Delayed reaction

India

Aug 11th 2005 DELHI
From The Economist print edition

A massacre in 1984 brings a ministerial resignation at last

“A BLOT on the nation's conscience,” said India's prime minister Manmohan Singh in parliament on August 10th, referring to the 1984 slaughter of his fellow Sikhs in Delhi. The “national shame” lay not just in the orgy of thuggery, arson and murder that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi, then the prime minister, by her Sikh bodyguards and left perhaps 3,000 people dead. It lay also in the failure to punish any of the culprits. Later that day, in a hint that the wheels of justice may at last begin to turn, Jagdish Tytler, the minister in Mr Singh's government responsible for overseas Indians' affairs, felt forced to resign because of accusations about his role in the riots.

These had been repeated in the report of the latest—ninth—commission to inquire into the riots. Tabled in parliament on August 8th, it had cited “credible evidence” against Mr Tytler and a number of other figures in the ruling Congress party. Mr Tytler, it said, was “very probably” involved in organising the riots. One affidavit signed in 1987 by a young Sikh claiming to be an eyewitness quoted him: “I had promised large-scale killing of the Sikhs.”

Mr Tytler protests his innocence, and the government argued there was not enough evidence for legal action against him or the others. Both the main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and Congress's allies, the Communist parties, said that heads should roll. Congress pointed out the hypocrisy of the BJP's position. Unlike Mr Tytler, its leader, L.K. Advani, faces legal charges for allegedly inciting the riot that led to the demolition of a mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, and to vicious communal violence thereafter. More recently, in 2002, the BJP-led government in the state of Gujarat was accused of complicity in an anti-Muslim pogrom that killed perhaps 2,000 people. There, too, not a single murderer has been convicted.

Congress, which is now led by Mrs Gandhi's daughter-in-law, Sonia, is proud of its “secular” tradition—she, after all, was born Italian and forsook the prime minister's post in favour of a Sikh. But many Sikhs were not satisfied by Mr Tytler's resignation and that of his party colleague, Sajjan Kumar, from a post in the Delhi local government. They would like to see killers punished, and would have respected Congress much more if its action against Mr Tytler had been spontaneous, rather than a surrender to political pressure.

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