The Punjab Story

by Amarjit Kaur

  It was in such a situation that the foot-soldiers were made to launch assault after assault. The Kumaonis led by Major Mishra, almost made it to the building’s entrance, but with disastrous consequences. A murderous volley of fire cut down the assault team, leaving Major Mishra and at least seven other ranks dead. Even as the bodies lay sprawled in front of the marble citadel, the commandant of the Madras Battalion, asked to follow up the attack, requested for volunteers. Led by a young captain, the dare-devil bunch of ten volunteers leapt across and, with unparalelled courage, pressed on despite fire to enter the Akal Takht building, the first and the only troops to succeed in doing so while resistance was still on. But to their misfortune, the section ran headlong into about 30 militants who were running down the narrow staircase. In the shootout that ensued in the confined space, only the most fortunate on either side could have survived. Of the troops, six died, two crawled back, wounded, and one, a JCO, lay wounded in the passage with the captain trying to bring him back. For nearly half an hour, as the officer tried desperately to reach his wounded comrade in the dark, the commanders waiting outside presumed he had fallen too. Finally, finding it impossible to trace his wounded JCO in the dark in the heap of dead and wounded men and amid heavy fire, the officer crawled back. At this stage, the futility of launching frontal infantry attacks was clear to the commanders. As one of them later said, a whole division of troops would have to be sent in against such well-planned and built defences, manned by people with determination. It was time to go for drastic measures.

  Meanwhile, it was not only in front of the Akal Takht that troops were dying. The Parikrama was covered by deadly snipers hiding in the Harmandir Sahib, shooting at whoever stirred out in the open. Officers and men survived jumping from one marble pillar to another. Later, the heavily chipped pillars bore ample evidence of the fire which could, in all probability, have come in only from the temple. But that was one fire the troops were prohibited to return and officers recall situations of near insubordination as they tried to prevent their men from firing back. In the last-minute address to the troops before the assault, Brar had said: ‘In no circumstances are you to fire at the temple. I know this amounts to sending somebody to the boxing ring with one hand tied behind his back. But here, this will have to be done.’ The orders to officers were to hand out summary punishment, even dismissal to anyone violating this order and it is only because of this that the temple still stood after the operation more or less intact, barring some bullet marks that could have resulted from strays in the heavy crossfire. Among those who fell to the snipers hiding in the temple was Lieutenant Ram Prakash Ruparia of the 26 Madras who caught a bullet in the neck on June 6 as he tried to climb down from the first floor of Parikrama to bring water for his troops lying prone for hours under a withering sun. Ruparia died three days later in the field hospital and, in a touch of brutal irony, his body was sent to his native village in Haryana on 10 June, his birthday. ‘You let us down, Ram Prakash,’ said his grief-stricken father repeatedly. ‘We had always thought it will take at least 20 to 25 bullets to kill Ram Prakash. And here, see, you could not survive one.’ For the officers and men of Madras Regiment this was the sad end of a simple, courageous and extremely popular officer, often called ‘Robert Prince Ruparia,’ his modified, anglicized name a tribute to his rustic simplicity. Ruparia’s men did not fire back at the temple.

  Initially, the commanders’ concept of drastic measures was the use of wheeled, ‘Scot’ armoured personnel carriers (APCs) that were supposed to take troops safely into the vicinity of the Akal Takht. A number of APCs of a mechanized infantry unit were kept outside the temple gate for such a contingency. But as one was brought in, it ran into problems. The fairly high marble steps at the entrance facing the serais made it a perilous drive in for the APCs. A tank was thus used to crush the marble steps, one at a time and reversing, to ensure that it did not roll down, blocking the only safe passage available for the entry of tanks into the Parikrama. But there was yet another surprise in store for the troops as the militants unleashed a surprise weapon, a 40 mm, Chinese-made RPG-7 and one of the first shots bored through the side of the lead APC, wounding Captain Jagdev Singh, in command. The immobilized vehicle was now a sitting duck and the commanders ordered the troops to abandon it. It was in that process that the driver, while alighting, was shot in the eye and killed.

  The generals had by now begun to realise that they had miscalculated the determination, firepower and the skill of the defenders and that could no longer delay the inevitable, the use of tanks. The commandant of the commando unit had even initially asked for the use of armour and many other officers on the ground also held the same view, but the top brass was hesitant for valid reasons. Firstly, the use of tanks for shelling would certainly cause substantial damage to the Akal Takht building. Second, even if the main gun was not used, the tank tracks were bound to damage parts of the marble floor of the Parikrama. It was for that reason that they had refrained from using the tracked, sturdy, Soviet-made BMP-I, a heavily armed infantry combat vehicle (ICV). Instead they had used Scot APCs with wheels. Such an APC was more vulnerable to a barrage of sustained, intense fire. But they were running out of time and patience. Sunrise was not very far away and the commanders reckoned that, once there was light, survival would become impossible for each one of the nearly 800 troops still inside the Parikrama. Besides, reports coming in from villages surrounding Amritsar were consistently alarming, with the army and police having a tough time dealing with mobs of angry Sikhs marching towards Amritsar to ‘save the Harmandir Sahib.’ All along the day on 5 June, helicopter reconnaissance patrols had been spotting mob formations all over the district. One mob that got perilously close to Amritsar town in the direction of the Raja Sansi Airport was intercepted in the nick of time by a column of jawans who overcame it only with the use of intense automatic fire. Much of it was, however, directed at the mob’s flanks, killing just eight persons.

  Similarly large mobs had been gathering near the milk village of Verka and at Golwad near Jhabal, about 25 km from Amritsar, under the leadership of a preacher Baba Bidhi Chand. With every passing hour army and police officers had been reporting an increase in the intensity of mob fury. As an officer later said, ‘Each successive mob that we encountered was more furious and required use of greater force. Now there is a limit to which you can use force against a crowd. After all, you can’t use artillery against them and kill hundreds of people.’ In retrospect, the marching of mobs was one pre-planned Bhindranwale operation that failed to come off. For months since he began fearing a police entry into the temple complex his speeches ended with exhortations like: ‘They say they will send police into the Harmandir Sahib. Let them do so. Many of you come and ask me, “what will happen to you in that case?” Don’t worry about us. We will take care. But believe me, once Harmandir Sahib is attacked, there will be no future left for the Sikhs outside. You all will be butchered. So the moment you get the first inkling of an attack take up arms and start taking revenge.’ In a series of tell-tale euphemisms that would follow, the hint always was that the revenge was killing of Hindus. On 3 June, just while the army was sealing the trap around his bastion, he had told me: ‘We can hold them off for long enough here. But the real job will have to be done by the Sikhs all over the world. My message to them would be, apne apne haath se apna kaaj sanwariye (use your own hands to do what is good for you).’

  The exhortation taken out of the holy Sikh scriptures later became the militants’ code-word to begin slaughtering Hindus and to march to the Golden Temple as soon as the siege began, and it had apparently gone around even on the morning of 3 June, hours before the first columns of the army moved in. On that quiet morning, India Today photo editor Raghu Rai and I had gone to the small mandi-town of Rayya, nearly 40 km from Amritsar, to look at the impact of the Akali call to blockade the transport of wheat at the mandis. On the way back, we decided to take a detour via the village of Nagoke, about 20 km f
rom the Grand Trunk Road. Nagoke has been the cradle of militancy and Kulwant Singh Nagoke, one of the first Bhindranwale men to have died at the hands of the police, hailed from here. My idea was to visit his place as part of a continuing study of the phenomenon of extremism. But the atmosphere in his house was tense, with his widow doing all the talking and a bunch of eight young men keeping absolutely quiet. The truth dawned on us as we were leaving. One of the youths took me aside and dropped the bombshell, saying: ‘I have seen you with Santji (Bhindranwale). So we feel sorry for you. Please run away as soon as you can. Word has gone round to kill all the pandits (Bhindranwale’s favourite expression to describe all Hindus). No one will even bother to stop your car, they will just shoot. And I am afraid I cannot help you beyond the boundaries of this village.’ And then he added, as an afterthought, ‘Hun kam shuru ho giya hai (now the campaign has begun).’

  Thus, while the commanders battled with the option of sending in the tanks, the ‘campaign’ had been on for over 60 hours and sheer providence had so far prevented a large-scale massacre. While the local authorities were getting increasingly worried, pressure had been mounting from Delhi as well to achieve results quickly as curfew could not be maintained for an indefinite period and a relaxation was unavoidable the following day.

  Initially, the idea of Generals Sundarji, Dyal and Brar was to use tanks only for giving armoured cover to the advancing infantry while giving the militant battlements a workout with its turret machine gun at close range. To break the will of the defenders, the bigger bangs were to be provided by the 3.7 inch howitzer, which fires at fairly close ranges horizontally, unlike the modern artillery pieces that fire only at a trajectory, which renders their use tricky at short ranges and in confined spaces where half a metre here and there could make all the difference between victory and disaster. An artillery colonel – a specialist observation post flier – was instructed to haul a howtizer up on a rooftop overlooking the Akal Takht. The choice initially fell on the Punjab National Bank building. Civilians from nearby houses helped the gunners haul up the howitzer with ropes. But after repeated attempts failed, another building nearby was chosen. The stage was now set for the fire assault on the Akal Takht building.

  Initially, the howitzer fired only smoke shells to find the target. But the real fireworks followed shortly afterwards and these were responsible for the damage to the domes of the Akal Takht. Yet, this failed to have the desired effect quickly enough and, with first light just a little over an hour away, the tank-men received the clearance to open up with the main, 105-mm gun. Over 80 shells were fired and these accounted for the whole front facade of the Akal Takht and pillars. To begin with, as the tank-men failed to distinguish the Darshani Deori from the Akal Takht, thanks to its peculiar location in straight line with the latter, a few shells were misdirected. These caused the destruction to the small Darshani Deori domes and also part of the Toshakhana where chandni, the bejewelled canopy gifted to the temple by Maharaja Ranjit Singh, was burnt. Some shells – it is difficult to say whether from the tanks or howitzer – also fell in the congested localities behind the Akal Takht, flattening scores of houses. One of the high-explosive shells in fact strayed and landed across the town, over 5 km away, inside Shahid Nagar, the officers’ residential colony in the cantonment, wounding an unsuspecting jawan. Odd misses apart, the guns did their job effectively and as dawn broke on 6 June, the only resistance in the temple complex came from the snipers. The main defences of the Akal Takht had been ‘neutralized’.

  The troops were, however, still not sure about the fate of Bhindranwale and his key associates like Shabeg Singh, Bhai Amreek Singh and Thara Singh and since intermittent fire continued from the Akal Takht, no attempt was still made to storm it physically.

  The first indications of a capitulation came around 11 a.m. Officers recall the strange spectacle of about 25 militants rushing out of the building, firing at random and running straight into death as troops opened up in all their pent-up fury. A few threw away their weapons and managed to jump into the Amrit Sarovar, the holy tank around the temple, in sheer desperation. Jawans picked them out quickly. The generals guessed that the mad dash was an indication that Bhindranwale was either dead or wounded or had, confirming their worst fears, escaped. Yet the situation was considered reassuring enough to allow the district authorities to order a two-hour relaxation in curfew in the afternoon.

  And how Amritsar came to life in just those two hours! No vehicles were allowed; there was thus a procession of thousands of men on all roads, out shopping for food, vegetables and medicines. Rotting, week-old dussehri mangoes sold for Rs 12 a kg. There were long queues even in front of a group of shops selling fodder for cattle – so acute had fodder shortage been during the curfew that, with restrictions on movement making it impossible for them to take their cattle out for grazing, many in Amritsar had taken the painful decision of leaving their cattle astray, to fend for themselves. But even in such bleak times, the Punjabi sense of enterprise was visible all over, nothing representing it more effectively than the figure of a Sikh youth with polythene shopping bags slung over his shoulders, skating merrily past The Mall, beating the ban on plying vehicles, even bicycles.

  Deeper inside the walled city, the atmosphere was different as crowds welled to have a closer look at the exteriors of the temple complex, a persistent throng also hung around the brick-red Kotwali building, barely 400 m from the temple, where the army had been bringing in the captured militants. But the crowds and even police officers present at the kotwali were not as keenly interested in the prisoners as in the two private trucks parked outside, loaded with bodies of people killed inside the temple complex. The policemen and municipal sweepers, entrusted with the task of clearing the bodies, had not done it with any respect to the dead. Limbs of the dead still hung outside the sides of the vehicles and blood seeped out of the crevices in the truck. In the later stages of the operation, however, as scores of bodies hidden inside rooms and under the debris rotted, stank and even grew maggots, the army had a tough time persuading even the municipal workers to pick them. Through sheer intimidation they succeeded in bringing a bunch of sweepers from Islamabad, a predominantly Dalit locality. But officers recall that a number of them fainted after picking just a body or two. As a major concession now, the civil and military police officers supervising the ‘scavenging’ allowed the workers to remove the dead men’s belongings as compensation. Later when even that did not work, the army’s universally accepted currency, rum, was used in generous measure.

  The brief, two hour reprieve from curfew brought for the onlookers other shocks too. There was, for example, the gory sight of about a dozen suspected militants caught from the Akal Takht, being pushed by jawans towards the kotwali in spite of their injuries and beaten up rudely in the kotwali compound. Immediately afterwards, they were lined up in the verandah, facing a light machine gun, while a Sikh officer questioned them. Each bit of information they revealed was passed on to the troops to be conveyed to the officers still battling inside. The machine gun never boomed though wild rumours later talked of suspected militants having been machine gunned by the dozen in the kotwali verandah.

  Closer to the temple, surprises were of the other variety. The whole road was lined up on both sides with tanks, APCs, recoilless guns and jawans carrying Carl Gustav guns and LMGs besides the usual self-loading rifles and carbines. Their faces showed fatigue and anger. There were dozens showing dressings and pieces of adhesive plaster on minor wounds. But on the road leading out of the serais, facing the Brahm Buta Akhara, there were two trucks, each carrying bodies of six troops on bunks along the sides. At least two of the bodies I was able to look at closely still showed fresh beads of perspiration, indicating that the jawans could not have died very long ago. While the troops still maintained their composure to some degree, the CRPF men guarding the street were quite obviously full of anger. There was a young sub-inspector with bandages all over his face and lip
s, who beat up any Sikh found in saffron turban, considered to be a sign of protest. Also, the communal schism could not have been clearer in the heart of the city. Scores of people were roaming on the road, offering chapattis, pickle, dal and lassi to the jawans. Not one of them was a Sikh. In a tell-tale gesture shortly afterwards, the army authorities forbade the troops from accepting eatables from any civilian as it could lead to their getting a biased image. An officer even went around confiscating utensils to discourage the do-gooders.

  Inside the temple, however, it was business as usual despite the relaxation in curfew, and outside one could still hear the sounds of gunfire, so close it made you wish you could hide. It was only much later in the day that a wounded sevadar crawled out of the Akal Takht building and informed the army that while Bhindranwale and Amreek Singh had died, Shabeg Singh lay wounded. The army now entered the ruins of the building, snuffed out the challenge from a handful of survivors who, while keeping the troops engaged, had been hurling arms and valuables into the deep well behind the Akal Takht, perhaps for use in future – it was all fished out later by divers requisitioned from the navy. The body of Bhindranwale was found in a heap of about 40 corpses near the Akal Takht basement. Shabeg and Amreek were not very far away, though it took the officers a little time recognising the former major general’s body. In spite of the destruction that they had initially planned to avoid, the officers heaved a sigh of relief. The main part of Operation Metal, meant to snuff out militants inside the Golden Temple complex, was now over, even if at an enormous cost. Officers recall how the whole building smelt of cordite and gunpowder. The floor in some rooms inside the Akal Takht was covered with ankle deep heap of spent cartridges. Senior officers, in fact, wondered how the militants had been able to fire so much during the night. As one of them said, ‘Automatic fire is all right, but you can’t do it all the time. Your weapons develop problem and, if nothing else, the barrels melt unless you give adequate pauses between bursts.’ The frequency with which the militants fired could have earned an armyman a severe reprimand for misusing weapons. A number of militants, officers recall, had deep blue bruises on the shoulders, a clear indication of their tenacity in defence. They may have been short on rationalism, but motivation was obviously around in abundant supply, as was evident from the efforts some of the arrested militants made to touch the dead Bhindranwale’s feet, lying on display on slabs of ice near the main entrance.