Lest We Forget

25 years later, Sikhs around the world continue to hold protests, vigils, and conferences commemorating the Indian State’s organized pogroms against Sikhs in Delhi and across the country.

The Indian State hasn’t launched a single objective investigation into these massacres and continues to sweep all evidence relating to these attacks under the rug. The dozen or so Indian kangaroo courts and commissions that have examined the issue have thought it was better to whitewash the matter than to hold the perpetrators responsible.

In the course of the last two and a half decades, its become evident to anyone objectively studying the Nov 1984 massacres that Rajiv Gandhi and his kitchen cabinet, along with other high level politicians, played a key role in organizing the mobs that were given lists of Sikh homes and businesses to attack and loot.

What’s most shocking is that powers that be within the Indian State and Punjab Government felt it appropriate to name Hospitals, Colleges, and Technology Parks in honor of Rajiv Gandhi – the central mastermind of the 1984 carnage. Rajiv, in front of National media, said “When a tree falls, the earth shakes.” As the leader of the world’s largest democracy, Rajiv felt there wasn’t an issue with ordering systematic massacres of Sikhs under the guise of spontaneous ‘riots’, in response to the assasination of his mother by her Sikh bodyguards in return for her ordering the attack on the Darbar Sahib (Golden Temple) Complex earlier that year, where thousands of innocent Sikh pigrims were killed.

Would the United States ever erect Technology Parks in the name of King George III or Israel inaugurate Hospitals in honor of Adolf Hitler? How can Sikhs and the government of Punjab allow anyone to give such reverence to Rajiv Gandhi?