Was November 1984 a genocide or “riots”?

The claim: The Government of India has not accepted the word genocide. When Ontario’s legislature passed a motion in April 2017 calling the killings a genocide, the external affairs spokesperson, Gopal Baglay, said: “We reject this misguided motion which is based on a limited understanding of India” (Tamil Guardian). The official inquiries lean the same way. According to The Caravan, the Misra Commission found the violence “natural” at first and organised only when “anti-social elements” took over, and the Nanavati Commission found no evidence that Rajiv Gandhi or any other top Congress leader organised the attacks, attributing them to local leaders and workers acting “for their personal political reasons”. Behind this sits a legal objection: genocide needs intent to destroy a group, and the Delhi High Court itself noted that such intent is hard to prove.

The sourced facts: The record is larger than the label.

• Toll. The Delhi High Court cites official figures of 2,733 Sikhs killed in Delhi and nearly 3,350 across the country (The Wire). Human rights organisations and independent observers put the countrywide toll above 5,000, according to The Tribune’s review of Manjeet H. Singh’s book.
• A court’s finding. On 17 December 2018, convicting Sajjan Kumar, the Delhi High Court held that the killings “answer the description of ‘crimes against humanity’”, that they were “engineered by political actors with the assistance of the law enforcement agencies”, and that most perpetrators “enjoyed political patronage and were aided by an indifferent law enforcement agency”. It added that neither crimes against humanity nor genocide is part of India’s domestic criminal law, a loophole that “needs to be addressed urgently” (The Wire).
• Organised, in the inquiries’ own words. The Nanavati Commission wrote that “what had initially started, as an angry outburst became an organized carnage”, with attacks made “in a systematic manner and without much fear of the police” (quoted by Human Rights Watch). The Tribune reported that it called the violence “an organised attack on the Sikhs” and found that the police “turned a blind eye”. The PUCL and PUDR, in the report Human Rights Watch cites, described “a well-organised plan marked by acts of both deliberate commissions and omissions”. Mobs carried iron rods, lathis, kerosene and acid powder (The Tribune), and voter lists to find Sikh homes (The Tribune).
• A Home Minister’s word. On 26 December 2014, handing compensation cheques to victims’ relatives at Tilak Vihar, Rajnath Singh, then Union Home Minister, said: “It was not riot, it was genocide instead” (India TV).
• The legal test. Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention covers “killing members of the group” with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (United Nations). Abraham Joseph argued in The Wire in 2017 that killings aimed at the partial destruction of a protected group fall within it.
• Recognition. Ontario passed its motion by 34 votes to 5 (Tamil Guardian). The Delhi Assembly adopted a genocide resolution in December 2018 (Scroll).

The Panthic answer: Sikh institutions use the word without qualification. Giani Raghbir Singh, then Jathedar of Sri Akal Takht Sahib, said on 4 November 2023 that the Centre should pass a resolution condemning the killings, and pointed to the use of voter lists to mark Sikh homes and to police inaction as clear evidence of “Sikh genocide” (The Tribune). In 2013 Giani Gurbachan Singh, as Jathedar, directed the AISSF and Sikhs for Justice to file their “Sikh Genocide” petition at the United Nations (SikhNet). SGPC president Harjinder Singh Dhami demanded in February 2025 that Parliament pass a “resolution of condolence and apology” for the “Sikh genocide” (The Tribune).

The historian Bhai Ajmer Singh, speaking at Punjabi University, Patiala, in 2016, argued that denial goes with genocide because it hides who did the killing: labels such as “goons” and “killer mobs” erase the perpetrators. He holds that the killings of November 1984 were the direct outcome of a “genocidal impulse” in Hindu society once it held political power (Sikh Siyasat News, which reports the speech in summary).