PROJECT 1984?
The name of my project is an intentional misnomer. Initially, my project was supposed to be based on the events of 1984 in India. It has since expanded to include the aftermath of 9/11 here in the United States, but I had no idea what to call the project. So, for now, the project name stays, while the intent and content change shape.

1984
When people talk about 1984, it’s as if everything hinged on this one year. As if prior to 1984, everything was running smoothly, and after 1984, everything returned to “normal.”

When I first started my project, I wanted to tell the story, in the form of a novel, of the Sikhs, in what I thought were the three key defining moments in my lifetime of the Sikh identity: 1) the storming of the epicenter of Sikh sensibilities and spirituality – the Golden Temple – during Indira Gandhi’s sanctioned and K.S. Brar’s lead “Operation Bluestar” in June, 1984, 2) the era of faked encounters by K.P.S. Gill where many innocent Sikhs were tortured and killed and all of these deaths were dressed up as daring police encounters with dangerous terrorists in some remote area of Punjab, and 3) From November 1-3, 1984, a full day after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the anti-Sikh pogroms –state sanctioned massacre of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere – at the instigation of congress leaders like Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar, who will, in all likelihood, never face a day in jail.

A Quick Background
The spirit of the Jakara youth movement is a model that I think should be emulated in other countries, including India. It began in 1999 when a handful of Sikhs in their teens and early twenties attended the Sikh Renaissance Conference, run by people of our parents’ generation. They found the message informative, but thought there wasn’t a meaningful discussion because the youth voice was drowned out by the adults. So they decided to start their own conference and keep the adults out.

Growing up in Fresno, there really was no excuse for me not to have attended Jakara until I was 30, the cut-off age. I always found something else to occupy my time with: in 1999, when they first began, I was 21, in the Naval Reserve, and had just started taking depressing Victorian literature courses at Fresno State. So that summer I had extended my Annual Training in Spain to go travel around Europe. In 2000, I wasted most of my time swimming and playing video games. The year after that I was working on my thesis, then I left to go teach in China for two years, and then I was in graduate school. In the summer of 2005, I got married. Then my wife and I went on a backpacking honeymoon across India for six months. The point is, for some reason, although I was a stone’s throw away, I didn’t think to make it a priority to go. And it isn’t that I found the topics being explored boring; I didn’t bother to see what they were. The truth is, I found the idea of being confined for an entire weekend discussing Sikh issues utterly miserable.  Yes, I was one of those people.

I have scoured the internet, bookstores, scholastic journals and databases for exhaustive information to try and understand the reality of the events of 1984, as well as the unique nature of this kind of oppression at the hands of the state. The following is a glimpse of what I deem to be useful, as far as my research is concerned. I am sure I have skipped many books and articles, so please leave a comment or contact me if you feel there are any sources or areas that are amiss:

Bits and pieces of everything: Wikipedia
While I sternly warn my students never to use this source for any of their papers, it has some surprisingly good cursory information. For an overview of the timeline of bluestar, the delhi pogroms, bios of many of the people involved, and it even has information on fake encounter killings. Again, use this to gain a very BASIC idea. It is not a reputable source because anyone can write an article on wikipedia and there is no system of accountability.

Bhindranwale and the rise of militancy in Punjab

Identity and Survival: Sikh Militancy in India 1978-1993 by Kirpal Dhillon
Before you ask, no I am not related to Kirpal. Nor do I get a cut in the profits. Now living in Bhopal, Kirpal was the Director General of Punjab Police within weeks of Operation Blue Star. It is very eloquently written and discusses the roles of K.P.S. Gill and Lt. Gen. K.S. Brar. Both men, incidentally, have produced memoirs of their own, which I have read, but cannot in good conscience provide as a resource for people to go out and buy. I would recommend reading it for the active researcher though.

In 1985, I was about seven years old and living in Crawley, a small town 40 minutes by tube from London. I can’t remember exactly what we were all watching. We were all very particular about what we watched as a family: Black Adder, Only Fools and Horses, Monty Python, or Lenny Henry. The phone rang and my mum picked it up. She said very little, which is very unlike her. She loves to gab. My dad got up from the sofa and went over to give my mum a cuddle. Definitely very unlike him.

Earlier that day, my dad had been upset and livid as he heard a news story on the radio about militants gunning down a middle-aged woman and her two pre-teen daughters, one of them handicapped. “What kind of people are these?” he had said. It turned out, the woman was Minder Massi, my mum’s sister, a fiercely independent large framed woman in her 40s, who loved to gossip and could spend hours telling low-brow Punjabi jokes involving bodily functions.

Her first daughter had died of pneumonia when very young and as a result my mother had gone to live with her for several years. So their relationship was more like a mother and daughter. The mentally handicapped girl was named Jippan – she had Down Syndrome – and we used to get on incredibly well. She taught me how to play gend-gita, a game a little bit like Jacks, but played with pebbles, and a healthy dose of aggression.

With my father’s arms around her, my mother listened to the speaker at the other end of the phone give her the news. My mother’s sister and her two children were gunned down by militants for a perceived slight committed by her son-in-law.  He was later hacked to pieces by a childhood friend, one of the militants, his body placed in several paper bags -the kind used by butchers – and delivered to his parent’s home in a narrow alley in Kharu, a small village near Tarn-taran. The reverberations of these deaths on the dynamic of their family are so gut-wrenching and far reaching that, over 26 years later, neither the year nor any of the events are ever mentioned.