Tilak Vihar

Tilak Vihar is a resettlement colony in West Delhi, known as the “widows' colony”. It was built for survivors of the Delhi killings of 1 to 3 November 1984, many of them women whose husbands, sons and fathers were killed in Trilokpuri, Sultanpuri and other colonies. Outlook reports that survivors were moved from relief camps to the new colony after a few months, with flats given out by drawing chits. The Quint calls it the widow colony of Delhi, “perhaps the only such in the world”.

Human Rights Watch puts the Delhi toll at no fewer than 2,733 Sikhs, the Ahuja Committee's figure. Outlook adds that the killings left over 1,300 widows and 4,000 orphans.

What the sources record

• 2018: Newslaundry quotes resident Atma Singh Lubana saying 948 families live in the colony, in thin-walled double-storey houses with regular power cuts.
• 2022: The Quint says almost 900 families, most of them Sikh, live there, and that nearly every family lost someone in 1984. Women resettled there got low-level government jobs as their main income. Residents say children left alone while their mothers worked “went astray”, and locals allege that drugs flowed into the colony after 1984 and believe this was deliberate; The Quint reports these as residents' accounts, not findings. It reports that almost 90 percent of those aged 10 to 16 in 1984 fared badly.
• 2024: advocate H.S. Phoolka tells The Quint that even the rehabilitation of the widows in Tilak Vihar “was a failed effort”.
• November 2025: Outlook finds the flats cracked and leaking and calls them dangerous. Resident Harleen Kaur says one generation was ravaged in 1984, another by drugs and a third left illiterate. One resident received a promised government job in June 2025 after decades of waiting.

What it means today. Tilak Vihar is where the cost of 1984 is still visible a generation on. Human Rights Watch reported in 2014 that only about 30 people, mostly low-ranking Congress supporters, had been convicted over the Delhi killings and no police officer, and called it a comprehensive failure of the justice system.