Report on riots opens old wounds in India
NEW DELHI: India's Parliament was disrupted Tuesday as rival lawmakers clashed over a report that named governring Congress Party leaders in connection with anti-Sikh riots in 1984 that left nearly 3,000 Sikhs dead.
Outside Parliament, Sikhs protested against what they called the inquiry commission's whitewash of those accused of orchestrating and participating in the riots.
"We want justice, we want justice," shouted widows and other relatives of the riot victims. Some said that those responsible should be hanged.
Opposition lawmakers want the government to take action against a junior minister, Jagdish Tytler, who the report said may have instigated rioters after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was killed by her Sikh bodyguards more than 20 years ago.
But the Congress Party-led coalition government headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh,himself a Sikh, said it was not taking action against Tytler because the panel did not have conclusive evidence against him. Tytler has denied the charges.
The inquiry - by a retired judge, G.T. Nanavati - was brought before Parliament on Monday. It looked into the deadly religious riots that broke out across northern India after Gandhi was assassinated on Oct. 31, 1984.Media reports and human rights groups say the Congress Party, which was governing the country at the time as well, was involved in organizing the anti-Sikh killings, a charge the party has denied.
On Tuesday, deputies from the opposition National Democratic Alliance, including members of a small Sikh party, demanded an immediate discussion of the report in the lower house of Parliament; but the speaker said a time had to be agreed upon first for such a debate.
"I deeply mourn the occasion," speaker Somnath Chatterjee said of the riots, as opposition lawmakers shouted anti-government slogans.
He then adjourned the lower house.The upper house was also adjourned for an hour as an uproar erupted over the Nanavati report.
"The Nanavati Commission has held the Congress Party responsible for the killing of Sikhs," Sushma Swaraj of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party said in the upper house.
The government said it would investigate whether legal action could be taken against another Congress leader, Dharam Das Shastri, also accused of instigating riots.
The uproar in Parliament is an embarrassment for the government, but not a threat to its survival, analysts said.
"For the Congress, it is an important moment," the Indian Express wrote in an editorial. "Its credibility is on test."
Most of the Sikhs killed in the riots in 1984 died in New Delhi, where about 600 cases of arson, killing and rioting were registered. But the police closed half of the cases, with only about 10 rioters convicted of murder.
At least 2,733 people were killed, many of them burnt alive, in reprisal killings after Gandhi's assassination.
The former prime minister's killing was to avenge her decision to send troops to flush out Sikh separatists from the Golden Temple, Sikhism's holiest shrine, in north India.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/09/news/india.php
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