There is no greater punishment for a journalist than being assigned to cover a sideshow of a historic story. But sometimes those sidelights bring the main story into a much sharper focus. Reporting out of Bombay on the day of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination did not hold the promise of a devastating tragedy but it had its telling moments.
Within hours of the murder there was palpable fear that Sikhs in the city could become a target of collective anger. On November 1 when Delhi exploded into independent India's worst pogrom, the authorities in Bombay were pushed to the edge. I remember Bombay Police Commissioner Julio Ribeiro, with whom I was in regular touch because of my crime reporting assignment, saying soon after the killings of Sikhs began in Delhi, "Today Bombay is not very far from Delhi but we won't let anyone harm a single Sikh in this city."
Apart from Ribeiro, the safety and security of the Sikhs in Bombay depended a great deal on a newspaper cartoonist and political satirist turned politician Bal Thackeray, the cadres of whose Shiv Sena party had the means to unleash considerable violence against Sikhs that day. Ribeiro knew this and so did Thackeray. I am not sure if there was any specific communication between the two men on the subject but it is not altogether inconceivable.
There were strong suggestions by many from within the Sikh community that it had essentially "bought" peace. Several local Sikh leaders said they had "paid off" those who mattered to ensure that no harm was done to the community unlike in the capital where Gandhi's Congress Party had announced an open season on it.
Coming back to how a single incident illuminated the Gandhi killing for me personally, I took a taxi from Ribeiro's office to return to my newspaper sometime after 4 p.m. on November 1. The driver was a Sikh man who had heard about what was going on in Delhi. His details were inevitably sketchy and somewhat sensationalized. "Puri Dilli jal rahi hai sahab (The whole of Delhi is on fire). Sarey Sikh bhaag rahen hein (All Sikhs are fleeing)," he told me. Since I had emerged from the police commissioner's office he had presumed that I had to be either a journalist or a policeman. In his judgment I could not have been a policeman because I seemed too young for that and still afford a taxi. So he concluded I was from the press.
"Yes, there has been some violence but it is not as if the whole city is engulfed," I said, trying to bring in some objectivity.
He then showed me a deep cut on his right arm and said, "Yeh dekho, aaj subah jab ghar se chala taxi leke to kisi ne bottle se kata (Look at this. This morning when I left someone cut me with a bottle.)"
I could see that my objectivity was no longer useful because the violence in Delhi had become personal for the driver. He told me that he had chased the assailant who had managed to escape through the narrow lanes of his slum.
The driver, Teja Singh then said something that I remember vividly 25 years later. He said he could not care less about the politics behind Gandhi's assassination even though in some ways even identified with his community's anger against her. He said he was ashamed by the act of her two Sikh bodyguards because they had attacked and killed an unarmed and unprepared adversary. That she was a woman made it particularly tragic for him. I may be paraphrasing here but he said something like this: "Nihatthe, auraton or bachchon pe hum war nahi karte. (We do not kill the unarmed, women and children)."
I found it instructive that Teja Singh was not troubled as much by the actual killing and the motivation behind it as the way it was done and to whom.
As I reached my destination and took out the fare, Teja Singh stopped me saying, "Bahut khoon baha hai. Aaj paisa nahin. (Too much blood has been shed. No money today)." He drove off.