by Amarjit Kaur
‘Some time in the second week of March this year,’ says the jeweller, ‘I received a telephone call at my residence from Bhai Amreek Singh of the AISSF. I had never met the man before, only heard of him. After introducing himself, he politely asked me if I could spare a little time that evening. He said that Sant Bhindranwale wished to see me, and could I make myself available for his darshan on the rooftop of the Langar building. I could not inquire what the reason was because the call was disconnected. But as you can imagine I was exceedingly worried. For months one had heard all kinds of stories, and I even knew certain families that had suffered, but as far as I knew, no other jeweller had been sent for.
‘I spent a very nervous day and, at a little before five in the evening, made my way to the Langar. I gave my name to the armed men at the entrance and after a few minutes, Bhai Amreek Singh himself appeared and escorted me inside. He motioned me to sit down with the sangat (congregation) who were listening to Bhindranwale speaking. I had never seen the sant before.
‘After about an hour, the sant ended his talk and rose to leave himself. Most of the people also rose to go. It was then that Bhai Amreek Singh, having whispered a few words to the sant, took me up to meet him personally. He smiled and said that he was honoured that Amritsar’s most famous jeweller had come to visit him. I simply stood there with folded hands. Then he asked me, without much fuss and within earshot of people standing around him, that since my family and I were such old devotees of Darbar Sahib, didn’t I think that we should make a donation.
‘I stood there completely silent. Quickly he said, "How about twenty kilos of gold? Does that suit you?" and began moving towards the door. I could not believe his request. It was as if the ground was slipping from beneath my feet, I was so shaky. I fell down at his feet and pleaded. I will be ruined, I said, I do not have that kind of money. I am not a bullion merchant, I am only a man who works with other people’s gold. I will have to sell out to make that kind of contribution.
‘He was not a bit irritated. In fact, he started laughing. “All you rich men are the same”, he said, and added that I could if liked, pay the sum in monthly instalments. But I kept clutching to his feet and saying that even a kilo of gold a month was too much, have some mercy on me and my family. “Okay, okay,” he said, half a kilo then, but remember every month we should get it and there should be no lapses.’
‘It was downright extortion and it took place openly. There was nothing I could do about it and for the first month, till the payment was made in the form of gold ornaments, I did not tell a soul including members of my family. But I began to fear for my sons and my grandchildren. The whole matter weighed so heavily on me, that it worsened my heart condition. I was bitter, disgusted. Sometimes it seemed to me that it was worth closing down the business in Amritsar and moving to another city. In fact, I sent one of my sons away to investigate opening a shop in Delhi. But we count ourselves lucky. In the end, we paid out about two lakh rupees. But you can imagine our relief when the army moved in and ended the menace of the sant. Having gone through such an experience, tell me, do you blame me for feeling relief that the Bhindranwale hurricane that threatened to wipe us out has ended?’
It was not only Hindu traders who were coerced to making such donations – Sikhs too, except perhaps they were not pressurized as strongly. ‘Bhindranwale was secular in one thing-he spared no one, Hindu or Sikh, in making money,’ says Sardar Dilbir Singh, a member of the executive of the Chief Khalsa Diwan, an important Sikh charitable trust, in Amritsar. But there are enough instances to prove that some Hindus, especially if they were perceived as leaders of public opinion, came in for a harsher sentence. The best-known, and widely documented, example is the family of Lala Jagat Narain in Jullundur, owners of the Hind Samachar group of newspapers.
In August 1983, the last occasion I met Ramesh Chander, Lala Jagat Narain’s son, he was already a man under great stress. Carrying on valiantly as editor of the paper, his daily mail included at least a couple of abusive, threatening letters. Anonymous callers made it impossible for him to pick up his telephone directly. Two gunmen and two bodyguards stood at the bottom of the stairs leading to his office; later a personal bodyguard travelled with him everywhere. After his father’s murder, Chander seemed to be under continuous attack from the Sikh leadership. When his paper published a calendar with a picture of Guru Gobind Singh, with a small picture of his late father in the margin, the SGPC claimed that it ‘injured the feelings of Sikhs’ and demanded an apology. Bhindranwale called it an insult, and declared that any Sikh who took revenge on Chander for such a sacrilege would be honoured. ‘I am bitter,’ Chander had then said, ‘but not against Sikhs, only against certain sections of the Sikh leadership. Of course, one has become cautious, cautious even in attending public functions.’
That caution proved ineffective as, stepping out of a function in the city’s public library on 12 May 1984, the spirit of revenge overpowered him. As he drove past a crowded roundabout in broad daylight Chander was gunned down by a group of Sikhs passing by in a speeding car. His gunman was seated behind and could do nothing. Nor could a police patrol on duty; they simply disappeared when the cold-blooded murder was brought to their notice. Chander’s body lay at the spot for several hours and even the district commissioner, with whom he had left the function, could exercise no immediate decision to have it taken away or control the angry mob that collected.
Chander’s two sons, twenty-eight-year-old Ashwini Minna and twenty-two-year-old Arvind now occupy bis office. They carry revolvers and have not stepped out of the office since the day of their father’s death. Each day the mail brings more threatening letters, and the boys continue to fear for their life even after the army action. There are now pickets with soldiers on duty round the clock at the bottom of the stairs and the roof of the building is equipped with a wireless, morchas, searchlights and a whole platoon of CRP men. When Minna crosses the street to his house, he is escorted by four guards armed with Sten guns. ‘I was counting my days after my father’s death,’ he says, ‘and even now the threat has not gone. Communal feelings have grown since the Operation. And, frankly, if the army is not posted in Punjab for another six months to a year, there could be thousand Bhindranwales sprouting everywhere.’
Virendra, owner and editor of the Vir Pratap group of newspapers, and his son Chander Mohan, echo Minna’s sentiments. They see a continued army presence as a prerequisite to long-term peace in Punjab. ‘It’s necessary at a time when communal passions are aroused,’ says Chander Mohan. Like other forthright members of Punjab’s Hindu elite, Chander and his father consider themselves secular, but say that their championing of Hindu pressure groups such as Punjabi Hindu Sangathan in Jullundur, the Rashtriya Suraksha Samiti in Amritsar and the Hindu Suraksha Samiti in Patiala, was forced upon them as a measure of self-defence. Their attempts to bring these organizations together, however, has proved feeble, given lack of popular support and a unified leadership. But they feel that the effort must be kept up if only to check further escalation of communal tension.
One reason why the advent of communal emotion is centred in the town of Punjab is because over 80 per cent of its non-Sikh population is concentrated in urban areas. Its effect in rural society is marginal, there being no more than a handful of Hindus each in Punjab’s 12,000 villages. Where they exist, usually in the role of the local bania (trader) or artiya (commission agent), they are so well-knit into the social fabric that the Sikhs tend to be protective of them in a time of crisis.
That, however, does not imply that Punjab’s rural areas are devoid of tension or have remained unaffected by the army’s action or its presence. Its villages are as convulsed by a wave of anger as its cities, only the emphasis of the reaction is different and the resentment directed at other targets. In the villages the army is seen as the chief aggressor in its phase of flushing out the countryside of extremists and rounding up of weapons. On the other hand, Bhindran
wale’s image has rocketed into the realm of the supernatural. Here and there some villagers may express dissent, or doubt the general impression, but by and large Bhindranwale and his defence of the Akal Takht has become part of everyday folklore. And Punjab’s gurdwara towns, particularly those where the army was engaged in fighting extremists, thwarted religious fervour has resulted in an atmosphere of sullen gloom. Preposterous stories abound. ‘In his (Bhindranwale’s) village in district Faridkot,’ says a shopkeeper outside the gurdwara in Tarn Taran doing brisk business in the sale of kirpans and the black bands to which they were attached, ‘his family have special amrit kept in a glass bottle. So far its colour is clear which means Sant Jarnail Singh is alive. He left it at home before returning to the Darbar Sahib to take on the Indian army, and said that no one was to fear for his life, till the colour of the liquid turned red. Someone who came back from his village told me that it has not. His family is confident that he is safe and well somewhere.’
In Bhindranwale’s own gurdwara at Chowk Mehta about 40 kilometres outside Amritsar, the gloom is all pervasive. The gurdwara is empty save for a few villagers including a plumber and an eccentric-looking, stooping character called Sukha Singh who has bicycled for two days from a village a hundred kilometres away to check things out at Chowk Mehta. ‘My friends and family in the village warned me: Don’t go, they said, the army will definitely get you. But I said to them, ‘Let the army get me. What is a Sikh worth these days, any way? I must go and find out what happened to the sant.’ Understanding nods of approval from everyone in the mourning group, including the vocal plumber Ajit Singh, who says: ‘Would you have believed such a day would come? That the army would attack our gurdwaras and us. They’ve broken our .backs. Brother, you are from the city, and you should go back and write that in Punjab every man who wears a turban and keeps a beard is called a terrorist. They have dragged men from their homes here and flogged them and kept them in jail without any explanation. They have taken our cash offerings from our gurdwaras and ransacked our stores. The very same army that was proud of its Sikh soldiers has begun to commit atrocities upon them.’
About 70 kilometres southwest of Moga town in district Faridkot is Bhindranwale’s hometown of Roda. He was born here, his family lives here and the entire community seems to bask in the reflected glory of its somewhat sinister connection. Past large village houses splashed with ‘Join AISSF’ slogans, we arrive at an airy house built around a traditional open courtyard. It is easily recognizable as Bhindranwale’s family home because of cars parked outside. They belong not to his family but to prosperous visitors from Faridkot and Moga who are visiting the late Sant’s birthplace. As a centre of pilgrimage, Roda is fast gaining importance since the death of its most famous son. And as the chief perpetuator of the Bhindranwale myth, his father Jathedar Joginder Singh, a man in his late seventies with a long white beard and bushy, furrowing eyebrows, proves to be the centre of attraction.
He is holding court to a group of villagers and two prosperous-looking young couples who have arrived in the cars. This is educated small town gentry: the women speak English in convent school accent and their husbands argue vehemently with a religious zeal difficult to reconcile with urban education.
After a few minutes of listening to Bhindranwale’s father, it is easy to spot the similarities with his son. He speaks with the same irrational rhetoric and rabble-rousing passion that leaves no room for lucid argument or open-ended dialogue. It is difficult to carry on a conversation. Too many questions are fielded with a mixture of shrill contempt and shrewd evasion. He is convinced that his son was possessed of super human prowess, physical and spiritual, from the day of his birth – rather is, because he firmly believes that Jarnail Singh is not dead, and snaps angrily at people who use the past tense. He remembers that Jarnail Singh, as a young boy, was an all-round prodigy; ‘someone,’ in his words, ‘who could fell a tree in a single blow and at the same time memorize whole chapters of the Granth and recite them a hundred times a day,’ It is improbable that the old man’s memory serves him right; in fact he hardly knew his son and, in recent years, used to visit him at the Golden Temple like any ordinary devotee. Bhindranwale left his village when he was an adolescent to join the itinerant band of religious preachers headed by Sant Gurcharan Singh Bhindranwale from whom he later inherited the mantle of the Bhindranwale seat in Chowk Mehta. Jarnail Singh rarely returned home after that, though he was later married. His wife and two young sons continue to live in the same house in Roda but are kept strictly in purdah, especially when the press is visiting.
‘He was only a preacher of religion,’ the father is saying of Jarnail Singh, ‘one of the greatest the Sikh faith has ever produced. What did he ask of the Sikhs but that they should read gurbani, keep their beards untrimmed, take amrit and leave liquor. Was that too much from a man who all his life stuck to all spiritual disciplines? Was it too much for the government who called him a terrorist, a rebel, a hater of Hindus and accused him of murders and dacoities.’
The monologue was unceasing. But I had not bargained for the electrifying effect the old man’s words would have on the affluent visitors from Moga and Faridkot. Turning around to one of the men, I casually asked what he thought was the general Sikh reaction to the army operation. There was a pause before I realized that the man was choking with sobs. Tears were pouring down his face. He was shaking with a grief so private and sudden that his words were a barely-audible sputter: ‘You don’t and can’t understand,’ he said bitterly, ‘what Sikhs feel like. We are helpless. We cannot react. We have become incapable of reaction.’
His wife sitting on the other side of the old man’s cot was brushing away her own tears. ‘I’ll tell you,’ she said, ‘what it feels like. It feels as if you have been stripped naked and assaulted. Religion, after all, is a very private thing. And a place of worship has a special privacy, call it mystique. That has gone because it has been brutally invaded. The sanctity of our gurdwaras is gone forever. How can the government ever compensate that?’
As I left the old man began to rail once again: ‘I can tell you that only God knows what the consequence of this diabolical action will be. The rule of those who have attacked the Darbar Sahib will end as fatefully as the rule of Turks and Mughals who attacked it in the past. It is God’s home and God has his own way of taking revenge.’
Such scenes of pent-up anguish verging on hysteria were common place in the villages of Punjab in the aftermath of Operation Bluestar. Its effects were so various and wide-ranging that it was difficult to arrive at precise conclusions and construct a credible hypothesis. One could only sense that, like a deep-rooted tree struck by some massive bolt of lightning, there were cracks and fissures that spread in every direction along the central communal split. But if one were to isolate the causes of resentment and pain of the aggrieved community as a whole, if one stripped the layers of local and personal factors to listen, as it were, the changed cadence of people’s inner voices and record the irreparable damage inflicted on their beliefs, two major factors emerged as contributory to the post-Bluestar crisis.
One was the total lack of speedy and accurate information about what exactly happened during the Operation and what was the extent of damage to the Golden Temple. The importance of this factor cannot be emphasized enough, in view of the fact that government media erred dangerously. All India Radio’s white-washed news bulletins and Doordarshan’s mindlessly repeatist visual imagery were designed to deceive, as if the information had to be doctored for the benefit of an enemy. This succeeded in intensifying the trauma, especially in the villages where accurate information disseminated at regular intervals is hard to obtain at the best of times. Villagers, if and where possible, plugged into foreign networks for whatever scraps of information they could obtain. The BBC became the norm, and Radio Pakistan came a close second. Even to the uneducated peasant, unaware of the intricacies of the long-drawn-out negotiations between the Akalis and t
he government and their subsequent breakdown, it appeared excessive to have to listen six times a day news of protestors marching daily to the gates of the British High Commission to register their grievance over the BBC’s broadcast of an interview with self-styled Khalistan leader Jagjit Singh Chauhan eight thousand miles away. Certainly, the incessant drum-beating of didactic lessons in Hindu-Sikh harmony must have sounded callous when in fact they were at their lowest ebb. And for those with access to television, opinion clips (repeated insensitively, as many as three times an evening) of certain Sikhs lauding the army action at a moment when the Sikh reaction was one of unequivocal horror no doubt drove large sections of viewers to switch off their sets. In the circumstances, it was rumour that took over: word-of-mouth stories, mixed fabrication and fact and swept Punjab’s villages for as long as three weeks after the army action.
The other factor that continues to prolong the after-effects of the trauma is the continuing presence of the army. It is not in the scope of this chapter to discuss what its effects in national terms may be, or what, in fact, is the effect upon the army itself, but in Punjab’s rural society the antagonism against the army is steadily grown. This is due to its role of flushing the countryside of extremists and weapons, a role made more complicated by the villagers’ perception of the armed force as an aggressor, not an impartial arbiter involved in restoring law and order. Such a devaluation was inevitable but possible to redress if the army’s stay or its authority was limited. As it is not, the devaluation grows proportionately in the public mind. And while it is true that certain sections of Punjab’s population, especially urban Hindus, argue vociferously that its presence is a necessity, their insecurity only betrays the government’s bleak disinterest in either finding a political solution or applying the healing touch. No such touch is possible in Punjab so long as towns and villages are treated as border outposts, and kept under surveillance by soldiers and bayonets.