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When Rajeev Masand referred to the events of 1984 as “riots” during an interview with Diljit Dosanjh, Diljit stopped him. The actor was discussing Jogi, his film about the violence against Sikhs following the killing of Indira Gandhi, when he objected to Masand's terminology. Diljit said that the appropriate word was "genocide," explaining that what happened was not simply a two-sided riot but an attack in which one community was targeted. The exchange was brief, but it captured a much larger disagreement over how the violence of 1984 should be remembered and, more fundamentally, how it should be named.
The academic discourse surrounding the politics of nomenclature and state-driven interpretations of mass brutality finds a significant voice in the work of political scientist Paul R. Brass. As a prominent authority on the manufacturing of communal disturbances in India, his scholarship provides a framework that is remarkably pertinent to the current debate.
Brass examines the deliberate political decision to categorize coordinated violence as a mere "riot," demonstrating how such terminology serves to obscure institutional involvement and mask the underlying systematic design of the attacks.
Brass in ‘Riots and Pogroms’ notes “The study of the various forms of mass collective violence has been blighted by methodological issues... Our work becomes entangled—even through the very theories we articulate—in the diversionary tactics that are essential to the production and reproduction of violence. The diversionary process begins with the issue of labelling “
That conversation is particularly relevant today, August 20, 2026, following the death of former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar. Kumar, 80, died at Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi after being taken there from Tihar Jail, where he was serving a life sentence. He had been convicted in cases arising from the killing of Sikhs during the violence that followed Indira Gandhi's killing in 1984.
The coverage of Kumar's death today offers an interesting illustration of precisely the problem Diljit was pointing towards.
Wrong Framing
NDTV's obituary describes Kumar as an “1984 Anti-Sikh Riots” convict. NDTV has also published a separate explainer titled “Who Was Sajjan Kumar, Ex-Congress MP And 1984 Riots Convict”. The Times of India today published both “Former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar, convicted in 1984 anti-Sikh riots case, dies at 80” and “Who was Sajjan Kumar? From 3-time Congress MP to 1984 riots convict”.
Rediff describes him as having been jailed in the “1984 anti-Sikh riots case”, while The Daily Pioneer uses “1984 riots cases” in its headline. The New Indian Express describes Kumar as serving a life sentence for his role in the “1984 anti-Sikh riots”. Deccan Chronicle goes even further in its headline: “1984 Anti-Sikh Riots Convict Sajjan Kumar Dies.”
The Federal similarly uses “1984 anti-Sikh riots cases”, while NewsGram uses “1984 Anti-Sikh Riots Cases” in its headline. NewsDrum calls him an “1984 riots convict”. India Legal also describes him as convicted in the “1984 anti-Sikh riots case”.
None of this means that every one of these publications is consciously attempting to minimise the violence. That would be an unfair conclusion.
“1984 anti-Sikh riots” has become a deeply entrenched journalistic shorthand, reproduced for decades across media reports, official documents and political discourse. Journalists often use it without considering the implications of the noun itself.
But that is precisely why the terminology deserves scrutiny.
Words do not merely describe history. They frame it.
The word “riot” ordinarily evokes disorder: crowds, public violence, competing groups, a breakdown of law and order. It does not necessarily tell us who was targeted, who organised the violence, whether the violence was reciprocal, or whether political actors and state institutions played a role. And that matters enormously when describing November 1984.
The Case Against Sajjan Kumar
On October 31, 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards. What followed was a wave of mass violence against Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere in India. Thousands of Sikhs were killed. Sikh homes and businesses were looted and burned. Gurdwaras were attacked. Men were dragged from their homes, beaten, stabbed, burnt alive and hanged. Women were subjected to sexual violence. Families were destroyed because their members belonged to a particular religious community.
The Government of India put the number of people killed in Delhi at around 2,800, although independent estimates have varied. The violence lasted for days. It was not simply a spontaneous moment of anger immediately following the assassination of a prime minister.
There is extensive evidence that portions of the violence were organised and that political actors were implicated. The Nanavati Commission recorded testimony concerning the involvement of Congress leaders and workers, including allegations against Sajjan Kumar. Those allegations should of course be distinguished from judicial findings. But they are part of a substantial historical record that makes the description of 1984 as merely a spontaneous communal riot deeply inadequate.
Sajjan Kumar's own legal history makes this distinction particularly important.
Kumar was not simply a politician whose name appeared in accusations surrounding 1984. In December 2018, the Delhi High Court overturned his acquittal in the Raj Nagar case and convicted him in connection with the killing of five members of a Sikh family and the burning of a gurdwara. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and surrendered to authorities.
This NDTV report notes that Kumar was convicted for the murder of five men during the violence. The New Indian Express likewise records that the Delhi High Court sentenced him to life imprisonment in 2018 in a case concerning the killing of five Sikhs and the burning of a gurdwara.
His legal troubles did not end there. In February 2025, a Delhi court convicted Kumar in another case concerning the murders of Jaswant Singh and his son Tarundeep Singh in Saraswati Vihar on November 1, 1984, and sentenced him to another life term.
This is an important distinction. Sajjan Kumar did not die merely as a politician “accused” of involvement in the violence. He died as a convicted criminal serving life imprisonment for crimes arising from the killing of Sikhs.
And yet the dominant shorthand remains “1984 riots convict”.
That formulation is not technically inaccurate. But accuracy is not always the same thing as adequacy.
Imagine describing a person convicted of murder during a pogrom simply as a “riot convict”. The phrase tells the reader that a crime occurred, but it says little about the nature of that crime, the identity of its victims or the political circumstances surrounding it.
That is the problem with the language used to describe 1984.
The distinction becomes even more striking in today's coverage from The Indian Express. Its report is headlined “Sajjan Kumar dies on day court was to hear his 1984 riots appeal”, while another Indian Express article published today is titled “Sajjan Kumar dies: What Nanavati Commission said about his role in 1984 riots”. At the same time, the first report describes him as having been sentenced to life imprisonment in a murder case.
The juxtaposition is revealing. The individual crime is identified as murder. The larger historical episode is called a riot.
There is another way of looking at this.
The word “riot” focuses attention on the behaviour of the crowd. Terms such as “pogrom”, “massacre” or “organised anti-Sikh violence” force us to ask different questions: Who was targeted? How were they identified? Who organised the attackers? Where did the weapons come from? Why did the police fail to intervene? Why did prosecution take so long? Why were politicians implicated in the violence able to continue their political careers?
The noun changes the questions.
And this is why the argument over whether 1984 should be called a “riot” is not merely semantic.
For Sikhs who survived the violence, 1984 was not an abstract episode of communal disorder. It was the murder of a father, a husband, a son or a brother. It was a burned home. It was a destroyed business. It was a family forced to rebuild its life after losing everything. It was decades of waiting for the criminal justice system to recognise what had happened.
The survivors were not participants in an equal conflict.
They were victims.
Why Terminology Matters
There are also journalists who have chosen language other than “riot”.
The Tribune’s obituary places greater emphasis on Kumar's convictions for murder and abetment to murder. The Indian Express's political profile focuses on his political rise and the allegations and convictions surrounding his role in the violence. Open Magazine describes the violence against Sikhs and the political history surrounding Kumar in considerably greater detail.
And notably, not every publication today has used “riot” in its framing. Northlines refers to the “1984 Sikh Massacre” in its headline.
That distinction is important because the argument should not be that every Indian journalist is deliberately engaged in historical erasure. The evidence does not establish that, and such a sweeping claim would weaken the argument.
The stronger claim is that the dominant vocabulary remains “riot”, even when the facts being reported describe something much more specific: targeted killings, political mobilisation, criminal convictions and decades of impunity.
And the persistence of that vocabulary matters.
It shapes how future generations encounter 1984. A young reader who sees “1984 riots” repeatedly may understand the episode as another instance of communal violence in which two sides fought each other. The political context, the targeting of Sikhs and the systematic failures of the state can disappear behind a familiar two-word label.
This is particularly troubling because justice for 1984 came extraordinarily late.
Sajjan Kumar remained a powerful Congress politician for decades after the violence. His first major conviction came 34 years after the killings. Other cases against him produced acquittals. His legal proceedings continued into 2026. Today's Indian Express report notes that his appeal against his conviction was due to be heard by the Delhi High Court on the very day he died.
The extraordinary length of this process is itself part of the history of 1984.
The violence ended on the streets. The struggle for justice did not.
The scrutiny must also extend to the Congress party. While state-level leaders and senior figures like Pawan Khera, Deepender Hooda, and Bhupinder Hooda publicly mourned Sajjan Kumar, describing him as a significant figure in their ranks, the Delhi Congress utilized official platforms to laud him as a distinguished leader. This internal reverence raises a fundamental question about the substantive depth of the party's "Mohabbat ki Dukaan" narrative. In the shadow of Kumar’s convictions, one must ask if this slogan represents a genuine alternative to communal politics or if it functions merely as convenient political rhetoric divorced from historical accountability.
This is why Sajjan Kumar's death should not be treated simply as the death of an elderly former politician.
His death is an opportunity to ask what India remembers when it remembers 1984.
If it remembers an “anti-Sikh riot”, the emphasis falls on disorder.
If it remembers a massacre or pogrom, the emphasis falls on the victims.
If it remembers organised anti-Sikh violence, the questions of political responsibility and state complicity become unavoidable.
And if it remembers genocide, as Diljit argued, then the question becomes one of collective targeting and intent.
These descriptions are not interchangeable. They carry different historical meanings.
Perhaps that is why Diljit's correction of Rajeev Masand remains so powerful. He was not merely correcting a journalist's vocabulary. He was challenging a framework through which an entire community's trauma has been described for four decades.
Today, Sajjan Kumar is dead. He died in prison, serving a life sentence for crimes connected to the killing of Sikhs in 1984. His death cannot return the people whose names appear in the court records. It cannot restore the families that were destroyed. It cannot undo the decades during which survivors waited for justice.
But it does give us another opportunity to confront the language with which we remember those crimes.
There is nothing inherently wrong with debating terminology. There should be room for historians, lawyers and journalists to disagree about whether “genocide”, “pogrom”, “massacre” or another term best captures the events of 1984.
But there should also be an honest recognition that “riot” is not a neutral word simply because it has been repeated for decades.
A riot is what we call disorder.
A massacre is what we call the killing of people.
A pogrom is what we call organised violence against a community.
The question India must continue to confront is which of these descriptions most honestly reflects what happened to Sikhs in 1984.
And perhaps, more importantly, whether the victims deserve to have that question asked at all.
(Nishtha Sood holds a degree in Politics and International Relations from SOAS, London, and writes on terrorism laws in India, linguistic movements, and issues of identity. Jagpreet Singh is an activist and social worker based in Chandigarh, known for his work on the ground and his active involvement in Punjab’s protest movements. This is an opinion article and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)