Respected Justice Pillay,
We, the undersigned, call for
An independent international inquiry into Rajiv Gandhi's and the Congress party's role in planning, organizing and executing the November 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms in New Delhi, India
and the immediate removal of the name of former Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, from all public monuments, airports, roads, stadia, parks, sports awards, and professorships.
By conservative estimates, 4000 Sikhs were killed in the first week of November 1984 on the streets of India's capital. Organized armed groups, equipped with lists of Sikh households, overtook the city, as a curfew was imposed, and law enforcement was either absent or facilitated the atrocities.
These organized massacres followed the assassination of Rajiv's mother, the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, by two Sikh bodyguards, who were avenging the attacks against Sikh shrines in June, 1984. On June 4, 1984, a major Sikh religious holiday, Indira Gandhi had ordered Indian troops to storm the holiest of the Sikh gurdwaras, Darbar Sahib, and 31 other gurdwaras, resulting in the brutal deaths of thousands of innocent pilgrims.
Rajiv had been sworn-in as the new Prime Minister immediately after the assassination, and very soon thereafter, the carnage against Sikhs ensued. For four days following this, Sikhs were killed with complete impunity in New Delhi under express orders from many prominent politicians such as H.K.L. Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar, and Jagdish Tytler – of Rajiv's political party.
In the April 26th, 2009 edition of the Indian Express, an eye-witness quotes Tytler as telling a crowd, "I had assured you that you kill Sikhs and nothing will happen to you. I had given a promise to the Centre. Despite this, by killing least number of Sikhs, you have lowered my prestige." This on-the-spot involvement of high ranking party members, and inaction and worse on the part of the police, complete with names of perpetrators in many cases, was first documented by a group of human rights activists (all non-Sikh) in the report, "Who Are the Guilty?," within a month of this massacre.
Shortly afterwards, Rajiv commented at a rally, "But, when a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little." Not only that, Rajiv promoted politician Bhagat to the rank of cabinet minister, and rewarded Tytler with an appointment as minister of state. The assiduous efforts made ever since then by the Indian state to shield the guilty of 1984 are now fully documented in the book, "When a Tree Shook Delhi," by Manoj Mitta and H. S. Phoolka. We submit that such an extensive and intensive cover-up, which still continues as the Indian Express article of April 26, 2009 cited above clearly shows, would have been impossible to initiate, and sustain for so long, unless Rajiv was deeply implicated in these mass murders from the very beginning.
International criminal law recognizes the primacy of holding the one with the maximum responsibility most guilty in order to break cycles of impunity. "Command responsibility" holds a superior legally responsible for human rights violations by subordinates if the official knew or should have known about these violations but failed to prevent them or punish those who committed them.
We therefore call for an inquiry into Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress party's responsibility for the November 1984 massacres. The dozen odd kangaroo courts and commissions set up by the Indian government over the past 25 years have served to do nothing more than insult the intelligence of the Sikh community in general, and the surviving relatives of the victims in particular, who still continue to suffer due to the carnage that was unleashed on the streets of Delhi. This partisan record of Indian courts and the inaction by the government in the past 25 years necessitates that such an inquiry be held by an international body, one that is acceptable to Sikhs world-wide.
We also call for the immediate removal of Rajiv Gandhi's name from all buildings, awards, monuments, etc. This rampant and tasteless glorification of a very doubtful political character is a constant daily re-victimization of the Sikhs, and a reminder to them of the justice that has almost totally eluded them so far.
That "history repeats itself" couldn't be more true than in the parallel between the Sikh massacres of 1984 under the Congress party leadership and the Muslim massacres of 2002 under the Bhartiya Janta Party leadership. Narendra Modi should similarly be indicted and tried for his instigation and planning of ostensible pogroms that left thousands of Muslims dead. We call for justice to all, regardless of which Indian party is in control, and regardless of the faith or class of the victims.
Rajiv Gandhi's heirs are deluding themselves if they think that they can make the Sikhs forget the facts about 1984. At the very least, they should have desisted from naming even small-town parks in the Punjab after him. Unless their objective in so doing was not to let the Sikhs forget 1984? For, they are only succeeding in constantly reminding the Sikhs of their humiliation, by confronting them, day in and day out, with the name, and often the picture, of the person whom the Sikhs hold the most culpable.
