by Amarjit Kaur
After several visits to the Golden Temple it slowly became clear that this was how the hit list was prepared. Bhindranwale dispensed his own version of justice. People would come from all over Punjab with complaints against policemen, officials, judges or just other people. Their complaints would be carefully noted down by Racchpal Singh and action taken of one kind or another. If the complaints were against Hindus the punishment was generally death; Sikhs could sometimes be let off if they came and begged forgiveness. If someone received a favour from Bhindranwale then it was understood that in future he would consider himself one of his men to be called on if the need arose. By the end he managed to establish a network of spies in the villages through whom he silenced those who did not believe in him.
By the time I first met Bhindranwale he had been living inside the Golden Temple for almost a year. He moved in on 19 July 1982 after his two lieutenants Amreek Singh and Thara Singh were arrested. He seemed to have learned very quickly the art of getting headlines and by 1983 he had become a big media star. He had come a long way from those early days in 1978 when he was first discovered by an important Congress(I) member and his school friends.
Bhindranwale was born in Rode Village near Moga in 1947. His father Jathedar Joginder Singh married twice and he was the second son of the second wife. According to his family he was interested in religion from a very early age and dropped out of school after class five to concentrate on learning the Sikh scriptures. He then joined a religious group called Chakravarti Gurmat Prachar Jatha Bhindran and eventually ended up as a follower of Sant Kartar Singh of the Damdami Taxal.
This Taxal, whose headquarters are in Mehta, was founded by Baba Deep Singh, a legendary Sikh hero after whom the Baba Deep Singh Gurdwara in Amritsar is named. It has been built at the spot where he according to legend, was beheaded while fighting Ahmed Shah Abdali. He is said to have held his head in his hand and fought on till the Golden Temple, nearly a kilometre away, and finally fell in the Parikrama. It was he who founded the Damdami Taxal as a school for teaching Sikh scriptures and over the years it came to be recognized as an institution which taught the essence of Sikhism.
Bhindranwale took over from Sant Kartar Singh, Amreek Singh’s father. Amreek Singh should have been the natural heir since he was brought up in the Taxal and groomed as its next head but he was at the time of his father’s death studying Punjabi literature at Khalsa College, Amritsar, and already deeply involved in the politics of the All India Sikh Students Federation and he encouraged Bhindranwale to become the next head of the Taxal. In those early days Bhindranwale was strongly influenced by Amreek Singh who, it is believed, had hoped to manipulate him for his political ends.
Bhindranwale took over as head of the Damdami Taxal in 1977 and almost immediately started having problems with the Nirankaris. Contrary to the popular belief that he took the offensive, senior police sources in Punjab admit that the provocation came in fact from a Nirankari official who started harassing Bhindranwale and his men.
There were two or three Nirankaris in key positions in Punjab in those days and they were powerful enough to be able to create quite a lot of trouble. The Nirankaris also received patronage from Delhi which made Sikh organizations like Bhindranwale’s and the Akhand Kirtani Jatha, headed then by Bibi Amarjit Kaur’s husband, Fauja Singh, hate them even more.
The enmity culminated in the Sikh-Nirankari clash outside the Golden Temple on 13 April 1978 (Baisakhi) in which 13 Sikhs, including Fauja Singh, were killed. The following day the Babbar Khalsa was formed as a breakaway faction of the Akhand Kirtani Jatha, created with the specific aim of taking revenge on the Nirankaris. It was also from this point that the Akhand Kirtani Jatha and Bhindranwale parted company because Bibi Amarjit Kaur felt that Bhindranwale had shown cowardice by not turning up for the anti-Nirankari demonstration despite having vowed to lead it.
It was shortly after the Baisakhi incident that Bhindranwale started being noticed in Delhi. Mrs Gandhi had now been out of power for a year and, thanks to the Janata government, she was now seriously thinking in terms of a comeback. When casting his eyes in the direction of Punjab, the Congress(I) member is believed to have confided to some of his friends that since the Akali Dal was doing quite well the only way to break their hold would be to try and find some religious leader who they could build up as the real representative of Sikh interests.
The amateur politicians then started their search for a sant. They approached at least twenty who refused their offers of money and fame and finally turned to Bhindranwale who in those days was becoming quite well known in the village around Mehta for his zeal in converting people back to the true faith. He and a group of his youthful supporters would tramp through the dust of village streets, armed with sticks and full of aggression against anyone who looked as if he may have clipped a few discreet inches off an unruly beard or may have imbibed an intoxicant of any kind. His philosophy in six words was Nashey chaddo. Amrit chhako. Gursikh bano. (Give up addictions. Take Amrit. Become good Sikhs.)
One of these new political recruits remembers that it was quite difficult to persuade Bhindranwale to see that there was more to life than his simple, rustic philosophy. He remembers that Bhindranwale had said that it would be very wrong to divide up the Sikhs which is what their strategy would do and he also remembers him saying often, Kaka sarkar naal ladna bahut aukha haunda hai (Son, it is a very difficult thing to take on the government).
The Congress(I) leader and his friends were, however, masters at making offers that were impossible to refuse and Sant Jarnail Singh and his men, heavily financed by the Congress(I), fought the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) elections against the Akali Dal in 1979. This was the birth of the Dal Khalsa. The Akali Dal won all but 4 of the 150 seats and among the other groups who fought against them were Dr Jagjit Singh Chauhan and the Khalistan lobby and Amreek Singh as a member of the AISSF.
After the humiliating defeat of all his candidates Bhindranwale turned to his Congress(I) mentors and said that this was clearly a sign from the gods that what he was doing was not right and so he decided to go back to preaching Sikhism instead. Once more the persuaders got to work and Bhindranwale did what he could to assist the Congress(I) in the 1980 elections.
Then on 24 April 1980 Baba Gurbachan Singh was murdered and Bhindranwale made no efforts to hide his approval. He was taken in for interrogation but could not be implicated. The following year on 9 August 1981 came the murder of Lala Jagat Narain and Bhindranwale’s nephew was one of the suspected killers. He himself was believed to have been involved and there was the extraordinary drama of his arrest. The authorities allowed him to decide where and how this would take place and he took the opportunity to demonstrate his first show of strength – 100,000 people gathered at gurdwara Gurdarshan Prakash, his Mehta headquarters, and at least 20 were killed in the violence that followed his arrest. After which he was released unconditionally.
By then he appears to have understood that the name of the game was being in the right place at the right time and that Amritsar being the political centre was a better choice than Mehta and so it was from Amritsar that he started his anti-tobacco movement and the agitation for getting ‘holy city’ status for the old part of Amritsar. Then came the final move following Amreek Singh’s arrest after which the Akali Dal appears to have also understood the importance of Amritsar for they picked up their dying morcha and shifted it from Kapoori to join hands with Bhindranwale in a new dharamyudh morcha.
In retrospect when one looks at the events that led to Operation Bluestar it is clear that the first flashpoint was the killing of DIG Atwal. Several policemen were prepared to swear that they had seen a youth wearing a greyish kurta and a black turban run inside the Golden Temple after shooting the officer dead at point blank range. Later there were even those who said that the DIG was followed while he was still in the Parikrama and that his murder was without doubt the result of a plo
t hatched inside the Golden Temple. The police was of the view that they should have been allowed to enter and arrest the suspect.
All the factions that inhabited the gurdwara at that point were, on the other hand, convinced that the murder was a government plot devised to find an excuse to enter the temple complex. Nevertheless, although the possibility of a police entry inside the gurdwara did start being discussed, nobody lost much sleep over it and life carried on in a fairly carefree fashion.
The extremists and the moderates seemed to spend long, idle days doing nothing. Bhindranwale never gave any audience till around 10 a.m. and generally began the day with a trip to the Harmandir Sahib accompanied by his Stengun toting bodyguards. Afterwards he would meet the journalists (nobody was ever refused an interview) and other outsiders who had come to see him. He loved the sound of his own discourses and could talk endlessly on being a good Sikh, or being a good Hindu or on religion in general.
While on the subject of politics he would never miss an opportunity to make a snide remark about Longowal but apart from this there was no overt tension although the Akalis spent most of their time debating whether Bhindranwale was still being paid by the Congress(I) or not.
In the afternoons everyone rested and a silence would descend over the place as the gurdwara was turned over for a few brief hours to the pilgrims who would come and sit on the white hot marble and gaze at the Harmandir Sahib or sit in shaded spots and listen to the soft notes of kirtan.
Then suddenly at around 4 p.m. the whole place would burst into life. Political slogans, shouted over loudspeakers, would drown out the kirtan and hundreds of volunteers wearing saffron bands on their heads would march from the Manji Sahib to the Akal Takht where they took vows to give their lives for the dharamyudh morcha.
A priest would make the volunteers swear that if the dictator of the morcha sent for them at any time they would come whether it meant leaving their own wedding ceremony or even the last rites of a loved one.
The jathas leaving to court arrest was the event of the day and the volunteers were often addressed by Longowal, Bhindranwale and other important leaders. Shouting the Sikh battle cry they would leave the gurdwara through what was called the ‘Street of the Serais’, where the Akali Dal office and Guru Nanak Niwas are.
Once the jatha left peace would descend on the Golden Temple again and dusk would see the place converted once more into just a place of worship.
In those early days Bhindranwale and Harmandir Singh Sandhu were the two most sought-after people in the extremist camp till the rediscovery of Khalistan secretary-general, Balbir Singh Sandhu. For a few weeks in the middle of 1983 he took the centre stage when the press suddenly remembered that the so-called Khalistan headquarters were in the Guru Nanak Niwas and this reminded the government and the opposition about something they should have known anyway which is that Balbir Singh Sandhu had been living in room 32 since 1980. It was from here, in a much publicized event, that he issued the first blue and gold Khalistan passport on 13 April 1981 to Gopal Singh Shahid, a farmer from Mehta.
The Guru Nanak Niwas, during the days that it was inhabited by Bhindranwale and his men, was like a rabbit warren of dingy, dismal rooms in which you expected every moment to come across some armed criminal or some illegal activity. The arsenals were believed to be in the string of heavily padlocked rooms on the ground floor but these were out of bounds to outsiders.
Room 32, the Khalistan headquarters-cum-residence of the secretary-general, was at the end of a damp corridor full of bathrooms. The only nice thing about the room was that it had a view, through a barred window, of the Manji Sahib Gurdwara with the Golden Temple in the background.
Balbir Singh Sandhu hardly ever left the room. His food used to be brought up to him and he had a small electric stove, placed on one of the window-sills, on which he heated tea for guests.
The Khalistan secretary-general was a large, affable man in his mid-fifties. He spoke very chaste Punjabi and had a world-view based on a strange mixture of progressive ideas borrowed from Marx and some very rigid beliefs based on Sikhism. Before he became actively involved in the Khalistan struggle he was a writer of progressive plays and books. In 1970 he published a play called ‘Lahu Dhara’ which received considerable acclaim.
The refreshing thing about Sandhu was that, whereas Longowal clothed his statements in ambiguity and Bhindranwale talked in parables, he always said exactly what he meant. He believed that even the so-called moderates in the Golden Temple were in the final analysis fighting for Khalistan and would have to say so sooner or later. Although Bhindranwale had been hesitant to admit a link with the Khalistan secretary-general, Sandhu said openly that they met each other almost every evening.
He believed that Bhindranwale had helped the Khalistan movement greatly by encouraging Sikh fundamentalism and the Akalis had made a major contribution with the resurrection of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution.
He said, ‘Sant Jarnail Singhji Khalsa Bhindranwale has drawn the Sikh masses back towards the gurbani and given them the strength to go back to following their old traditions, this has helped to create in their hearts a desire for Khalistan. Where the Akali Dal is concerned, we feel that this morcha in the name of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution has strengthened the determination among the people to have Khalsa Raj. If the Akalis betray the morcha, then the people will lose faith in them and there will be a direct wave in favour of Khalistan.’
Sandhu was convinced that nothing would stand in the way of Khalistan becoming a reality. If the army entered the Golden Temple, he believed, that the process of formation of Khalistan would only be helped along the way.
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the tension between the moderate and the extremist camps began to come out into the open but by September 1983 the facade of peaceful coexistence had begun to crumble,
The Akali Dal, attended in July that year, an opposition parties meeting on Punjab, arranged by Democratic Socialist Party president, Mr H.N. Bahuguna, in Delhi and agreed to a plan under which the water dispute would go to the Supreme Court and Chandigarh to Punjab.
Inside the Golden Temple, however, a campaign was mounted against them by the extremists who mocked them for even thinking of a solution that did not include all the demands in the Anandpur Sahib Resolution. In what looked like an almost deliberate attempt to destroy any alliance they might be considering with the national opposition parties Bhindranwale made his first blatantly anti-Hindu statement around September when he said he would kill 5,000 Hindus if the police did not release a minibus of his that had been impounded.
Bhindranwale was clearly making a conscious effort to embarrass the moderates into either taking a hardline or accepting a back seat in the agitation. A whisper campaign started in the Golden Temple against ‘the weakness and treachery’ of Longowal.
It was around this time that dead bodies started appearing in the sewer in a street directly behind the Guru Nanak Niwas. The first one was discovered some time in August or September when a terrible stench hung over the street and filtered through to the SGPC office. Bhan Singh, the SGPC general-secretary, telephoned the senior superintendent of police and reqested a police party to come and ‘look in the sewer where there appeared to be a body.’
The police party, after taking special permission from the SGPC to enter ‘their territory,’ opened up the manhole and fished out the body of a youth who appeared to have been tortured to death.
In the next few weeks three or four more bodies were fished out of the same sewer in similar conditions. Inquiries inside the Golden Temple were answered with sullen stares in the direction of the Guru Nanak Niwas. Those who were prepared to talk only did so in whispers. They said that the victims had betrayed Bhindranwale and had been tied in sacks and beaten to death. Nobody dared to even remember their names. They were just traitors.
The police, of course, could do nothing at all because the mur
ders had taken place in ‘their (extremists’) territory.’ A section of the Brahma Boota Bazaar had already become part of extremist territory, as had a couple of streets in the immediate vicinity of the temple. The police behaved as if they needed a passport to enter this area. One senior officer said he had tried driving into the Brahma Boota Bazaar late one night but the minute he got within firing range of the Golden Temple’s entrance he had noticed a machine-gun pointed at him from the roof of the Akal Rest House.
Slowly Bhindranwale’s ideology of violence began to become the official policy of the Golden Temple. Longowal seemed to retire deeper into his lair and was hardly ever seen in public. If the SGPC and the Akalis disapproved of what was happening they kept it to themselves. The only person who seemed to have one leg in either camp was Gurcharan Singh Tohra, the SGPC president. He was clearly at home in both the camps.
By September 1983 Amreek Singh and Thara Singh had been inadvertently released. They were acquitted of some of the charges against them and were meant to have been rearrested, on other charges, the minute they left court but, for some mysterious reason, the police officer who was to have made the arrests did not show up and they were given enough time to be whisked off to the Golden Temple in a brand new Fiat car that had been waiting outside the court.
A year in jail had convinced Amreek Singh that the moderates in the Akali party were wrong and that Bhindranwale was right. Despite this, however, to the very end he retained a gentle, rather polite manner and never exhibited the venom and fanaticism of Bhindranwale or Harmandir Singh Sandhu.
Having been brought up in the religious atmosphere of the Damdami Taxal he had, even as a student, the mannerisms of a Sikh priest. Those who were students with him at Khalsa College remember that he wore traditional clothes even then. Ironically, his advent into Akali politics was in the moderate camp and he was close to Prakash Singh Badal.