The Punjab Story

by Amarjit Kaur

  Slowly the atmosphere inside the Golden Temple became charged with constant tension. Gone were the idle, endless days of former times. Now everybody seemed to be involved in doing something. Meetings were constantly being held; Amreek Singh and Harmandir Sandhu were less accessible than before and less interested in debating the righteousness of their cause. Bhindranwale himself often spent days without coming out on to the Langar roof.

  At the same time exchanges of fire with the paramilitary troops became more frequent and reports started filtering in about police action in Ferozepur, Moga and other places. The one thing that never seemed to weaken however was Bhindranwale’s resolve to fight back if and when the attack came. ‘They will never take me alive,’ he repeated over and over again.

  In the meantime internal tensions also increased and the two camps were openly at war. Some time in December, Ranjit Singh, the suspected killer of the Nirankari Baba, had been persuaded to leave the Golden Temple and had been taken to Delhi where he was arrested. Huge posters, appeared all over the gurdwara, blaming the Akalis for doing this. It was clear that the enmity between Bhindranwale and Longowal was now a permanent thing.

  A week before Baisakhi, the extremist camp received information from one of their contacts in the Intelligence Bureau that there was a plot to kill Bhindranwale on 13 April. Major General Jaswant Singh Bhullar, one of the former generals in the militant camp, said he warned the Sant that there would be an attempt on his life.

  According to Harmandir Sandhu they immediately took precautions and in the days that followed it became almost impossible for anyone to get close enough to the Sant to take a shot at him. The extremists said that on 11 April they also got information of a secret meeting held between the Akali Dal secretary Gurcharan Singh and two Bhindranwale’s supporters, Surinder Singh ‘Chhinda’ and his girl friend Baljit Kaur. They heard that the two were offered Rs 4 lakhs to kill the Sant and were given Rs 2 lakhs in advance.

  Sandhu’s version is that on Baisakhi, Baljit Kaur, carrying a pistol concealed in a bag, went up to the roof of the Langar and sat opposite Bhindranwale for at least two hours but either got too scared to shoot or did not get the chance because he was so well protected by his guards. Sandhu said, ‘We noticed her sitting there and we also felt that she looked very uneasy but we didn’t know why.’

  In any case Baljit Kaur got up and went down to the Guru Ram Das Serai where she and ‘Chhinda’ are believed to have met Gurcharan Singh again who is then supposed to have told them that since they had already taken half the money they should kill someone close to the Sant.

  S.S. Sodhi who was the senior commander of Bhindranwale’s killer squads, and who had sometimes been seen returning after ‘eliminating an enemy of Sikhism’ and being greeted by the rest with sweets and garlands, was the obvious choice. In the extremist camp he was considered Bhindranwale’s right-hand man in terms of implementing his orders.

  ‘Chhinda’ was sent to invite him down to the Sindhi tea shop, opposite the Serai entrance to the Golden Temple, where Baljit Kaur lay in wait.

  She is believed to have then held out a bandaged thumb and asked Sodhi to examine the bandage to see if it needed redoing and while both his hands were occupied ‘Chhinda’ reached under the table for his pistol and shot him dead at point-blank range.

  After killing Sodhi, ‘Chhinda’ ran off into the bazaar and escaped to his village while Baljit Kaur returned to Bhindranwale shouting that Sodhi had tried to rape her. Explaining why she did this Sandhu said, ‘She knew that Santji was very strict about these things and would have taken action even against Sodhi if her charge was true.’

  Baljit Kaur was then ‘interrogated’ by Bhindranwale’s men and is said to have broken down during the interrogation and confessed on tape that they had been paid by Gurcharan Singh to kill Bhindranwale. In the process she also implicated another Bhindranwale follower called Malik Singh Bhatia.

  A blackboard with ‘Chhinda’s’ name on it was immediately put up near the entrance to the Langar building and chalked on it was the statement that he would be killed in 24 hours. Bhatia in the meantime fell at Bhindranwale’s feet and begged for his life. He was spared with the ominous warning that it would only be till the end of the morcha and he is then said to have gone downstairs and stood near the blackboard where some Nihangs were discussing the events of the day. One of them said that ‘Chhinda’ would be killed soon but there was another man who was also believed to have been involved. Bhatia said it was him but that he had been forgiven by the Sant.

  When the Nihangs discovered who he was, one of them pulled out a sword and hacked his arms off in full view of everyone. He was then dragged off into the Guru Ram Das Serai and killed. His body joined the growing list of bodies that were being trundled out of the temple complex in a sort of tin trunk on wheels. The bodies would be handed over either to the municipal authorities or to the dead man’s relatives.

  ‘Chhinda’ was tracked down and killed that night and two days later the horribly mutilated body of Baljit Kaur, her breasts had been chopped off and there were torture marks all over, was found in a sack somewhere in Amritsar.

  The extremists denied having killed her. They said it was the Akalis who had done this to prevent her giving further information about the assassination plot. Gurcharan Singh, on the other hand, denied the existence of any plot and claimed that all the characters involved in the gruesome drama were former smugglers and the killings had taken place as a result of some internal quarrel. A five-member committee set up by Longowal also absolved Gurcharan Singh but it is an indication of Bhindranwale’s power that Gurcharan Singh had to resign anyway. He finally demonstrated this power when as a result of the Sodhi episode a large number of members walked out of an Akali Dal meeting in the Teja Singh Samundari Hall at the end of April and pledged their loyalty to him. Longowal had lost the battle and the war. He continued to cling on to the shreds of authority that were left to him but it was clear that the so-called moderates had become irrelevant to the dharamyudh morcha.

  In the meantime, Bhindranwale’s death squads continued to spread destruction. On 28 March the Delhi Gurdwara Management Committee president, H.S. Manchanda, was killed at one of Delhi’s busiest traffic intersections. Two weeks later on 16 April, 38 railway stations in Punjab were set on fire in a carefully synchronized pre-dawn operation. An organization called the Dashmesh Regiment took credit for both acts of terrorism and it became clear that a trained military mind was behind them.

  Bhindranwale had no dearth of military minds to call on. In December 1982 when Sant Longowal called a convention of ex-servicemen inside the Golden Temple, 170 officers over the rank of colonel were among the approximately 5,000 ex-soldiers who came forward.

  When the mysterious Dashmesh Regiment made its appearance, however, all fingers seemed to point to a frail, embittered former war hero, Major General Shabeg Singh. In military circles they said if there was a commander-in-chief of the Dashmesh Regiment it could only be him as he was recognized as the foremost expert in urban warfare. It was he who had trained the Mukti Bahini during the Bangladesh freedom struggle.

  Shabeg Singh was dismissed from the army a day before he was due to retire under a special clause which did not even entitle him to a trial. This special clause had never been invoked in the case of any other officer in the history of the Indian Army. Afterwards the matter was handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation who framed two cases against Shabeg Singh, one that he took a truck in somebody else’s name and thereby misused army transport and another saying that he built a house costing Rs 9 lakhs. Shabeg Singh won both cases.

  These were not, however, the reasons for his dismissal and for nearly five years after he was thrown out he haunted political circles in Delhi begging to be given a trial. He even approached Giani Zail Singh who was then home minister and said that if a court-martial was not possible then he should be given a civilian trial or e
ven a civilian court of inquiry so that he could clear his name of what he believed were completely false charges. Nothing was done and Shabeg Singh slowly became obsessed with the belief that he had been discriminated against only because he was a Sikh. ‘The aim was to deny me my promotion because I was a Sikh. This is how Sikhs are being persecuted in the army.’

  Shabeg Singh believed that he had sacrificed the best years of his life for the country. In 12 years of active service he had only taken a six-month break. He fought with honour and distinction in every war and was consumed with bitterness about the ‘reward’ he had got for his patriotism.

  Shabeg Singh was a fanatical Sikh but trimmed his beard and cut his hair to go into Bangladesh disguised as a Muslim. He believed that he had done more to prove his patriotism to India than almost anyone else and that the only reason why he was still a suspect was because he was a Sikh.

  After his dishonourable dismissal from the army he turned more and more towards religion and when I met him in the Akal Rest House, about three weeks before Operation Bluestar, he had been staying at the Golden Temple for three weeks because he had just won the cases that the CBI put up against him and was offering a routine of prayers in thanksgiving.

  He would wake up at 3 a.m., have a bath and be ready by 4.30 a.m. for the Palki Sahib Seva when the Guru Granth is carried from the Akal Takht to the Harmandir Sahib. He would then stay on in the gurdwara and do his Sukhmani Sahib prayers for another few hours and then return in the evening for the rehras, the sunset prayers. In addition, he and his wife, who was seriously ill, used to go every Sunday to the Baba Deep Singh Gurdwara for six hours of meditation and prayers.

  Shabeg Singh was a frail, slight man with a long, flowing beard. He looked more like a Sikh priest than a former general. He said that he did not live at the Golden Temple in any permanent sense but came often because his village, Khiala, was only about 16 km away.

  On the face of it he looked like an unlikely commander of the Dashmesh Regiment and denied any links with it. He was, in fact, quite amused to hear that his name was being associated with it and said, with a half smile, ‘Perhaps it is my fate to have lived through so many wars only to die dishonourably as a terrorist.’

  Shabeg Singh made no efforts whatsoever to deny that he believed in Sant Bhindranwale as a leader. He said, ‘As far as my relations with Sant Jarnail Singh are concerned, there is nothing to suspect. I’ve told you that I am a patriot of a finer mould than the prime minister herself. I have met Bhindranwale. There is no doubt about it, and I also feel that there is a strong touch of spiritualism in this person. He is a man who stands by the truth. The government is deliberately terming him a traitor because his brand of politics probably doesn’t suit them. But the fact is that there is hardly a Sikh in this world who does not accept him as a leader. I also accept him as a leader. I firmly believe that he is the only Sikh born after Guru Gobind Singh who can get justice for the Sikhs as a community in this country where we have been persecuted ever since Independence and suspected individually and as a community as a whole.’

  Apart from Shabeg Singh there were at least two other former generals who were close to Bhindranwale, Major General Jaswant Singh Bhullar and Major General Narinder Singh.

  Bhullar, lived in a beautiful house in Chandigarh surrounded by army memorabilia and elegant objects d’art. There were pictures in silver frames, books by Tolstoy and antiques collected from various parts of the country. It was a world so removed from Bhindranwale’s that there seemed to be no area on which the two could have found something common. Yet, the former general, in urbane English, expounded the same militant views as the extremists in the Golden Temple and talked about how the Sikhs had always been discriminated against. He admitted that he himself had only become aware of the problem during the Asian Games when he was stopped several times on the way to Delhi and ‘humiliated’ by Haryana policemen who insisted on searching him even though he had an identity card proving that he was a former general.

  Like Shabeg Singh, Jaswant Singh Bhullar looked upon Bhindranwale as a saviour of the Sikhs and defended even his anti-Hindu tirades by saying, ‘I have heard most of the speeches and they are most conditional. All that he is trying to say is that if anything is done to the Sikhs settled outside Punjab then don’t forget that there could be reprisals against the Hindus living here. So most of the communal things he says are conditional, for instance he said that if my bus is burned – it has happened before when the Guru Granth Sahib was burned (in Chando Kalan)–then if it happens again I will start killing Hindus.’

  Major General Narinder Singh also lived in Chandigarh and was as unlikely a supporter of Bhindranwale as Bhullar. He said that he had realized during the Asian Games that Sikhs were not first class citizens. He related stories of how many people he knew had been dragged off buses and humiliated in Haryana only because they were Sikhs. It was after this he decided to go to the ex-servicemen’s convention called by Longowal.

  Narinder Singh made Trequent trips to the Golden Temple and was often involved in mediating between Longowal and Bhindranwale when differences arose.

  Neither Narinder Singh nor Bhullar saw anything wrong in the terrorism that was obviously part of Bhindranwale’s philosophy. Narinder Singh said that it was the direct result of police atrocities in Punjab and Bhullar went one step further by saying, ‘You see we find that it is the only thing which shakes up the government so we keep quiet about it.’

  Men who live by the Stengun are always prepared to die by it one day and as the paramilitary forces started inching closer to the forbidden territory of the Golden Temple, the men inside seemed to become aware that the time had come at last for a final battle. In the month before 6 June there was constant activity inside the extremist camp. Gun battles with the para-military forces had by now become a daily occurrence and these necessitated fortifications which seemed to come up overnight.

  Slowly the gun battles became longer and more serious and the security forces started setting up positions on rooftops overlooking the temple. The extremists responded by occupying some houses themselves so that the immediate environs of the Golden Temple became a war zone at least ten days before the last battle.

  In a funny kind of way the extremists seemed to think that they would succeed in holding off an attack. Somehow, they seemed prepared to fight but not to die. Bhindranwale, himself, gave the impression of being confident till the very end. On 3 June, which was the last day that journalists were allowed in, he was seen personally loading guns and handing them out to his followers.

  But after curfew was declared that night and the entire state was closed down for 36 hours it became clear that the army meant business. It was at this stage that a large number of Bhindranwale’s men are believed to have escaped through the more obscure exits from the temple. According to some Akalis, who were there till the morning of 6 June, the only people who stayed with Bhindranwale and fought till the very end were the youths who had belonged to the Damdami Taxal.

  Whoever they were, the army believes that they were up against at least 1,500 extremists of whom about 500 were the really motivated ones. Some hid in tunnels and manholes and continued fighting till two days after Bhindranwale was killed. A couple of shots were even fired at Zail Singh when he visited the gurdwara on 8 June. On the morning of 6 June, while the fighting continued in the Akal Takht and the Harmandir Sahib, army troops surrounded the Teja Singh Samundari Hall and the Guru Ram Das Serai and took Longowal and Tohra into custody. Bibi Amarjit Kaur was arrested at the same time from a room near the Sikh reference library which was later destroyed in a fire.

  Even for the rescued there was a final tragedy when a bomb was thrown into the courtyard of the Ram Das Serai and at least 70 people were killed including the controversial Akali secretary, Gurcharan Singh. Finally, several hours later, the rescued Akalis, pilgrims and SGPC officials were taken out of the gurdwara through a back entrance.r />
  How Harmandir Singh Sandhu happened to be among this lot is a question that people have been asking without finding a satisfactory answer. According to SGPC officials who were there at the time, he was in charge of a gun position on top of the Ram Das Serai and when he saw the army surround the place he came down and mingled with the rest. It is said that he fell at Tohra’s feet and begged to be allowed to leave with the rest of them.

  Controversy surrounds the death of Amreek Singh, Shabeg Singh and Bhindranwale. One priest, who was hiding near the Akal Takht, says he saw them on the morning of 6 June. He says that he talked to them and that they told him they had decided to fight on till the very end in view of the extent of damage to the Akal Takht.

  After this the fighting continued all day and by the evening of 6 June the army was considering the idea of sending a platoon in after dark with the specific purpose of bringing Bhindranwale out. Around 5 p.m., two police officers were sent in to reconnoitre the area and ran into a couple of injured extremists who told them that Bhindranwale was dead and that his body, along with that of Shabeg Singh and Amreek Singh, was lying near the Akal Takht.

  The body had seven bullet holes and was hastily cremated the following day along with hundreds of others which had littered the white marble Parikrama at the end of the battle. So the only member of the inner circle left alive was Harmandir Sandhu. Even Balbir Singh Sandhu is believed to have died in the action although his body was never identified.

  Later, when the army captured the Akal Takht they discovered an escape route that they had not known about. Bhindranwale could have escaped if he wanted to. Why did he choose not to? The answer to that question died with him as did the answers to many other questions. In the villages of Punjab, however, they believe he is definitely alive. Some swear on the Granth Sahib that they had dinner with him only the night before. Others say that the reason why they know he is not dead is because he gave his sister some amrit one day and told her that only on the day when it turned red should she think that he had died. The amrit is still the colour of water so he obviously is alive, they say. The Bhindranwale myth may, by the look of things, prove to be more powerful than the man.