Blood-letting in India shows no abating

Press, 3 November 1984, Page 10

Blood-letting in India shows no abating

NZPA-Reuter New Delhi

India awoke from a night of fear yesterday, armed Sikh and Hindu vigilante groups guarding their areas after arson and violence killed at least 156 people. Eye-witnesses reported several fresh arson attacks at first light yesterday, and occasional shots were heard in New Delhi. Hacked and charred bodies were being found in alleys and ditches and the death toll was certain to rise. About 1000 people were injured.

Shops, homes, buses, and taxis smouldered after the violence throughout the country after the assassination of Indira Gandhi by two Sikh bodyguards on Wednesday. Armed soldiers patrolled the capital and other Indian cities with orders to shoot dead rioters and looters. The Government clamped an indefinite curfew on most of New Delhi and curfews were imposed on 23 other cities and towns. Hindus and Sikhs in many areas of New Delhi formed their own vigilante groups to protect their hdmes and families. , “It was a long night — one of the worst I’ve known. None of us slept,” said one resident. “The women and children huddled on the roof armed with bottles and stones while the men patrolled around the houses. “We kept in touch by using loud-hailers. The men were armed with long sticks and some of us had guns,” he said.

Many foreign tourists were trapped in hotels, airports, and railway stations across the country as bands of Hindus roamed the streets stalking Sikhs.

“India is ablaze with hate and anger,” the “Times of India” newspaper said in an editorial.

“In city after city from one corner of the country to the other enraged mobs have gone and are going about systematically burning and looting Sikh properties and assaulting Sikhs without discrimination.”

The “Statesman” newspaper called the carnage in New Delhi the worst since the 1947 partition of India and what became Pakistan when Hindus and Muslims slaughtered each other. According to reports by the Press Trust of India news agency, towns and villages most affected were in an arc of Hindu-dominated states running from Uttar Pradesh in the north, through central Madhya Pradesh, to Bihar in the east.

P.T.I. reported that Sikhs with their distinctive beards and turbans had been burned and beaten to death in vengeance killings. In Madhya Pradesh 12 passengers had been dragged from an express train from New Delhi and beaten to death with sticks and clubs by angry villagers. Forty other people were injured.

A London doctor witnessed a similar incident in another train. "The Sikh was thrown off the train, kicked, - and stoned, and then the mob set fire to his body. “I wanted to help him, but was locked into the railway compartment and could do nothing,” said Dr Elizabeth Joyce, who was travelling with her husband from the western Indian city of Udaipur to New Delhi. i Further down the line she

and her husband saw another Sikh being pulled off the train. He was beaten to death with pickaxe handles. “The train stopped several times and gangs with sticks jumped on to the train looking for Sikhs. They beat against the shutters of the compartments,” she said.

“We lowered ours and, when they saw we were Europeans, they smiled. There was no anger in their faces, it was like a carnival.

“We heard women screaming and believe Sikhs were killed in other places. “All along the route we saw crowds of people in a circle watching something and we think it was the same thing. Children were there, and women in bright saris.” Police and soldiers on the train were unable to stop the killings. “There were huge crowds armed with sticks on the stations where we passed. All the police were doing were walking among them.” She said that she had pleaded with a boy on the train that she wanted to help the wounded. “This is India, don’t worry, it is nothing to do with you. They (the Sikhs) won’t mind,” she quoted him as replying. Hundreds of thousands of mourners, meanwhile, paid their last respects to Mrs Gandhi, filing past her flower-decked casket in the panelled, entrance hall of the house where her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, lived and died.

Her body was carried on Thursday on a gun-carriage to the house in southern New Delhi, now a memorial museum and library. It was accompanied by her surviving son, Rajiv,

who shortly after her death was named India’s new Prime Minister. All-India Radio said that Mr Gandhi and senior Ministers had met several leaders of Indian opposition parties in New Delhi to discuss the assassination and the killings. After the talks a joint statement was issued, which expressed anger at Mrs Gandhi’s assassination and appealed to Indians to work for communal harmony. The police in Punjab had arrested six relatives and two friends of one of the two assassins, the United News of India reported. The “Statesman” newspaper reported yesterday that a serving Sikh majorgeneral in the Army had masterminded the assassination.

Satwant Singh, a member of Mrs Gandhi’s security staff who was wounded by her bodyguards immediately after the attack, had made the confession to his interrogators in hospital, it said.

A conspiracy also had been hatched to kill the Federal President, Mr Giani Zail Singh, a Sikh, and Mr Rajiv Gandhi. “The most disconcerting aspect of Satwant Singh’s confession is that the entire operation was being masterminded by a serving senior Army officer with the rank of major general based in Chandigarh (the joint capital of Punjab and Haryana states)," the paper said.

Mrs Gandhi was to have been killed on October 13, but the chosen assassin, Beant Singh, had failed to hurl a powerful hand-gre-nade he had carried, Satwant Singh was . quoted as saying.