Gudha-Kanina: Sikh families besieged and driven out of Mahendragarh

Who: The Sikh families of Gudha village and the Sikh shopkeepers of Kanina Mandi in Mahendragarh district, Haryana. Khem Singh, a former sarpanch of Gudha, gave the main eyewitness account. The attackers are not named. The Sikh Siyasat News report calls them organised and well-equipped death squads and, speaking of the Haryana sites together, says such squads were patronised by the then Congress chief minister, Bhajan Lal. That is the claim of the groups that brought the case forward, the All India Sikh Students Federation (AISSF) and Sikhs for Justice. No inquiry has examined it for Gudha-Kanina.

What: After Indira Gandhi's assassination, Sikh houses and shops at Gudha and Kanina Mandi were attacked and burned in November 1984. Khem Singh said the attackers set a Sikh family's house on fire, and that Sikh families then fortified themselves inside an old haveli. He said the siege lasted more than a week, while Sikh shops and houses in Kanina Mandi were looted and burned. The whole Sikh population then abandoned its homes and businesses and left Haryana. A survivor from the haveli owner's family said they "narrowly escaped death".

Sikh Siyasat News published a Gudha-Kanina FIR dated November 1, 1984 and a Kanina police station document dated November 20, 1984. It reported that the only FIRs registered at Kanina police station that month were never investigated. Its report gives no death toll, so what is documented here is a siege, arson and the expulsion of a community, not a count of the dead.

Where: Gudha village and Kanina Mandi, Mahendragarh district, Haryana.

Why it mattered: Sikh Siyasat News reported the case on August 4, 2012 as another site of the November 1984 violence in Haryana, after Hondh-Chillar, Pataudi and Haily Mandi, brought forward by AISSF and Sikhs for Justice. It said no inquiry commission had examined it in the 28 years since. The Garg Commission, a one-man inquiry begun in March 2011, covered Hondh-Chillar. Sikh Siyasat News reported on 16 July 2012 that Haryana had extended it to Pataudi and Gurgaon, and The Tribune reported the extension on 19 December 2012. The 4 August article says the commission was inquiring only into Hondh-Chillar, Pataudi and Gurgaon, not Gudha-Kanina. Its two reports, on Hondh-Chillar in March 2015 and on Gurgaon and Pataudi on 29 April 2016, are described by The Tribune and The Indian Express without any mention of Gudha-Kanina. A survivor described it as an organised attempt to wipe out the area's Sikh population, and the case went uninvestigated for nearly three decades. It rests on one published account, so the claims about who organised the attacks should be read as allegations.