by Mark Tully
Satisfied that the capture of the strategic road between the hostels and the complex proper would prevent any militants escaping, Gill told Sarabjit Singh that the curfew could be lifted in most of the walled city: it was enforced only within a radius of 400 yards of the complex. This was done before the director-general of police left for Delhi again on Thursday night.
Gill had another reason for feeling confident. Telephone lines to the rooms around the parikrama had been kept open, and Gill was able to speak to one of the separatists. By the tone of the man's voice, he judged that morale was collapsing. But Gill's confidence was misplaced: while he was in Delhi, ten to twelve people tried to escape. Two were shot and the rest ran back into the temple complex. From then on, night curfew was imposed in the whole of the walled city.
One of the decisions taken in Delhi was actively to encourage the press to witness Operation Black Thunder. This was in sharp contrast to Operation Blue Star, when we had all been bundled out of Punjab. Gill explained this decision to me: ‘We were particularly anxious to have television there because we were genuinely afraid that the militants might blow up the Golden Temple. If they did and it was filmed, then everyone would be able to see what had happened and no amount of propaganda could have saved them.’
The governor of Punjab told me the decision to encourage the press to watch the operation had been taken by Rajiv Gandhi himself. He had apparently told Gill, ‘I want Sikhs to see that we are not committing any excesses. I also want to be able to see for myself that you don't commit any.’
There was some resistance to this decision, as the police and the National Security Guard were not used to operating under press surveillance. In fact the National Security Guard were so shy of publicity that they had disguised their men in police uniforms. These difficulties prevented us seeing the next stage of the Gill plan – the capture of some of the outer buildings of the complex itself.
Ribeiro told me there was another disagreement over the capture of those buildings. At about midday on Friday, Gill apparently phoned Ribeiro to complain that the commandos were refusing to accept his orders to occupy the buildings and so he was going in with his own police. Ribeiro told him he must wait for clearance from Delhi and contacted Chidambaram, who gave the go-ahead. The commandos captured the langar – the canteen where free meals were served to all those who came to the Golden Temple – and the Gurdwara Manji Sahib – a large hall used for public meetings by the militants and the Akali Dal. Three members of the security forces were wounded during the capture of the langar and the gurdwara – the only casualties the security forces suffered during the whole operation.
On Saturday I was taken to the top of Gill's headquarters for my first ringside view of Operation Black Thunder. It was not exactly a comfortable experience, as I had to run across an open roof to get to the police posts, which were just a few yards from one of the bungas or towers still occupied by the Sikh separatists. The police were firing intermittently, but fortunately there was no response from the towers.
While I was in the headquarters, the police made another attempt to get all the remaining non-combatants out of the complex. Sarabjit Singh knew that some were still stuck inside because Baba Uttam Singh, the burly Sikh elder in charge of the reconstruction of the Akal Takht, had told him that some of his craftsmen were still missing. I watched Baba Uttam Singh announce a temporary cease-fire through a loud hailer and appeal to his craftsmen to come out. The deputy commissioner had offered to allow the baba to go into the complex to rescue his men, but had warned him that there would be nothing the security forces could do about it if he were held by the militants. The baba turned that offer down. When he made his appeal, the militants shouted from the bunga near me, ‘We will only allow them out if the baba himself comes to get them.’ But I saw two elderly men and one woman scuttle out of the east gate of the complex and totter across the road to the safety of the hostel opposite. The militants fired on them, injuring the woman. Only two other people – also elderly – came out that day.
Gill decided the time had come to step up the pressure. Snipers had already softened up the bungas; now the National Security Guards were ordered to bring up their Carl Gustaf rocket-launchers to fire at the defensive positions. The onslaught was kept up all night. Staying in the Ritz hotel, perhaps a mile away as the crow flies, I could see tracer bullets criss-crossing the sky above the Golden Temple and hear the deep staccato stutter of heavy machine-guns, the sharp crack of the snipers' PSG German rifles and the occasional rocket exploding. Searchlights shone down on the complex. Gill told me, ‘The intention was psychological: we wanted to make them feel what they were up against.’
Sunday was the worst day of the siege for Gill. In the early morning, fire broke out in the clock tower above the main entrance to the parikrama. Gill admitted, ‘I was a very worried man. It was very hot and dry: the fire was very unpredictable – especially in an old building like that – but, when we contacted the boys on the telephone, they would not allow us to bring up the fire brigade. If that fire had spread to the parikrama, it would have been a terrible thing. Fortunately, the fire burnt itself out.’
‘Do you know whether the fire was started deliberately, in an attempt to destroy the temple and discredit you?’ I asked.
‘I honestly don't know, but I suppose that's possible. We never discovered how it started. It could have been a short circuit. Anyhow, however it started, I can tell you I was very worried while it was raging, but luck was on our side – the fire just burnt out.’
Later that morning, Gill's luck seemed to be holding. Sarabjit Singh came to the operational headquarters and made another appeal to the militants to surrender. To the delight of all in the headquarters, 148 people walked out from the east gate of the parikrama with their hands above their heads, crossed the road and surrendered to the police in one of the hostel buildings. Many of them were young men – clearly Sikh separatists.
Sarabjit Singh didn't allow his excitement to show. He calmly announced an extension of the cease-fire, in the hope that more would surrender. His instinct seemed to have been proved correct when another group of people emerged from rooms on the far side of the parikrama with their hands above their heads and started walking in single file following the directions he was shouting over the loudspeaker. But then their leader turned sharply and walked through the gateway which houses the Golden Temple treasures and along the causeway leading to the shrine itself. The rest of the group followed. Sarabjit Singh shouted, ‘Turn back turn back. Keep on the parikrama or you will be shot.’ But the snipers had strict orders not to fire at the Golden Temple itself, and so forty-eight people were able to take sanctuary there, knowing that the security forces would never be allowed to attack the shrine.
Gill was not there at the time he had been called away to meet Ribeiro, who had arrived from Chandigarh. As soon as he was told that some militants had moved into the temple itself, he drove straight back to his headquarters.
Occupation of the temple, Gill told me, was the worst possible thing that could have happened. ‘We had always feared that they would somehow hole up in the Golden Temple, then there would be nothing that we could do except wait for them to come out. We couldn't possibly attack the temple. On the other hand, it would be a big defeat for us if we just went away and left them in control of it. We would find it very hard to make excuses for that. At the same time, I was very worried about what they would do if we made them desperate. They might, for instance, have blown up the shrine.’
Nevertheless Gill did not reprimand anyone for failing to prevent the militants entering the shrine. He held a long discussion with his officers, at the end of which he agreed with their decision not to open fire. He explained to me, ‘It would have looked very bad if there had been bodies littering the causeway leading to the temple. Half our battle was psychological, not to upset the Sikh community. That might certainly have done so.’
Sarabjit Singh told me that some of the police officers ha
d wanted to open fire, but he had opposed this. ‘I said no. We have given a blanket cease-fire and should not break our word. I also thought that perhaps they might have gone into the temple to pay their obeisance before surrendering.’
Gill's troubles that Sunday were not yet over. When he reached the courtyard where the 148 people who had surrendered were being held, an excited junior officer said to him, ‘I think Surjit Singh Penta, the man we have been looking for, is among this lot.’ Penta was the commander of the Bhindranwale Tiger Force, a particularly brutal terrorist organization. He had recently led an attack on a children's birthday party in Delhi, shooting thirteen of the guests dead. Penta was still barely twenty. He had been an outstanding athlete, training to represent India, when his parents were arrested on suspicion of harbouring a terrorist. That turned him against the Indian police and drove him into the hands of the Sikh militants.
The officer pointed to a young woman who he said was Penta's wife. Gill went over to her and asked which was her husband. Penta was watching her. As soon as he saw the woman he had married only nine months before look towards him, he hurriedly stuffed his hand in his mouth, chewed on a capsule which he kept on a string round his neck and collapsed. He had swallowed cyanide. Sarabjit Singh saw him collapse and shouted for a doctor, but Penta died before medical help reached him. That was a serious setback to Gill, who had hoped to extract invaluable intelligence by interrogating Penta. Gill ordered a close watch to be kept on all the others who had surrendered and made arrangements to start interrogating them as soon as possible.
Gill's immediate aim was to find out more about the situation inside the temple. He was told that militants were still holding out in well-fortified positions in cellars below the two bungas, and that the militants' position above the clock tower was still intact in spite of the fire. Those positions had to be knocked out, just in case Rajiv Gandhi did eventually allow the security forces to go on to the parikrama.
That evening the press gallery – or perhaps I should say grandstand – was ready. It was the roof of the Guru Ram Das hostel, which overlooked the whole of the complex. I went up there during the night to watch the bombardment from close quarters. The bright beams of the searchlights sparkled on the white marble and lit every corner of the parikrama. I could see a body lying in a pool of blood outside room 14 and the notice above the door of that room saying ‘Office of Khalistan’. The body was that of Jagir Singh – the spokesman of the Panthic Committee which claimed to control all the groups fighting for Khalistan. He had made many statements to the press from that office.
The temperature the next morning was up in the forties. The authorities had put up a shamiana or canvas pavilion on the roof of the hostel to give us some shade, but it didn't provide a good view of the parikrama so we had to brave the full heat of the sun. The evening before there had even been talk of a bar, but Sarabjit Singh had pointed out that Sikhs regarded the hostel as part of the Golden Temple complex and that they would not take kindly to pictures of journalists drinking beer on its roof. Derek Brown of the Guardian – certainly the most mild-mannered and good-humoured of the foreign correspondents – was a bit put out when told he couldn't even smoke for fear of offending Sikh sensitivities. Eventually a little cubby-hole halfway up the stairs was identified as safe for Derek to smoke in. The only correspondent to come well prepared was Bruce Palling of the Independent. Always a man dressed for the occasion, he arrived on the rooftop wearing a khaki solar topi and carrying his personal water-purifier. In spite of these precautions, however, he soon turned lobster-red.
Monday was dull as well as hot. The security forces kept up the pressure with sporadic firing, but there was no response from the temple complex. The bombardment of the bungas continued, but we began to wonder whether they really were occupied. When the sun was at its height, a few of the wives who had surrendered on the day before were brought on to the roof to appeal to their husbands to surrender, but they were too nervous to carry conviction over the loudspeakers when they told the young men in the Golden Temple that they had been well treated and had been assured that no one who surrendered would be tortured.
Sarabjit Singh also tried to get Jasbir Singh Rode, the head priest who had led the abortive march on the temple, to appeal for a surrender. Rode, however, excused himself on the grounds that he was not senior enough: he said the appeal should come from Baba Thakur Singh, who headed Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale's religious order, the Damdami Taksal. Baba Thakur Singh was very old and rarely spoke in public because of his frailty; nevertheless, he did agree to appeal. But he soon changed his mind under pressure from younger members of the Damdami Taksal, who told the deputy commissioner, ‘This is the government's job, not ours. Baba can't do this sort of thing.’ When Sarabjit Singh pointed out that the daily religious ceremonies in the Golden Temple had been disrupted, they replied, ‘That may be so, but there's nothing we can do about it. You have attacked the temple.’
By Monday evening, Gill was beginning to doubt whether the militants in the Golden Temple would surrender. They had survived two days in what must have been an inferno. The terrifying sounds of the bombardment had not shaken their resolve. Nobody knew how much food or water they had stored in the temple, but it was quite possible they had provisions for many days more. Each day that went by increased the chances of an accident which might damage the sacred shrine – the one thing Gill had been told he must avoid.
On Tuesday morning Gill decided to try another cease-fire. It was announced by his deputy, Chaman Lal, and by Sarabjit Singh, thus giving the militants the assurance that their safety was guaranteed by the operational command and the civil administration. While the announcement was being broadcast, the door of the temple facing us opened. A young Sikh came to the edge of the pool and drew water in a bucket. Snipers asked, ‘Shall we fire?’ Gill replied, ‘No – time the intervals between their going inside the temple and returning to refill the buckets.’ The timings led Gill to conclude that the water was being drunk as it was drawn – that the militants had nowhere to store it.
During the cease-fire, two young men also ran down the causeway and tried to pick up a sack of flour from a corner of the parikrama. Sarabjit Singh shouted, ‘Get back or you'll be shot!’ The two men dropped the sack and ran back into the temple.
The cease-fire restored Gill's confidence. It was now clear that the militants had no water and were short of food. He did not believe that they could hold out for long under those circumstances. He told his colleagues, ‘There will be no more cease-fires. We will leave them for twenty-four hours to let the heat get at them. Let them stew in it. We won't make any announcements at all, but we will complete the capture of the bungas. That should make a hell of a noise and make their lives even more uncomfortable.’
Shortly after the cease-fire, I saw masked commandos wearing black denims and flak jackets running towards the towers with explosives tied to the end of long poles. We heard a series of muffled explosions and saw brown smoke seeping out of the holes in the bungas. Nothing seemed to happen for some time. Then we heard a series of loud explosions which appeared to come from below the bungas. We were at first told that the commandos had fought their way into the cellars, but later Gill admitted that the separatists had fled earlier and that the commandos had found only two dead bodies.
Gill now knew that he could send the commandos into the parikrama without fear of their being fired on from the rear, but he didn't believe that that would now be necessary. He was confident that all he had to do was to let events unfold. The security forces continued firing throughout Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, although they no longer had any targets: their commanders now knew that the only militants left were those in the Golden Temple, and firing at that was totally taboo. The sharp crack of the snipers' rifles and the deep stuttering of the heavy machine-guns were now just part of Gill's psychological warfare.
It was not until the militants had felt the full force of the midday sun on Wednesday th
at Gill made his next move. We were woken from our torpor by the voice of Sarabjit Singh. He was standing on the roof of the langar building, looking intently at the Golden Temple and speaking slowly and deliberately over the loudspeaker. He said, ‘We told you yesterday that we would give you a time to surrender today. If you have made up your minds to come out, wave cloths.’
Almost immediately, a saffron-coloured cloth waved from one of the windows of the temple. It looked like the cloth of a militant's turban. Sarabjit Singh's voice rose in excitement. ‘I will give you instructions. Wait, wait.’ More cloths were waved from other windows of the temple. One person waved so vigorously that he dropped his cloth into the pool. We couldn't see who was waving. Sarabjit Singh said, ‘I have seen the cloths you are waving. Wait, wait. Do not move until you hear my instructions, and then follow them exactly.’ The waving continued for another minute or more. Then Sarabjit Singh, who was by now very much in control of himself, said, ‘Come out of the temple. Walk down the causeway and turn to the right at the end. Keep moving all the time.’ The Sikhs obediently walked out of the temple in a single file. We could see one woman among them.
A continuous stream of instructions from Sarabjit Singh echoed around the parikrama. ‘Walk straight on until you come to the parikrama and then turn right. Keep moving. Don't stop. Don't drop your hands. Keep going and move exactly as I tell you.’ But when the file reached the parikrama, some turned left. Sarabjit Singh screamed, ‘Go back! Go the other way or we will open fire!’ For a moment the young Sikhs panicked. They stopped and stared like rabbits caught in the headlights of a car, not able to move. Sarabjit shouted, ‘Turn round, walk back along the parikrama in the direction of the clock tower. Follow my instructions.’ The message went home: the petrified militants turned around and followed those who were walking the other way round the parikrama. One stopped and bent down to drink water from the pool. Sarabjit shouted, ‘Get up. Keep moving. You will be shot if you stop. We will give you water.’ He kept up his commands until the last man had walked through the eastern gate of the complex into the waiting arms of the police.