Pataudi Massacre

Who: Sikh families of Pataudi, a town in the Gurgaon area of Haryana, many of them families uprooted from Pakistan in 1947. The attackers were mobs. The published reports on the Garg Commission, which inquired into the killings, do not name them.

What: On 2 November 1984, after Indira Gandhi's assassination, Sikhs in Pataudi were killed and their homes and shops were destroyed. Official records count 17 Sikhs killed, among them two teenage girls. Survivors who gave affidavits to the Garg Commission on 13 July 2013 described what they lost. Jeevni Bai's husband Kishan Singh and their three sons Harbhajan Singh, Harman Singh and Kuldip Singh were killed on the spot. Amrit Kaur's husband Amarjit Singh was killed. Shanti Devi's father-in-law Fateh Singh was killed, and she was badly injured and left for dead by attackers who thought she had died. Activist groups say a separate attack at Haily Mandi, near Pataudi, killed more than 28 Sikhs; that site has its own entry.

Where: Pataudi town, Haryana, in the Gurgaon region.

Why it mattered: The killings stayed buried for 27 years. Human Rights Watch reported that the site came to light in March 2011, two months after the burned village of Hondh Chillar was found. On 12 July 2012, on the High Court's direction, Haryana widened Justice T.P. Garg's one-man commission to cover Pataudi and Gurgaon. It examined 43 Pataudi claims, 12 of them death cases, and in its report of 29 April 2016 blamed an "all-round failure of public authorities" and recommended Rs 12.07 crore in compensation across Gurgaon and Pataudi.

Relief was slow and incomplete. In January 2018, 33 years after the killings, seven survivors went to the Punjab and Haryana High Court for the first time to ask for compensation, saying they had not known that claims commissions had been set up. Among them was Harnam Kaur, who lost two adult daughters and her son Gurbax Singh, and whose FIR was registered at the Pataudi police station.