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Above: A courthouse in New Delhi where even its lawyers now look over their shoulders ...

1984

The Ghosts of 1984 Now Haunt New Delhi?

ANNIE GOWEN, THE WASHINGTON POST

 

 

 

Why do the ghosts of 1984 now haunt the days and nights of the superstition-ridden Hindu populace of New Delhi and India?  A people who ostensibly believe in ‘karma‘ have a lot to answer for, and will remain doomed to wander in nightmare-land, stalked by their crimes of omission and commission, until they’re ready to face their jinns.

 


Over the past year, some unusual events have occurred at a courthouse in eastern New Delhi. Books have disappeared, strange noises have been heard. Computers and lights have seemed to switch on by themselves.

Employees at Karkardooma District Court began wondering whether the complex was haunted. Eventually, the executive committee of the local bar association called a meeting, mulled over the evidence and decided to install closed-circuit television cameras to find out what was going on.

“We were primarily concerned because we thought somebody was stealing books,” said Raman Sharma, joint secretary of the Shahdara Bar Association. But they were unsure whether the culprit was human or otherworldly.

In opening its investigation, the bar association joined a long list of authorities that have taken seriously complaints of paranormal activity in India, a country said to live in several centuries at once.

Last year, for example, a police station in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh was shuttered after a “resident spirit” terrorized the beat constable on duty, according to a report in the Times of India. A state lawmaker demanded an inquiry. Elsewhere, a primary school was closed temporarily when a boy said he saw an egg-shaped ghost emanating from a chalkboard.

Staff members of a courthouse in Delhi said they found their computers turned on in the morning even though they shut them down before leaving office the previous morning.

Police regularly investigate complaints about alleged supernatural events. “We entertain all complaints, be it against zombies or werewolves,” a police officer told the Times earlier this year, referring to another paranormal matter.

Fantastical tales -- of levitating holy men, firewalkers, conjurers, religious statues seeping saffron water -- are not uncommon in India, an ancient culture in which the line between superstition and belief is often blurred.

“This is how everyone in India is brought up -- listening to ghost stories,” said Sushil Sharma, a lawyer who has worked in the courthouse since 1989.

New Delhi, the country’s sprawling capital and home to 16 million people, is known as the “city of jinns,” a reference to genies from the Islamic tradition still said to inhabit the city’s shrines and graveyards. News of the courthouse haunting, thus, “will bring relief to people who feared Delhi’s age-old djinns and spirits are being driven away by the process of gentrification,” the news Web site Scroll noted drolly.

But there’s a darker side to such beliefs. In tribal areas of eastern India, women are still accused of being witches. Blamed for everything from crop failure to infertility, the accused are often beaten and sometimes killed. Villagers with little access to health care often turn to shamans, or faith healers, for help. Last year, a prominent Indian rationalist who long advocated a law against black magic was gunned down while on his morning walk in the western city of Pune.

Just a block from the courthouse in New Delhi, a billboard advertises the services of a healer who can solve a variety of vexing problems, from sour love affairs to demon possession.

“We’ve got a country with a 16th-century mindset superimposed on the 21st century,” groused Narendra Nayak, president of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations. “People will use their mobile phones to view ghosts, and we will do a puja [prayer ritual] before sending a spacecraft to Mars. Lots of cultures have learned to get over these things and be more rational in their approach, but we haven’t. That’s the tragedy of this country.”

The bar association’s grainy, dim surveillance video had plenty to satisfy believers -- floating white orbs, flickering computer screens -- and much to raise doubt.

“It was just a virus,” lawyer Madan Lal Karkar said Tuesday while sitting in the small cyber library seen in the video. Karkar was playing computer chess, but in general, the room is used infrequently now. The Internet isn’t working.

The library is in one of several concrete buildings with open-air corridors that during daylight hours are filled with witnesses, suspects, lawyers in their customary black jackets and banded collars -- a holdover from the British Raj -- and an occasional stray dog. To say the place is dusty would be an understatement. Piles the size of large anthills clutter stairwells. Plastic sleeves protect legal volumes.

When Sharma heard about the surveillance cameras, he felt somewhat vindicated, he said. For years he has been saying that supernatural activity is occurring at the courthouse -- ever since he and a colleague were returning to their chambers late one evening and heard loud knocking and saw a padlock swinging wildly back and forth, seemingly on its own. These days, he makes sure to leave work before nightfall.

“I was fully conscious. I’m not a drug addict, I’m a lawyer,” Sharma said. “I believe something is happening here. We should talk about it.”

The bar association said it plans to leave the spirit alone for now, until the publicity dies down.

It was getting late. Darkness gathered. A curl of moon rose. It was time for Sharma to go home. No ghosts seemed to be in evidence. A colleague who had started happy hour early began singing drunkenly in his chambers. The sound echoed eerily throughout the emptying complex and floated down to the busy street.


The author is The Washington Post’s India bureau chief and has reported for the Post throughout South Asia and the Middle East. Jalees Andrabi contributed to this report.

[Courtesy: The Washington Post. Edited for sikhchic.com]
November 2, 2014
 

Conversation about this article

1: Kaala Singh (Punjab), November 02, 2014, 10:36 AM.

The real ghosts of 1984 are not the spirits that roam around. The "Karma" of the populace that conceived, carried out and allowed the crimes is coming back to them. It is estimated that about a multitude of criminals were mobilized by the Indian State to carry out the 1984 Genocide in Delhi alone, which had a Sikh population of 1 million prior to 1984. Once done with the Sikhs and granted state protection and immunity from law, they then turned on the Hindu population and hence you see the rampant lawlessness in Delhi and surrounding areas. Then the the process of corrupting the Police and law enforcement agencies, Judiciary, Media, Politics, Civil Society and every arm of the government began ... to cover up these crimes. All this has resulted in a country which is all the more corrupt and dysfunctional ... beyond repair. These are the real ghosts of 1984.

2: Kaala Singh (Punjab), November 02, 2014, 12:29 PM.

It was after 1947 that the Sikhs displaced after partition started settling in Delhi in large numbers and brought with them the skills and the work ethic that built the city and its economy and turned it into a major centre for arts and culture. The Sikhs were at the very heart of Delhi's cultural life. After 1984, the Sikhs who stayed went into hibernation, and many left. I personally know many Hindus who talk nostalgically about the loss of the city's Sikh and Punjabi character and one can hear stories floating around about the honesty, ethics and character of hardworking Sikhs overcoming every obstacle and succeeding. Many Punjabi Hindus also displaced by partition remember how the Sikhs helped them and saved them during partition violence and feel ashamed at what happened to Sikhs in 1984 and lament at how Delhi has now turned into a city infested with criminals. These are the real ghosts of 1984!

3: Baldev Singh (Bradford, United Kingdom), November 02, 2014, 3:13 PM.

Sikhism has no fear of anything or anyone and will always produce super humans who will take on tyranny, superstition and sectarianism.

4: Sangat Singh (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), November 02, 2014, 6:08 PM.

You could never ever hide 1984 behind a curtain with a false belief that it would go away. Every page written adds and keeps gathering energy to keep it alive as the most damning blot on India for all times to come. The dynasty called Congress is already becoming history as it moves towards its grave. They never read history of the Sikhs nor learnt any lessons from it. This is already a part of the daily Ardaas and shall remain ever so for all times to come.

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