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1984 was a year that saw two major catastrophes in India, the world’s so-called largest democracy; first being a brutal massacre of one single community and another one the biggest industrial disaster of its time, thus turning George Orwell’s imaginative year of totalitarianism into reality.
In the first week of November, 1984 thousands of Sikhs were slaughtered across India after the assassination of then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. This was followed by a gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in December of the same year that left many dead. Not only these incidents were preventable, but the government remained allegedly complicit in both cases.
37 years later, two journalists who have been trying to make the Indian establishment answerable for these calamities have died due to Covid-19 complications.
While Jarnail Singh passed away on May 14, Rajkumar Keswani died exactly a week later on May 21, 2021.
Singh had burst into the limelight for throwing a shoe at India’s then home minister, P. Chidambaram during a press conference in 2009. He had protested before one of India’s most powerful politicians of that time, after he refused to answer repeated questions about attempts to shield those involved in the Sikh massacre of 1984.
Singh worked for the Dainik Bhaskar daily paper at the time of the incident. Interestingly, Kewani until recently worked with the same publication.
Keswani was a whistle-blower who had much before the gas leak in Bhopal, had forewarned about the accident through his writings. Unlike Singh, who later joined politics after being sacked from his job, Keswani continued to work as a journalist. Whereas, Singh was only 48, Kewsani died at the age of 71.
That the Indian government was responsible for both tragedies which had shaped the future of these two men is well documented.
In New Delhi alone, close to 3,000 Sikhs were murdered by the mobs led by the slain leader’s Congress party. The mass murders were carried out with the help of police.
Gandhi’s bodyguards were seeking revenge for the army invasion on the Golden Temple Complex, the holiest Sikh shrine, in June of that year.
The ill-conceived military operation was ordered to deal with a handful of armed militants inside the place of worship. The invasion left many pilgrims dead and important historical buildings were heavily damaged.
Chidambaram, a minister in the Congress-led government, expressed his satisfaction in 2009 over the “clean chit” given to party leaders involved in the massacre.
Keswani has been writing consistently about the gas leak that killed more than 3,000 people in Bhopal. His articles on safety lapses at the Union Carbide plant were first published in 1982 for a different newspaper, two years before the tragedy and the last one warning about potential disaster was written in June for another publication, six months before the deadly gas leaked out during the intervening night of December 2-3, 1984.
The Congress government back then had compromised with public safety in spite of warnings about the plant being located near residential areas. Much as in the case of Sikh massacre, it helped the top company officials involved to go unpunished.
The victims of both episodes have been fighting for justice and closure. This is despite the fact that an attempt was made to cover up the Bhopal case by falsely blaming it on the Sikhs in a highly polarised environment.
The untimely deaths of Singh and Keswani under these difficult times when bigotry and corporate control has grown under a right-wing Hindu nationalist regime in India is a huge loss to not only journalism, but the humanity at large.
*Views expressed are the author’s own.
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