Avantika Maken had an idyllic childhood. The six-year-old was blissfully unaware that her sprawling house, where she often got lost, was also known as Raj Bhawan or the Governor’s House, in Hyderabad. All she knew was her grandfather lived there with her grandmother.
Avantika has vague memories of a clammy afternoon in July 1985 when a rattle-like sound had shattered the peace of her Kirti Nagar house in Delhi. She had just finished eating a boiled egg and wondered about the noise because Diwali, the festival of lights, was still several months away. She ran outside and witnessed a horrifying sight. Her father Lalit Maken and mother, Geetanjali lay dying in a pool of blood. They were shot by three men who fled on a scooter after ascertaining that the job had been done. A report in The Telegraph newspaper recapitulated the event lucidly:
As Avantika turned, she saw her father Lalit Maken, then MP from South Delhi, lying still in a pool of blood next to a security guard, who was also motionless.
Terrified and confused, she ran back to her mother, crying and screaming. But by then, Geetanjali’s face too had become calm and still.
The murder of Avantika’s father was the result of a terse, four-line paragraph in a booklet titled, “Who Are The Guilty?” in which he was identified as a provocateur by survivors of the anti-sikh riots:
Lalit (Maken), Cong. (I) Trade Union Leader and Metropolitan Councillor. Reportedly paid a mob Rs 100 each plus a bottle of liquor. A white Ambassador car reportedly belonging to him came 4 times to the GT Road area near Azadpur. Instructions to mobs indulging in arson were given from inside the car.
In November 1985, Dr Shankar Dayal Sharma was appointed the Governor of Punjab and moved to Chandigarh. Less than a year later, it was time to move again – this time to Mumbai to take up the governorship of Maharashtra. A year and a half later, he moved back to Delhi and took over as India’s Vice President. A sprawling bungalow on Delhi’s Maulana Azad Road, adjacent to the Vigyan Bhawan was home to the bubbly girl who was tormented by dark images of her parents lying in a pool of fresh blood. Five years later, in 1992, it was time for another move: this time to the massive complex atop the Raisina Hill, also called the Rashtrapati Bhawan or the President’s Estate. By the time Avantika was twelve, life had meant five changes of residence and as many set of friends.
In another part of the world, life-changing events were impacting Ranjit Singh “Kuki” Gill.
While Avantika was meandering her way through the maze of rooms in what had once been the Viceroy’s House in British India, Gill was in a United States prison awaiting the resolution of extradition proceedings by the Indian government in February 1988.
Gill’s journey into the netherworld began on India’s Independence Day in 1984 after he had declined to pursue a PhD programme in Kansas University (he already had a Masters in plant breeding from the Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana). Instead he decided to get baptised for the quam, which in the aftermath of Operation Blue Star meant keeping the flag of militancy flying – if not in deed, then at least in thought.
The decision to serve the Order stemmed from a deep-seated angst after he was arrested by the police on the flimsy charge of wearing a black turban. A few days after this incident, Kuki joined the All Indian Sikh Students Federation or AISSF. In contrast, his two siblings were studying medicine and his father, Khem Singh Gill, was a senior professor in the university and later went on to become its Vice Chancellor and was also awarded the Padma Bhushan.
Ironically, the professor received the award in the same year Avantika moved back to Delhi with her grandparents. But it was still time before the two families became familiar with each other.
Kuki Gill was one among hundreds of fugitives who had fled India using forged papers after the riots in 1984. In 1985, he was charged with the murder of the Maken couple along with Sukhdev Singh alias Sukha and Harjinder Singh aka Jinda. On 28 February 1986, Kuki fled to the United States but was detained by the Interpol on 14 May 1987 after it issued a lookout notice in his name following India’s plea.
Meanwhile Sukha and Jinda carried out two more assassinations – Arjan Dass in September 1985 (a Congress leader named in the People’s Union of Civil Liberties or PUCL report), and General Arun Vaidya, chief of the Indian Army at the time of Operation Blue Star, in January 1986. The two were later arrested and executed – exactly three months after Avantika moved into the President’s Estate with her grandparents.
By the time Kuki was finally extradited to India on 7 May 2000, Avantika was a young woman and had moved out of Rashtrapati Bhawan at the end of her grandfather’s tenure as President of India. She was also preparing for her betrothal to an Indian Air Force officer, which eventually ended on a sour note. Meanwhile, Kuki prepared for a long haul in Indian jails despite an assurance that he would not be charged under the now-defunct Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, or TADA and would instead be tried for the offences of murder and attempt to murder.
In May 2004, Avantika encountered the surviving assassin of her parents.
The meeting was set up by a young man whose father, Dr DN Tewari was a member of the Rajya Sabha and was shot dead in April 1984 by terrorists in Chandigarh. The son was at the time Vice President of his college union besides being the general secretary of the National Students Union of India (NSUI). This young man called, Manish Tewari later went on become the Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting in Dr Manmohan Singh’s government.
A report in Open magazine in June 2009 described the meeting that brought Avantika face-to-face with Kuki, who was then an undertrial:
Kuki recalls it vividly. “I had gone alone to meet her. As soon as we sat down, she asked me ‘Why?’ I answered. After all, it did not matter who had carried out the act. I told her there was nothing personal about it. It was a result of the turn of events. As a Sikh, I was on one side, and she, despite being Punjabi, as a Hindu was on the other side. If Darbar Sahib had not been attacked, if the riots had not taken place, none of this would have happened.”
Avantika wanted to know the exact motive behind her father’s murder. Kuki replied matter of factly: because his name was on the list. She however refrained from asking about her mother’s killing.
But Kuki decided to tell her. It was a mistake, he conceded. When Lalit Maken ran inside after being shot, Geetanjali came out to embrace him and it was typical collateral damage. He explained further – just as innocent Sikhs were killed in an act of vengeance for an assassination they were never part of, or for a war which was never theirs! Avantika was severely impacted after meeting Kuki but the moment soon turned over and she was back to addressing more pressing matters in her life.
This included seeking the assistance of Congress President, Sonia Gandhi or rather, benefitting from her intervention. For some time now, a young man called Ashok Tanwar (who was a general secretary of the NSUI), had been pursuing her for marriage. Finally, Sonia Gandhi cajoled her and Avantika, who had a daughter from the failed marriage, married Ashok in June 2005.
It would take another four years before Kuki’s long trial came to an end in which he was pronounced guilty and awarded a life sentence. But the then chief minister of Delhi, Sheila Dikshit invoked her powers to commute his sentence after she had Avantika’s consent, a decision that was gently aided by her uncle Ajay Maken, another senior Congress leader and a former union minister. The final order that enabled Kuki to walk out of jail was issued on 7 July 2009.
What had made the daughter pardon the man guilty of assassinating her parents?
What could have led to a change of heart? Was her act a silent admission from a leading political family of involvement in the carnage of 1984? Or was it more philosophical? These questions remain unanswered despite several efforts by journalists and one even by filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt, who proposed a film on Avantika’s life, but to no avail.
I tracked Kuki down to Ludhiana and was surprised to see him filing stories for a London-based website, and a radio station in Toronto between tending to his agricultural land. His wife Harabhjyot Kaur is thirteen years younger and at fifty-three, he is father to a four-year-old daughter called Gneeve. His email ID is suffixed with an interesting number, 2004, and I asked him why? “That is the year when I tasted freedom after a long detention in the US,” he said.
I asked him if he felt any remorse. He spoke about his gratitude to Avantika, but reiterated that 1984–85 should be analysed in the historical context. “I would have done things differently… perhaps sublimated my anger, understood the political process involving Punjab,” he said calmly. During the conversation, I noticed that it caused him great discomfort when queried specifically about 1984: why did the government allow the Golden Temple to be converted into a veritable fortress? What was the need for a “botched up” army operation etc?
“I go to sleep every night wondering if truth shall ever be told,’ Kuki said. But any fresh initiative in the political process still makes him hopeful and he dreams of becoming a part of it. It happened even as recently as the spring of 2011 after the emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) which initiated some steps to bring a closure to the anti-Sikh riots of 1984.
Since his acquittal, Kuki has never felt the need to meet Avantika. It was as if the chord which bound them together had finally come undone.
Excerpted with permission from Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, Westland Books.
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Avantika has vague memories of a clammy afternoon in July 1985 when a rattle-like sound had shattered the peace of her Kirti Nagar house in Delhi. She had just finished eating a boiled egg and wondered about the noise because Diwali, the festival of lights, was still several months away. She ran outside and witnessed a horrifying sight. Her father Lalit Maken and mother, Geetanjali lay dying in a pool of blood. They were shot by three men who fled on a scooter after ascertaining that the job had been done. A report in The Telegraph newspaper recapitulated the event lucidly:
As Avantika turned, she saw her father Lalit Maken, then MP from South Delhi, lying still in a pool of blood next to a security guard, who was also motionless.
Terrified and confused, she ran back to her mother, crying and screaming. But by then, Geetanjali’s face too had become calm and still.
The murder of Avantika’s father was the result of a terse, four-line paragraph in a booklet titled, “Who Are The Guilty?” in which he was identified as a provocateur by survivors of the anti-sikh riots:
Lalit (Maken), Cong. (I) Trade Union Leader and Metropolitan Councillor. Reportedly paid a mob Rs 100 each plus a bottle of liquor. A white Ambassador car reportedly belonging to him came 4 times to the GT Road area near Azadpur. Instructions to mobs indulging in arson were given from inside the car.
In November 1985, Dr Shankar Dayal Sharma was appointed the Governor of Punjab and moved to Chandigarh. Less than a year later, it was time to move again – this time to Mumbai to take up the governorship of Maharashtra. A year and a half later, he moved back to Delhi and took over as India’s Vice President. A sprawling bungalow on Delhi’s Maulana Azad Road, adjacent to the Vigyan Bhawan was home to the bubbly girl who was tormented by dark images of her parents lying in a pool of fresh blood. Five years later, in 1992, it was time for another move: this time to the massive complex atop the Raisina Hill, also called the Rashtrapati Bhawan or the President’s Estate. By the time Avantika was twelve, life had meant five changes of residence and as many set of friends.
In another part of the world, life-changing events were impacting Ranjit Singh “Kuki” Gill.
While Avantika was meandering her way through the maze of rooms in what had once been the Viceroy’s House in British India, Gill was in a United States prison awaiting the resolution of extradition proceedings by the Indian government in February 1988.
Gill’s journey into the netherworld began on India’s Independence Day in 1984 after he had declined to pursue a PhD programme in Kansas University (he already had a Masters in plant breeding from the Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana). Instead he decided to get baptised for the quam, which in the aftermath of Operation Blue Star meant keeping the flag of militancy flying – if not in deed, then at least in thought.
The decision to serve the Order stemmed from a deep-seated angst after he was arrested by the police on the flimsy charge of wearing a black turban. A few days after this incident, Kuki joined the All Indian Sikh Students Federation or AISSF. In contrast, his two siblings were studying medicine and his father, Khem Singh Gill, was a senior professor in the university and later went on to become its Vice Chancellor and was also awarded the Padma Bhushan.
Ironically, the professor received the award in the same year Avantika moved back to Delhi with her grandparents. But it was still time before the two families became familiar with each other.
Kuki Gill was one among hundreds of fugitives who had fled India using forged papers after the riots in 1984. In 1985, he was charged with the murder of the Maken couple along with Sukhdev Singh alias Sukha and Harjinder Singh aka Jinda. On 28 February 1986, Kuki fled to the United States but was detained by the Interpol on 14 May 1987 after it issued a lookout notice in his name following India’s plea.
Meanwhile Sukha and Jinda carried out two more assassinations – Arjan Dass in September 1985 (a Congress leader named in the People’s Union of Civil Liberties or PUCL report), and General Arun Vaidya, chief of the Indian Army at the time of Operation Blue Star, in January 1986. The two were later arrested and executed – exactly three months after Avantika moved into the President’s Estate with her grandparents.
By the time Kuki was finally extradited to India on 7 May 2000, Avantika was a young woman and had moved out of Rashtrapati Bhawan at the end of her grandfather’s tenure as President of India. She was also preparing for her betrothal to an Indian Air Force officer, which eventually ended on a sour note. Meanwhile, Kuki prepared for a long haul in Indian jails despite an assurance that he would not be charged under the now-defunct Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, or TADA and would instead be tried for the offences of murder and attempt to murder.
In May 2004, Avantika encountered the surviving assassin of her parents.
The meeting was set up by a young man whose father, Dr DN Tewari was a member of the Rajya Sabha and was shot dead in April 1984 by terrorists in Chandigarh. The son was at the time Vice President of his college union besides being the general secretary of the National Students Union of India (NSUI). This young man called, Manish Tewari later went on become the Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting in Dr Manmohan Singh’s government.
A report in Open magazine in June 2009 described the meeting that brought Avantika face-to-face with Kuki, who was then an undertrial:
Kuki recalls it vividly. “I had gone alone to meet her. As soon as we sat down, she asked me ‘Why?’ I answered. After all, it did not matter who had carried out the act. I told her there was nothing personal about it. It was a result of the turn of events. As a Sikh, I was on one side, and she, despite being Punjabi, as a Hindu was on the other side. If Darbar Sahib had not been attacked, if the riots had not taken place, none of this would have happened.”
Avantika wanted to know the exact motive behind her father’s murder. Kuki replied matter of factly: because his name was on the list. She however refrained from asking about her mother’s killing.
But Kuki decided to tell her. It was a mistake, he conceded. When Lalit Maken ran inside after being shot, Geetanjali came out to embrace him and it was typical collateral damage. He explained further – just as innocent Sikhs were killed in an act of vengeance for an assassination they were never part of, or for a war which was never theirs! Avantika was severely impacted after meeting Kuki but the moment soon turned over and she was back to addressing more pressing matters in her life.
This included seeking the assistance of Congress President, Sonia Gandhi or rather, benefitting from her intervention. For some time now, a young man called Ashok Tanwar (who was a general secretary of the NSUI), had been pursuing her for marriage. Finally, Sonia Gandhi cajoled her and Avantika, who had a daughter from the failed marriage, married Ashok in June 2005.
It would take another four years before Kuki’s long trial came to an end in which he was pronounced guilty and awarded a life sentence. But the then chief minister of Delhi, Sheila Dikshit invoked her powers to commute his sentence after she had Avantika’s consent, a decision that was gently aided by her uncle Ajay Maken, another senior Congress leader and a former union minister. The final order that enabled Kuki to walk out of jail was issued on 7 July 2009.
What had made the daughter pardon the man guilty of assassinating her parents?
What could have led to a change of heart? Was her act a silent admission from a leading political family of involvement in the carnage of 1984? Or was it more philosophical? These questions remain unanswered despite several efforts by journalists and one even by filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt, who proposed a film on Avantika’s life, but to no avail.
I tracked Kuki down to Ludhiana and was surprised to see him filing stories for a London-based website, and a radio station in Toronto between tending to his agricultural land. His wife Harabhjyot Kaur is thirteen years younger and at fifty-three, he is father to a four-year-old daughter called Gneeve. His email ID is suffixed with an interesting number, 2004, and I asked him why? “That is the year when I tasted freedom after a long detention in the US,” he said.
I asked him if he felt any remorse. He spoke about his gratitude to Avantika, but reiterated that 1984–85 should be analysed in the historical context. “I would have done things differently… perhaps sublimated my anger, understood the political process involving Punjab,” he said calmly. During the conversation, I noticed that it caused him great discomfort when queried specifically about 1984: why did the government allow the Golden Temple to be converted into a veritable fortress? What was the need for a “botched up” army operation etc?
“I go to sleep every night wondering if truth shall ever be told,’ Kuki said. But any fresh initiative in the political process still makes him hopeful and he dreams of becoming a part of it. It happened even as recently as the spring of 2011 after the emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) which initiated some steps to bring a closure to the anti-Sikh riots of 1984.
Since his acquittal, Kuki has never felt the need to meet Avantika. It was as if the chord which bound them together had finally come undone.
Excerpted with permission from Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, Westland Books.