1984: An Unending Torment

Bhupinder Singh Mahal

"A little fire is quickly trodden out Which, being suffered, rivers cannot quench"
- Shakespeare [Henry VI]

In 1949 George Orwell were to look into the dark depths of man’s nature to choreograph an imaginary world half a century down the road. His visualization of the ills of a totalitarian state that were to plague his world in 1984 was a dire warning. Who would have guessed that the political abuses penned by George Orwell in his premonitory novel would have become articles of faith for Mrs. Indira Gandhi and her government who would translate the ominous nightmare scenario that Orwell so feared onto their Indian landscape in that very same year.

1984 were to turn the real world of each and every Sikh topsy-turvy. Like Orwell’s hero, Winston Smith, the Sikhs, too, were made to pay a heavy toll for airing their grievances and asserting their rights. Like Smith they were no match for an unjust and unfeeling government intent upon not only to break them physically and to bring them to fall on their knees but to "root out their independent mental existence and their spiritual dignity".

Now who would have thought that a year beginning with a promising hope of an accommodation by Mrs. Gandhi of Akali Dal’s Anandpur Sahib Resolution will have, in a twinkling melted into a cataclysmic outrage, in early June, at Amritsar, Sikhdom’s holiest city? As if driving a stake through the heart of Sikhism was not enough, Hindu citizenry were whipped into a catatonic stupor by Congress (I) leadership, in November 1984, and let loose to hunt down Sikhs in the streets and by-lanes of Delhi, Bombay, Kanpur and other towns and cities of India.

II

MRS. GANDHI STOOPS TO CONQUER

"All hereditary government is in its nature tyranny...To inherit a government, is to inherit the people, as if they were flocks and herds"
- Thomas Paine

In the eyes of the Sikhs the 1984 ‘Bluestar ‘attack on the Golden Temple remains an unforgivable sacrilege. Even outsiders, given the benefit of hindsight, see it as a crazed act. The wickedness of the planners lies bared by the date selected for the launching of the attack. A date in June of great religious significance on the Sikh calendar commemorating the sacrifice of the beloved Guru Arjun Dev. A day sure enough to draw thousands upon thousands of Sikh pilgrims from every where. By penciling in that particular date, in June 1984, the planners betrayed their intent of wanting to inflict so large a number of casualties that would sufficiently demoralize the Sikh community. The military action, so claimed Mrs. Gandhi and her mandarins, were solely aimed at reasserting political authority over the Golden Temple complex, nothing more.

The military action was brought to pass by the northern Hindus who wished to exact vengeance from the Sikh militants, headquartered in Golden Temple complex, whom they accused of mounting a systematic campaign of terror killing hundreds of their brethren; and, their frenzied calls were reaching Mrs. Gandhi, and her cabal, loud and clear. Elite military garrisons were mobilized and a tight military cordon was thrown around the temple surroundings, manned by thousands upon thousands of veteran soldiers supported by heavy armour, tanks and the state-of-the-art weaponry, all in a set-battle array meant to inflict an overwhelmingly disproportional force that will destroy anything that moved.

But, Mrs. Gandhi, herself, repeatedly downplayed the military adventure by insisting that the operation was directed solely at seeking the ouster or surrender of the Sikh-militants from the precincts of the Golden Temple. This was humbug - given that there were no signs of a quarantine net being thrown around the Golden Temple complex for the interdiction of food, provisions and arms, which is what you must do if ouster or surrender were on the cards. But Mrs. Gandhi was very adept at saying one thing for public consumption while privately hatching more sinister plots.

What had brought into being such a sad state of affairs? For starters, Mrs. Gandhi had nursed a grudge against the Sikhs, especially the Akali leadership, whom she had blamed for her 1977 electoral defeat. On retaking the nation’s helm, in 1980, all the harboured ill-will she had were translated into a strategy to play tough in any and all negotiations dealing with the Sikhs and Punjab. While the Akalis were at the time in disarray, not so Mrs. Gandhi who was hell bent to render them powerless once and for all.

In seeking to destroy the Akalis, Mrs. Gandhi’s strategy, according to Patwant Singh, were to draft "a Sikh with a magnetic and mesmerizing personality whose extravagant utterances (of an exaggerated Hindu threat to the Sikh faith) would wean the Sikhs away from the moderate Akalis." To do her bidding she were to rely on the old campaigner, Zail Singh, a person as crafty as herself. Like Cassius, though not as lean, he was no less mean and selfish. This conspiratorial nexus were to hatch a Machiavellian plot to confound the Sikhs. At the centre of their plot was their protege, Bhindranwale who were to take stage and, in the words of Patwant Singh, he were to "become a turbulent presence in Punjab." Punjab was never ever to be the same again. When and why Bhindranwale turned his back on his sponsors is a story in itself, but doubt there is none that he were to escalate the nature, shape and intensity of Sikh militancy. What was disturbing was not so much that he was the one to throw the gauntlet, but that he were to conduct himself as Caesar and Plato rolled into one, holding durbar in the Golden Temple precincts, issuing edicts and dishing out his own brand of justice.

By Vaisakhi 1984 the political situation had worsened and with the near collapse of civilian authority in Amritsar Mrs. Gandhi chose her June ’84 date to launch the Bluestar operation. It was a plot conceived by an imperious leader whose I-can’t-do-anything-wrong attitude came to be reflected in her government’s excessive ethnocentric overbearance. In the words of Ken Ringle, a Washington writer, it is " the classical temptation of mortals who, finding themselves garbed in the unaccustomed robes of leadership, start imagining themselves invulnerable and so tempt the fates". Think of Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin (Uganda), "Papa Doc" Duvalier (Haiti), Efrain Rios Montt (Guatemala), Pinochet (Chile), Jorge Videla (Argentina), and, in recent times, Slobodan Milosevic (Balkans), and one finds that the Gandhis (Indira and Rajiv) are not far behind in succumbing to hubris by believing that they are uniquely blessed by God and destiny.

III

MRS. GANDHI’S LEGIONS RUN AMUCK

"There is a pleasure sure In being mad which none but madmen know."
- John Dryden, The Spanish Friar

A match-stick packs a power for good and evil. It does good when used to light a fire to cook a meal. But, it is an instrument of evil in the hands of an arsonist. The army is just like a match-stick, a latent power, which in the hands of a prudent leader will defend the honour and integrity of the realm; but in the hands of a mean and an impudent leader it may be turned into a killing machine. Which is precisely what the arrogant Mrs.. Gandhi did in June 1984 to crush the Sikh agitation in Punjab.

What protocol were followed by Mrs. Gandhi to deploy the Army remains a secret but it is clear that there is no record of the local authorities having placed a requisition for intervention by the army to bring peace and order in turbulent Amritsar during 1983-84. The word making the rounds says that several months earlier ‘Bluestar’ was rehearsed using an exact replica of the Golden Temple complex. Such a staging presumes not only that it were blessed by Mrs. Gandhi, the head of state, but also that it was a forethought action. That the army were to mount a purely military operation, and so named, on its own populace is unheard of in any civilized democracy. Again, Bluestar operation was unique for another deviation from the norm. For example, the field commanders chosen to supervise Bluestar were Sikhs (Maj. General K.S. Brar and Lt. General R.S. Dayal) whereas the soldiers serving under them were mostly Hindus. The fact that Sikh officers were ready and willing to attack the temple were seen as giving legitimacy to the venture, a perverted illusion. The use of mostly Hindu soldiers, whose faith differed from and sometimes clashed with Sikhism, were to free them from being burdened by religious considerations in using full force. In keeping with the dictums of the Sikh faith, the Army vowed not to desecrate the holy precincts by soldiers treading the grounds in boots and bared heads, but photographs taken during and following Bluestar show otherwise.

IV

To date, the only accounting of Bluestar from someone actually involved in the operation is the written record in Maj. General K.S. Brar’s book, "Operation Bluestar; the True Story". Brar’s version has been severely criticized by several political analysts. One such challenger is Brig. Manmohan Singh Virk (Retd.) who in his review ("Black Spots in the General’s Bluestar") of Brar’s book, wonders why the General failed to address compelling counter evidence such as "the linkages involved in the rise of Sant Bhindranwale, allowing weapons into the Golden temple even when it had been sealed and surrounded by CRPF Units for over a year, and the build up of a situation where the use of the Army could be legitimized, the Constitutional Akali demands, tortuous course of negotiations between the Akalis and Indira Gandhi, and how, on two occasions, these were aborted after an agreement had been reached; of disinformation on Punjab which twisted the content of the problem from Constitutional to communal - including the stage-managed discovery of a cow’s tail and ears in Durgiana Temple and the cigarette butts in the Golden Temple in 1983."

Brig. Manmohan Singh Virk believes that the Bluestar was a "devious" plot since it ignored other more appropriate, and less lethal, measures. He feels that, " Given the quantum of Army deployed in Punjab, the terrain, easy observation, and prevention of movement, and the narrow and congested city lanes, there could be no serious interference with the Operation, were it to be a siege." His accounting of the July 1984 meeting presided over by COAS, attended by top Army brass, is indeed illuminating. When, at one juncture, General Sundarji, Chief of Army, is quoting the casualty figures of the terrorists and the civilians killed and wounded, Lt. General Bhupinder Singh, then GOC-in-C of Central Command, were to ask "how many of those killed were terrorists" to which Gen. Sundarji were to reply "practically all of them." Unsatisfied with the answer, attendee Brig. Manmohan Singh Virk were to ask follow-up questions, which Q & A tells a story of its own:

Brig. Virk: Sir, how did you determine who is a terrorist and who is not?

Gen. Sundarji (losing his cool) : What the hell do you want to find out?

Brig. Virk: Just the answer to the question I have asked.

Gen. Sundarji: They were there, they got killed.

Brig. Virk: I am afraid that does not answer my question.

Gen. Sundarji: The number of weapons recovered and the number of persons killed were about the same

Brig. Virk: I am afraid this still does not answer my question

Gen. Sundarji: What the hell could we have done? The bodies had petrified.

Brig. Virk: Sir, it may be in the Army’s long-term interest to say we do not honestly know how many of them were terrorists.

According to Brig. Manmohan Singh Virk, "the Army had no idea of how many militants were inside the Golden Temple", a statement when measured against the report of a journalist that weapons were added to the arms cache recovered, reveals that Army brass not only exaggerated the number of terrorists killed but that the Operation itself was ill-conceived and poorly executed.

General Sundarji’s prevarication is understandable. In what god’s name could he justify killing thousands of innocent pilgrims, looting of valuable Sikh relics and torching original historical documents? That he was an instrument to do Mrs. Gandhi’s evil bidding is crystal clear. He should have known better and taken the high ground even if it meant his disobeying the immoral summons - as called for by the judgement at Nuremberg.