Author : Arun Anand
(RSSFACTS is a column that demystifies the functioning, organisational structure and ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.)
On the evening of 31 October 1984, as word of Indira Gandhi’s assassination spread, Sikh families across northern and eastern India shut their doors and waited. In city after city, including New Delhi, mobs moved from street to street. Shops were set on fire. Men were dragged out of their homes. Survivors say the same thing again and again: the police who were meant to protect them stood by and watched.
What happened next on some of those streets is missing from most accounts of 1984. Men in khaki shorts, carrying wooden sticks, came out across the country and stood between the mobs and Sikh families. They were swayamsevaks of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Some of these stories are now on record. Humanity Beyond Fear: Swayamsevaks in 1984, compiled by Amardeep Jolly, gathers first-hand testimonies from Sikh survivors who say they owe their lives to RSS workers. In his foreword, Iqbal Singh Lalpura, former Chairman of the National Commission for Minorities, writes that the compiler “has collected the personal accounts of many families” and “highlighted the role of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) workers who rescued people during this horrific massacre.” The book does not claim to be complete. Its foreword says that countless more stories must exist.
Bahadurgarh : thirteen days in a stranger’s house
Charanjit Kaur and Harinder Singh Juneja, two survivors from Bahadurgarh in Haryana, remember an RSS worker named Ishwar Das coming to their door on the evening of the assassination. He told the family that their lives were in danger. At around 3 am, with blankets covering their faces, they slipped out and went with him to his house.
They stayed there for thirteen days. Ishwar Das, they say, also kept watch over their empty home. Juneja adds that RSS men stood guard outside and saved his uncle’s shop too. When the family later decided to move to Tilak Vihar in Delhi, the same men asked them to stay and promised to continue protecting them.
Cuttack : five days, then a goods train
Dr Avtaar Singh Shastri was fifteen or sixteen and visiting relatives in Cuttack, Odisha, when mobs began hunting Sikhs there. Six members of his family hid in the house where they were staying. Shri Ram Mahapatra, who was associated with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (an RSS-inspired organisation) and was a familiar figure at the annual Rath Yatra of Lord Jagannath, took them into his own home. They stayed there for five days before making their way to Kolkata hidden in a goods train.
Two years later, the family returned to thank him. He had died by then. Dr Singh also learnt that a relative of his, a turbaned Sikh travelling on the Punjab Mail from Trilokpuri in Delhi, had been caught up in the violence at the railway station. A stranger hid him in the boot of his car and got him out alive. The family later discovered that the man was an RSS worker. Dr Singh himself went on to join the Sangh.
Chandni Chowk : twelve days on guard
Sardar Gurmeet Singh was ten and living in Chandni Chowk, Delhi, when the riots broke out. The Sikh-owned bakery across the street went up in flames. So did the Sher-e-Punjab Hotel. His family waited for their turn.
At dusk, a group of RSS workers arrived in khaki shorts, carrying sticks. The family initially thought they were another group of attackers. Instead, the men ringed his house and the neighbouring Sikh homes, guarding them day and night. Gurmeet recalls that the group was led by Shanti Desai and that the watch continued for twelve days, with local men taking turns. Desai later served as Mayor of Delhi. He died in 2006.
Kanpur : a warning, a warehouse and a loudspeaker
Sardar Gurvinder Singh was about eight and lived in Kanpur, the city hit hardest after Delhi. The Ranganath Misra Commission recorded 127 deaths there, while local estimates, according to this compilation, put the toll at more than 300.
On the evening of 31 October, an acquaintance warned his father that a mob planned to loot their house and abduct the women. The next morning, the man returned, his face hidden under a blanket, with a deadline: the attack would come at 10 am. Neighbours locked the family inside a warehouse behind the street and told the mob that they had already left for Punjab.
On 2 November, the mob gathered again, and no neighbour was willing to step forward. Then the men in khaki shorts arrived. Gurvinder remembers BJP leader Ravil Patni arriving with RSS volunteers. They marched through the streets with loudspeakers, announcing: “Sikh brothers, there is no need to fear. We stand with you like a rock.”
Sirsa : a doctor who held the street
Harinder Singh Manocha was in his early twenties and living in Sirsa, Haryana, when shops across the city were torched. Dr Surinder Kumar Malhotra, an eye doctor who lived on his street and was the RSS district general secretary, told the neighbourhood that protecting the only Sikh household among them was everyone’s responsibility. No hooligan would be allowed to enter the street, he said, as long as he and the RSS workers were there. He also sheltered a father and son, both shoemakers, and saved their lives. Other RSS workers helped families who had lost everything, Manocha recalls. The state government later offered his family Rs 5,000 in compensation. They turned it down.
What the testimonies add up to
Read together, the accounts follow a clear pattern. The rescues began on the first night, before anyone in authority had moved. The methods hardly changed from town to town: Sikh families were taken into volunteers’ homes, while streets, houses and shops were guarded round the clock. Nobody waited for orders, and nobody asked for credit.
The volunteers faced the same mobs as the families they sheltered. In Cuttack, Dr Singh recalls, anyone who tried to protect a Sikh was putting his own life at risk. They held their ground anyway.
These are survivor testimonies, gathered by a compiler who sat with people who are still alive to tell their stories. They belong in the public record of 1984, which has so far made little room for them. Lalpura’s foreword aptly describes them as “not just stories from the shadows of the past, but facts that reveal the truth.”