The Punjab Story

by Amarjit Kaur

  If such were his spirit of accommodation, it was also true that he could be an altogether shrewd and successful schemer and calculatedly play hard to get. In April 1983, Raghu Rai, the photographer, and I were working on a magazine’s cover story on Punjab. Our plan for the perfect cover picture was to somehow persuade the four Sikh leaders – Bhindranwale, Longowal, Tohra and former chief minister, Parkash Singh Badal – to pose together. Given Longowal and Badal’s ill – disguised antipathy for Bhindranwale it was a tall order. Still, we persevered in our persuasion of Bhindranwale, with Raghu exposing yards of film to soften him to the suggestion. Finally, he acquiesced and himself fixed a time and place for the shot: he would arrive the following morning at 7 a.m. sharp on the roof of the Teja Singh Samundari Hall provided we could get the others to agree.

  It was a difficult job to talk them into it but, obviously, the idea of the four Sikh leaders appearing together on the cover at a time when the dissensions in the leadership were being widely aired, was a scheme the political leaders thawed to. Provided, they said, that we had made sure that Bhindranwale would turn up. With messages being passed to him till late at night – and assurances received – Raghu and I returned to our hotel quite pleased at our little coup. The next morning there was a drizzle and the clouds refused to clear up, but early and eager for a unique picture we were waiting on the roof of Teja Singh Samundari Hall. One by one the three leaders – Longowal, Tohra and Badal – appeared and waited in the rain for Bhindranwale’s arrival. The already embarrassing prestige issue as to who would arrive before, Bhindranwale or Longowal, became more embarrassing as the minutes ticked by and the assembled leaders grew wetter in the rain. Eventually, Tohra, the only one with any clout in Bhindranwale’s camp, sent two messengers one after the other to haul him out. Back came the message: there was no Bhindranwale in Guru Nanak Niwas. He had chosen the exact moment for going into Darbar Sahib for his morning darshan. After a drippy photo session, the leaders thankfully dispersed, but the sting of it was not lost on Longowal, especially after the cover appeared with a closeup of Bhindranwale looming upon the picture of the three leaders. When I next saw him to ask about his viewpoint on politics of the moment, he giggled nervously and said: ‘What viewpoint? Go ask your friend next door for viewpoints. We are not worth much given the space we get on your cover. I mean, you shoved us all into the bottom of his beard.’

  If Bhindranwale was pleased at the success of his manoeuvre, he did not show it. Incensed by quotations inside that betrayed his anti-Hindu feeling, he refused to speak till a taperecorder was switched on. By now, the thin congregations of the year before had swelled into a daily swarm. A shamiana had been erected to shade the people from the afternoon sun. A spanking new taperecorder faithfully recorded every word he uttered and the latest ultra-sensitive Sony microphones were being brandished by a vastly-expanded squad of armed men who checked visitors at each flight of stairs. Lying on the same camp cot, with his toes thrust out for devotees to touch as they came in, he quickly pocketed cash offerings himself. It was now more difficult than ever to carry a sane or rational conversation with him. He would bark short, hard answers if he felt up to it. Or simply turn his face away. The only remarkable things he said to me, in an irritated high-handed-fashion, was that ‘whoever performed those great feats (the murders of the Nirankari leader and Lala Jagat Narain) deserves to be honoured by the Akal Takht ... If their killers came to me, I would weigh them in gold.’ And some especially nasty jibes about Sikh Congress(I) politicians whom he called ‘sarkari Sikhs.’ This was Bhindranwale approaching his prime: a saviour touched by divinity in the eyes of some or a raving fanatic preaching hatred in the view of others.

  The Bhindranwale now emerging in the complex web of growing violence and intrigue was the skilled political operator and arsenal builder, unraveller of hit lists and lethal blackmail. His power grew proportionately with his myth. His myth, in turn, buttressed his dictat which ricocheted through the city, so that people in Amritsar speak of the period as the period of ‘Bhindranwale’s government.’ Simultaneously grew his authority as a religious and administrative leader: there were those who saw him as the ultimate dispenser of justice, the final arbiter on affairs social and temporal. He presided over marriages and ruled on property disputes; there was no area of life that his brand of extremist violence did not cast its ominous shadow upon. ‘It was as if he had hijacked the whole town,’ explained the general secretary of the largest Hindu temple in Amritsar later.

  Looking back, the astonishing fact about Bhindranwale’s meteoric, if terrifying, rise is that it took him less than a year to accomplish. True, it was a multiplicity of factors, both intentional and inadvertent, that fanned the aura of his myth and prowess. But it was not only the centre’s continuing policy of drift, the weakening credibility of the Akali leadership and the defunct institutions and disabled politics of Punjab that propelled Bhindranwale to the forefront. His evil genius lay in grasping every twist and turn of the shifting scenario and capitalizing on every error of judgement made during the government’s negotiations with the Akalis.

  Equally, it was his charismatic appeal, and what it came to stand for among sections of the Sikhs who identified with him and today deify him. It was his capacity to offer them an alternative system, however subversive and trigger-happy, in place of one that had failed to keep pace with the galloping progression and dynamism of the people of of Punjab’s. His fatal flaw was that his religious, ethos and political ambition failed to accommodate the aspiration of nearly half Punjab population, which happens to be non-Sikh. In gathering Sikh grievances under the all-purpose umbrella of a Sikh religious revival, Bhindranwale further isolated Punjab’s Hindus. He succeeded in communalizing a society already polarized by the ongoing Akali agitation of three years. And his reign of terror drove the wedge so deep that a completely secular, wholly integrated society became afflicted with deep-seated scars.

  If Bhindranwale’s method of striving towards Sikh aspirations (whatever their fluctuating demands) was bloody and vindictive, it is because his interpretation of Sikh history was that of an illiterate village zealot: it proved rigid, iconoclastic and myopic in a modern secular state. A brief foray into Sikh history may serve as an example that motivated Bhindranwale in the direction he took.

  In 1607 when the sixth Sikh guru Hargobind took charge, he stood at the Akal Takht which he had established, and there he adopted two swords, one symbolizing spiritual power and the other temporal authority. He adopted regal paraphernalia and introduced martial traits among his followers. He issued hukumnamas among them and commanded them to bring arms and horses instead of cash offerings. It is with no hint of irony that one can locate the parallel in Bhindranwale: his move from Guru Nanak Niwas to the Akal Takht in December 1983 was not merely a move to safer ground. The symbolism of the guru’s example was not lost on him. He too was combining his spiritual power with temporal authority. He too was campaigning among his followers to collect weapons as well as cash offerings. It was a brilliant populist move. It served to enhance his aura as a truly spiritual leader, someone beyond the arm of the law as well as a remarkable upholder of the guru’s example.

  Reactions to Bhindranwale today, specially in Amritsar, where his authority was most strongly felt, show the degree to which opinion is polarized along communal lines after the Operation Bluestar. While a denunciation of the army action is unanimous and unequivocal among Sikhs everywhere, there are few who can openly find fault with Bhindranwale or his tactics, even if they suffered at his hands.

  His popularity, if anything, has grown in the wake of the ‘sacrilege’. Sikh shopkeepers whose shops had been destroyed due to two nights of crossfire in bazaars like Maniaran, Papad Bazaar and Tarkhanan Gali which lie directly behind the Akal Takht, pinned the entire blame of the battle upon the government. Bhindranwale, on the other hand, was viewed as a great man, a deeply religious saviour or a martyr. Two weeks after the Operation, rumour
gripped the entire city that he was alive: that he had escaped miraculously, that he was safely in Pakistan, that he would one day be resurrected. ‘No one saw his last rites so it is difficult to believe he is dead,’ said Shyam Singh, a prosperous trader in Papad Bazaar whose shop had been razed to the ground. ‘People like us,’ he continued, ‘were very dependant on Sant Bhindranwale. On various occasions we visited him to sort out disputes and he always had time for us. He gave good advice. He was a man concerned about the problem of every Sikh.’ Others, if they were willing to concede that he was dead, referred to him and his men as shahids or martyrs, thereby establishing their noble end in the tradition of Sikh gurus.

  The wave of outrage among Sikhs was generally directed towards the government, but on occasions spilled over to encompass Hindus. The sense of hostility was evident in the most commonplace exchange of conversation. Coming out of the Golden Temple among the rush of first visitors on 25 June, I was walking along an excitable group of Sikh women, returning home after witnessing the devastation inside. I casually asked one of them what she thought about it. Bitterly turning upon me, she snapped: ‘You should know. It’s your raj.’ Registering the insult aimed directly at a Hindu, I retorted: ‘Not my raj. It’s army raj.’

  ‘Well,’ she shot back sharply, ‘the army belongs to Indira Gandhi and Indira Gandhi belongs to you lot. Go ask her what there is to see inside.’

  In the Sikh mind, the reaction to the army action had discernably hardened into the following equation: the army belongs to the government and the government belongs to Hindus. The example of Hindu offensiveness most often quoted by Sikhs after the action was the fact that in some Punjab towns they had distributed sweets in celebration of Bhindranwale’s extermination.

  Further offence was felt either due to a lack of authentic information put out by government media, such as the All India Radio and Doordarshan, or lack of its reliability. Television viewers in curfew bound Amritsar, for instance, were not shown the extent of damage to the Golden Temple till 2 July, over three weeks after the Operation. During that period they were fed on fleeting glimpses of the temple or shots of the weapons seized inside so often, that the crass repetition reduced government’s credibility further and heightened the hostility. As a result, the suggestion that the pile-up of arms found inside had probably been planted by the government to discredit Sikhs gained credence. The government media’s reports of the narcotics hoard found inside the temple, which were later contradicted, was quoted as one example of the government’s effort to malign Sikhs. Sources of information being limited in the weeks after the action (stringent censorship was imposed on local newspapers) the television viewing habits of Amritsar’s population also became polarized: Sikhs generally gave greater credence to Pakistan television’s slickly produced, carefully propagandist news bulletins while Hindus quoted from Doordarshan reports. ‘The government has been vindictive towards Sikhs,’ said Sardar Atma Singh, acting president of the SGPC who was later arrested. ‘On the one hand it has set the army upon us, and on the other they have silenced our voices through censorship.’

  The Hindu reaction after the army action was one of palpable relief, as if a long-festering sore had at last been decisively and successfully cauterized. Hindus generally spoke to applaud the government decision and gave graphic accounts of Bhindranwale’s excesses. ‘It is as if we have found another life,’ said Bawa Joginder Singh, a wholesale trader in woollens whose shop had been looted by an angry Sikh mob in November 1982 in Bazaar Ghanta Ghar, a stone’s throw away from the main Golden Temple entrance. For two years, he said, people like him had been subjected to listen to daily indoctrination and anti-Hindu speeches on loudspeakers from Manji Sahib, a public hall on the verge of the Golden Temple. ‘Listening to those speeches day in and day out, you could feel the poison brimming over. It was a calculated assault on Hindus and Hindu sentiments. Our status had been reduced to that of targets for shooting practice.’

  His neighbour, a businessman called Pran Mehra who deals in nylon yarn, said that his business had been so badly affected in the past two years that he had almost stopped coming to the shop. ‘My retail counter sales were down by 90 per cent. There were simply no customers. I had originally taken this office because I thought it would be such a convenient address, being close to the Golden Temple. I did not realize how quickly it would become a curse.’ The curse, claimed Mehra, lay in the daily threat of Bhindranwale’s men arriving to extort money. ‘There was no way anyone could refuse. Only 45 days before the action, his men came to me and asked me to vacate the office because they wanted to use the building as a morcha. I just pulled the shutters down that evening and stayed away.’ Another shopkeeper in the vicinity said that Hindu-Sikh relations, strained for two years, had deteriorated in the aftermath of the army action.’ Today every Sikh feels let down and vengeful. One of my customers said to me, ‘We’ll see you in two or three months after the army leaves.’

  Even moderate Hindu opinion is based on fear of a vengeful Sikh reaction when the army leaves Punjab. Satish Mahajan, a well-known textile mill owner whose family has been in business in the city for 32 years, says that ‘it is a case of being once bitten, twice shy.’ ‘The army action is bound to have some reaction sooner or later. Citizens who have burnt their fingers once feel that such a reaction must be dealt with effectively. That can only happen if there is a massive overhaul in the civil administration. Or chaos will return once the army leaves.’

  The sense of relief is as understandable among Hindus as the overriding anguish and anger among Sikhs. Primary among the scares the Akali agitation wrought for the Punjabi Hindu, traditionally the shopkeepers, traders and industrialists of Punjab, was economic. It was the threat of having to close shop indefinitely. Over fifty per cent of Amritsar’s population of about six lakhs being Hindu, and the majority of them being merchants, they have been sitting in their shops for two years watching their business run aground. ‘Even if we closed our shops, where would we go?’ A textile trader in the city who had been there since Partition told me last year, ‘People like us have been uprooted once. We had to flee our homes when Pakistan was created. We won’t flee them a second time in our lives. We won‘t leave because Sikhs want Khalistan. This is our home and we will fight for it and die here.’

  Such a threat, remote and intangible two years ago, became more and more perceptible as Bhindranwale’s terror tactics gathered momentum. Their extreme phase began after he had shifted into the Akal Takht. As the killings and threats of violence became more wanton, and citizens saw for themselves or heard stories about the fortifications being built inside the Golden Temple and the arms being collected, the forebodings were no longer hypothetical. Especially, as there were daily instances of people directly coming to harm.

  Even if some of the specific instances of blackmail and extortion quoted in Amritsar today may be coloured by the fact that the fountainhead of fear is eliminated, some of the stories are worth recording because they come from sources whose integrity is unimpeachable. And also because they provide a record of what was a very harrowing time in the life of a once-prosperous city that came close to paralysis.

  One businessman I know had his car stolen from under his nose in January 1984 while his family visited an ice-cream parlour on Lawrence Road, a popular thoroughfare in the city. He said it was futile to raise an alarm because the men who drove away in the car were armed. And although a crowd collected, policemen on patrol duty were approached and later the theft registered, nothing happened. For months afterwards the owner heard reports of his car in use in the city – even the number plates had not been changed – and himself saw it twice. ‘There was nothing I could do despite repeated protests to the police. It was a write off and I was advised to forget it.’ Another businessman, a Delhi-based building contractor, who won an important public works tender for construction in Amritsar reported that days after work had started, he began to receive anonymous letters de
manding a ‘contribution’ of Rs 50,000. If the money was not immediately handed over at a certain address by a certain time, the letters threatened kidnapping one of his family members. When next the contractor visited Amritsar he travelled under an assumed name and checked into a hotel incognito. Two days after his return to Delhi, he received a letter giving exact details of his subterfuge and demanding the delivery of cash promptly, failing which the kidnap would be effected. ‘I was stunned,’ he told me, ‘I could not believe how they had found out about my visit to Amritsar. My family absolutely refused to let me go again. It was my last visit. I simply dropped the contract.’ The infiltration by the extremists into public services and institutions extended to the police, the civil administration, educational institutions and communications. The network was so extensive that almost any kind of information required was immediately available. ‘Even their telephone calls from the Golden Temple had priority at the exchange when we first arrived,’ an army general told me after the Operation.

  Although it is clear that it was through this network that Bhindranwale and his men acquired weapons, it is easier to establish that the large sums of money extorted from local traders, businessmen and industrialists was funnelled into purchase of arms. And it was not only members of the rank and file of the militant leadership who were assigned the task of collecting funds. In the organized and controlled heirarchy that Bhindranwale and his chief lieutenant Amreek Singh of the All India Sikh Students Federation headed, they set the example. The following is a first person account given to me by a well-known jeweller in Amritsar’s Guru Bazaar of his direct encounter with Bhindranwale and Amreek Singh. The account is reliable if only because the jeweller, a man in his mid-sixties, is a reputable figure whose family has operated their business in the city for over a hundred years and also because the man’s style is so low-key and cool-headed that his story is unlikely to appear exaggerated.