This was a situation when you found yourself having to apologize for the same riot, where you were a victim and your own house got nearly torched down, all because you're a Prime Minister from the same political party responsible for the riot, which occurred against your own minority community.
Dr. Manmohan Singh apoligized to the Sikh community in 2005, when he was prime minister of India. He offered the apology for the Congress-led anti-Sikh riot of 1984. According to the former PM’s daughter Daman Singh, their house in Delhi's Ashok Vihar was saved just because of their brother-in-law who was 'not a Sikh'.
Similar cases can be seen elsewhere also, where certain politicians had to speak in favor of their party, some to the extent of standing in opposition to the path of justice for their own minority community. Otherwise, they may not find work. They may no longer be of any use to their party. So they ended up carrying the flag pole of their own enemy.
The extreme version of such cases can be found in the Indian state of Manipur, where the majority community controlled the govt contra constitution. The minority community people are entitled to political autonomy under the constitution, had it not been for the majority community who stood against the constitutional safeguards of the minority. This is constitutional crisis, as someone put it brilliantly, in regard to Manipur fiasco.
In the Indian democracy, the representation system is wildly different from, say, the US. In the US, the number of representatives in Senate is equal and always 2 for each state, whereas in India, it's a whole another arrangement. One Indian state will have just the bare minimum of one representative in both upper and lower houses while another state has 31 representatives in the upper house and 80 in the lower house, depending on the number of population. So the minority people have no chance under the Indian democracy even if they have a so-called state.
When the system is already inherently unjust, some still want an even greater scale of injustice and have undone the last, bare minimum constitutional safeguards (see Manipur, where the highlanders are made to live in caves and eat the dust from the earth to this day). What do you say to those who had been coerced at gunpoint to join the Indian Union (see Nagaland, where the military scorched earth policy has sent them back to the stone age)? Injustice in one place is a threat to justice everywhere.
When even the Sikh community could feel so marginalized and brutalized, what option is left for other smaller ethnic and religious minorities that don't have much of a breathing space in the Indian chaos? This is a killing machine, not democracy. The worst sufferers are those whose ancient republics had been replaced by this present inferior system. All societies aren't the same; some are egalitarian while others are not. When a superior system is replaced by an inferior one, someone is bound to find himself in a situation of being 'ethnocided'... This is the least assumption that can be made, won't you agree?
During 1984 riots, even Manmohan Singh’s family home was about to be burnt down
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