The Punjab Story

by Amarjit Kaur

  After he became president of the AISSF it is believed to have been Tohra who became his mentor and urged him to sever the student body’s links with the moderates. Right up to the time of his arrest in 1982, Amreek Singh was considered a moderating influence on Bhindranwale.

  From the moment he came out of jail, however, it became clear that if there was a choice between the extremists and the moderates, the AISSF would stick with Bhindranwale.

  On 20 September 1983 the students’ body, officially meant to be a branch of the Akali Dal, held a meeting in the Manji Sahib Gurdwara which turned into a massive show of support for Sant Jarnail Singh.

  From the dawn of that day an endless stream of trucks started pouring into the complex and parking outside the serais. Truck after truck unloaded hundreds of armed youths shouting ‘jo boley so nihal, sat sri akal.’ Some carried guns, others carried hockey sticks or lathis. Nobody came unarmed.

  Then the leaders started arriving, each of them accompanied by armed bodyguards so that the dais became a virtual forest of Stenguns and rifles.

  Longowal made one of his rare public appearances and the meeting was also attended by senior Akali leaders, senior SGPC officials, former army men like Major General J.S. Bhullar, journalists like the Akali Patrika editor, Bharpoor Singh Balbir and most district presidents of the AISSF. The star of the show was Bhindranwale in spotless white and carrying a huge sword in a scabbard of gold thread.

  For some inexplicable reason the meeting went virtually unnoticed in the national press and by the government although at least 80 per cent of the speakers spoke as openly for Khalistan as it was possible to do without giving it a name. Even Longowal said, ‘We say raj karega Khalsa. Well it is to rule that we are fighting and it will be a Raj of the kind that Guru Nanak dreamed about.’ He added that this was the fourth struggle that the Sikhs had taken part in – the first against the Mughals, the second against the British, the third against the Emergency and now the fourth for ‘our own freedom.’

  Bhindranwale’s sense of morality was so warped that between speeches, the audience was made to listen to anti-government and anti-Hindu songs in which concepts like non-violence were mocked and sneering remarks made about Gandhi. ‘Our Bapu (Guru Gobind Singh) had arms and fine arrows and their Bapu had an old man’s walking stick.’ Jathedar Jagdev Singh Talwandi, who was by now closer to Bhindranwale than Longowal, and the editor of the Akali Patrika, Bharpoor Singh Balbir were arrested that day for making secessionist speeches but no attention was paid to the speeches by moderates like Longowal and Bibi Rajinder Kaur, the former MP, who said, ‘The slavery that we faced under the British has been nothing compared to the slavery we have faced since 1947.’

  The message of the meeting was that the extremists were now in control and Balbir Singh Sandhu who heard the proceedings from his room overlooking the Manji Sahib Gurdwara commented afterwards, ‘Sooner or later every Akali leader will be forced to ask for Khalistan because this is what the people want.’

  Once the daily jatha had left for the Kotwali police station, this time with more than normal ardour, the stars of the show repaired to various dimly-lit rooms in the Guru Nanak Niwas. In one such room, amid streams of drying turbans, I met Amreek Singh for the first time. He was relaxing with Harmandir Singh Sandhu and several other AISSF members and conversation inevitably turned to ‘threats’ to the very existence of Sikhism.

  Amreek Singh said the Sikh children were losing ties with their roots because they went to schools where from day one were taught about Hinduism and Hindu culture. ‘They are told that Gandhi is their Bapu and Nehru their Chacha. Their Bapu is Guru Gobind Singh not Gandhi.’

  Sandhu produced a textbook for class eighth children in Delhi schools and turned to a page which said that Guru Gobind Singh had started fighting the Mughals because they killed his father. ‘This is the kind of rubbish our children are being taught and they tell us they are not threatening our culture,’ he said. This was the first of many similar discussions with Sandhu and Amreek Singh most of which ended up with them saying that although they were not fighting for Khalistan, it would become inevitable unless the Sikhs could have a portion of India (as envisaged in the Anandpur Sahib Resolution) in which their culture would be dominant over Hindu culture.

  The story of Harmandir Singh Sandhu is a strange one. He was one of the two or three people very close to Bhindranwale. He was the most outspoken of the lot, an articulate champion of Sikh militancy and yet in the early years of his political life he is believed to have been very close to Raghunandan Lal Bhatia, the president of Punjab Congress(I), and is even said to have campaigned for police commissioner P.S. Bhinder’s wife during the 1980 elections.

  He was the son of a small, quite well-to-do farmer Rattan Singh Mattia and became general-secretary of the AISSF at the same time that Amreek Singh became its president. He studied law at Khalsa College.

  Before hiding in the Golden Temple, he had spent a year in jail and had 20 police cases against him. Sandhu was articulate and the only member of the inner circle who spoke fluent English, so his main job in the temple was to act as an interpreter for Bhindranwale. In one of the conversations we had he explained the rise of the military sant by saying, ‘You see, for a while Sikh youths had turned their face away from Sikhism, mainly because the Akali leadership had become passive – they had adjusted to the so-called democratic system. To be a Sikh and to be young necessarily means to be adventurous. Sant Bhindranwale offered us the adventure.’

  Slowly the venom that was being spewed out every day from the Golden Temple started to get into the very blood of Punjab and this culminated inevitably and horribly in the killings of six Hindu bus passengers in Dhilwan village, near Jullundur on 5 October 1983. The men were singled out by Sikh terrorists and shot dead for the simple reason that they were Hindu.

  The following day a terrified administration handed in its resignation and the state was put under president’s rule. While the whole country reacted with shock and horror, the extremists in the Golden Temple showed neither remorse nor sorrow.

  Naturally, they denied that the killers were hiding in the gurdwara, as the police claimed, but when asked what he felt about what had happened Bhindranwale replied ominously, ‘Six Hindus are killed and the government falls. Two hundred Sikhs have been gunned down by the police and nothing has been done. This shows that to the government, Hindu lives are more important than Sikh lives.’

  Bhindranwale, despite being the prophet of hate that he was, had managed to touch some kind of raw nerve in that nebulous, barely comprehended phenomenon called the Sikh identity crisis and his sympathizers were not all terrorists. Around the time that president’s rule was declared I met a former civil servant Gurtej Singh who was very close to the Sant and believed, in fact, to be one of his chief ideologues. Gurtej Singh was in the Indian Administrative Service’s Andhra cadre for ten years and resigned in November 1982 after propagating the theory that the Sikhs were a separate nation.

  Gurtej Singh was the exact antithesis of his comrades in the Golden Temple. He had grown up in the privileged world of upper-middle class India, a world of public schools, expensive colleges and financial security. He lived in Chandigarh in a large, well-furnished house whose only concession to the cause was an enormous picture of the Sikh hero Banda Bahadur which hung in the drawing room.

  Gurtej, more than anyone else in the Bhindranwale camp, represented the conflicts of the Sikh identity crisis. His only explanation for having sacrificed a career in the Indian Administrative Service was that he believed fundamentally that the Sikhs were a separate people to the Hindus and that they could never get a fair deal in the existing political setup. ‘If Ireland were to be made a part of Russia and then it were said that in Ireland there is one man one vote, it can elect a government and therefore it should submit to the government of the majority, would it be fair? You see we are facing the tyranny of the majority. Like-
minded people can get together and elect their own universally acceptable government. But not when they are poles apart.’

  He would quote Guru Nanak to prove that Sikhs were not Hindus. It was the first guru who said ‘Na hum Hindu, na Mussalman,’ he would point out, and add that to say Sikhs were Hindus was like calling all Christians Jews because Christ had been Jewish.

  Bhindranwale, to him, was almost a messiah and could do no wrong. He even absolved him of the terrorism charge, saying, ‘All I can say is why does the government not manage to catch a single person in these incidents? Even those men of his whom they caught, have been released. If Bhindranwale is capable of organizing terrorism on such a scale and the government can do nothing about it, they should hand over power to him.’

  By the end of 1983, the scale of terrorism had become truly astounding and it was beginning to look as if Bhindranwale really was the ruler of Punjab, but inside the Golden Temple his opponents had decided to take a stand. Longowal, who for months had watched silently, as Bhindranwale became the de facto leader of the dharamyudh morcha suddenly seemed to feel the need to fight back.

  As if realizing finally that you cannot fight Stenguns with words he turned to the Babbar Khalsa and Bibi Amarjit Kaur for armed assistance and on 15 December a civil war broke out between the extremists and the moderates which lasted till the very end.

  Early on the morning of 15 December, six armed youths belonging to the Babbar Khalsa group entered the Guru Nanak Niwas which was recognized as Bhindranwale territory. The Babbars lived mainly in the Guru Ram Das Serai and the Akal Rest House, situated on the other side of the Teja Singh Samundari Hall. According to Balbir Singh Sandhu who witnessed what happened, from room 32, ‘These youths came in looking for a fight. They marched into some rooms occupied by Sant Jarnail Singh’s men and told them to get out. They said the rooms were theirs.’

  Bhindranwale had at least 200 armed men staying in the Guru Nanak Niwas at the time but instead of fighting the Babbars, he and his followers packed their belongings and moved by that afternoon into the Akal Takht.

  Bhindranwale said later, ‘I did not want to desecrate the sanctity of the Harmandir Sahib by allowing a fight to take place, that is why I moved.’

  In the moderate camp, however, they said that the move was a political stunt and the Babbar Khalsa, who were now ironically part of the moderate camp, saw it as a yet another indication of Bhindranwale’s cowardice. ‘Six unarmed Babbars managed to scare away 200 armed men,’ scoffed Jathedar Sukhdev Singh who headed the Babbar Khalsa.

  About two days later people in the Ram Das Serai heard shots being fired in one of the rooms and rushed in to find Santokh Singh, a follower of Bhindranwale, dying in a pool of blood. The extremist camp swore that they saw a member of the Akali Dal youth wing coming out of the room. Within hours the victim’s relations had collected outside the SGPC office and started shouting that the Akalis were responsible for what had happened. The dead man’s mother beat her breast and said Longowal had done nothing to help her whereas Bhindranwale had immediately promised financial assistance.

  Inside the Teja Samundari Hall, which housed the Akali Dal and SGPC offices, there was little sympathy forthcoming. In fact, when a senior SGPC official was told about the rumour that it was a member of the Akali Dal who had been accused of committing the murder he said angrily, ‘What about the men they have killed? What about them?’

  Once again it was left to Tohra to act as mediator. He flitted between the roof of the Guru Ram Das Building, where Bhindranwale had now taken to holding court in the December sunshine, and the Teja Singh Samundari Hall opposite. There were confabulations and secret meetings and ostensible efforts to resolve the dispute but the battle lines remained drawn with the Akalis, the Akhand Kirtani Jatha, the Babbar Khalsa and the SGPC on one side and Bhindranwale, the AISSF and the youths from his Taxal on the other.

  As a result of the bloodless coup in the Guru Nanak Niwas the Babbar Khalsa suddenly emerged from the shadows. Jathedar Sukhdev Singh, a youth of about 28, who dressed like a Nihang, started requesting journalists to come up and meet him in a small, sunless room in the Akal Rest House. He would talk about how it was really the Babbars who had killed most of the Nirankaris so far and how they would continue to kill them (the toll was already around 40) because they followed the dictate of the Akal Takht and they were only abiding by an edict (hukumnamas) issued by them.

  The extraordinary thing about the Babbars, (there were about 40 of them) was that they could come and go from the Golden Temple as they pleased because the polce had no idea who they were. They never had themselves photographed.

  Sukhdev Singh said that his organization had nothing to do with the Akali Dal or Bibi Amarjit Kaur but it was six Babbars, armed with Stenguns, who guarded her room in a portion of the Akal Takht, quite close to where Bhindranwale lived

  She had agreed to meet me but I was asked to wait because some ‘intellectuals’ from Chandigarh were inside talking to her. I was led into a large hall in which her bodyguards also sat. It was a freezing December morning so they sat huddled on the floor under thick quilts, with only their Stenguns and rifles showing.

  There was a lot of snickering going on over how Bhindranwale had ‘fled’ from the Guru Nank Niwas and a lot of remarks about how he was a bad Sikh because he practised untouchability, vegetarianism and other things that had nothing to do with Sikhism. They also felt that since he allowed people to touch his feet he had set himself as a guru which was completely forbidden in Sikhism.

  Conversation turned to weapons and they said that Bhindranwale and his men had enough guns to arm a batallion. There were also some light-hearted complaints about how difficult it was for them (the Babbars) to obtain guns and how nice it would be if they could lay their hands on some of Dhirendra Brahmachari’s Spanish guns.

  Bibi Amarjit Kaur lived in a room which was constantly filled with the sound of kirtan from the Golden Temple of which there was a perfect view. She was a short, fat woman who retained the stern, spinsterish manner of the headmistress she had once been. She taught for several years in an Amritsar girls school but gave up to come and stay in the gurdwara where she wanted to listen to kirtan and find peace.

  The Bibi, as she was always referred to, did not like Bhindranwale because she never seemed to have forgiven him for not having led the anti-Nirankari demonstration in which her husband was killed. She believed that the Nirankaris would not have become violent had he been there. She was not anti-Hindu in the sense that Bhindranwale was but in every other sense she was as much of a hardliner as he was. According to her, ‘If the centre wants peace in Punjab then they must fulfil the demands listed in the Anandpur Sahib Resolution. Except for four subjects (defence, foreign relations, currency and general communication) the state must control everything else and the Sikhs must rule. If the centre does not agree to this then there will be Khalistan.’

  The Bibi believed with a fanatical conviction in the ‘mission’ for which her husband started the Akhand Kirtani Jatha. The mission was to fight the threat to Sikhism posed by sects like the Nirankaris, the Neeldharis and the Radhasoamis as well as the threat from Hindu organizations like the RSS and ‘anti-Sikh people like Charan Singh.’

  Like the other hardliners she believed that the Sikhs had not been given a fair deal in independent India. ‘The Sikhs have been turned into slaves. Look what happened during the Asian Games. Look at the fact that only in Punjab have 47,000 people had to go to jail to try and make Punjabi the official language. Look at the fact that the Sikhs never get top jobs.’

  For a while after Bhindranwale moved to the Akal Takht, it looked as if Longowal had managed to get the reins of the morcha back into his hands. Bhindranwale had taken to sulking on the roof of the Langar building as if he had somehow been isolated from the mainstream. The moderates, on the other hand, organized a successful state-wide bandh on 8 February and had even agreed tentatively
to begin negotiations with the government again.

  Their brief, hopeful moments centre stage were abruptly ended, however, when Hindu-Sikh violence erupted in Punjab and Haryana on 14 February. The incidents in Haryana, in which Sikhs were burned and publicly humiliated and gurdwaras were desecrated, resurrected Bhindranwale and he rose mightier than ever before because for once he had been proved right.

  ‘Kill the Hindus who have done this.’ he thundered in his speches, tape recordings of which were now being distributed in the villages. After the 14 February violence he said, ‘We have tried to stick to peaceful methods but after observing these recent incidents, I think the time has come for the Sikhs to unsheathe their swords.’

  He made it increasingly clear that he was against Hindu-Sikh fraternity and friendship. ‘They are destroying our gurdwaras, they will not stop till we make them eat steel channas (gram). Arm yourselves, be prepared. There are no courts to try those who murder our guru or the Granth Sahib.’ ‘Our guru,’ said one Sikh, ‘could fight, 125,000 (sawa lakh sey ek ladaoon). We have calculated that with a total Hindu population of 66 crores, it comes to only 35 per Sikh. Imagine only 35, not even a hundred. So don’t think of yourselves as weak.’

  Outside in the city of Amritsar there was curfew, as there was in at least five other Punjab cities. The state seemed to be coming to a grinding halt and slowly the security forces started closing in on the Golden Temple.

  Paramilitary pickets were now visible from the Golden Temple itself and once or twice they got close enough to provoke exchanges of fire. The undercurrent of fear and impending doom that had always existed inside the gurdwara suddenly seemed to surface. Bhindranwale’s bodyguards were doubled and during his daily sojourn on the roof of the Langar armed men, wearing saffron turbans and carrying light machine-guns would position themselves on all four sides. Fortifications started coming up at strategic places and an iron fencing was erected around the main entrance to the Golden Temple. The preparations for war had begun.