Wound, Waste, History

Wounds are expected to heal. Our very conception of victims and victimhood is based on this hopeful axiom. But not all wounds heal, some remain in a constant state of decay, degenerate, and ultimately risk turning into waste too. It is this possibility of waste that this article explores. The 1984 violence is one of those historical wounds that has neither faded from public memory nor fully healed. At the heart of this unhealing wound is the question of justice that has long been denied to the victims. The judicial affidavits prepared in early 1985 not only narrate the violence that unfolded systematically, but three decades later testify to the inability of the state apparatus to help heal its wounded citizens.