When people you have lived with and trusted for years, your neighbours, your friends, the people you elect to protect you, are suddenly willing to kill you for some vague idea of religion, it is like the ground giving away from under your feet. And even if you survive the trauma, your life is never the same again, for that very unique human to human bond that joins us all together and makes life worth living, has been ruptured so brutally.
It is strange that we never learn lessons from history and keep on repeating it in the most bizarre and surreal manner. The collective subconscious of north Indians has never quite gotten over the partition of the country and the riots that ensued then, with approximately a 1.5 million people dead and another 14.5 million people rendered homeless. “Refugee” is a word I learnt early in life. For me, it stood for all the death, heartache, hunger, cruelty, destruction, homelessness, utter desolation—the story of my family, as recollected by many of them. For most people “refugee” is a word signifying a person who seeks refuge somewhere else other than home. But for all those who crossed to both sides of the new boundary between India and Pakistan, it was lived reality. It was all the shrieks and blood. It was the disease and the winter cold of North India that followed after August 1947. It was the rape of women. It was the wistful distant memory of a childhood once spent in a safe ancestral home, with friends from all religions. It was years of hard work and misery in a new country, living in refugee camps. It was my old grandfather cycling to work in Delhi in a small factory, when he had been an engineer by profession, in Lahore. It was my uncle, studying for MBBS under the street lamp light. It was the story of a distant cousin who came in a train of dead bodies, amidst the rotting human flesh and death. That is what riots are and that is who a refugee is.
And yet I had to witness it again during the 1984 riots. Born in an atheistic family, which had had enough of religious bigotry in the partition, and raised by a Hindu mother, a Sikh father and strict catholic Nuns in a convent, I had a sense of a bag full of mixed and happy identity, all its strands unique, yet blending. But I was jolted out of that harmony because Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi was killed by her Sikh guards and suddenly in a few seconds, when my father was missing from the PM’s office, where he worked, I realized, that in social terms I was just a Sikh and all other aspects of my life and identity were negated. I was whisked away to a Hindu maternal uncle’s home for refuge, to avoid “a fate worse than death”, and my parents bid me goodbye, all of us wondering whether we would see each other again ever. We all survived. We all were scarred. And yet again the nation reverberated with the 2002 Gujarat riots. As I sat riveted to the TV, I could identify with the utter desolation on the victims’ faces.
None of the perpetrators have really been punished. All of us who have gone through riots, lead lives where there has been no retribution. We live in a country where many perpetrators of such crimes, still hold their grandiose offices. No messiah has come to soothe our hurting souls. Our wounds have never healed. We are still waiting. All we can hope for is that we as a nation would have learnt our lessons and not repeat our sins again.
