دانلود کتاب 1984 – راز گناه هند

Sikh houses and shops were marked for destruction in much the same way as those of Jews in Tsarist Russia or Nazi Germany… for the first time I understood what words like pogrom, holocaust and genocide really meant. One of India’s best-loved authors and journalists, the late Khushwant Singh, wrote these harrowing lines about the India of November 1984. He was describing his own experiences of being caught up in the wave of genocidal killings that swept through the capital, Delhi, and further afield following the assassination of the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Over four days, an estimated 8,000 Sikhs, possibly more, would be slaughtered by rampaging mobs in the world’s largest democracy. To put the sheer scale of this destruction into perspective, the figure cited is broadly equivalent to the civilian death tolls of the Northern Ireland conflict, Tiananmen Square and 9/11 combined. The eminent British lawyer and campaigner Geoffrey Robertson QC rightly calls it ‘India’s guilty secret’ – a phrase that so succinctly sums up the crimes that it lends itself to the title of this book. At the time, the authorities projected the violence as a spontaneous reaction to the tragic loss of a much-loved prime minister. But evidence points to a government-orchestrated genocidal massacre unleashed by politicians – with the trail leading to the very heart of the dynastic Gandhi family – and covered up with the help of the police, judiciary and sections of the media. The Indian government of the day worked hard on its version of events. Words such as ‘riot’ became the newspeak of an Orwellian cover-up, of a real 1984. To protect perpetrators, the most heinous crimes have been obscured from view: evidence destroyed, language distorted and alternative ‘facts’ introduced. The final body count is anyone’s guess. As the celebrated author and essayist Amitav Ghosh, another witness to the scenes in Delhi in 1984, has stated: ‘Nowhere else in the world did the year 1984 fulfil its apocalyptic portents as it did in India’. And yet what may well go down in history as one of the largest conspiracies of modern times is hardly known of outside of India. At the time, Western governments toed the line of their Indian counterparts and downplayed events – arguably for fear of losing trade contracts worth billions – to the misnomer of ‘communal riots’. Global reaction to other atrocities such the killings in Chile by the Pinochet regime, China’s Tiananmen Square massacre and the largescale, post-World War Two genocides of Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur and Syria has rightly been firm and unequivocal. Each received considerable global attention and international condemnation from governments, human rights organisations and high-profile campaigners. By way of comparison consider how the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia recognised the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, in which 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered, as a genocide. But for the innocents of November 1984, there has been a deafening silence, a lack of comparable international concern or consideration of the nature of the violence which has allowed the guilty to evade justice and crimes to go unrecognised for what they actually were.