1984 Sikh Archive/Sondeep Shankar.

1984 Sikh Archive/Sondeep Shankar.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the November 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms, the Wiener Holocaust Library, City Sikhs and the 1984 Sikh Archive will host an event in conversation with Pav Singh and Bobby Friction.

The genocidal attacks on Sikhs in November 1984, following the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, were one of the largest cases of collective punishment seen in modern-day India. Yet much of the primary evidence was suppressed by the official authorities, government, police, and judiciary at the time. 40 years on, we are now able to piece together the chain of events through original testimonies that led to thousands of innocent deaths.

This talk will reflect on the importance of preserving narratives and testimonies with the launch of the 1984 Sikh Archive, an evidence-led, online archive documenting the events, their causes, and consequences.

About the Speakers

Bobby Friction is a BBC Radio and TV Presenter. Bobby has appeared in various TV documentaries and shows incuding, BBC 1’s ‘This England’ and Channel 4’s ‘Bollywood Star’ and ‘Generation 7/7’ and has won three Gold Sony Awards for his work.

Bobby was in Delhi as a child and will share his experience of a traumatic time.

Pav Singh is the author of ‘1984: India’s Guilty Secret’. As a member of the Magazine and Books Industrial Council of the National Union of Journalists he has been instrumental in campaigning on the issues surrounding the 1984 massacres.

In 2004, he spent a year in India researching the full extent of the pogroms (from which members of his extended family narrowly escaped) and the subsequent cover-up. He met with survivors and witnessed the political fall-out and protests following the release of the flawed Nanavati Report into the killings.

Pav’s extended family who lived in Delhi were also caught up in the violence. He will talk about the importance of preserving narratives and testimonies with the launch of the 1984 Sikh Archive.