Chandigarh: In a press statement issued on Monday (April 10) Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal) president Sukhbir Badal said that the widespread massacre of Sikhs in Delhi and some other parts of the country in November 1984 was “most certainly a genocide of the community in vast numbers.”
Reacting to the Ontario parliament’s decision to treat the 1984 massacre as a “genocide”, former Punjab CM said, “We are indeed grateful to the authorities and the people of Ontario for this very touching gesture of compassion and solidarity. They have called this shameful chapter by its right name and they deserve our thanks. Every Indian, except those guilty of this tragedy, regards it as a genocide”.
He also requested the Government of India to formally acknowledge this shameful massacre of Sikhs as “ a brutal genocide.”
Rajnath Singh and Sukhbir Singh Badal at the memorial’s foundation stone-laying ceremony [File Photo]
Notably, the Narendra Modi led BJP government in the Indian subcontinent, in which Sukhbir Badal’s party SAD (Badal) is also an ally, has objected to the Sikh Genocide 1984 motion passed by the Ontario parliament.
Sukhbir Badal, however, once again showed his party’s narrow vision in this matter by blaming one party (Congress) for the genocide.
“There is no doubt about this in anyone’s mind that the Congress planned and executed a genocide of the Sikhs in 1984. Senior leaders of that party holding top positions in the government of India actively facilitated, directed and even participated in this gruesome genocide. Orders for this genocide had come from the very top in the government.The entire world was shocked when the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi publicly justified this inhuman genocide as “a natural reaction to the falling of a big tree ( Mrs Indira Gandhi’s assassination.) Another Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh later had to apologise for this to the nation,” said Mr Sukhbir Singh Badal in a statement here.
Sukhbir Badal in his statement also further the false propaganda that the Sikhs as a “community” and all right thinking people in the country and across the world are grateful to the members of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) who had courageously come out in the streets during this genocide to stand by and save their Sikh brethren against dangerous and armed criminals and killers.
“We now request the “Honourable Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi ji” to apply balm to the deep wounds of the Sikh community by personally intervening to ensure that the guilty of this genocide are not allowed to go Scott-free any longer”, the statement issued by SAD (Badal) quotes Sukhbir Badal as saying.
The fact is that the Sikh genocide 1984 was perpetrated by the Indian state working under the genocidal impulse of the Hindu society, of which BJP is also a part. Documents and evidences have surfaced which shows that the genocide was supported and carried by active and ideological participation of the Hindutva forces such as Rashtriya Swayam Sewak Sangh (RSS) and the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP).
SEE: Sikh Genocide 1984: Long Search For Culprits; Tracing RSS link to the November 1984
ALSO READ: 1984 Unimagined Catastrophe (book in Punjabi) by Ajmer Singh
Moreover, Narendra Modi himself faces accusations of perpetrating the Genocide of Muslim minority in 2002 in Gujarat.