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32 Years After The 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots, This Poet's Tweets Recount The Horror

One family's experience of the violence.
AP Photo/Channi Anand

Yesterday, on the 32nd anniversary of the 1984 Sikh riots, Mumbai-based poet Harnidh Kaur recounted her family's experience of the violence in Delhi in a moving Twitter thread. The tweets, which were inspired by a dinner table conversation with her mother, soon went viral.

Kaur narrated how her maternal grandmother coped with the outbreak of violence around them, with her three children at their Rajouri Garden home in Delhi. Meanwhile, her maternal grandfather was stranded in Agra and was barricaded into an empty room by friend, a hotel owner.

Her grandmother spent the next three days hiding, as the neighbourhood's Hindus helped the Sikh families by giving them shelter and food, and taking night rounds to keep rioters out.

Even after the violence was over, the lives of the affected families had changed forever.

So far, the most common reaction to Kaur's story has been one of shock. "While history textbooks talk of the massacre most people don't know the extent of it," Kaur told HuffPost India. "So it was a rude shock to a lot of them. A LOT of people spoke about how it was cathartic for them. Many people tried making a political agenda out of it. A few trolls here and there, but mostly, it was a moment of solidarity in grief."

Towards the end, Kaur wrote of the Sikh community's silence on the 1984 riots and their struggle to forget the violence.

"As a minority, it's often easier to forget and consolidate the tatters of what dignity you have left than actively hunt for this nebulous concept of 'justice'," Kaur said. "Most people did that. They left their homes, struggled to build their lives up again, generally tried to create a separate identity. That's what caused the dearth of literature, of art, which should be the logical extension of trauma. My grandparents, my parents, their generation was too directly impacted to try and remember. My generation, being chronologically removed (and a lot more privileged) is trying to remedy that."

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.