A New Idea of India: Individual Rights in a Civilisational State by Rajeev Mantri & Harsh Madhusudan

Author:Rajeev Mantri & Harsh Madhusudan [Mantri, Rajeev]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2020-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

Nellie and Delhi: Communal Riots, Contorted Discourse

In an interview 152 to the Financial Times , when asked why she had not acted earlier to stop the violence during Assam’s Nellie massacre of 18 February 1983, when the state was under President’s rule, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had said, ‘One has to let such events take their own course before stepping in.’ 153

Mrs Gandhi was never probed about what she meant when she said this, and neither has the Congress party ever had to answer for what was one of the worst riots in independent India’s history, with the official number of dead said to be 2,191, most of them Muslims.

When Manmohan Singh was re-elected to the Rajya Sabha in 2013 as a representative of Assam, he said, ‘It’s a great opportunity for me to rededicate myself to the service of the people of Assam.’ 154 Singh entered the Rajya Sabha claiming to be a resident of Assam and a tenant of the Congress party’s Hiteshwar Saikia, the man who took over as Assam’s chief minister on 27 February 1983 after the Nellie riots.

It was under Saikia’s chief ministership that the Assam Accord was executed in 1985 by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. As part of the Accord, 310 charge-sheeted criminal cases related to the Nellie violence were dropped by the Union government 155 —a curious case of the Union government exonerating itself, given that the violence took place when Assam was under President’s rule and hence under the control of Indira Gandhi.

Indira Gandhi’s remark is lesser known than Rajiv Gandhi’s disgraceful comment that justified the Congress-sponsored pogrom against Sikhs in 1984—the worst riots in the history of the republic. ‘When a big tree falls, the earth shakes,’ Rajiv Gandhi had said, referring to his mother’s killing. 156

The government-controlled Doordarshan, immediately after Rajiv Gandhi’s first speech as prime minister, ‘showed shots of H.K.L. Bhagat and his supporters beating their chests and shouting “Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge ” (Blood will be avenged with blood). 157 It should be remembered that Doordarshan was the only TV channel in India then, and played an outsized role in public communications. Bhagat had also showed up at Rajiv Gandhi’s residence after his assassination, asking if it was Sikhs who had killed the former prime minister. Bhagat died in 2005 and, in fine Congress tradition, his son Deepak Bhagat was made the general secretary of the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee.

Immediately after Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, he was posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna. Manmohan Singh as finance minister announced a donation of 100 crore in the 1991 budget (equivalent to about 1,000 crore today) to the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, 158 a private trust created in the former prime minister’s name and controlled by his widow, Sonia Gandhi. With India reeling under an economic crisis, Singh deemed it fit and responsible to dole out a huge public grant to a private foundation. After protests by opposition parties, the government was forced to cancel this donation.

Singh claimed while campaigning

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