More than thirty years after they occurred, the events of 1984 refuse to slide into the past. As recently as 2012, Lieutenant General Brar, who led Operation Blue Star, was attacked in London for his role in that operation. In 2014, the Punjabi film Kaum De Heere, based on the lives of the men responsible for Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination, was banned. To this day, the struggle goes on to deliver justice to the victims of the anti-Sikh pogrom that followed the assassination. Rather than entering the garbage heap of history, the events of 1984 have become a testament to William Faulkner’s words: ‘The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.’
This book examines the human narrative of 1984. It tells the stories, both real and imagined, of men and women whose lives were altered by that tragic chain of events and who continue to live with them to this day. Through the telling of these stories, it gets at the heart beating inside the body of facts to bring out the essence of a society and nation marked indelibly by what happened in 1984.