by Amarjit Kaur
Blood, Sweat and Tears
SHEKHAR GUPTA
25 MAY 1984, AROUND MIDNIGHT
On that breezy summer night in sunburnt south-western Punjab, excitement was palpable in the field headquarters of the 9 Infantry Division of the Indian Army. The countdown to the ‘H-Hour’ had begun. While officers went over the plans and systems one last time, troops did a final, reassuring check of the weapons. In the OperationsRoom loomed the by now familiar figures of Major General Kuldip Singh (‘Bulbul’) Brar, General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the Division and Lieutenant General K Sundarji, GOC-in-C, Western Command. Quickly, in his typical clipped tone, Brar laid out his assault plan before Sundarji. And then Sundarji walked across to the ‘enemy.’
He was now listening to the strategy of the defenders, yet another of the Indian Army’s crack infantry divisions, given the task of defending a ditch-cum-bund from 9 Division’s assault. But even as his troops geared up in their defences, there was to be no action for them that night.
For the troops, it was to be, on the face of it, an anti-climax. In a short while, as a terse message landed from higher quarters, Sundarji called off the ambitious ‘Exercise Vajraban.’ It was time for the troops to end the war games, and get into a real battle. Mrs Gandhi had finally decided to put an end to the terrorism in Punjab.
But to the troops and officers in the field, it was still not clear why such an elaborately planned exercise like the ‘Vajraban’ had been called off so abruptly. They had the impression that they too were required to strengthen security on the Indo- Pakistan border, relieving the Border Security Force (BSF) to tackle insurgency in the countryside, a process which had begun a few days earlier. While the troops packed up and waited in anticipation of the marching orders, the top brass had begun giving final touches to Operation Bluestar in New Delhi and Shimla, where the Western Command headquarters was then located. The Operation was still a complete secret outside the strategy rooms.
Even to a city familiar with the screech and whine of rifle bullets and the bursts of automatics, the loud bangs on the morning of 5 June came as a rude awakener. People in distant localities could only make wild guesses, but practically everyone in the walled city had an idea of what was happening. The army’s recoilless guns and a tank had gone into action as part of a softening-up operation to destroy the high-perched firing positions built by Bhindranwale’s men in the Golden Temple complex. There were the two 18th century towers, called Ramgarhia Bungas, flanking the Guru Ram Das Langar, where Bhindranwale had been holding his daily congregation till recently. Perhaps even more formidable was the gun emplacement atop a concrete water tank behind Teja Singh Samundari Hall. Men, highly motivated and charged with religious fervour, had been manning these, watching practically all possible approaches to the temple complex. The high-rise positions covered every inch of these approaches, up to about a kilometre away. The army knew there would be no approaching the temple without neutralizing these positions. The defenders never expected that the army would hit them with artillery of any kind. A measure of their confidence was the small, saffron pennant fluttering atop one of the bungas.
The first shells failed to make much impact. But the army meant business and soon, better ranges and angles were were found. As Gurdev Singh, the acting Akali Dal secretary and one of the survivors in the temple precinct, recalled, ‘Shells hit sandbags and sent them flying, along with men, with flailing limbs. It is only later when the pillboxes and sandbagged firing positions were destroyed that some of the shells went past, without making contact with the targets.’ For Major General Brar and his men, the initial workout was more than merely a softening-up operation before the assault. On the contrary, it was expected to stave off the possibility of a frontal assault. The show of firepower, generals felt, would overawe the defenders, besides serving the tactical purpose of clearing the approaches to the temple complex, should an assault become inevitable.
It did. Alongside the shelling and intermittent exchange of automatic fire, those in and around the temple complex were getting used to one more sound, that of the warnings on megaphones, asking the defenders not to be silly and surrender. These made no impact at all. ‘Let the army come, we will teach them the lesson of their lifetime,’ Bhindranwale often used to say. But his bravado was evidently in the hope that, first, the government would be hesitant to use the army, fearing large scale mutiny by Sikh soldiers and secondly, even if it did, the ‘inevitable’ revolt by the Sikhs not only in the army but in all civil, paramilitary and police services would help him turn the tables. He had told me confidently just a fortnight before the assault: ‘Even if that Brahmin’s daughter (as he sneeringly referred to Mrs Gandhi) sends in the army, there is no doubt that the Sikh soldiers will keep out of it. And we are absolutely good enough to deal with the topi wallas (Hindu soldiers).’ It was the same wishful thinking that obviously added to his men’s overconfidence.
But on this day, they were in for a rude surprise. Commandants of four of the six assault battalions were Sikhs, two of the three commanding generals, Division Commander Brar and Western Command Chief of Staff Ranjit Singh Dayal were Sikhs. And the battalion that launched the first assault, the 10 Guards, was a mixed unit containing a generous sprinkling of Sikhs and led by Lt Col Israr Khan, a Muslim. But the same bravado had left the thousand-odd men to the right of the bungas untouched. Most of these consisted of Akali Dal and SGPC officials and workers, and over 500 pilgrims who had come in on 3 June, the martyrdom day of Guru Arjun Dev. Though they all took the warnings seriously, there was no getting away without risking one’s life as bullets flew all over. Only 117, including a large number of labourers engaged by the SGPC, took the risk of walking out and surrendering to the army. As subsequent events proved, they were the ones who weighed the odds correctly. Of those who chose to stay inside, no less than half never came out and many ended up maimed for life.
‘One-five, infantry suffering heavy casualties. One-five, infantry suffering heavy casualties. Tank support imperative and necessary,’ crackled the voice on the wireless set as the generals and staff paced about impatiently, following the course of the battle, ensconced in a high-rise building with an overview of the complex. Only about an hour earlier, they had taken the painful step of launching the infantry to free the temple complex of its gritty occupants. The unit chosen to lead the assault was 10 Guards, known for decades for its fierce, do- or-die reputation. On this evening of June 6 it was being tested severely.
Four years back the compound in front of the Golden Temple’s main entrance used to be a wide, wind-swept patio, forming a kind of oasis in the congested walled city. But the first fallout of the Akali agitation that began three-and-a-half years ago had been encroachment by structures facing the entrance that rapidly devoured the open space. A tall wall barred a part of it. The new stalls for keeping pilgrims’ shoes too were constructed outside the temple complex, reducing the space further, limiting the approach to a fairly narrow passage. And it was more than effectively guarded by pillboxes along the parapet of the Parikrama (circumambulation), on the clocktower, on the main entrance gate and, most effective of all, on the terrace and from inside the rooms of Hotel Temple View, formerly a favourite with the pilgrims and which had some time back been occupied by the militants as part of their strategy to set up watch-posts along the periphery of the temple. Similarly, the ancient Brahm Buta Akhara overlooking the narrow entrance to the serais’ side was a militant stronghold. Before the main assault, the army wanted the two buildings cleared and decided to use the jawans of the CRPF and BSF instead. After a brief firefight, the CRPF was able to clear the Akhara early in the evening. Hotel Temple View posed more problems as militants fought out and the BSF commandos could overcome resistance only after lobbying grenades in some of the top floor rooms. The BSF commandos suffered two casualties in the process.
The forward posts removed, the way was more or less clear for the Guardsmen who were e
xpected to be joined in from the serais’ side by men of 26 Madras and a company of the Kumaonis. The generals were still hopeful of a quick capitulation. As an officer recalled later, the optimism stemmed from the fact that while the Guardsmen spilled into the side facing the temple and the Akal Takht, followed by men of the 7 Garhwal from the gate facing the main entrance, the collective assault would break the defenders’ will. But two factors made it a futile hope. One, that the defenders were not rational or calculating, weighing their risks. Second, the operation did not exactly go as planned and the troops failed to spill into the Parikrama at the same time, thus unable to surprise the militants with a sudden, massive invasion. On the other hand, to militants just had the Guards to deal with in the beginning, and the troops took the brunt of firing from all three sides.
The Guardsmen had slipped in, hugging the outer Periphery, and thus escaping the initial fire from the pillboxes along the parapets that covered the approaches but unable to do much about the intruders walking right beneath. However, the secure feeling was momentary as the first company, led by Captain Jasbir Singh Raina, a Sikh, broke in. A body of men, also led by a Sikh junior commissioned officer (JCO), set about the task of clearing the militant-infested rooms along the Parikrama. But the Guards battalion, led by Lt Col Israr Khan had run into more than it had expected. Even the initial volley fired by the militants felled nearly a score of Guardsmen, including Captain Raina. The intensity of fighting is best described in the words of an officer from one of the paramilitary forces who happened to be leading a picket in the nearby Katra Ahluwalia. ‘I will never forget that scene,’ he said. ‘When the troops first went in, one of my colleagues had been joking with the Army Medical Corps men accompanying the two ambulances parked at the edge of the market, facing the temple. He had been telling them how futile was their wait going to be as the militants were not likely to put up a fight. And how we were proved wrong. Within minutes we found nine bodies lying there and the men in the ambulances had more than a handful.’
But the Guardsmen were not the ones to be daunted by casualties. Noticing that the militants, obviously following Shabeg Singh’s advice, had sited machine-guns 23 cm above the ground along the Parikrama, the army officers quickly instructed the troops to refrain from crawling. ‘It was difficult, but the only tactics we could possibly have used,’ recalled an officer, describing how troops were told to use for cover the rather slender marble pillars along the Parikrama, and spring out whenever there was a momentary lull in machine-gun fire to lob a grenade inside a room. But that did not solve the problem, for, as the troops discovered later, Shabeg Singh had had thick walls built, dividing each room into several sections. Consequently, often even when a grenade burst, it cleared out only one section of the room while the militants hiding in the rest did a bloody kamikaze act with approaching jawans, shooting, though they knew they wouldn’t get away.
But even as the troops pressed on, they were being badgered by the generals to do more, and quickly. While the ground floor of the Parikrama itself was taking time, the generals were desperate that the first-floor parapet positions be cleared out first as these were threatening the troops coming in from other sides. The troops made a mad rush for the staircase at each end of the Parikrama. But Shabeg had not earned his reputation of a wily, doughty commander in the army for nothing. He had anticipated just this and the sprinting troops ran headlong into automatic fire from men who sprang out of the manholes, strategically situated at the foot of each staircase. With no time to lose, the commanders ordered the troops to throw assault ladders and get up on the parapet.
As the Guardsmen fought on, troops of the Madras, Kumaon and Garhwal Regiments were facing their own problems. The Madras battalion, commanded by Lt Col Panikkar, had not been able to join up with the Guards at the expected time because of the extraordinary strength of the steel gate guarding the entrance from the serais’ side. A Vijayanta tank had to be used as a battering ram to break it open. Further, as soon as they entered the complex, the 26 Madras troops encountered fire from militants hiding in the piao (water stall) in front of Guru Ram Das Serai and immediately suffered casualties. By the time they were neutralized, it was time for a company of Kumaoni troops to move into the Parikrama from the same entrance. In the dark, as confusion reigned, the troops of the two units got mixed on the steps. Inevitably, the officers had to go through the painful process of first separating their respective troops before joining battle.
Around this time, jawans of 7 Garhwal, a unit drawn from the reserves of the 15 Infantry Division posted at Amritsar and not directly participating in the action, came in from the gate facing the main entrance. Firing a recoilless gun in confined space, two of their jawans died of the back-flash.
This brought into the arena Brigadier (now Major General) A.K. Diwan (nicknamed Cheeky), then the deputy GOC of 15 Infantry Division who had initially come in to coordinate the transfer of his unit’s troops to the field of action but now stepped in to see what had gone wrong. Inexorably, he was drawn into action which was to prove even more fierce than the fight with the Chinese for Chushul in 1962 when, as a young Captain, Diwan had led a contingent of tanks of the 20 Lancers Regiment of Armoured Corps. The feat of taking and effectively using tanks at some of the highest altitudes in the history of modern warfare had brought him a Vir Chakra. On the night of 5 June, however, he was at the head of not tanks but infantrymen who were not sure which side the enemy was and on which their own troops. The danger of jawans getting caught in fellow units’ crossfire was real and officers in the Parikrama recall the silhouetted figure of Diwan blinking a torch and shouting at the men of Madras and Kumaon regiments, ‘Don’t shoot, I am the Deputy GOC.’ Diwan’s providential arrival on the scene was to have decisive impact on the situation as it helped control the confusion with jawans from various units crammed on the Parikrama floor. With the infantry busy clearing up the Parikrama, the task of ‘contacting’ the Akal Takht was left to the highly-trained commandos of Special Frontier Force (SFF), the secret outfit run by the RAW at Chakrata near Mussoorie. Originally the installation, also called ‘Establishment 22,’ had been set up after the 1962 Indo-China War with American help to train Dalai Lama’s followers in guerrilla warfare to carry out hit-and-run raids against the Chinese garrisons in Tibet. With the passage of time and change in the geo-political situation, the Establishment had lost its original relevance. But it is here now that the government maintains its best-equipped and trained commando outfit, officered mainly by men drawn from the parachute and commando units of the army. The SFF commandos had been the only ones to have had the opportunity to practise the raid on a fairly accurate mock-up of the temple complex at Chakrata and Sarsawa near Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. It was now the same men, commanded by Lt Col Chowdhury and dressed in their usual black dungarees and bulletproof vests, trying to head stealthily for the Akal Takht from the flanks, hoping to deliver a quick coup de grace. But that was not to be as Shabeg and his men had the approaches well covered. With casualties mounting, the commandos found progress impossible and advised ‘one-five,’ the code for the command post to use tanks. The commanders decided to first use the old-fashioned foot soldiers instead.
With the benefit of hindsight it is often asked now why the commandos did not try to break into the Akal Takht through one of the back lanes or through one of the adjoining rooftops. The logic is that a frontal assault without any element of surprise stands in inherent contradiction of commando warfare. But officers involved in the action said the possibility had been examined earlier, but given up since most of the buildings behind the Akal Takht were found to be occupied and fortified by Bhindranwale’s men. The situation had obviously changed for the worse since April 1984 when the commandos had first begun making reconnaissance visits in CRPF uniforms. It was also because of this increasing fortification and rapid increase in militants’ qualitative and quantitative armed strength that the government had given up its initial plan of a pure
ly commando assault in the temple complex in April. According to the first plan, drafted in longhand by Shiva Swarup, Director-General of the CRPF, a joint force of commandos drawn in from all paramilitary forces, including the BSF and Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), was to prise out the militants after breaking in through a gap in the Parikrama wall, to be blasted with explosives. The scheme demanded that the army release some armoured personnel carriers and 84 mm, shoulder-fired Carl Gustav guns. One of the reasons the scheme was not pursued seriously was the army’s refusal to part with the equipment. Later, however, a less practical plan was rehearsed, involving about 300 SFF commandos. This was given up as rehearsals threw up weaknesses and Bhindranwale fortified himself better inside the Akal Takht. Even that night, it was not a task for the commandos any more.
Alongside, in the commanders’ quest for a relatively bloodless operation, attempts were being made to toss ‘CS’ gas canisters into the Akal Takht. Only slightly stronger than the tear-gas that the police use, the ‘CS’ gas grenades are a lot milder than the stun grenades used by Britain’s famed Special Air Service. Yet, if aimed correctly, these would have served the army’s purpose of at least leaving the defenders confused and with visions blurred and while they tried to recover, the Akal Takht could have been taken. But even this did not work. Heavily sandbagged windows and entrances left no gaps through which grenades could be lobbed in even when the commandos got perilously close to the Akal Takht. Soon, however, the army found the cost of continuing the operation prohibitive. As an officer recalls, these grenades can be lobbed only at close range and to get that close in that situation amounted to committing suicide. The whole marble square between the Akal Takht and the Darshani Deori was covered with machine guns, some of them peeping most menacingly out of battlements cut in the thick marble wall of the Akal Takht building, less than half a metre above ground. This was Shabeg Singh’s killing ground. As the marble floor left jawans devoid of any cover whatsoever, the militants’ combination of grazing and plunging fire, sweeping every bit of the area, made any approach impossible.