17 Dec, 2014
Delhi’s indifference to 1984 riots led to other massacres – Hindustan Times
The 30th anniversary has passed by — almost unnoticed — of the days when Delhi was engulfed in the tumult of the bloodiest frenzy of communal slaughter after the Partition riots, extinguishing over 3,000 lives. Ganga Kaur, who lost her husband, brother-in-law and four nephews in the carnage, sighs, “Every time November returns, we remember. This history will only die with us.” Like many widows of the carnage, her tears refuse to dry.
Yet “the official memory of 1984 is a blank, erased slate,” rages journalist Nilanjana Roy, “wiped tapes where no voices speak…commission reports that nobody was to blame, nobody would be blamed”. “The important thing,” writer Pradip Krishen adds, “surely, is to remember” it is immoral to just “move on”, “to gloss over the terror and coordinated cruelty”. In her personal battle against our collective forgetting, Gauri Singh has compiled a luminous heart-breaking booklet of her photographs of the widows’ colony in Tilak Vihar, with testimonies, narratives and poetry.
Read the rest: Delhi’s indifference to 1984 riots led to other massacres – Hindustan Times.
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