NEW DELHI — On Oct. 31, 1984, two Sikh bodyguards gunned down Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in her garden. In the three harrowing days that followed, more than 3,000 Sikhs were killed by enraged mobs seeking to avenge her death.  1984 Enraged mobs killed more than 3,000 Sikhs and destroyed buildings belonging to Sikh merchants in New Delhi in the days after two Sikh bodyguards assassinated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on Oct. 31.  2010 Sikhs rallied earlier this month in New York to call for justice after the 1984 massacre. A former government minister is currently facing trial in India on charges that he led mobs that slaughtered Sikhs.  Eighteen years later, 58 people, most of them Hindu pilgrims, died in an inferno on a train in Gujarat, in western India. The fire was blamed on Muslims, and within days 1,000 died in widespread riots.  These two spasms of horrific sectarian bloodletting have stood as direct challenges to India’s status as a democratic, secular state governed by the rule of law. In both instances, senior officials of the party in power were accused of looking the other way or, in some cases, even orchestrating the bloodshed. In both cases, a mere handful of the killers were ever convicted. In both cases, the political fortunes of politicians accused of fomenting the violence flourished in the aftermath.  But that pattern of official impunity may be changing. In the past month, two senior politicians have found themselves in the cross hairs of legal action that could, after all these years, force them to face accusations that they egged on killers in the two mass killings.  As investigators and prosecutors move in on these officials — a former member of Parliament for the governing Congress Party, and a chief minister and one-time rising star of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party — hope is rising that India might at last be ready to face up to some of its darkest moments and deliver justice for crimes that undermined the core of its national identity.  The changes that wrought this turn of events are not sudden or obvious; in India they rarely are. But analysts, lawyers and human rights advocates here say there has been a slow, inexorable drift toward demanding justice for these crimes. Relentless news media coverage, international embarrassment over allegations of human rights abuses and increasingly activist courts have conspired to advance long-stalled investigations of high-ranking officials.  “Something has shifted,” said H. S. Phoolka, a lawyer who has been working for two decades to prosecute the killers in the anti-Sikh violence that followed Mrs. Gandhi’s death. “No longer will it go down in history that such a large-scale massacre happened and nobody paid a price. People realize that if it is not checked, then nobody is safe.”  Sajjan Kumar, a former senior Congress Party official member and former government minister, is currently facing trial on charges that he led mobs that slaughtered Sikhs in 1984. He has denied any wrongdoing, and is not accused of killing anyone himself, but witnesses say that he and other Congress Party officials incited hordes of people who rampaged through the streets of the capital, setting upon any Sikh they could find.  Late last month, the chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, was grilled for 10 hours by a special team appointed by the Supreme Court to investigate the 2002 riots. Human rights groups say he allowed, or even encouraged, Hindu mobs to tear through Muslim neighborhoods, leaving more than 1,000 dead.  Mr. Modi and his supporters say the charge that he encouraged rioters is ludicrous.  But the fact that either official has even been questioned represents a major step toward justice, said Teesta Setalvad, an activist who has been working to bring the organizers of the Gujarat riots to trial. “People finally realize that it is important to prosecute crimes of this magnitude,” she said. “You must acknowledge some among your community have committed a heinous crime and get justice for it.”  Governments in New Delhi have been reluctant to even acknowledge, much less punish, acts of mass violence. There is no grand memorial, for instance, to the hundreds of thousands of victims of the bloodletting between Hindus and Muslims that broke out when British India was split in two in 1947.  Regarding the violence in 1984 and 2002, the government created endless blue-ribbon panels to produce doorstop-thick reports on each episode, but none have produced convictions or even administrative sanctions against the most senior of the accused. Indeed, mass killings have been treated as the kind of regrettable but ultimately understandable tragedies that are inevitable in a diverse nation.  Hari Kumar contributed reporting, and Saimah Khadjwa contributed research.
Prosecutors are moving in on officials for fomenting sectarian violence, sparking hope that India might be ready to face its darkest moments.