January 2008 Edition
Manoj Mitta on why and how he and Phoolka wrote the book
IN that fateful year of 1984, I was still a student in my hometown Hyderabad.
Although I did not witness the carnage or know anybody affected by it, I somehow
could not get over the fact that such a massacre had taken place at all,
that too right in the capital. The idea of writing a book on 1984 occurred to me,
though, about three years later. The seed of the book was planted in 1987 by a
story I broke, as a rookie reporter in The Times of India, on the first ever indictment
by an official probe of a Congress
leader in connection with the slaughter
of Sikhs. I found myself sucked
into the issue as I became privy over
the next few years to a series of subtle
and not-so-ubtle counter-efforts by
state players, including senior judges,
to shield Sajjan Kumar.
The nature and extent of the coverup
indicated that the stakes went way
beyond the fate of a solitary Congress
MP. The ruling party seemed taken
aback by Sajjan Kumar’s indictment,especially since it figured in the first
set of cases recommended by an
administrative probe conducted by
one Jain Banerjee committee. Given
that many more cases were on the
anvil, the independence displayed by
the Jain-Banerjee committee threatened
to undo the ‘gains’ from a judicial
inquiry conducted by a very compliant
Supreme Court judge,
Ranganath Misra, who gave a clean
chit to the Congress party and its leaders
as well as the Rajiv Gandhi government.
Apart from the struggle for seeking justice to carnage victims, I was captivated, as a student of law, by the glaring evidence of the Supreme Court judge misusing the credibility of his office to do a whitewash. I would read and re-read the evidence recorded by the Misra Commission and the report it came up with. Given the moral pretensions of judges, I could not cease to marvel at the fact that Misra could get away with such crude obfuscations and half-truths. The subversive thought of bringing out all that drama in a book gripped me so much that, in those early days of the IT revolution, I hired a PC and even took a break from journalism in 1989. But I had bitten off more than I could chew. As the administrative inquiries into the complicity of the police and the lapses in the registration or investigation of carnage cases were still going on, in a follow-up to the Misra report, it was rather premature to attempt the kind of book I had in mind. There was hardly an aspect of the carnage I could write about at that stage with a degree of finality. Nor did I have such academic or activist grounding in human rights that would have instinctively helped me get a perspective. But then, at 25, I wasn’t mature enough to prevent my passion from clouding my objectivity. As my living expenses ate into my meagre savings, I returned the PC after a few weeks without being able to do much with it for all my efforts.
Adding to my stress, it was also the time I married my childhood sweetheart
Renu Rao who had just returned from a two-year Masters course in the US, with
great expectations of our life together. The trauma of finding me instead
obsessed with some book project just when she looked forward to seeing me in
honeymoon mode left a permanent scar on our relationship. Let me give a small
example of my madness (or insensitivity). It did not even occur to me to remove
a gory picture I had pasted next to our bed of a mother holding in one hand an ID
card of her son killed in the carnage and, in the other, a remnant of his roasted
skull. That I could not deliver the book then after all the damage I had inflicted on
our marriage for its sake made Renu even more bitter. She often complained, “That book is a wall between us.” For her, it was always “that” book. So much so
that when I did fulfil my dream project long years later, Renu could not get herself
to read the book despite all the response it evoked, in the media and otherwise.
Every time she tried to read it, she would lapse into a psychological pain as
if it reopened an old wound. All this from a person who is otherwise very warm
and sensitive. My own need to hold on to the book dream, regardless of the problems
within and without, has disabled my wife from relating to it normally.
But I am jumping ahead of the story. Following the failure of my maiden shot
at writing a book, I resumed my journalistic
career and in the course of it
changed jobs and even shifted to
Hyderabad for a while. I kept up with my interest, though, in the 1984 carnage,
gathering more material as I
wrote articles seeking to blow the
cover on further attempts in 
the
nineties to shield political culprits
such as Sajjan Kumar and H K L Bhagat.
Yes, I also sought to revive the book
project when all the official inquiries
into the 1984 carnage had concluded
and no further material was likely to
be generated. Or so it seemed till, in a sudden and unprecedented development,
the Atal Behari Vajpayee government
at the beginning of 2000
appointed a fresh judicial inquiry into
the 1984 carnage.
The tacit purpose of setting up the Justice G T Nanavati Commission, on the strength of an allparty consensus in Parliament, was to undo the whitewash by the previous judicial inquiry conducted by the Misra Commission. It was a happy augury for the long-pending book project. Since it had anyway been delayed so long, the book could well wait for the outcome of the Nanavati probe. Things did not quite turn out so smoothly, thanks to the pro-activity displayed by my co-author, senior advocate H S Phoolka, in a bid to make up for lost time. He came on board soon after I shifted back to Delhi in the middle of 2000, carrying two cartons of papers connected with the book. A lot of that material had in fact been given to me by Phoolka, who had not only been spearheading the campaign for justice but had also been instrumental in mooting the proposal of having a fresh judicial inquiry into the carnage. At our first meeting on my return to Delhi, I discovered that my key source for the book had meanwhile developed an ambition of authoring one himself. Phoolka said that he was under pressure from Sikhs around the world to do a book on the carnage. And since he didn’t have the writing skills to attempt it, and since we have been comrades-in-arms, who better than me, he asked, to ghost a book for him or, alternatively, to co- author it?
Frankly, I was startled at the implication of his proposition: writing off my
own independent project, he was asking me to do something in which he too
would have a say. My fear was not so much about sharing credit as about losing
control over the interpretation of the material. Given my struggle with the book
over the years to “get it right,” I was concerned about surrendering or even
diluting my autonomy just when the gaps in the material were set to be filled,
presuming that the Nanavati Commission was bound to conduct a more transparent
inquiry than its discredited predecessor.
Despite our tried and tested association in pursuing matters related to the carnage, I feared a conflict of interest when it came to writing a book together -
between my role as an observer and Phoolka’s role as 
a central participant.
Much as a 1984 carnage book bearing his name might promise a lot more
insight, can it also pretend to have the necessary detachment? As a journalist, I
interacted all through not only with the side of the victims but also with those
alleged to have engineered the violence (leaders like H K L Bhagat, Sajjan Kumarand Dharam Dass Shastri) or facilitated it (the then lieutenantgovernor of
Delhi, P G Gavai, and senior police officers in charge of the worst affected
areas). On the other hand, Phoolka, as a lawyer advancing the cause of the victims,
was accustomed – and, indeed, professionally entitled - to seeing things
only from their viewpoint.
There was every danger of a book authored or even co-authored by him turning out to be- if not just appearing to be- no more than a summary of his elaborate written arguments before the two inquiry commissions. Such a book too might have its own value but I wasn’t sure if I wanted the one I had been agonising over for so long to end up having a sectarian appeal and falling short of the rigours of human rights and the rule of law. For all such fears, I am, in retrospect, glad that I took the risk of having Phoolka as a co- uthor. It turned out to be a case of converting adversity into opportunity. Within its limited framework of seeking the truth about the 1984 carnage on the basis of official records themselves, I doubt if the book could have been as good without Phoolka’s involvement as a co-author. Being a practising lawyer, Phoolka went out of his way to ensure that we didn’t focus mainly on the harm done by judges to the cause of justice. The book is both fairer and richer for putting in context the activism displayed by the Delhi high court to find a way, for instance, for holding the executive to higher standards of compensation for the mass murders that had taken place right in the capital. Equally important, the collaboration provided a rare opportunity to record a first person account of Phoolka’s struggle for justice against all odds, a stirring example of the difference made by a callow lawyer from rustic Punjab through sheer tenacity. It was indeed an honour for me to be the medium through which Phoolka’s inside stories came to be told with corroborative evidence in the second of the two parts of the book.
This is, however, not to suggest that my misgivings about having him as a coauthor
were entirely misplaced. The ‘detachment’ of an observer and the ‘inherent
bias’ of a participant did have their clashes on a range of issues figuring in
the book. A case in point is 
something as basic as the question of the death toll
of the carnage in Delhi alone. I preferred to go by the official figure, 2,733, and take the liberty at the most of rounding it off as 3,000. Reason: As evident from
the last chapter of the book, we did have representative instances of killings that
had not been taken into account for want of documents when the official enumeration
had been done about three years after the carnage. Thus, from my
point of view, we were already leaning towards the higher side when we took
the death toll in Delhi as 3,000. But, from Phoolka’s point of view, even that was
a gross underestimate! For, he had all through maintained on the basis of a survey
done by his team before the Misra Commission that the death toll in Delhi
was around 4,000. Whatever its shortcomings, the Misra report, it must be conceded,
gave a specific finding that Phoolka’s figure was inflated allegedly
because of a repetition of names. The subsequent official survey happened to
vindicate Misra’s estimate. In the circumstances, I insisted in keeping with my
conscious detachment that we had no option but to go by the official death toll
unless we were in a position to demonstrate major flaws in the methodology of
its enumeration.
To his credit, Phoolka yielded to my reasoning on this and other key issues on which the book deviated from the account he had presented before the last judicial inquiry on behalf of the victims. I am also grateful to him for agreeing to be objective about the Akali Dal despite all the help rendered by that party in the fight for justice. The book exposes the irony of two Akali Dal members inducing a riot widow to backtrack on her testimony in the court against one of the alleged organisers of the carnage, Congress leader Bhagat. Referring to the manner in which those two members thrived in the party despite that public scandal, the book said that it had sent out a cynical message that the Akali Dal’s association with the carnage issue had “more to do with politics than any genuine concern to secure justice.” Since he had extensively dealt with that party in the course of the struggle and otherwise, Phoolka had reservations on whether we could cast aspersions on the Akali Dal’s commitment to the cause just on the basis of the Bhagat episode. But as a journalist, I did not want us to pull our punches on anybody. It was an article of faith with me to be as severe on the Akali Dal (and the BJP, for Gujarat 2002) as we were on the Congress party and the Rajiv Gandhi regime.
There was a personal angle to my being so assertive about presenting facts as
they were. Surely, I did not strain my marital life to make compromises when I
actually got down to writing the book. It is because I am still as “possessed” as
before that I have been able to muster the will to complete the book, taking
advantage of the wealth of material that became public post-2000 in the course
of the Nanavati inquiry.
The book seemed worth all the pain and sacrifice that had gone into its making
when I received a feedback from its first ever reader, Sagarika Ghose of CNN
IBN, who had been sent a proof by the publisher, Roli Books. Sagarika’s SMS
read: “Can’t stop reading your book. It’s absolutely gripping, bone-chilling…” In
an extraordinary gesture, she went on to do a special prime time programme on
the book, effectively launching it. The book seems to have struck a chord
despite being out of synch with the prevailing“feel-good” in the country. At a
function marking the publication of the book, political scientist Yogendra Yadav
likened it to Gandhi’s style of introspection. One thing I surely have in common
with Gandhi is that I haven’t been entirely fair to my wife.
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