Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984

About the Book

A SEARING ACCOUNT OF 1984, PACKED WITH STORIES AND MEMORIES.
‘I want sukh, peace,’ said Shanti. She had watched her three sons, one of them an infant, and husband torched alive by marauding mobs. The sixty-five-year-old Sikh woman from a west Delhi slum said that the police had inserted a stick inside her.
The distraught man spoke a single sentence but repeated it twice in chaste Punjabi: ‘Please give me a turban. I want nothing else.’
In the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, 2,733 Sikhs were burnt, stabbed, beaten and otherwise hunted to their deaths across Delhi. Many of them were children. Several hundreds were killed elsewhere in the country. Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay uses personal histories to expose the truth of a state-sponsored riot: the thousands of lives that were destroyed, the cruel apathy of subsequent governments, the lack of reparations, the denial of justice. Poignant and raw, Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984 lays bare the innards of one of the most shameful episodes of sectarian violence in post-Independence India.

About the Author

Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay embarked on a career in journalism in the early 1980s and is best known for his reportage and analysis of the rise and growth of Hindu organisations, their politics and agitations. He was among the first journalists who tracked the emergence of the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid conflict from the late 1980s. He has followed, and written about, the political and electoral emergence of the BJP and its allies from that period.
He is the author of The Demolition: India at the Crossroads (1994), one of the first books on the Ayodhya discord and the rise of Hindutva. His biography of Narendra Modi, Narendra Modi: The Man, the Times, was published in early 2013, before Modi’s campaign to become prime minister took off. It is widely considered the most credible and authoritative account of Modi’s rise to power.
Mukhopadhyay is also the author of The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right. His most recent book, The Demolition and the Verdict: Ayodhya and the Project to Reconfigure India, was published in 2021. He is currently a regular columnist and contributor to several leading newspapers and web portals, and a well-known commentator and host on Indian television news and video channels.