Blood and Ink
ESSAY / CRIME
IT WAS THE MOST REVOLTING SIGHT I ever saw, and I have seen nothing like it since. One of my colleagues, Dipankar De Sarkar, bolted out of the Delhi Police mortuary in Subzi Mandi and threw up.
It was 1 November 1984, over twenty-four hours after Indira Gandhi had been shot dead by two Sikh bodyguards. Innocent Sikhs were being targeted in an orgy of senseless violence. It was medieval-era justice at its worst.
That morning, Sarkar, Rajiv Pande—another colleague—and I were on two scooters trying to map out the mayhem. We saw a young Sikh man lying dead, his body still partly burning, near the tracks just outside the Delhi Cantonment railway station. Bystanders said that the man, apparently a train passenger who had gotten off at the station, had been chased down and brutally killed. Seeing us taking notes, an army officer inspecting the area remarked that we were wasting time going around the city—we only had to visit the Delhi Police mortuary to know the extent and depravity of the bloodbath.
We turned up at the mortuary well after noon. It was my first visit to a mortuary since I had become a journalist six years earlier.
Dr LT Ramani, who was in charge, and his small staff clearly looked overwhelmed. Pointing to the rows of bodies placed horizontally on the cemented pathway around the complex, he said it would be near impossible to do an autopsy on each one. Even as Ramani spoke, we saw a middle-aged man push in a cart overloaded with more bloodied bodies—he may as well have been carting blood-soaked sacks.
I decided to count the bodies, starting from one corner. One, two, three … eight … 12 … 17 … 26 … 34 … 39 … 42 … “You may count all these bodies,” a watching policeman remarked. “Will you be able to count the bodies inside that room too?”
“Which room?” I asked. “How many bodies are there?” He replied, “Why don’t you go and see for yourself.”
Pande, Sarkar and I went to a large room he pointed towards. As we reached its open door, we stopped, overwhelmed by a gut-wrenching stench. Dumped there were bodies after bodies after bodies—Sikh men, women and children killed in the most horrendous manner. I was to later learn that many of the victims were
