Below, second image from bottom: Front-page lead-story from The Times. London, on Sat, November 3, 1984. The British Cabinet knew exactly what was happening in New Delhi and elsewhere in India.
1984
Much More to Thatcher Ignominy:
What Secret British Cabinet Documents From Nov 1984 Reveal
PARVINDER SINGH
As a young Sikh-Briton at the time, I couldn’t quite comprehend why my government looked the other way, while thousands perished in India’s anti-Sikh genocide of November 1984.
For 30 long years, the silence of the West has become deafening.
However, recently released Cabinet Papers by the National Archive in London reveal the harsh truths of why Margaret Thatcher, the then British Prime Minister, and her Conservative Government chose to remain silent over the catastrophic events taking place in Britain’s former colony.
While India’s Sikh minority was recovering from one of the worst pogroms in recent history, the British cabinet was busy cozying in with a culpable Indian administration, even when reports of organized killings began to appear in broadsheets like The Times newspaper.
A Guardian piece also featured the report from the Indian civil rights group, Citizens for Democracy, which pointed the finger for the carnage at the door of ‘at least 150 Congress leaders’, in a concerted plan to ‘exterminate the Sikhs’.
Contrast this with the current Vice President of the Congress, Rahul Gandhi’s assertion in a TV interview this week that ‘some’ Congressmen were ‘probably’ involved, and the almost laughable statement that the ‘government [of the time] was trying to stop the killings’.
Most western governments chose not to condemn the actions of the Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, on whose watch the bloodletting was allowed to go on for days, or his dereliction of duty in refusing to call out the army to protect its citizens. He then went on to publicly justify the violence, and thereafter appointed the ringleaders of the mass-murders to his new cabinet.
One such MP and Minister, HKL Bhagat, in whose Delhi constituency whole Sikh neighborhoods were wiped out overnight, held four ministerial posts alone in Rajiv Gandhi’s administration.
A Wikileak American Embassy cable later revealed that ‘during the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms’, another MP, ‘Jagdish Tytler, played a particularly grotesque role, competing with local Congress Party leaders to see which wards could shed more Sikh blood’. (Cable 08NewDelhi790).
Former Delhi Police Chief Ved Marwah recently stated the Police, whose responsibility it is to protect the citizenry, allowed the mobs a ‘free hand in killing Sikhs.’
Meanwhile, for a crucial fortnight after the massacres in India had taken place, the British cabinet, under pressure from the Indian High Commission in London, was bent on portraying Sikh-Britons as troublemakers and, in doing so, deflected the real horror that had taken place.
There was even talk of banning a planned Gurpurab procession in London to mark the birthday of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith.
Why did our elected leaders capitulate to a foreign government?
The cabinet meetings were chaired by Mrs. Thatcher with Tory grandees in attendance: Whitelaw, Hailsham, Lawson, Rees, Howe, Brittan, Heseltine, Joseph, Hurd, Walker, Ridley, Jenkin, Younger, King.
Reproduced on this page are facsimiles of some of those key documents.
The meetings reveal the real priorities of the government. Here’s what the documents recording their decision-making say:
In view of the importance of the British political and commercial interests at stake, it would be necessary to explore every possibility of preventing the march from taking place. [Cabinet meeting (cab-128-79), Thursday, November 15, 1984.]
This posed a serious risk. Export contracts worth £5 billion could be at stake. [Cabinet meeting (cab-128-79), Thursday, November 22, 1984.]
So in pursuit of the highly lucrative Indian market, the hitherto loyal Sikh-Briton subjects -- the very same who protected Britain and its Allies through both of their World Wars by offering life and limb by the hundreds of thousands -- were sacrificed at the altar of prurient commercial self-interest.
30 years has passed and no British government, Labour or Conservative, have had the courage of conviction to condemn the actions of the Indian governments and authorities in November 1984 and in the decades of state terror that have followed.
Will India's Coalition government right the wrongs of the past 30 years? End the silence on 1984? Or is it still business as usual with those who shield the perpetrators of genocide or carry on the Indian tradition of denial, silence, gaps,
half-truths and outright lies?
Please CLICK here to read the cabinet documents fully.
[The author is Senior Marketer at Bloomsbury (the publisher of ground-breaking novel, Helium by Jaspreet Singh). He is a member of The National Union of Journalists (UK) and the author of “1984 - The Sikh Kristallnacht.”]
February 3, 2014
Conversation about this article
1: Harmeet Singh (USA), February 03, 2014, 10:59 AM.
Disavowing all essential and moral obligations towards humanity -- and to its own citizens -- we now know that the British Cabinet played a complicit role in the genocide of Sikhs and their brutalization by India.
2: Baljit Singh Pelia (Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.), February 03, 2014, 11:20 AM.
1984 TIMELINE: 1982 - Sikhs pass Anandpur Resolution demanding constitutional reforms to break Nehru/Gandhi dynastic rule in India and giving autonomy to states, as envisaged in India's 'federal', US-like Constitution. 1983 - Indian intelligence operatives murder Hindus pulled off from buses in Punjab and assign blame on Bhindranwale via a compliant media, turnings public opinion against Sikhs. 1984 - A nationalist movement is painted as a separatist one (using Indian intelligence operatives in Britain), and a 'sant' is branded a 'terrorist'. Indira uses propaganda to win sympathy from the West. Attacks The Golden Temple & 38 other major Sikh centres. RAW plants bombs on Air India flight, killing hundreds of innocent people to blame it on Sikhs 'terrorists'. A wholesale massacre of Sikh youth is carried on across Punjab - closed to the national and international media -- for over 10 years. Pct-Nov 1984 - Two of Indira's personal security guards (who are Sikhs) assassinate her. 1984 Pogroms - Rajiv Gandhi, until now with no experience in politics, is installed Prime Minister; he orchestrates mass murders of Sikhs for 3 days. Through state complicity, Punjab is transformed into a drug haven. Plunder of state's natural resources and river waters. Mass conversions of Punjab's Sikhs to Christianity and Hindu cults encouraged and facilitated ...
3: Tajender Singh Khalsa (Ranchi, India), February 03, 2014, 3:18 PM.
So-called Hindustan has not been able to punish the crimes of their GauMata. So there's no point pressing them for justice any more. Rather, it's time to pounce on, and drag the perpetrators and punish them in accordance with the law.
4: Tej Kaur (London, United Kingdom), February 04, 2014, 6:09 AM.
"Hitherto loyal Sikh-Briton subjects -- the very same who protected Britain and its Allies through both of their World Wars by offering life and limb by the hundreds of thousands -- were sacrificed at the altar of prurient commercial self-interest." Really, Sikhs must get over this delusion that we have a "special" relationship with the British. Sikhs were nothing but convenient cannon fodder for the British; to believe anything else is to be in a state of denial.
5: Kaala Singh (Punjab), February 04, 2014, 10:57 AM.
In my own humble opinion, the Sikhs are responsible for their own fate. The Sikhs had been given the option to have their own homeland in 1947 by the British and take control of their own destiny, they chose not to be the masters of their own fate. The Sikh mind was not independent and the inept leaders of those times did not have the confidence to run a country. Look at Punjab today, it is in ruins. Why blame someone else if you choose to be gun fodder.
6: Gurteg Singh (New York, USA), February 04, 2014, 11:40 AM.
I really feel sorry for Sikh-Britons who thought they had some special relationship with the UK. The blunt truth is that the Brits usurped the Sikh Kingdom by co-opting the Dogra traitors by following the classic British policy of divide and rule, abducted the young son of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, imprisoned and expelled his mother from her own homeland and converted him to Christianity in order to finish the Sikh Kingdom. They conducted the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and never punished its perpetrators. They hired Sikh soldiers as mercenaries for their missions and were simply using them for their imperialistic ends. The lesson which we all should have learnt a long time ago is that these western governments are mostly subservient to commercial interests and are too willing to sell their souls at the first sight of sterling or a dollar while pretending to be the guardians of democracy, human rights and their "good western/Christian values." The so called inquiry into the British role is DEFINITELY going to be a whitewash with the likelihood of the destruction of other documents which would have brought out the whole truth.
7: Jim Halter (USA), February 04, 2014, 12:04 PM.
A colleague of mine who once worked with me at the local museum once said to me (and please forgive me for repeating his words verbatim in their crude form): "While Hindu India is like a pile of shit, Western civilization is different only in that it too is a pile of shit, but covered neatly with a clean sheet of fancy-looking fabric; however, you can smell both as soon as you get even a bit close." Thatcher and the Brits -- and Indira Gandhi -- have proved the point so well.
8: Baldev Singh (Bradford, United Kingdom), February 04, 2014, 3:46 PM.
If this news doesn't WAKE! up the Sikhs then what is the point of keeping secret what happened to our sovereign Sikh State and its extraordinary leader whose whole legacy and bloodline was obliterated brick by brick, offspring by offspring! We must start using every public relations tool to get the message across that all the world's problems stem from colonial crimes which continue to this very day. The result we can see on our screens every day with lawless Afghanistan, Pakistan and Hindustan also exporting their terror all over the world!
9: Baldev Singh (Bradford, United Kingdom), February 05, 2014, 7:44 AM.
Commentator #5: So true! What we need as Sikhs is not a new State created by fighting and violence, but perhaps getting back the Sovereign Sikh State which was stolen from us by the British. I have been visiting the extremities of the boundaries of our lost State in what is now 'Himachal Pradesh' and I can tell you it is breathtakingly beautiful ...
10: Baljit Singh Pelia (Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.), February 05, 2014, 11:07 AM.
UK sifts through all documents, incinerates the evidence of complicity in the 1984 attack on Harmandar Sahib. A 'white-wash'!
11: Rup Singh (Canada), February 05, 2014, 6:19 PM.
Comment #9 -- Baldev Singh ji, I do apologize in advance for being critical. When you say we don't need a new state created through "fighting and violence" but rather get back our "Sovereign Sikh State" stolen by the British, I'd be interested in knowing how we would do this and who do we ask, so it can be given back to us? Please don't forget how it was created in the first place and how it was maintained till the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.I do believe fighting and killing was involved at some point. Bhul chuk maaf karni ji.