The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Bizarrely, this was the backdrop to the cordial meeting between Gandhi and Zia ul Haq on the sidelines of the Seventh Nonaligned Movement from March 7 to 12, 1983, in Delhi. They signed an agreement on normalizing relations by setting up the Joint Indo-Pakistan Commission, with subcommissions for trade, economics, information, and travel.

  During 1983, China helped Pakistan with triggering devices for an atom bomb. These were either conventional charges or electronic trigging circuits. The Pakistani experts, led by Abdul Qadeer Khan, started conducting cold tests in a tunnel in the Chagai Hills of northwest Baluchistan to perfect a triggering device. Success came only at the end of more than twenty trials. That was the final step to assembling an atom bomb. They did so by the end of the year. At that point the Engineering Research Laboratory was officially renamed the Kahuta Research Laboratory.

  In Washington a (later) declassified US government assessment in 1983 concluded that “there is unambiguous evidence that Pakistan is actively pursuing a nuclear weapons development program. . . . We believe the ultimate application of the enriched uranium produced at Kahuta is clearly nuclear weapons.”21

  Yet no action was taken against Pakistan. The Reagan White House had equated hurting Pakistan by imposing sanctions on it with aiding the Kremlin. So when faced with the choice of expelling the Soviets from Afghanistan by all possible means or stopping Islamabad from building an atom bomb, it opted for hemorrhaging the “evil empire.” It was so unwaveringly committed to this policy that it deployed underhand tactics to squash the irrefutable evidence that State Department officials would periodically furnish to show Islamabad inexorably racing to produce a nuclear weapon.

  The Indo-Israeli plan to raid the Kahuta facility did not remain secret for long from the ISI. In the autumn of 1983 its chief Lieutenant General, Rahman Khan, sent a message to his counterpart in RAW, Nowsher F. Suntook. This led to a meeting between Munir Ahmad Khan, head of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), and Ramanna in a Vienna hotel. Ahmad Khan warned Ramanna that if India alone, or in collusion with Israel, attacked Kahuta, Pakistan would hit India’s nuclear facility in Trombay on the outskirts of Mumbai, with horrific consequences for millions of that mega-city’s residents.22 Faced with such a scenario, Gandhi hesitated.

  Meanwhile, the links between RAW and Mossad had grown so tight that Mossad equipped RAW’s two Boeing 707s belonging to its Aviation Research Center with specialist equipment to gather signals intelligence.23 It was against this background that in late 1983 Sharon offered to carry out the raid from Jamnagar in Gujarat by entering Pakistan beneath the radar and following the mountains in Kashmir to reach Kahuta. It was then that, with the connivance of the Reagan White House, the CIA station chief in Islamabad reportedly tipped off Zia ul Haq about Sharon’s proposal to Gandhi, hoping to de-escalate the dangerous tit-for-tat between India and Pakistan.24

  Zia ul Haq acted. At his behest, Qadeer Khan gave long interviews to two leading local newspapers in January and February 1984. His core message was that “Pakistan could build the bomb if it needed to. And if Kahuta is destroyed, more than one such plant can be rebuilt.” To leave nothing to chance, Pakistan’s ambassador in Delhi told India’s External Affairs Ministry that his country would rain fire in retaliation for an attack on Kahuta.25 Zia ul Haq’s aim was twofold: to show that Pakistan’s nuclear program was unstoppable in order to gain international acceptance, and to warn Gandhi that Pakistan was ready to strike back if she decided to raid Kahuta. He succeeded. In March Gandhi revoked her earlier go-ahead to Sharon.

  The year 1984 was the pivotal one for Pakistan’s nuclear program. After receiving an atom bomb assembled in Kahuta in January, the Chinese detonated it successfully at their test site at Lop Nor in Xinjiang province in March.26 This led to discreet jubilation among top officials in Islamabad and Kahuta. Having thus acquired parity with India in defense, Pakistani leaders were now equipped to challenge India’s claim to regional hegemony. This super-secret event at Lop Nor, however, would reach the CIA and RAW two years later, and others much later. Meanwhile, Zia ul Haq, a master in dissimulation, would only admit that his country had acquired a very modest uranium enrichment capability for peaceful purposes.

  In late 1984, Qadeer Khan said he was ready for a hot test in Baluchistan, but Zia ul Haq ruled it out. He did not wish to embarrass the Reagan administration, which had been overly generous to his government and had repeatedly overlooked its transgressions in its nuclear arms program.

  Zia ul Haq had another major reason to be cautious. In April 1984 the US Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee had adopted a restrictive provision, proposed by Larry Pressler and two other senators, to tie the continuation of economic assistance and military sales to Islamabad. The president needed to certify that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear explosive device, and to add that fresh aid to it would reduce significantly the risk that it would possess such a weapon. It was not until August 1985 that this provision, called the Pressler Amendment, was attached to the Foreign Assistance Act, covering fiscal 1985–1986. In the House of Representatives, Stephen Solarz’s amendment stipulated a ban on all military and economic aid to those nonnuclear nations that illegally procured or tried to procure nuclear-related materials from America.

  But there was an overriding opt-out provision that applied to all such amendments. The US president was authorized to waive these if he thought it was in the national interest to do so. Reagan did not use that option, though. Instead, while incontrovertible evidence from several sources piled up, showing Pakistan’s unflinching drive to produce an atom bomb, year after year Reagan certified to the contrary. He did so to keep the US military and economic aid flowing into Pakistan while its government boosted the destructive power of the mujahedin insurgents in Afghanistan.

  Soft Bellies of India and Pakistan

  Reagan’s unqualified backing and the deadly effectiveness of the Afghan mujahedin’s insurgency emboldened Zia ul Haq to implement his pet policy of pinpricks against India to weaken it. This meant providing material aid to any irredentist movement that arose there. The violent agitation of militant Sikhs for an independent Khalistan was one such. It gathered steam in the early 1980s. With many Sikh immigrants in Britain and North America backing the movement, it became comparatively easy for the ISI to contact their leaders.

  At home, Zia ul Haq’s rule came under pressure in early 1983. The PPP-led coalition of ten parties, called the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD), demanded elections and restoration of the 1973 constitution by August 14, Independence Day, on pain of starting a nonviolent campaign against the military dictatorship.

  Zia ul Haq failed to heed the call, describing the MRD as a tool of India. His allegation gained traction when Indira Gandhi endorsed the movement in a comment in the lower house of India’s parliament. Because the MRD was particularly strong in Sindh, the traditional bastion of the PPP, the military government charged that the MRD had the agenda of securing the secession of Sindh from Pakistan in protest of the Punjabi-dominated administration in Islamabad. Sindhi villagers dismissed the official propaganda. They backed the MRD’s campaign so staunchly that Zia ul Haq dispatched three army divisions to quell it. The army arrested fifteen thousand people and killed sixty to two hundred protestors.27

  In early October Gandhi inaugurated the World Sindhi Conference, a human rights advocacy organization registered in Welwyn Garden City, United Kingdom, in New Delhi. “We are for democracy and shall ever be so,” she declared. “We have to oppose injustice everywhere. We want that there should be democracy everywhere, and there is nothing bad or improper in saying so.” The conference passed a resolution for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Sindh and the restoration of constitutional rights of the people. All India Radio started broadcasting in Sindhi, which had been added to the list of recognized languages in the constitution in 1967 but never accorded the status of radio broadcasts before. When the news of these de
velopments was conveyed to the Sindhi nationalist leader Ghulam Murtaza Syed, he was overjoyed.28

  Zia ul Haq latched on to these events. On October 22 he asserted that the MRD was working in league with a foreign power: “As soon as the MRD began agitating, a foreign power, as agreed before, came out in its support.” There was no second-guessing as to who this “foreign power” was. Referring to Indians, he said, “They are not really reconciled to the existence of Pakistan.”29 This was the age-old refrain that still remained potent in Pakistan. On his part, in 1984, the Pakistani leader instructed ISI officers to establish contacts with the representatives of the Jammu and Kashmir Jamaat-e Islami (JeI) and the secular-nationalist Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF).

  Sikh Insurgency Claims Indira Gandhi

  In the Sikh-majority Punjab, a peaceful campaign for a larger share of irrigation water for the state in August 1982 was repressed by the Congress ministry. It arrested thirty thousand protesting Sikhs, and police shootings killed more than one hundred, in less than three months. During the run-up to the Asian Games in Delhi, held from November 19 to December 4, all Sikhs from Punjab traveling to Delhi were searched as a precaution against terrorist attacks during the event. Sikhs felt humiliated and alienated from the Hindu community. This swelled the ranks of the thirty-five-year-old firebrand religious leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. His inordinately long, raven-black beard and deep blue turban made him stand out in a crowd.30

  Along with several hundred armed acolytes of his, Bhindranwale planted himself in the Golden Temple—officially called Harmandir Sahib—a complex of forty-two buildings, many of them glittering shrines. They felt safe there because, as a rule, security forces did not enter places of religious worship. In his interviews with foreign TV channels, Bhindranwale called for the establishment of an independent state of Sikhs to be called Khalistan. He gained the backing of many affluent Sikhs settled in Britain and North America. Their donations enabled the Bhindranwale camp to arm themselves with Pakistan-made rifles smuggled across the 150-mile-long Punjab border.

  Bhindranwale threatened his Sikh opponents. In a sensational act, his partisans killed police deputy inspector general Avtar Singh Atwal in April 1983. The security situation deteriorated. Following the murder of six Hindu bus passengers in October, the Gandhi government in Delhi declared a state of emergency and imposed central rule. But there was no letup in violence. During the first five months of 1984, it claimed 298 victims in Punjab and spread to the contiguous Haryana and its neighbor, Delhi.

  Gandhi decided to launch a military assault to gain control of the Golden Temple, which had become the bastion of Bhindranwale and his six hundred armed followers. As a preamble to the attack by army troops and armed policemen—code-named Blue Star—a thirty-six-hour curfew in Punjab on June 3 brought all movement to a standstill. Strict censorship of news was imposed while seven army divisions were deployed in the state. Security forces, equipped with heavy artillery, tanks, and armored personnel carriers, stormed the Golden Temple on the night of June 5. They gained full control by the morning of June 7 after fierce fighting with the heavily armed insurgents, who had been arrayed in strategic positions in more than forty buildings of the complex by a retired Sikh general.

  The official fatality statistics of 136 security personnel and 357 insurgents and other civilians were widely believed to be unreliable. The number of suspected terrorists was put at 1,592. And there was a reference to 1,600 “missing” people. Bhindranwale was killed.31 Unofficial estimates of the dead ranged between 1,500 and 5,000. The Chicago Tribune on June 12 published a figure of 2,000. Military helicopters reported marches on Amritsar by tens of thousands of Sikhs in defiance of the emergency. More seriously, some 4,000 Sikh soldiers in garrison towns of Punjab defected, killed their officers, and marched on Amritsar. They were stopped by armed policemen, and many lost their lives.32

  In two subsequent military operations, code-named Shop and Woodrose, security forces raided rural Punjab to capture suspected extremists and scan the countryside. This dragnet campaign forced nearly three thousand young Sikhs to cross into Pakistan. They were arrested as aliens entering the country without proper documents.33 In its “White Paper on the Punjab Agitation,” published on July 10, 1984, the Indira Gandhi government referred to Pakistan’s involvement in backing the Khalistan movement, which was directed against India’s strength, unity, and secularism.34

  The Indian military’s ferocious assault on their most sacred shrine traumatized Sikhs all over India. They viewed this onslaught as an attack on their religion and identity. There were reports of Sikh civil servants and army officers resigning in protest and others, including the famous writer-columnist Khushwant Singh, returning their official honors.

  In their eyes, Indira Gandhi became evil incarnate. On the morning of October 31, 1984, as she passed a wicket gate between the garden of her official residence and her office to give an interview to Irish TV, she paid the ultimate price. Her assassins were none other than her Sikh bodyguards, twenty-five-year-old subinspector Beant Singh and twenty-one-year-old constable Satwant Singh Bhakar. Beant Singh aimed three shots from his .38-caliber revolver into Gandhi’s chest and abdomen. As she fell to the ground, Bhakar pumped all thirty rounds from his submachine gun into her bleeding body.

  They threw their weapons on the ground and were immediately apprehended by the commandos and taken to the guardhouse. Indira Gandhi was dead on arrival at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. In the evening her forty-year-old son, Rajiv, a junior member of the lower house of Parliament, was sworn in as prime minister. Three days of official mourning followed.

  During that time an anti-Sikh pogrom in greater Delhi and elsewhere was carried out by organized gangs. By the time the mob fury had spent itself, between six thousand and eight thousand Sikhs were killed—stabbed, burned, or beaten to death. More than one hundred Sikh temples were set alight, and thousands of shops and homes were pillaged. Altogether Sikhs lost property worth Rs 300 million ($6 million).35 To save his life, Khushwant Singh, who opposed the Khalistan movement, sought refuge in the Swedish embassy. “I felt a refugee in my own country,” he moaned.36

  With Indira Gandhi’s demise, India lost a politician who during her fifteen years of premiership had proved to be a strong leader, although her decision to impose a state emergency in 1975–1977 was wrongheaded and authoritarian. In her handling of domestic politics she was manipulative and vengeful—traits that, in the final analysis, lay at the root of the rise of Sikh irredentism. It was she who had bolstered an upstart Bhindranwale to rival an established Sikh leader she disagreed with. Later Bhindranwale morphed into a Frankenstein and turned against her.

  In Pakistan, the government declared three days of mourning. Zia ul Haq rushed to Delhi to attend the cremation of Gandhi on the banks of the Yamuna River.

  In the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, RAW secured the services of a senior officer of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, Shin Beth, to tighten up its prime minister’s security system. Indo-Israeli links tightened during her successor’s rule, much to the apprehension of Pakistani leaders.

  Untutored Rajiv and Duplicitous Zia

  In the wake of the assassination of his mother, a wave of popular sympathy favored Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress Party in the parliamentary election that followed. It garnered 404 of the 515 seats at stake.37 This was a truly remarkable achievement for the tall, robustly built, moon-faced Rajiv, who had entered politics reluctantly in 1981 after the death of his younger, politicized brother, Sanjay, in a flying accident. Though he studied engineering at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1962 to 1965, he did not graduate. He met and dated Antonia Edvige Albina Maino, an Italian, who had come to Cambridge to learn English and worked as a part-time waitress. On his return to India in 1966, Rajiv trained as a pilot and joined the state-owned Indian Airlines. Two years later he married twenty-one-year-old Maino according to Hindu rites in Delhi.
She changed her name to Sonia. After the birth of their two children, Rahul and Priyanka, the couple settled down to a humdrum domestic life, with Rajiv showing no interest in politics.

  Thus India came to be ruled by a public figure lacking experience in politics, administration, diplomacy, or strategy. Personable and sincere in his utterances, he was bereft of the guile of a politician, an attribute Zia ul Haq, though trained as a soldier, possessed in spades. The two leaders met in Moscow on March 13, 1985, during the funeral of Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. Whereas Gandhi was still struggling to find equilibrium in his exacting job, the Pakistani president was sure-footed.

  By holding a “party-less” general election to the National Assembly, Zia ul Haq had pacified his critics in the United States. And by a sleight of constitutional hand he had acquired the power to appoint one of the elected members of this Assembly as the prime minister. He picked Muhammad Khan Junejo for the post. US financial assistance, which had been running at $60 million annually since 1981, shot up to $300 million a year in 1985.38 The sly Pakistani general went along with Gandhi’s proposal to try to establish good relations between their countries.

  Their bilateral summit took place in mid-December 1985. After his overnight stay at the sprawling Indian president’s estate, Rashtrapati Bhavan, in Delhi, Zia ul Haq conferred with his host in the Yellow Room, used earlier by Lord Mountbatten for his high-level talks with the leaders of British India. Their one-on-one meeting lasted two hours.

  “The most important aspect [of our meeting] is that we have decided not to attack each other’s nuclear facilities,” Zia ul Haq declared at the joint press conference. Gandhi described the agreement as “a first step in establishing confidence.” India then had three nuclear reactors, five smaller research reactors, and three major nuclear power plants with two more under construction. Pakistan had a nuclear power plant, a research reactor, and one uranium enrichment facility. Neither nation had signed the 1968 NPT. Both claimed their nuclear programs were for peaceful purposes. Gandhi expressed his doubts about the peaceful nature of Pakistan’s nuclear program diplomatically. “We have not reached an agreement on the nature of nuclear programs.” he said.39