AN INTERNATIONALLY acclaimed play, highlighting one of the darkest episodes in Indian modern history, is coming to Scotland for the first time.

Kultar’s Mime, which links the horrific 1984 Sikh massacre in Delhi with the Kishinev pogrom of Jews, is being brought to Glasgow and Edinburgh this month by the Sikh Community of Scotland.

Launched by the Sikh Research Institute, the production follows events separated by time and space but bound by tragedy.

“The 1984 Sikh Genocide is rarely spoken or heard about,” said Charandeep Singh, General Secretary of Glasgow Gurdwara and human rights campaigner.

“It has largely been erased from India’s media coverage and this play is an important addition to the global artistic landscape in promoting the message of human rights through art, poetry and drama.

“I am particularly looking forward to hosting this international critically-acclaimed production in two of Scotland’s greatest cities: Glasgow and Edinburgh. The Sikh community of Scotland is fully committed to showcasing the realities of minority communities across the globe, with a view to play a full and active role in creating a better and fairer Scotland and world.”

GANG RAPE AND MURDER

THE Delhi genocide was triggered by a government-sanctioned military assault on the Sikh Darbar Sahib (Golden Temple), in Amritsar.

The order to attack was given by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who believed the temple was harbouring Sikh separatists and their weapons. Nearly 500 civilians were killed in the attack by the army.


Indira Gandhi ordered the attack at Amritsar


In retaliation Gandhi was shot dead by her Sikh bodyguards a few months later on October 31.

Her assassination triggered genocidal killings across India, particularly in the capital, New Delhi.

In the violence, frenzied gangs of Hindu youths dragged Sikhs out of their homes, trains and cars and set them on fire or clubbed them to death, gang-raping Sikh women and burning down houses, businesses and Gurdwaras.

According to witnesses, government officials and security forces provided the mobs with weapons and incited them to further violence.

At the peak of the killings, Sikhs were being murdered at the rate of one per minute. Official figures are that 3000 people died but unofficial figures are much higher.

“Almost as many Sikhs died in a few days in India in 1984 than all the deaths and disappearances in Chile during the 17-year military rule of General Augusto Pinochet between 1973 and 1990,” pointed out Barbara Crossette, a formerNew York Times bureau chief in New Delhi.

To this date, few have been brought to justice for the massacre and many survivors continue to live in abject poverty, with the word “riot” and its overtones of chaos continually used to describe the genocide.

“But for the backing and help of influential and resourceful persons, killing of Sikhs so swiftly and in large numbers could not have happened,” said a belated report for the government in 2000.

FEAR AND HATRED

EIGHTY-ONE years earlier the city of Kishinev, the capital of the Russian province of Bessarabia, erupted in violence. A horrific pogrom was organised, targeting the Jewish population. After three days of violence, 49 Jews were dead, 500 were wounded, 1300 homes and businesses were destroyed and 2000 families were left homeless.

While the years and many miles separate the two massacres, there are many similarities. In both Delhi and Kishinev minority communities were targeted with violence following libel, innuendo and propaganda, designed to stoke fear and hatred.

Afterwards both tragedies were the subject of powerful poems. In the City of Slaughter by the young Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik, he uses searing, powerful imagery to describe the horror that descended upon the Jewish residents of the city.

The second poem, Kultar’s Mime, draws upon eyewitness accounts of the Delhi massacre to describe their sufferings through the eyes of a group of young survivors.

GUILTY

KULTAR’S Mime, the poem on which the play is based, was written by Sarbeet Singh who describes it as “a scream of pain. A cry of rage at the unending pattern of injustice [that] targets the weak and the poor. A never-ending pattern that transcends geography, culture and time.”

Singh wrote the poem in 1990 spurred by anger when he learned the truth of what happened during the Delhi massacre. Distanced at the time by both class and geography Singh had, like many others, swallowed the myth peddled by the state-run media that cast the Sikhs as villains.

At college in Rajasthan in 1984 he said he was “one of those Western-oriented people in India who live in a bubble. Most people who suffered and died were very poor. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t identify with them.”

This changed when he left for the US in 1987 to study for a degree in computer science. There, in his university library, he found a booklet, banned in India, that documents the carnage and its perpetrators. Called Who Are The Guilty, it was published by The People’s Union for Civil Liberties and The People’s Union for Democratic Rights. On reading it, Singh was so enraged he wrote his poem which last year was adapted for stage by his daughter Mehr Kaur.

The play also incorporates elements from Bialik’s poem as Singh had been struck by the similarities between the two genocides.

“The no-too-subtle point,” he said, “is that in the end, all innocent victims are the same, regardless of how they worship God and what tongues they speak.”

Added Kaur: “The events of 1984 in Delhi were not only an inexcusable breach of the rights of Sikhs, but a violation of the rights of humanity.”

For more information go to http://www.glasgowgurdwara.org/kultars-mime-heads- to-scotland/