pre-partition period, the 'Pandit', Nehru, disrobed them with his systematic dismantling of their rights in the post-Partition period, and the 'Bibi', Indira, well, she simply completed the gruesome rape in June of 1984. And then, as if this last humiliation was not enough, her son Rajiv picked up where his mother had left off, as head of the state during the carnage of November 1984, keeping the army at bay while the Hindu mobs went about their terrible calculated massacres, and who promoted rather than punished many of the key players in the aftermath of those massacres.

In the end, it was indeed Jarnail Singh's words, largely unheeded prior to June of 84, that awakened the Sikh nation from its slumber. Until that day, I had somehow built up a degree of respect for the Indian state. It took such an event to see that my vision of that country was born out of an incredibly naivety, my vision reflecting the one promulgated by an Indian media always eager to cast their 'motherland' in the best possible light, lest the truth be too bitter for the sensitive eyes and ears of its citizens, or worse, lest it embarrass their nation in the eyes of the international community.

Until that day, I was hardly different from most other Westerners, my views about India had been carefully crafted by movies such as 'Gandhi' and stereotypes that cast the Hindu (who makes up 80% of India's population) as the epitome of ahimsa, 'non-violence'. That this 'movie' Gandhi was about as fictitious as any character in a James Bond film [1] hardly surprised me when I read excerpts from Gandhi's own writings years later. That the myth of an ahimsic Hindu society hardly meshed with the reality of routine episodes of orchestrated violence by Hindu mobs against Dalits (untouchables), Tribals, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians in post-independence India surprised me a little more, as I began reading and learning of these events [2].

The report, "Oppression in Punjab" [3] by independent human rights group 'Citizens for Democracy', was amongst the first to document, through eye witness accounts, the horror of the Indian State's assault on Sikh Gurdwaras in June of 1984 and on innocent Sikhs. It reaffirmed what accounts we had already heard by some of the survivors of that assault, people who, until they came to the West, dared not even whisper the truth in the 'democracy' called India, lest they become more casualties of India's war against the Sikhs. One of the commentaries in that report still rings in my mind with an irony that would be amusing were it not so tragic,

"Those who suffered and faced gallows during freedom struggle in
Punjab resisting British repression could never have imagined that
Punjab would have to face again the same kind of repressive laws,
even more drastic, in free India against which they were
revolting!"

Not surprisingly, 'free' India immediately banned the report when it was published and charged its authors with sedition.

References

[1] For a good overview of the contrast between the 'movie' Gandhi
and the real Gandhi, see:
The Gandhi Nobody Knows, Richard Grenier
First published in the magazine, "Commentary," March 1983.
http://eserver.org/history/ghandi-nobody-knows.txt

[2] For a few examples, read some of the reports by the
Washington based human rights group "Human Rights Watch"

Anti-Christian violence on the rise in India
http://www.hrw.org/press/1999/sep/christians.htm

BROKEN PEOPLE: Caste Violence Against India's 'Untouchables'
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india/

[3] See the full report, Oppression in Punjab by Citizens for Democracy, at
http://www.sikhmedia.org/resources/oip/contents.htm

Citizens for Democracy is an independent human rights
Group. In 1985, they sent a fact-finding team (five non-Sikhs
and one Sikh) to Punjab to document what had happened.