Hondh Chillar Massacre

Who: The Sikh families of Hondh, a hamlet outside Chillar village in Rewari district, Haryana. The Garg Commission counted 32 dead: 31 people of Hondh and an Army man, Inderjit Singh. An eyewitness, the then sarpanch Dhanpat Singh, said a truck and a bus brought young men of roughly 17 to 27 who shouted anti-Sikh slogans and carried flammable liquid, sticks and rods. The Tribune noted reports of 250 to 300 attackers and of a mob that killed for close to eight hours unchallenged.

What: On 2 November 1984 the mob burned the houses and gurdwara of the hamlet. Twelve people, among them Gurdial Singh, died when a granary was set on fire. FIR No. 91, registered on 3 November, recorded 20 deaths at the hands of unidentified people. Police closed the file as untraced on 9 December 1985 and destroyed the record on 4 January 1994. The police officer who registered the FIR, Ram Kumar, told the Garg Commission in May 2014 that he reached the village at about 11 a.m. next morning and saw the bodies of men, women and children strewn around, and that he was promoted within 10 days and transferred. A medical officer could find no record of post-mortems. Survivors now live in Delhi, Ludhiana, Jalandhar and Firozepur.

Where: Hondh, outside Chillar village, Rewari district, Haryana, about 80 km from Delhi.

Why it mattered: It came to wider notice only 26 years later. In late January 2011 Manwinder Singh Giaspura, a Gurgaon engineer, heard of a "deserted village of Sardars", visited it and found bones and the ruined gurdwara. Human Rights Watch reported the burned, abandoned village as discovered in January 2011. On 5 March 2011 the Haryana government set up Justice T.P. Garg's commission, and that month the Akal Takht Jathedar laid the foundation stone of a Sikh Genocide Memorial at the site. In a 2011 petition, AISSF and Sikhs for Justice alleged that then chief minister Bhajan Lal was hostile to Sikhs, so no fair investigation was possible.

The commission's report, submitted on 27 March 2015 after 273 petitions and 455 witnesses, recommended an extra Rs 20 lakh for each of the 31 dead of Hondh, whose families had received Rs 7 lakh earlier, and Rs 25 lakh for Inderjit Singh's widow. Dal Khalsa called the report a damp squib. By November 2017 the victims' houses were dilapidated and AISSF was still asking the SGPC to build the memorial.