“Sikh Women Becoming Widows Because of Indian Government”
No End in Sight to Sikh-Hindu Strife
The New York Times August 2, 1984
By: Steven R. Weisman
Special to The New York Times

NEW DELHI, Aug 2- In a burst of gunfire, arson and rock throwing, angry mobs of Sikhs and Hindus did more than wreck the tranquility of a middle-class neighborhood in western New Delhi last weekend.

They also shattered any remaining complacency that the Sikh-Hindu conflict, perhaps the most serious threat to India’s national unity, was on its way to being eased.

A weeklong curfew in western New Delhi was lifted Wednesday, and tensions have diminished. But the story of how the violence began and spread, leaving six people dead, epitomized the reasons why hostilities between Hindus and Sikhs will be hard to overcome.

Prospering Neighborhoods

Four groups of people in two adjacent neighborhoods had a role in the tensions over the last several months. Each group, seeing itself as an innocent victim, took some form of action that victimized someone else, resulting in an endless cycle of vengeance.

“This place has been like a powder keg for a long time,” a civil defense worker said the other day. “It was bound to blow up.”

Tilak Vihar and Tilak Nagar are tow largely prosperous neighborhoods of Hindus and Sikhs in the capital’s western outskirts. On normal days, their markets bustle with activity and the broad tree-lined streets are filled with pedestrians, cars, scooters, goats and cows…Militant Hindu groups in growing numbers have been calling on their co-religionists to begin arming themselves against Sikhs.

Roots of Nationalism

Some of these groups trace their roots to the 19th century Hindu nationalist and even fanaticism of the kind that led Hindus to assassinate Mohandas K. Gandhi in 1948.

In recent months, Hindu wearing saffron caps and wielding spears have stepped up processions and other protests against the Sikh violence in the Punjab. The main sponsor has been another fast growing group called Shiv Sena, or Shiva’s army. Shiva is one of the principal Hindu gods.

Ignoring warnings that a protest might spark violence, Shiv Sena organized a procession of a few thousand Hindus on Saturday morning in Tilak Nagar to protest the bus massacre. At its head was a group of women beating their bears and wailing emotionally.

The procession quickly spun out of control, and Hindu mobs began attacking Sikh shops, homes, and cars. One group stormed and burned a Sikh temple in the neighborhood.

Widows of Murdered Sikhs

But a third group in this volatile mix where the Sikhs living in nearby Tilak Vihar, a new apartment complex that is mainly the home of several hundred Sikh widows, whose husbands were murdered in the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. Some 2,500 Sikhs died in the 1984 [note to readers, several other reports say the death count was triple this amount, or even higher], which was sparked by the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by the two Sikh security guards. Sikhs of all persuasions regard the riots as a holocaust they can never forget.

“My children still wake up with nightmares in the middle of the night,” said Dhanwant Kaur, a 30-year-old widow whose husband and three brothers-in-law were burned alive in 1984. “The kids say to me: ‘Dad has gone away. Will you be going away, too?’”