: Braving an Angry Mob, This IPS Officer Saved Lives During the 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots #IndiaNEWS #Delhi While the Delhi Police was accused of being absent in many instances of bloody carnage during the

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Braving an Angry Mob, This IPS Officer Saved Lives During the 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots #IndiaNEWS #Delhi
While the Delhi Police was accused of being absent in many instances of bloody carnage during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, there was one distinguished officer and his small platoon who performed their duties battling all odds. On the morning of 1 November 1984, additional Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP), Maxwell Pereira led his small platoon of about 25 personnel to protect Sikhs taking shelter at the historic Gurudwara Sis Ganj Sahib in the city’s Chandni Chowk area against a mob comprising of hundreds of rioters.
Despite no backup and with only one revolver at his disposal, Pereira and the small force of brave personnel did everything in their power to prevent the mob from attacking the gurdwara and the people taking shelter in it. Had Pereira not been there, the mob could have desecrated one of Sikhism’s most sacred sites of worship where Guru Tegh Bahadur—ninth of 10 Gurus who founded the Sikh religion—was beheaded on the order of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, and massacred the people taking shelter in it.
Standing up where it counts
In his book ‘1984: The Anti-Sikh Riots and After’, Sanjay Suri, a former journalist with The Indian Express who was on the ground to document the carnage, dedicates a chapter to how Pereira and his ‘ramshackle platoon’ protected the Sis Ganj Gurdwara from the mob.
Before his heroics at Sis Ganj, Pereira spent the night of 31 October, the day when former prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated, guarding Sikhs in North Delhi. His teams were escorting members of the community to their homes.
Sikhs being attacked during the riots in 1984. (Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
In the early hours of 1 November, he was called by the Police Commissioner to oversee security for the new Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, at Teen Murti Bhavan, where Indira Gandhi’s body lay. Once there, however, Pereira found himself simply waiting as reports came from his wireless operator of Sikh-owned establishments being attacked.
Upon receiving news of a fire at Bhagirath Place, a wholesale electrical goods market across the Red Fort and a few minutes away from Sis Ganj, Pereira insisted to the Commissioner that he could no longer stand around while there was no one to handle the situation.
“I left sometime between 9 am and 9. 30 am. I reached Red Fort in my jeep. We were a total of six or seven people in the jeep. They had their hand weapons only—short batons,� Pereira tells Sanjay Suri in a conversation for his book.
Upon reaching the Red Fort, he met with the local police post in charge, who had about two or three people with him. With just 10-12 police personnel, they marched towards Bhagirath Place in an attempt to disperse the crowd assembling there.

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