jayasim@uiucdcsb.CS.UIUC.EDU (11/25/85)
I was surprised and hurt that Pinaki Mazumder refers to the dastardly
and heinous crime on the 3000 and odd innocent Sikhs that were butchered after
Mrs G's murder as something that might amount to "MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING".
Let me make my position clear - I'm not a Sikh and I tend to believe that
the army was justified in entering the Golden Temple (atleast at that stage,
though allowing things to degenerate to that stage was itself questionable).
As Mazumder himself states:
cry which was made and is still being made by the Sikh
community ironically twisting the main issue and cribbing
about the gory details of the violence, needs to be
ignored.
How can the gory details of the violence be ignored? How can it even
be understandable (as was stated by somebody previously here on the net)?
This brand of argument would have proposed the following solution
to the Iranian hostage crisis - people on the streets here in the US
round up the Iranians and start killing them.
Infact, I would go far as to claim that the butchering of the Sikhs
after Mrs G's murder is "the main issue". We have an example of two Sikhs
with a very misplaced idealogy killing the Prime Minister. Should the
response to this be taking revenge on an entire community. Moreover, consider
the barbaric nature of the crime - "realists" may claim a death is a death-
but I claim that there is a difference - a soldier killing somebody under-
standing it to be his duty - an idealogy, however misplaced it might be, but
still an idealogy, and somebody killing for the sheer pleasure of it or out
of rage or even out of revenge. When those 3000 and odd Sikhs were butchered,
it was done, and I'm damn sure about it, with rage, revenge and in some cases
even with pleasure. If we can say that it's still OK and still call ourselves
civilized, then civilization has missed the bus somewhere along the way.
The killing of the Sikhs is as deplorable as the bloody killings
during the partition (there were even parallels - Sikhs who boarded trians
bound for New Delhi arrived in New Delhi - only that they were hacked to
death!) or the Assam riots. If some group did not raise their
voice against the Assam massacre then they were cowards. But that in no
way justifies that we keep our mouths shut about the Sikh massacre.
If the massacre in the wake of Mrs G's killings amount to Much Ado
About Nothing then I would include a few more in the list - Hitler's exter-
mination of the Jews; the invention of the decimal number system and finally
the accolade for Shakespeare especially for his "Much Ado About Nothing".
Infact, we have been making MUCH ADO ABOUT EVERYTHING.
D.N.Jayasimha,
U of Illinois, C-U,
UUCP : ...!{ihnp4,convex,pur-ee}!uiucdcs!jayasim
csnet: jayasim%uiucdcs@uiuc
arpa: jayasim@uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu