On 31st October 1984, the then Prime Minister of India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, was gunned down by her Sikh bodyguards at her official residence in New Delhi. Four months earlier, Mrs. Gandhi had ordered the Indian Army to storm the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple, in Amritsar, in India’s only Sikh-majority state, Punjab, to flush out an armed rustic preacher, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, and his band of 200-odd AK-47 wielding renegades who had taken refuge inside the Golden Temple complex.

A few years earlier, Bhindranwale had been propped up and patronized by Mrs. Gandhi’s younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, and her key trusted aide and Home Minister, Giani Zail Singh, whom she had elevated to become the President of India.

Sikhs all over the world were incensed by the attack on the Golden Temple, which was severely damaged in the Army operation, codenamed ‘Operation Bluestar’. So, they vowed to take revenge on her. Her bodyguards belonged to Delhi Armed Police but had their roots in the Punjab hinterland. They had taken leave of absence from work to visit their villages in the run up to her killing and had their fury fired by her enemies under a deep-rooted conspiracy to eliminate her.

When Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated, her elder son, Rajiv Gandhi, already a key functionary in her political party, the Congress—which played a key role in India’s struggle for freedom from British colonial rule in early and mid-20th century—was away on an election campaign in the eastern state of West Bengal. President of India, Giani Zail Singh, was away on a state visit to Yemen. Both cut short their trips and returned to New Delhi by the evening.

On arrival, Giani Zail Singh immediately swore Rajiv Gandhi as the next Prime Minister of India. But the Congress party decided to teach the Sikhs a lesson to avenge Mrs. Gandhi’s killing. So, between the evening of 31st October and 3rd November, 2,733 Sikhs were killed on the streets of Delhi alone by rampaging mobs armed with sticks, petrol, diesel, kerosene, ammonium nitrate and old tyres, etc. Thousands of properties belonging to the Sikhs—including houses, business establishments and vehicles—were torched and destroyed. The Delhi Police, according to a lot of testimonies before multiple commissions of inquiry and courts, was verbally instructed not to intervene or respond to distress calls from the Sikhs. Eventually, three days later, when there was a huge public outcry, the Army was called out to get a grip on the situation, as about 50 heads of state had begun to arrive in the Indian capital to attend Mrs. Gandhi’s funeral.

The genocide of the Sikhs was subsequently condoned by India’s new Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi. In a public rally on 19th November 1984, Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s 67th birthday, at the Boat Club which faces the Presidential Palace in the heart of New Delhi, Rajiv Gandhi said, “when a big tree falls, the earth does shake.” The opposition parties objected to his brazen endorsement of violence and asked why the earth shook only in the Congress-ruled states. But he did not answer the question. He, in fact, didn’t agree to setting up of an inquiry into the violence until July 1985, by which time he and the Congress party had won the national election with a brute three-fourths majority (404 seats out of 514 in the lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha).

So, for more than 36 years, the Sikhs have been fighting for justice in various Indian courts at their own cost and peril, but with little success. Cases have dragged on for decades without a result or resolution; they have been scuttled and off tracked; attempts have been made to buy over witnesses to rescind their testimonies, or intimidated. The families of witnesses have gone through every stage of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance and finding meaning.

For over 5,000 killings in India in that fateful week, there have not even been 50 major convictions, many of which are under appeals and reviews. The justice has been delayed as well as denied to the victims and their families, particularly the widows and the orphaned children. And all four pillars of Indian democracy, the Executive, the Legislature, the Judiciary, and the Press, have failed to deliver justice due to institutional apathy and indifference.