Hundreds killed when ‘the mob came’

Press, 5 November 1984, Page 6

Hundreds killed when ‘the mob came’

By-

BARBARA CROSSETTE,

of the “New York Times” (through NZPA) New Delhi

On Saturday morning there were only wailing women, uncomprehending neighbours and piles of ashes where men had been burned in Block 32, a Sikh community of perhaps 1000 people in a corner of the poor settlement of TrilokRuri, a few kilometres from tew Delhi. The neighbourhood itself had vanished. “The mob came," an elderly Muslim neighbour named Ali said. “They were about 1000 strong. Allah knows where they came from.”

The Sikhs of Blocks 32 and 33, mostly carpenters, labourers, rickshaw-drivers and their families, had tried to resist at first, neighbours said. But finally, exhausted, they had retreated to their homes. “And that is when the mob broke through and began killing them in their houses,” Ali said. “Beating them with bricks and sticks, burning, stabbing, destroying, looting.” Bodies and possessions had been set afire with kerosene, witnesses said.

No-one knows exactly how many Sikhs — all the victims were described as able-bodied men — died on Thursday night and Friday in Trilokpuri. Another Muslim resident of the neighbourhood, who spoke English and said that he had a Government job, said on Saturday that he had seen several hundred bodies, an estimate also

offered by reporters from the “Indian Express,” who were the first to reach the scene.

The police said on Saturday that they had found only 95 bodies. A nearby resident said that he had seen two truck-loads of dead men being moved out during the night. An unknown number of men apparently survived by fleeing to safe houses.

Women and children, many of whom had been sheltered in the homes of Muslim and Hindu neighbours before being taken away by the police, were beginning to return to the scene of the slaughter to salvage what they could from their ransacked houses.

One elderly woman, overcome with grief, ran sobbing and wailing from house to house. Pulling a visitor into the remains of a oneroom home, she fell on the bloodstained floor and kissed the sandal of her dead son, then held to her heart a fragment of cloth she drew from the blood and ashes where he died.

Early on Saturday morning a few grotesquesly positioned bodies still lay among the little houses along narrow lanes, one dead man jammed into a narrow sewerage ditch, another frozen in death as he had lunged from his bed. The mass killings at Trilokpuri, a tragedy in its own right, also raises questions among Indians about two disturbing factors in the days of violence since Mrs Gandhi’s assassination.

The first is the repeated failure of the police to inter-

vene against acts of terror and killing. The second, based on increasing evidence from witnesses, is the apparent organisation behind the attacking gangs, strangers who arrive in trucks and disappear when the deed is done.

“The Statesman,” an independent newspaper, said on Saturday that police conduct over the last few days had been a “major failure.” The “Indian Express” said on Friday that “the machinery of law and order had totally collapsed” in the capital. Account after account by victims and witnesses of violence speak of the absence, reluctance or indifference of local law enforcement authorities. The police are empowered to shoot on sight during the hours of a total curfew.

In Trilokpuri on Saturday neighbours of the killed Sikhs said that two police constables on motor-cycles had visited the area on Thursday to give warnings that there had been rumors of planned attacks, but that officers would be too tied up in funeral duties to protect them'

That night, witnesses said, the carnage began. A policeman interviewed at Trilokpuri on Saturday said that two groups of policemen arrived at Block 32 on Friday night, 24 hours after the attacks began. One contingent had arrived at 8 p.m., he said, and the second about 10 p.m. “By that time everything was- over. We don’t know who the attackers were or where they came from. Nobody is talking to us here.

They run away when we approach them,” he said. Fearing more violence, some soldiers began to patrol the town in armoured personnel carriers on Saturday. The commanding officer and his deputy expressed outrage at what had happened. “We are no longer under civil authority here,” the commander said: “As of now, I am in charge. We can shoot to kill and, unlike the policemen, you can believe we mean just that.”

Trilokpuri, a resettlement area built for squatters in New Delhi, was home to the poorest Sikhs, some of whom lived in mud huts, others in small but well cared-for and brightly decorated concrete houses.

Their attackers, neighbours said, were Hindus and some Muslims from another village. One man said that he did not recognize a single face.

In more affluent neighbourhoods in the Indian capital, attacks on Sikh property are often described in similar terms. Attackers appear to be young men unknown to the area and often of lower castes or untouchables.

Middle-class Sikhs, living in hiding and fear, have been joined by some Opposition politicians in asserting that some members of Mrs Gandhi’s Congress (I) Party are to blame, at least locally for the incitement if not the hiring of killers. The radical Hindu group, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, is also blamed for incitement. No-one has offered reporters proof of either allegation.