When a big tree tree falls….

Let me begin with a frank question. How many of you ever knew that something bad happened in 1984. I did not until yesterday. If you did know about this then you will have to excuse the naiveté of your shameless friend other wise read on.
In the October of 1984, the then prime minister of India, Mrs Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards for being stern on Sikh radicals. All the hell broke loose in the following 3 days. Thousands of Sikhs were butchered by congress-sponsored hooligans. Police remained mute spectators while truckloads of corpses were hauled away. What Delhi was in 1984 was Ahmedabad in 2002.
During those dark days, my temperament was fortunate enough not to understand those horrible things committed.
Indians have somehow learned the knack of overlooking the significance of the deaths of thousands of its peoples. Someone put it euphemistically as learning to live in the face of all odds. But the stark reality is that we let incidents like this happen all over again. The government has done a meticulous job of wiping all instances of its pogroms from its history textbooks. I am amazed that I did not come to know about all this for I was not a very bad student after all. It took two films ‘Kaya Taran’ and ‘Amu’ on this subject for the matter to come up any where near the top of the list of items in the news aggregator. I went around the net in a shameful gait looking for related articles. I found many. I saw them all. Agony of a bygone era screaming across the Internet. A truck load of bodies hauled away. A mongrel having its day out. An orphaned child looking into an uncertain future. Gurudwaras been vandalised. The Shame still lingers on: After the violence, all the gurudwaras decided to have a defense of a 10 feet high wall. This practice is continued till date. Protection from its own country and from its own countrymen. As Khuswant Singh said, to be a Sikh in Delhi during that time is akin to being a Jew in Nazi Germany. How can this horror be muted. If only the government showed this kind of diligence into less barbaric endeavours…..
It is more than obvious that the government encouraged this vandalism. They let the hooligans loose on to the streets of Delhi for 3 days and when the last of the Sikh community was wiped out, they called the army which immediately put the horror to rest. Had they done this simple and obvious thing 3 days before, so many lives could have been saved. Who knows probably we could have had another Khuswant Singh.
I did not specifically consider Rajiv Gandhi a scoundrel. But I am still coming in terms of the reality. For, this is what he said when he was asked about the violence against Sikhs in the days after Indira Gandhi’s death: “When a big tree falls, the earth trembles”.
One can only get misanthropic after going through all the horrors in its most mind-numbing details. Then there is Hope.
With the advent of the Internet the kind of ignorance engineered into people’s minds by the government is hard to sustain if not impossible. Where else can one get to the most democratic source of information?
If you are convinced that Internet is the elixir of democracy, then join me in a moment of adoration: For all its failings, God bless the Net.