by Kuldip Nayar
‘Tell him that his guests have arrived,’ Longowal said, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice when referring to Bhindranwale. What he had long feared was happening. Troops had taken up positions around the Golden Temple. Reports that the army action was imminent had been in the air for several days. Longowal had been hoping against hope that the inevitable would not happen. Only the previous night had he heard Indira Gandhi’s broadcast to the nation about the Punjab crisis and said that ‘if any misgiving or doubt on any issue remain, let us sit round the table and find a solution’. How could she first order a military operation and then suggest negotiations? Longowal complained to me later. Besides, even if the Akalis were ready to talk, how could they contact her? All their telephone lines had been cut.
Although curfew was clamped late in the evening, hundreds of pilgrims were still within the precincts of the temple, 3 June being the martyrdom anniversary of the fifth Sikh Guru, Arjun Dev. Longowal was now certain that the army troops would indeed enter the temple complex unless, of course, Bhindranwale surrendered.
Bhindranwale, feeling secure at the Akal Takht, was telling some journalists: ‘If the authorities enter the temple, we will teach them such a lesson that the throne of Indira is sure to crumble. We will slice them into small pieces … Let them come …’
His information from government sources was precise to the last detail. He knew exactly when the commandos landed at the airport near Ludhiana, and when they moved into Amritsar. He told the journalists that one lakh troops had moved into Punjab and that there would be simultaneous raids on 35 gurdwaras, including the Golden Temple. His second-in-command, Shabeg Singh had no time for journalists on 3 June. He merely said: ‘They [the troops] are all over; I have a lot of work to do.’
While the militants seemed to be well posted with what the authorities were planning, the army’s own intelligence was scant. It did not know how many extremists were inside the temple, where they were hiding, and what weapons they had. The government’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) was unable to provide even details regarding the fortifications inside the temple though it reported the smuggling of arms. The Punjab Intelligence was worse; it did not even report the regular inflow of arms into the precincts of the shrine.
Punjab had already plunged into the next phase of violence which was far more dangerous than the first. Pakistan saw in it fertile ground to conduct its proxy war and stepped in. The .303 rifles with Bhindranwale’s men were replaced with lethal AK 47s, rocket launchers, grenades, and improvised explosive devices.
Before the army action, Indira Gandhi had put the Disturbed Areas Act on the statute book. That night (4 June 1984) the army exchanged heavy machine-gun fire with the militants entrenched in the Golden Temple and sent batches of 25 commandos inside the temple. ‘We will not surrender. We will fight to the last man,’ said Bhindranwale, in what was apparently his last interview with a journalist. ‘No might in the world can make us bow our head.’
One of the officers commanding a unit on the night of 5 June described how the commandos were mowed down by Sikh militants firing from inside underground tunnels. The military operation had to be temporarily suspended because of the unexpected disaster.
At about 9 p.m. on 6 June, the entire city of 700,000 was plunged into darkness by a power cut. Half an hour later, Amritsar was shaken by powerful shelling, mortar explosions, and machine-gun fire. The big battle had begun and half the city was up on the rooftops watching it. Tracer bullets and flares lit up the sky. The explosions in the Golden Temple rattled doors and windows miles away. While the battle was raging, All India Radio claimed the city was ‘calm’. Between 10.30 p.m. and midnight, slogans were heard from the outskirts of the city, raised by villagers trying to march to the Golden Temple from three different directions. The slogan, ‘Long live the Sikh religion’ and ‘Bhindranwale is our leader’, were heard briefly and were followed by rapid army machine-gun fire and screams.
Few residents slept that night (7 June). This was when the battle was at its severest, and it ended over twelve hours later, at around 10.00 a.m. By then the curfew had been extended indefinitely and main streets were being heavily patrolled by troops. There were reports of heavy casualties: according to the official, preliminary count, 800 Sikh militants and 200 army men had been killed in the storming of the temple. Among the dead were Bhindranwale and two former Indian army generals who were leading the Sikh militants.
On 8 June, despite the military capture of the Golden Temple, troops still battled pockets of resistance within the complex, and the intermittent sound of mortar and machine-gun fire continued to be heard all over the town. A tank and an armoured personnel carrier outside the shrine as well as an armoured personnel carrier on the marble pathway inside the temple complex lay smouldering. Lt Gen. Ranjit Singh Dyal recalled that ‘resistance was so heavy that they could not have cleared the terrorists from the Akal Takht had they not used tanks’. The stench of death pervaded the neighbourhood of the temple.
Brigadier Kuldeep Singh Brar first brought in armoured personnel carriers (APC) at 4.10 a.m. from the Guru Ram Das Sarai side to close in on the Akal Takht. However, anti-tank rockets fired from the Akal Takht substantially damaged one. This came as an acute shock to Brar, as no one had suspected that the militants had rockets.
After the destruction of the APC, seven tanks were brought in from the Guru Ram Das Sarai side. The steps leading to the parikrama were broken by a tank to facilitate the entry of the others. Some damage was also inflicted to the parikrama, a part of it caving in under the weight of the tanks. Once the tanks had been stationed, appeals were made through megaphones to the terrorists to surrender. Nearly 200 of them did, including 22 who had taken position in Harmandir Sahib.
The tanks opened fire in the afternoon of 6 June. Under the cover provided by them, the jawans who had retained a position near the trees in the compound rushed in and captured a portion of the Akal Takht after room-to-room fighting which resulted in heavy casualties on both sides.
The principal assault on the Akal Takht and the basement, which was the terrorists’ arsenal, began that evening. This was when an incendiary bomb fell inside the library and set it on fire. The SGPC alleged that the library was set on fire by the army on the morning of 7 June, but it appears to have been an accident, the responsibility for which is difficult to determine. The library had some rare books and manuscripts, including handwritten copies of the Granth Sahib and hukumnamas bearing the signatures of several gurus. All that was left of this treasure was a mound of ashes.
The firing from the Akal Takht continued unabated. Earlier, Brar had used the neon lights of the tanks to blind the terrorists while his men crept up, but the lights would burn out. They were more in the nature of flashlights, intended for a brief duration. The Bhindranwale men were able to resume firing as soon as the lights were out. The tanks were then ordered to use their heavy guns. Some shells from tanks stationed on the other side of the sarovar missed the Akal Takht and hit Darshini Deori, the entrance to the causeway leading to the Harmandir Sahib, demolishing a part of it.
At around 11 p.m. someone emerged from the Akal Takht and, rushing to the Nishan Sahib, fired off a shot in the air. Some soldiers thought it might have been Bhindranwale’s signal of surrender, but whoever it was, he carried no white flag and there was no let up in the firing. The lone man was hit in the leg and when he fell several militants rushed out and dragged him back inside the Akal Takht. A few of them were killed in the process.
The firing from the Akal Takht now lessened. Though it took the army a few more hours till late at night to clear the ground floor and the basement, the battle was clearly over. There were 31 more bodies strewn all over.
How did Bhindranwale die? I put this question to Dyal a fortnight after his body was found. Dyal said: ‘It is very difficult to say; a bullet may have hit him or some masonry might have fallen on him.’ Could, as the home secretary, M.M. Wali, had speculated, Babbar Khalsa men have killed
him? Dyal said: ‘This is not possible, not believable.’
Curiously, while there were troops everywhere in the city, there were none at the crematorium. ‘The army probably thinks that the ghosts will take care of intruders,’ said the man on duty at the crematorium. He and police officials, who were given charge of removing the dead from the temple complex, said that bodies were being brought in municipal garbage trucks round the clock from early 6 June. ‘We have been really busy. To add to our woes, we don’t have enough wood to burn the dead, and so we are cremating them in heaps of 20 or more,’ said the crematorium official.
On 10 June, a reporter found a body of a petty shopkeeper, who apparently had died of starvation and thirst, being pulled out from a wayside stall by troops about 2 kilometres from the Golden Temple. Later, the district police chief admitted in confidence that 6 people and over 1,000 buffaloes had died of starvation because of the strictly-enforced curfew. In Amritsar’s Green Avenue district, babies had no milk to drink and residents were largely reduced to eating lentils and homemade bread. A village milkman who tried to bring milk to the area in violation of the curfew was shot dead by soldiers. Some 100 people were killed between 4 and 10 June when the army fired on crowds of Sikh villagers trying to march to the Golden Temple.
I was keen to find out who had ordered the entry of tanks into the Golden Temple. The military officials who were involved in the operation felt that the continuous firing coming from the direction of Akal Takht made the soldiers sitting targets in their exposed positions. Indira Gandhi was woken up by the Chief of Army Staff Krishnaswamy Sundarji for permission to deploy tanks.
Several of the slain Sikh militants were shot at by troops with their hands tied behind their backs. The doctor, whose team examined 400 corpses, including those of 100 women, and 15 to 20 children, said he had conducted postmortems of several Sikhs whose hands were tied behind their backs with cloth from their turbans.
The firing at Guru Nanak Niwas sparked off indiscriminate shooting from the Akal Takht, the library, and some adjoining buildings. The troops fired back. It was probably then that the damage to Harmandir Sahib was caused (it carried the marks of at least 300 bullets). One bir (Guru Granth Sahib) was hit by a bullet; the government tried to take away that volume on 13 June by attempting to make the priest an accomplice.
Dyal told me later, ‘We did not resort to firing towards the Harmandir Sahib even when the extremists used the place where the kirtan was held, to fire at us.’ However, one officer who was part of the operation did admit that ‘the jawans fired in reply to the firing from the temple’. I did not get any explanation of the attack on the library in the gurdwara even though the army had an aerial photograph of the buildings and knew where each was situated.
Ramowalia miraculously escaped the killing. Six before him, he said, had been shot dead. When his turn came he shouted and raised his hand with the holding the member of parliament card. He was spared and so were a few others who had been lined up against a wall.
It was all over in less than five days. It was a tragedy that could have been averted. Perhaps the community could have been told that if Bhindranwale did not vacate the Golden Temple even an army operation was possible. Perhaps some Sikh leaders and top retired Sikh commanders could have intervened to put an end to the state within the state which Bhindranwale had built.
The Sikhs were not only hurt but also humiliated. R.K. Dhawan, Indira Gandhi’s personal assistant, came to my residence within a few days of the Golden Temple operation. He said that Indira Gandhi had sent him to inquire what the government should now do. I was very upset and told him that she had laid the foundation of Khalistan. ‘This was precisely what Prime Minister Indira Gandhi anticipated you would say,’ Dhawan said.
My advice was that the troops should be immediately withdrawn from the Golden Temple in order to allow the public free access to it; that would allow them to come and vent their pain and serve to provide catharsis to their pent-up rage. I also proposed that the government should have nothing to do with the election of the SGPC and let the community elect its representatives to manage the gurdwaras.
I warned Dhawan that the government should not rebuild the Akal Takht, which had been destroyed during the operation. If I knew anything about Sikhs, I told him, they would prefer to rebuild the Akal Takht themselves and tear down anything the government raised. None of my suggestions were implemented.
Some days later, the troops were withdrawn after Brar, heading the combat force that went into the Golden Temple, bowed before the Granth Sahib to seek forgiveness. It was not the end of the chapter; just the beginning. Punjab went through 10 years of militancy and people lived a miserable life, many losing their near and dear.
Air-Marshal Arjan Singh, Lt Gen. Jagjit Singh Aurora, and I, as members of the Punjab Group, went to the Golden Temple within a few days of Operation Bluestar. The briefing to us was undertaken by Brar, to Arjan Singh and J.S. Aurora separately because they discussed with Brar the operational details which I, a journalist, was not supposed to know.
This discrimination was understandable, but I could not make out the discrimination shown to Arjan Singh and Aurora on a road to Jalandhar. We three were returning in different cars, the two of them in one and I in another. Their car was searched notwithstanding the top positions they had enjoyed in the air force and army respectively. I, clean-shaven, was allowed to proceed without being searched. I also witnessed the discrimination in Delhi when the Sikh police were not given any weapons. The truth was that Sikhs were removed from all sensitive positions, particularly in the intelligence agencies.
The broadcast President Zail Singh made after Operation Bluestar was probably his finest hour. He literally wept over what had happened at the Golden Temple but at the same time he stood by the government. His resignation would have created a crisis for the nation which it could not afford. It would have meant a confrontation between the Sikhs and New Delhi. He resisted all pressure from within the community and flew to Amritsar to offer his apologies but at the same time carried out his duties as president of India.
He told me that he had conveyed his annoyance to Indira Gandhi. This, I argued with him, was not sufficient; he should convey his annoyance in writing. Posterity would need proof and that could not be oral. He agreed with me and poured his heart out in a note that he, as the president, sent to the prime minister. He resisted the community’s pressure to resign because as he told me such an act would have made the entire Sikh community suspect in the eyes of Hindus.
Many years later, the government tried to undo the injustice. General J.J. Singh, a Sikh, became the first Sikh chief of staff. Congress President Sonia Gandhi expressed her regrets in 2004 over Operation Bluestar and the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere in 1984.
The suspicion in the minds of Sikhs that they were not trusted ended when Manmohan Singh was elected India’s prime minister. His apology at the Golden Temple in 2004 closed the chapter. I have never been able to understand why he was opposed to the resolution I wanted to move in the Rajya Sabha in 2001 (he was the opposition leader) which sought forgiveness from the Punjabis, particularly Sikhs, for Operation Bluestar. He told me that by doing so I would be raking up old controversies. In any event, the chairman of the Rajya Sabha, Krishan Kant, did not permit me to move the resolution.
Indira Gandhi’s assassination was the revenge of radical Sikhs for Operation Bluestar. The IB wanted to replace her Sikh guards but she insisted on their retention lest their transfer send a wrong signal to the Sikh community.
A night before the assassination she returned from Orissa. It was unusual for her to hold a darbar for visitors the day after her return, but she did not cancel it because a well-known actor, Peter Ustinov, had arranged to film her among the people. She gave instructions to R.K. Dhawan regarding the guest list for the dinner she was hosting to welcome Princess Anne from the UK.
It was around 9 a.m. on 30 October 1984 when she walked through the wicket gate,
connecting her residence, 1 Safdarjang Road, with 1 Akbar Road, the venue of darbar, with Dhawan following her. A servant passed that way. She stopped to inspect the cups and saucers he was carrying to serve tea to Peter Ustinov, and asked him to go back and get a better tea-set.
At the wicket gate itself, Beant Singh, one of the guards, shot her with his pistol. As she fell to the ground, another guard, Satwant Singh, fired at her with his Sten gun. Dhawan, as he told me, was at a loss to believe what he was witnessing. Beant Singh said in Punjabi: ‘We have done what we had to do. Now you can do what you have to do.’ Both assailants dropped their weapons and surrendered to the police.
Dhawan looked for an ambulance. There was none. He put her in an ambassador car and took her to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). The VIP section was closed so she was wheeled into the casualty ward where a team of doctors was waiting. She was dead by then but they still took her to the operation theatre to try to revive her. The BBC announced her death five hours before the official announcement was made at 4 p.m. in India.
Arun Nehru said, as Indira Gandhi was wheeled in, that people in the country would not remain silent and there was bound to be large-scale violence in response to the attack. He told me later in London that phupi (aunt) was against Operation Bluestar.
Arun Nehru was not wrong in anticipating violence because the cavalcade of President Zail Singh, who rushed to the AIIMS straight from the airport (he had just returned from abroad), was stoned. Rajiv Gandhi was in Calcutta when Indira Gandhi was assassinated. Zail Singh decided in the plane itself that he would swear in Rajiv Gandhi as prime minister, without waiting for the ruling Congress to elect a leader of its parliamentary party.