Shahdara

Shahdara is an area of East Delhi, across the Yamuna. In the first days of November 1984, after Indira Gandhi's assassination, Sikhs in its colonies were hunted down in the Delhi pogrom, the Tesra Ghallughara (a name Sikhs also give to the June 1984 attack on Sri Darbar Sahib). The 1984 Sikh Archive publishes survivors' affidavits for Delhi area by area, and its Shahdara page covers more than a dozen neighbourhoods. It gives no overall toll for Shahdara and none of the sources opened here does. The affidavits are survivors' allegations; most blame neighbours or "mobs", and the archive does not say which have been tested in court.

What survivors say (from affidavits, as the archive reports them)

• West Gonda: Pal Singh and a relative, Baldev Singh, were burnt alive in the presence of police.
• Ashok Nagar, 1 November, about 9 a.m.: Piar Kaur, whose affidavit the archive cites to the Misra Commission, describes a mob of 2,000 to 3,000 that killed six of her relatives.
• Ram Nagar: the gurdwara was set alight on 1 November, and four men were thrown into a burning truck on Loni Road while five policemen are said to have stood by.
• Jagatpuri: Lakhbir Singh, then 15, saw a mob of about 500 burn the gurdwara; his affidavit lists ten family members and tenants killed.
• Nathu Colony, 2 November: one account says five members of one family, three sons, a brother-in-law and a grandson, were burnt alive after sheltering at the house of a Congress worker described as close to the local MP, H. K. L. Bhagat.
• Babarpur, 3 November: police are said to have taken Jeewan Singh, his son and a cousin home, saying it was safe; a mob then burnt all three.

Official records

• A case registered at Shahdara police station over the killing of seven members of Shardul Singh's family at Babarpur on 2 November 1984, five of them women, reached the charge stage on 6 June 2019, when a Delhi court framed charges against twelve accused. Shardul Singh says he reported it on 12 November 1984 but was pressed to say he had no grievance, and that his 1985 affidavit to the Misra Commission brought no action; a special investigation team later reopened the case (The Tribune).
• The Supreme Court's SIT under the retired judge S. N. Dhingra reported that on 1 and 2 November 1984 Sikh passengers were dragged out of trains at five Delhi railway stations, Shahdara among them, and that police told of the attacks arrested none of the mob on the spot (PTI).
• In 2005 a Delhi court framed charges against five men over a mob that attacked Shahdara railway station and killed a constable, his son and a relative; the FIR dated from 1996. H. K. L. Bhagat was named in that case by the CBI and discharged for lack of evidence (a 2005 report reposted on a Harvard blog).

What it means today. Survivors say police here stood by or sent Sikhs home. A Shahdara police station case reached the charge stage only in 2019.