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Paper delivered by the Association of Indian Progressive Study Groups, (AIPSG),
at a Public Meeting in London at the School of Oriental and African
Studies (SOAS) on June 26th 1999 to mark the 15th anniversary of
Operation Blue Star
On behalf of the Association of Indian Progressive
Study Groups (the AIPSG), I would like to thank the Revolutionary
Communist Party of Britain, (Marxist Leninist) for organising this
meeting and for inviting us to participate in this important discussion
on the Legacy of Operation Blue Star. Operation Blue Star took place in
Amritsar, Punjab, between 4th June - 6th June, 1984. The reason we have
gathered here in London in June 1999 is not so much to debate about what
exactly took place in Amritsar fifteen years ago, but to discuss what is
happening in India and the world today, as we speak. Still more
important for us is to deliberate upon where do we stand on what is
happening today and how we must intervene into the current developments
on the basis of the conclusions we can draw from the legacy of Operation
Blue Star. This is the context in which the discussion on Operation Blue
Star will be most meaningful.
First of all, Operation Blue Star was the logical
culmination of a very long-standing policy of state interference into
religious matters. In a very concentrated and brutal way, it symbolised
the policy of religious divisions that the Indian State had been
practicing throughout India. In Punjab, this can be traced back to the
original partition of Punjab between Pakistan and India in 1947 on the
basis of Hindus and Muslims, and the subsequent carving out of Haryana
in 1968 on a strictly communal basis, dividing Hindus and Sikhs.
Operation Blue Star added to the division, supposedly between moderates
and fundamentalist Sikhs.
Secondly, Operation Blue Star occurred at a time when
the entire welfare-state approach, represented in India by the Congress
party, and in Britain by the Labour party had run into serious crisis.
It came at a time when the Soviet state was entering its final years and
began pushing perestroika and glasnost, which actually contributed to
its complete demise. It was in the context of this crisis of the welfare
state that in the U.S. and Britain, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher
were brought into power, who sought to solve this crisis with their twin
policies of militarisation and social cutbacks. They embarked on an
ideological and political warfare against the people of the world, from
Grenada to Nicaragua, from Iran to Ireland. In India, the approach that
the ruling circles decided to take in order to emerge out of their
crisis was one of open terror, anarchy and slaughter of the people on
top of their policy of divide and rule.
Operation Blue Star was not something sudden,
something unexpected, or as the state tried to present it, as something
the Indira Gandhi government was "forced" into doing. It emerged
logically out of decades of a policy of division and diversion, and was
in turn, to serve that policy in a new and more deadly manner in the
years to come. The last fifteen years have shown how this policy of
division and diversion has evolved and far from resolving the crisis in
favour of the Indian state as the Indira Gandhi government had hoped, it
has deepened the crisis further.
It will help to just take a cursory look at what has
happened to the policy of state interference in religion over the past
fifteen years. On the one hand, there was a so-called apology that the
Congress Party made a year or so ago for having organised Operation Blue
Star. But on the other hand, the controversies that are raging in India
over the past year relating to the appointment of the Jathedar to the
Akal Takht , the intrigue of the Americans into that fight who first
granted a visa to Bhai Ranjit Singh to visit the US, and then revoked
it, following which he was dismissed as the jathedar by the government
of Punjab, make it seem that this policy of state interference has not
ended, but has been elevated to a new plane.
The problem is not even limited to India any more,
for there are bitter fights and divisions taking place in Gurdwaras
around the world, including those here in Britain that mirror those
fights in India. There have been the murders of the care-taker at the
Surrey Gurudwara in British Columbia, and of the editor of Des Pardes, a
Punjabi-language newspaper also in Canada. Similarly, there are the
fights for sitting arrangements during langar in the Sikh temples in
several different countries where the police have sought hard to
characterise the problem as one of "fundamentalists" versus "moderates",
and on that basis, to criminalize the differences among people. In
conclusion, it is becoming evident that at least here in Britain, as
well as Canada, the US, and generally all over the world, the members of
the Sikh religion have become the target of state interference by the
state agencies of these countries besides the agencies from India and
Punjab itself. This is the legacy of Operation Blue Star.
The interference of the State into religion was not
invented in 1984 to launch Operation Blue Star, nor did it end with it.
The division of India in 1947 was itself the product of a conscious
policy of interference of the British State into the religious affairs
in order to maintain their colonial plunder, while today the rising war
clouds in South Asia also have their origin in the interference of the
State in the religious affairs of the people. In contemporary times,
Anglo-American imperialism is spearheading the division of people into
"fundamentalists" versus "moderates" on the world scale. This policy of
division and diversion is in its totality, the single most important
weapon that the Indian ruling circles and the world powers use to keep
people disoriented from taking up the tasks of renovating the economic
and political systems to serve their needs. It is on this issue we all
must take a stand. For us to be able to take a stand, we must discuss
what is going on in front of our eyes to make people fight with each
other and be set up for mutual slaughter.
Slaughter is the only way to describe what took place
on June 4th, 5th and 6th of 1984 in the premises of the Golden Temple
and Akal Takht when the Indian Army, under orders from Indira Gandhi
government, without warning, assaulted the premises with heavy
artillery, tanks, Howtziwer guns, and other mechanised weapons. The
attack coincided with the religious celebrations taking place at the
Temple on the occasion of the birthday of the Fifth Guru of the Sikhs,
Guru Arjan Dev who himself was martyred while defending the dignity of
the Sikhs centuries before. One of the main conclusions that emerges
after fifteen years of this infamous attack on the highest seat of
religion of the Sikhs is that its aim was to humiliate a whole people,
to attack their dignity and their struggle. What is going on today in
Britain, the US, Canada and India with respect to Sikhs tells us that
this policy to humiliate people has not ended. We can also say with full
confidence that the people have stood up and not permitted anyone to
lower their dignity. They stood up in 1984, courting martyrdom defending
the sanctity of Golden Temple with guns in hand, they stood up
afterwards when Punjab entered into insurgency and defiance which
plunged the New Delhi regime into a crisis from which it has not yet
emerged. They are standing up now by fighting against the violation of
rights that have occurred and occurring in Punjab. It is the present
struggle for rights and against state terrorism which has the greatest
potential to defeat the politics of division and diversion not just in
Punjab but in whole of India and create the possibility for a new India
to emerge on the basis of affirming rights of all on a modern basis.
Punjab was, is and will be at the center of the
solution of the problems of South Asia. Conversely, the destabilization
of Punjab was, is and will be at the heart of destabilization of South
Asia. If a war breaks out between India and Pakistan today, besides any
other place, Punjab will be the bulls-eye of destruction. Similarly, if
the Punjab nation can affirm the right to self determination in today's
world, or if the portion of Punjab that is within India or Pakistan can
affirm the right of self determination for the Punjabi nationality, it
will be an immense contribution for all the nations of South Asia in
their struggle to affirm their own rights. The struggle of the Punjabi
people prior to Operation Blue Star and afterwards has made it amply
clear that promoting anarchy and violence in Punjab is the insurance
policy of the ruling circles of India to keep the Punjab problem
unresolved and keep the Indian people divided and diverted.
Operation Blue Star was a defining event in Indian
politics in the sense that it institutionalized anarchy and violence
against the people as the preferred state policy and opened the path for
such infamies as the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the attack on the
Hazratbal, the burning of churches and temples in Gujarat, the
assassinations of Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Longowal and other
political personalities, the bomb blasts in Mumbai, Calcutta, Coimbatore,
Jalpaiguri etc, the massacres in Delhi, Mumbai, Madurai and so on. There
was a clear turning point in that sense during the mid-eighties, almost
coinciding with what took place worldwide as the fraud of bipolar
division came crumbling down, as the anti-social offensive of the world
bourgeoisie intensified, as the search for ways and means to move away
from the state monopoly capitalism to free market reform accelerated.
The trend ushered in by Operation Blue Star made it possible for the
Narasimha Rao government to introduce its privatization and
liberalization programs seven years later amidst great anarchy and
confusion in the country that had rendered the people incapable
effectively resist those attacks. What unfolded in Ayodhya later was
only a continuation of what Operation Blue Star had sanctioned, and that
infamous legacy carries on to this day.
As the retrogression in the world is deepening and
the world powers are embarking upon the path of war preparations, war
mongering and war on the one hand while stepping up the anti-social
offensive through WTO, IMF, World Bank, modifications to the
multilateral agreement on investment to impose MAI on the developing
countries and so on, India has unveiled its own initiatives for
militarization and war besides a "second wave of liberalization and
privatization". What is happening today in the world and in India are as
significant as what happened nearly fifteen years ago. If Perestroika in
Soviet Union and Operation Blue Star in India were symptomatic of what
was to come then, today it is Operation Allied Force in the Balkans and
Operation Vijay in Kashmir that define the way big powers want to enter
the next millennium.
In 1984, the Indira Gandhi government claimed that it
had no choice but to launch an army assault on the Golden Temple to
flush out terrorists. We know since then that overwhelming majority of
the people who were killed during Operation Blue Star were innocent
pilgrims and those who were arrested were released without charges
against them ever being filed. The Bains Commission which the government
of Punjab had appointed to investigate the terrorism charge against the
detainees established convincingly that there was no evidence of any
terrorist activity by the arrested individuals who, if you recall, were
called dreaded terrorists, Pakistani agents and what-not, and were even
detained in jails far away in Jodhpur in Rajasthan. Is there a
conclusion to be drawn that is relevant here for us today? Yes, it is
that disinformation is the stock-in-trade of all those who manufacture
pretexts to justify their attacks on the people which otherwise cannot
be justified. That is what is most likely going on today in Kashmir.
Bombing from the air on your own territory can never
be accepted by anyone as much as firing upon pilgrims in a religious
shrine can be justified. Such actions are meant to set precedents so
that the insurgencies in other parts of the country can be attacked, so
that villages can be bombed in the name of attacking terrorist
hide-outs, demonstrations of workers can be bombed in the manner British
had attacked anti-colonial demonstrations in Peshawar and other cities
in the 1930's. This is to continue spreading the big lie that the
insurgency in Kashmir is only because of interference from Pakistan,
which is the same logic that was given in 1984 when the white-paper of
Indira Gandhi supposedly documented the weapons cache it had uncovered
from Akal Takht premises which were supposedly supplied by Pakistan.
Facts have since shown that it was not the Pakistan government which was
behind the murders and mayhem in Punjab but it was the armed police of
India, under orders from New Delhi directly, which was carrying out the
mayhem both directly and through "anti-terrorist" squads it had
organized. The Indian state cannot hide the fact that its policy of last
decade to exterminate the fighters of Kashmir has been a failure and it
is resorting to more drastic and more draconian measures to accomplish
what it has failed to accomplish to date.
Just last year, India's Home Minister was
congratulating himself for his government's pro-active Kashmir policy of
"showing no false-pity" on the insurgents, was calling for open war
against peasant insurgents of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Orissa,
declaring them all to be criminal and denying that they had any economic
or political causes. Is there not a connection between this latest
attacks on pockets of militants in Kashmir and Advani's policy of
military attacks upon those fighting for political and economic rights?
No matter what pretext is given about cross-border infiltration and so
on for justifying the current bombings, it cannot be accepted that the
Indian government had no choice but to go for full scale war to flush
out pockets of insurgents in remote mountains of Kashmir.
It is also significant to note that the support it
has received for this adventurist policy is the same support it had
received in 1984, when it assaulted the Golden Temple. It was then the
Americans, Germans, British, Russians and others who had openly
supported the government of India for that infamy in 1984. It is not a
coincidence that today, the same powers are doing the same again, lining
up behind the Indian government one by one, starting with Bill Clinton
of the US, and Tony Blair being the latest.
This parade of the leaders of the G8 calling for
return to status-quo ante in Kashmir is the most revealing and most
worrisome development in the last week. It is worrisome because these
leaders, in their joint communique issue in Cologne last week, state in
Clause 40 that:
"In order to improve our ability to prevent crises,
it is necessary, consistent with the principles and purposes of the UN
Charter, to enhance the capacity to recognize and address the potential
for conflict at an early stage. Risks and causes of violent conflicts
must be more effectively monitored and the information shared to
forestall them".
In the resolution they adopted on regional issues,
they specifically identify Yugoslavia, Kosova and Middle East as zones
of conflict and then add Jordan, Cyprus, Nigeria and Kashmir as places
where they intend to "identify potential for conflict at an early
stage". On Kashmir, the statement reads:
"We are deeply concerned about the continuing
military confrontation in Kashmir following the infiltration of armed
intruders which violated the Line of Control. We regard any military
action to change the status quo as irresponsible. We therefore call for
the immediate end of these actions, restoration of the Line of Control
and for the parties to work for an immediate cessation of the fighting,
full respect in the future for the Line of Control and the resumption of
the dialogue between India and Pakistan in the spirit of the Lahore
Declaration."
Is there a link between the first and the second
communiqués? Was the visit of US General Mr. Zinni and a host of US
State Department officials to Pakistan just two days after this joint
communique was signed by Bill Clinton meant to identify "at an early
stage the potential for conflict between India and Pakistan"? What does
this sudden convergence of views of all the big powers on Kashmir issue
reveal about what exactly they are up to?
All these facts have to be analyzed in the context
that the world is in a state of disequilibrium since the end of the Cold
War. The big powers cannot just bluff their way to a new equilibrium. In
the era of imperialism, a new equilibrium can come either through war or
through the victory of the people. If the people do not succeed, then
war cannot be averted. In the end, the war will be among the big powers
themselves to redivide the world. In spite of all their show of
togetherness, it is very apparent that they are all preparing for such
an eventuality. The times are not ripe yet for the big powers to go to
war among themselves. They are testing their weaponry, their abilities
and so on as they move towards such an eventuality inch by inch. The
European Union has decided to have its own military alliance side by
side with NATO. Russia has started modernizing its defence systems. The
US has never stopped arming and rearming itself and its allies.
So far, since the end of Cold War, the big powers
have been able to stay together by creating common enemies like Saddam
Hussain or Slobodan Milosovic who themselves were one time clients of
one or more of these powers and have been demonized since then. They
have chosen their targets carefully, in the Middle East and in the
Balkan peninsula where the old colonial powers and their empires had
clashed before. They have tried to undo what the developments of
twentieth century had tried to resolve in these parts of the world. They
have sought to establish their old colonial privileges and clienteles in
these parts of the world. Does it require much imagination that Asia is
the biggest and most prized target of these Eurocentrist powers to undo
the advances of the 20th century on the front of formal independence of
the Asian countries from the European colonizers?
What better policy than the tried and tested policy
of perennial instability, war and bloodshed to claim their old colonies
as new clients? In other words, the conquest of Asia is on the agenda of
the European and American powers of today and their banding together on
the Kashmir dispute is the continuation of their banding together in the
recent past against Iraq or Yugoslavia. There is no other way you can
explain the sudden rush to activism by these powers on Kashmir issue
which has been festering for last five decades and on which each one of
these powers have a sordid history for taking the stand against the
interest of the people and of the nation of Kashmir each and every time
an opportunity had arisen to solve it.
They cannot hide their sordid history through
disinformation, by presenting terrorism as anti-terrorism, by presenting
aggression as humanitarian intervention and the like. No sooner had the
bombs stopped dropping on Kosova, than the US ordered ships away from
Adriatic sea and into the Korean waters in the East. The government in
Macedonia extended diplomatic recognition to Taiwan almost at the same
time the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed. The US has negotiated a
new military base agreement with the Philippines government while the
Japanese parliament approved legislation to allow the US military to
operate from Japanese territory without informing the government of
Japan under emergency situations.
What these developments are showing is that Kashmir
policy of the G8 has to be seen in time and place it is situated and
today, Kashmir is a potential zone of war. All the commentators
worldwide say so very openly these days. That means, the big powers of
the world are preparing for a war in Kashmir. Notwithstanding all the
disinformation spread about the infiltrators in Kashmir, it is
fairy-tale to believe that the US did not have a hand in the appearance
of any groups of infiltrators on the Indian side of Line of Control if
such a thing has happened. Otherwise, it makes no sense that the US
president, after remaining quiet in public for three weeks or so after
India started bombing in the Kargil region, one day made a public
display of his advice to Pakistani prime minister that the infiltrators
should be pulled out. But in the most pathetic manner, Indian government
officials are basking about the sympathy of the big powers to its view
point. How can this public phone call of the US president be a victory
for the Indian government's war policy? If anything, one can only say
that Indian government has walked into a trap set for it by the big
powers and the pit is so deep that they cannot see any light.
From the view point of the people, one can say that
India must deescalate the conflict and force the government of Pakistan
to negotiate with it on whatever issues that divide the two countries.
The government of India can do so by calling on the people of India to
hold political strikes and explain to them what it is doing to foil the
plans of international powers to impose war in Kashmir. It can create
mechanisms for the people of India to march in their millions on the
streets of Delhi, Mumabi, Surat, Ludhiana and so on demanding peace. I
can assure you that you will see the same in Lahore, Karachi and
Islamabad right away. People will be able to play their role to ensure
that military solution to Kashmir problem and Indo-Pak problem is never
considered as a solution either by the regime in Delhi or in Islamabad.
Indian government does not look at this as an option, in fact it does
the opposite, it looks at military option as the only option and
depoliticises the people so that they find for themselves no role in
setting the policy for war and peace even though their sons and
daughters pay for the policy with their blood and their taxes.
In short, the bombings and shelling in Kashmir are
the most provocative things right now which can plunge South Asia into
war and let no one rejoice that the G8 is taking up Kashmir issue on its
agenda. This is a matter on which all people must take a stand. It is a
matter of the same calibre as taking a stand against Blue Star in June
of 1984 which the British working class, along with other democratic
forces of the world, took right then which you will see in the video
tape of the meeting organized in South Hall on June 9, 1984 where
Hardial Bains so clearly spoke on behalf of us all.
For what can be said of those who conciliated with
the Indira Gandhi government at that time? These forces actually claimed
that it was the people of India who were communal and that the actions
of the Indian army in the Golden Temple were necessary measures to
secure the defence of secularism. In fact, it can be shown that the
secular-communal divide that is being pushed in India today has its
origins in the Operation Blue Star itself and furthermore, the forces
most vigorously behind the secular movement today are the very ones who
were the biggest defenders of the army action on Golden Temple in 1984.
It can also be shown that as the Soviet Union began collapsing in the
1980's and these conciliators could no longer just keep their democratic
credentials merely on the basis of repeating the Soviet positions on all
national and international issues is why they openly adopted the
doctrine of "defence of national unity and territorial integrity" of
India as their new credo.
This India of the big business houses and big
landlords became for them the standard bearer of the "secular fabric"
and its defence has been their new cause. They have defended the
brutalities in Punjab enacted under K.P.S. Gill and Beant Singh under
the pretext that the state terror unleashed by them was directed against
communalists and terrorists. Similarly, they have defended the massacres
of thousands of people by the Indian state and its agencies in Kashmir
because the issue there for them is one of Islamic fundamentalism that
will weaken the "secular fabric" of their Indian state. They have
consistently defended all forms of state terrorism in India in the name
of "defence of national unity and territorial integrity" and they are
today calling on people to support the bombing and shelling by the
Indian military in Kashmir as well.
Social chauvinism was the hallmark of German social
democracy during first Word War and it is not a coincidence that social
chauvinism is being used to keep people depoliticized and away from
looking at real solutions to real problems at a time when the
retrogression is pushing the world backwards to medievalism. But the
people of India have drawn conclusions from what has happened to this
world and what has happened to them. They are drawing new conclusions
everyday as the events and phenomena reveal themselves. This is the time
to politicize the people so that the program for renewal of the
economic, political and national-international life can be taken up
earnestly. This is where the struggle of the people of India is at this
time and the times are calling for doing those things which will enable
people to take a stand in favour of renewal at this time.
The main obstacles facing the movement for democratic
renewal in India or in Britain or the US are the depoliticization of the
people and the massive disinformation campaign. The coming electoral
struggle in India presents a great opportunity to the people to turn the
situation around in their favour by actually rejecting the pressure to
line up behind the parties who have been responsible for Operation Blue
Star, the fake encounters, the massacres of Mumbai and Delhi and so on,
rejecting the pressure to defend the "secularism" of the Indian state or
the doctrine of national unity and territorial integrity. This means,
rather than getting embroiled in the debate over which faction of the
ruling circles are communal and which ones are secular, people can
discuss and implement their own program for progress of India.
The politics of division and diversion is the
politics of keeping such an agenda away from the people. The program of
democratic renewal which the Communist Ghadar Party of India (CGPI) has
presented under the title: hum hai iske malik, hum hai hindustan,
majdoor, kisan, aurat aur jawan, is a program that can lift India out of
its crisis . Objectively speaking, movements like the one against state
terrorism in Punjab, against the Narmada project, against nuclear
weapons and war, against WTO and so on are all expressions of the
movement of the people for their empowerment for the renewal of India.
The growth of these movements in the last fifteen years show that the
plans of the Indian ruling circles can be defeated by the movement of
the people. People are refusing to be divided along ideological lines
and refusing to simply line up behind the "moderates" and the
"conservatives", or between the left and the right or the centre. There
is a lot of discussion taking place about what the developments in India
and abroad are revealing about the present and the future.
The imposition of war, promotion of anarchy,
disinformation and so on are the response of the ruling circles and the
world imperialism to keep people bound to the illusion that the big
powers can provide solutions to their economic, social, political and
national problems today. There are not a few forces in the world who
actually believe that the big powers will give them rights, especially
national rights. This is however, simply not the case. In fact, it is
the other way - all big powers are united to deny any people the
national right because they know that once the national right is
negated, no other right can be affirmed by any peoples and this means
the looters and plunderers, the hooligans of the world will flourish.
That is why the right of nations is one of the most blatantly violated
rights on the world scale today. The attack on national rights is one of
the main instruments to keep people divided and diverted and undermine
the movement for their social liberation. Right here in the British
Isles, you have your ample experience on this front. The suppression of
the national struggle in Kashmir, in the Balkans, in the Middle East, in
the Korean Peninsula and so on is emerging as the instrument for
imposing war in those regions. The attack on national rights is the
means to impose the anti-social offensive and to organise the plunder
and exploitation of resources of countries in Eastern Europe, Asia,
Latin America, Africa and so on as the current economic crises are
showing.
Operation Blue Star in 1984, among other things, was
directed against the national struggle of the Punjabi nationality in
India. The experience of the last fifteen years shows that no national
struggle can entertain the idea that the "international community" will
give rights to the people. Punjabis and Kashmiris have learnt this the
hard way. The liberation of the nations and the peoples can succeed
today on the basis of taking up the program for democratic renewal of
the nations themselves.
The point to be made in conclusion is that Operation
Blue Star represented a concentrated expression of the violence and
anarchy wreaked by the Indian state against the Indian people. But
beyond this, it also further institutionalized disinformation, division
and diversion. In the face of all the odds, the people of India have
marched on and a program for the renewal of India has emerged out of the
struggle of the people against state terrorism and divisions. In spite
of all the disinformation, people have been able to define their
movement for the renewal of India as the struggle for the affirmation of
rights. As we enter the next century, it is this trend, the struggle for
rights, which will finally end the legacy of Operation Blue Star.
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