1984 Sikhs Kristallnacht
Twenty-five years on... 1984 Sikhs’ Kristallnacht Four Sikh brothers, the owners of the burning Sahni Paints, are roasted alive by mobs; Paharganj, New Delhi, 1984 Parvinder Singh Introduction An image still haunts me, even after twenty-five years. Ashok Vahie’s lense had captured the beginnings of a horrible sequence of events, a Kristallnacht of India’s Sikhs. On a wide and leafy British built New Delhi road, a terrified Sikh man is sitting, cross-legged while a group of men casually take turns in attacking him. Despite being a minority in India, Sikhs had climbed up the heights of Indian society with the help of their strong work ethic. To the wider Hindu community though, it was time they were cut down to size. Half a century earlier, another minority community, the Jews, faced similar challenges in Europe. Sikhs have a lot in common with the people of the Jewish faith. Both share an healthy and positive optimism in their attitude to life in the face of adversity. Both have faced centuries of persecution. The month of November has brought them together. In November 1938, a German embassy official, Ernst vom Rath, was assassinated by a Jewish teenager, Herschel Grynszpan, in revenge of the mass expulsion of his people to Poland. Kristallnacht or the ‘Night of Broken Glass’, though portrayed by the German authorities as a spontaneous 1 November 1984, New Delhi, India. Photo by Ashok Vahie outburst of popular outrage, were actually pogroms organised by Hitler’s Nazis. Synagogues and Jewish businesses were particular targets, while the police and fire brigade looked on.
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