The Sikh Holocaust: over 20,000 men, women and children butchered in broad daylight
November 1984 (Delhi, India)
“Like being a Jew in Czarist Russia or Nazi Germany” Violence makes Sikhs fear for their future in India.
( New York Times, Nov. 11, 1984 )
“The blackened, stiff corpses lay against the walls… with their eyes open. The burn victims were Sikhs, identifiable only by the steel bracelets worn on their wrists.”
( Washington Post, Nov. 3, 1984 )
“When it comes to Kashmir and Punjab and Jammu, the Indian Government might as well not be a democracy. For people in those areas, India might as well be Nazi Germany.”
( U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-Cal.), August 1999 )
We have gathered here this evening to pay homage to the thousands of innocents who were massacred by the Indian Government in November 1984. Over 20,000 Sikh men, women and children were murdered in Delhi and other urban areas of India in a continuous weeklong orgy of murder, rape and arson.
The carnage, in which thousands of Sikh women were gang raped, some by police, hundreds of small infants’ heads were smashed, and thousands of innocent Sikhs were burnt alive with petroleum in the streets, was organized by none other than the Congress party of India. Trains were stopped and Sikhs were forcibly pulled out. Gasoline was poured over them and they were burned to death. Many others were hacked to death in broad daylight.
On November 1, 1984, one day after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi died, the Delhi Police in criminal collaboration with mobs of hoodlums, systematically looted, killed, burned, raped and molested thousands of Sikhs throughout India. The brutality and planning with which these heinous acts were committed has not been seen by the civilized world since the Nazi pogroms of Hitler’s Germany. “When the history is written of the horrors that followed the assasination of Indira Gandhi, the 32nd block of Trilokpuri Colony will be remembered as a place where civilization disintegrated”, wrote Rone Tempest in the LA Times, Nov. 6, 1984.
Not one culprit has ever been punished, however, the politicians involved have participated in elections again and again.
Sikhs, like the Jews of Nazi Germany, are being murdered even today under “legal” cover of draconian laws which presume guilt before innocence. We stand here today to seek justice and awaken the moral imagination of the world to the plight of the Sikh nation held captive in India’s map.