India (74 page)

The faith needed constantly to be revived, and there had been fundamentalist or revivalist preachers before Bhindranwale. One such was Randhir Singh. The movement he had started in the 1920s was still important, still had a following, could still send men to war against heretics and the enemy. The head of the movement now was Ram Singh, a small dark man of seventy-two, who had been a squadron-leader in the air force.

He said of the founder of his movement, ‘He saw the light. His skin was dark, but when he saw the light he started glowing. He could see the future and also all the things about the past. His skin glowed more than English people’s. He had rosy cheeks – the light emanated from his cheeks. He saw the light when he was twenty-six. He revolted against the British government. This was the Lahore conspiracy case of 1920. He was imprisoned for life.

‘In the jail one day a padre asked him, “You look healthy. You must have good food.” Sant Randhir Singh said to the padre, “I have the worst food.” The padre said, “You look happy. Do you have someone with you, or do you stay alone?” The sant said, “I’m never alone.” The jailer said to the padre, “The man is telling lies. We never put two prisoners together.” So the padre asked the sant again, “Who stays with you?” And the sant said, “Almighty.”

‘When the sant came out in the 1930s – after 16 years in prison – he began to devote his life to singing religious verses, and reading, and administering amrit to others.’

I asked Squadron-Leader Ram Singh, ‘Why is the amrit necessary?’

He said, ‘God is hidden within us. He is a name only – in every
human being. When you take amrit, only then you become aware of it – that name comes automatically on your tongue.’

He started on a discourse about amrit. ‘It’s a mixture of pure water and white sugar. The sugar is created out of white sugar and baking soda. It’s heated, so that it swells and foams up, so that, solidified, it forms sugar buns. It is mixed with the water in iron containers, and an iron double-edged sword is moved backward and forward in the mixture. This was initiated by the 10th Guru, Guru Gobind Singh. You give amrit to render the receiver deathless. Iron is a magnetic metal. In that iron vessel in which you mix the amrit you have the greatest concentration of lines of magnetic forces. When a conductor moves across the line of magnetic forces you get an electro-magnetic force. That energizes the sugar buns and water, and to a small extent dissolves the iron in it. So it’s a little iron tonic as well.’

We were talking in his sitting room. There was a carpet on the floor, and a cloth on the centre table, and knick-knacks on hanging shelves: a clock, a small statue of a rearing horse, a china jar, a colour snapshot of a child, a small silver salver (a souvenir of London), and some small painted flower-pieces.

Squadron-Leader Ram Singh was born in 1916. His father was a farmer, and he had gone to some trouble to give his son an education. Ram Singh joined the air force in British times, in 1939. In 1957 he had taken amrit.

Why had he felt the need? Had there been some personal crisis? He said no. He had read books by Sant Randhir Singh, and he had discovered that without amrit one just couldn’t reach God.

He spoke clearly. I felt he wished to be friendly. He had the tone and manner of a reasonable man, a man at peace. He was in a fawn-coloured costume, with a milk-chocolate-coloured cardigan. He wore what looked to me like a head-tie rather than a full turban; it was of a saffron colour. The knife, one of the five emblems of Sikhism, hung in a sheath from a big black cross-band, and it made him look less like a warrior than a bus conductor. His beard was a yellowish grey.

The movement aimed at creating pure Sikhs, and amrit was necessary. ‘After you take amrit, you don’t eat food not cooked by
amritdharis.
’ People who have taken amrit. ‘That helps to control the five evils: lust, anger, covetousness, ego, family attachments.’

It would also have created the idea of brotherhood. Was that
why some people in the movement had become suspect to the government?

He said they had had trouble with a reformist Sikh group who believed in living Gurus: they believed, that is, that the line of Gurus didn’t end with the death of the 10th Guru in 1708. They were a small group, but they were a great and constant irritant. In 1978 one person from his movement had been killed by people from that group, and some people of the movement had gone underground.

But he spoke as one for whom violence was far away. His life was consumed by his faith. He got up – his day began – at midnight. He had a bath, and said his prayers till four. From four till 5.30 he read from the Sikh scriptures. Then he slept until 8.30. That was his life. That was the life that had come to him with the pure faith he had turned to when he was forty-one. It clearly had given him peace.

Just before we left, his son came in. He was a handsome, light-eyed man. He had overcome polio, and was a doctor. He was sweet-visaged; he radiated gentleness; he had all his father’s serenity. He was in government service; he said with a smile that they were currently on strike. The silver salver on the hanging shelf, the souvenir of London, was something he had brought back after a trip to England.

The terrorists lived now only for murder, the idea of the enemy and the traitor, grudge and complaint, like a complete expression of their faith. Violent deaths could be predicted for most of them: the police were not idle or unskilled. But while they were free they lived hectically, going out to kill again and again. Every day there were seven or eight killings, most of them mere items in the official report printed two days later. Only exceptional events were reported in detail.

Such an event was the killing by a gang, in half an hour, of six members of a family in a village about 10 miles away from Mehta Chowk. The two older sons of the family had been killed; the father and the mother; the grandmother, and a cousin. All the people killed were devout, amritdhari Sikhs. The eldest son, the principal target of the gang, had been an associate of Bhindranwale. But a note left by the gang, in the room where four of the killings
had taken place – the note bloodstained when it was found – said that the killers belonged to the ‘Bhindranwale Tiger Force’.

The North Indian village tends to be a huddle of narrow angular lanes between blank or pierced house walls. Jaspal village, where the killings had taken place, was more open, simpler in plan, built on either side of a straight main street or lane. It was a village of 80 houses, and was a spillover from a neighbouring, larger village. Eight years before, some of the better-off people of that village had begun to build their farmhouses at Jaspal, on big, rectangular plots on either side of the main lane.

When we arrived, in mid-afternoon, the people at work on the edge of the village were cautious. We – strangers arriving in an ordinary-looking hired car – could have been anything, police or terrorists: two different kinds of trouble. They frowned a little harder at their tasks, and pretended almost not to see us. It was strange to find that there was no policeman or official in the village, and that less than 48 hours after the murders the village had been left to itself again.

The central lane was wide and paved with brick, and it was strung across with overhead electric lines. The farmhouse walls on either side were flat and low, some of plain brick, some plastered and painted pink or yellow. In an open space below a big tree there were short poles or stakes for tethering buffaloes, and there was a high mound of gathered-up, dried buffalo manure. At various places down the lane – as though the lane also served as a buffalo pen for some of the villagers – there were flat, empty, propped-up carts with rubber tires, and buffaloes and feeding troughs and heaps or pyramids of dung-cakes for fuel. The village ended where the bricked lane ended. Beyond the lane – half in afternoon shadow now, and dusty where not freshly dunged – there was a narrower dirt path, sunstruck, going through very bright fields of mustard and ripe wheat, with tall eucalyptus trees with their pale-green hanging leaves, and crooked electricity poles.

We didn’t have to ask where the house of death was. About 15 women with covered heads were sitting on a spread in the wide gateway. The gateway was painted peppermint green, with diamonds of different colours down the pillars. The two big metal-framed gates had been pulled back: a wrought-iron pattern in the upper part, corrugated-iron sheets fastened to the criss-crossed metal frame on the lower part, the resulting triangles painted
yellow and white and blue and picked out in red. At the far end of the farmyard – the vertical leaves of the young eucalyptus trees hardly casting a shadow – the men sat in the open on the ground, white-turbanned most of them, their shoes taken off and scattered about them, a string bed near by. The buffaloes were in their stalls, against the low brick wall, over which the gang had jumped two nights before. Such protection at the front, metal and corrugated-iron; such openness at the back, next to the fields.

We were taken to the farmhouse next door. It seemed a much richer place. The yard was not of beaten earth, but paved with brick, like the lane. It was one of the few houses in Jaspal to have an upper storey. This upper storey was above the entrance. It was decorated with a stepped pattern of black, white, green and yellow tiles, and at the corners there was a regular pattern of half-projecting bricks, for the style. The trailer in the courtyard was to be attached to a tractor: it carried the mysterious, celebratory words that all Indian motor-trucks have at the back: OK TATA. And there was something like a flower garden in one corner of the courtyard: sunflowers, bougainvillaea, nasturtiums, plants that loved the light.

We sat on string beds in the open, bright room at the left of the entrance. The brick ceiling, which was also the floor of the upper room, rested on wooden beams laid on steel joists. The concrete pillars were chamfered, with bands of moulded or carved decoration, and painted in many colours – an echo here of the pillars of Hindu temples before the Muslim invasions. Everything in this courtyard spoke of the owner’s delight in his property.

People began to come to us. They sat on the string beds, their backs to the light, or leaned against the painted pillars. The Punjabi costume – elegant in Delhi and elsewhere – was here still only farm-people’s clothes, the smeared and dirty clothes of people whose life was bound up with their cattle. A sturdy woman in her thirties, in a grey-green flowered suit, grimy at the ankles, came with a child on her hip and sat on the string bed. The woman’s eyes were swollen, almost closed, with crying.

The child who now sat on her lap and held on to her was the seven-year-old son of the eldest brother. The boy had been in the room when his father was killed; he had been saved from the burst of the AK-47 only because another brother had hidden with him under a cot. The boy was still dazed, yet still able from time to
time to take an interest in the strangers; occasionally, while people talked, tears appeared in his eyes. He had been put into a clean, pale-brown suit, and his hair had been done up in a topknot.

The uncle who had saved him was a handsome, slender man of twenty-three. He had dressed with some care for this occasion, all the visitors coming: a blue turban, a stylish black-and-grey check shirt. He began to tell of the events; while he did so a girl cousin came and unaffectedly rested her head on his shoulder.

The farming day went on. The buffaloes came home, through the front gateway. The heavy chains they dragged rang dully on the bricked yard, and their hooves made a hollow, drumming sound. And village courtesies were not forgotten: water was brought out for the visitors, and then tea.

Joga was the name of the man in the black-and-grey check shirt. What he said was translated for me then by the journalists with me, and amplified the following day by Avinash Singh, a correspondent of the
Hindustan Times
.

The family had had dinner, Joga said, and a number of them were in the room on the living-quarters side of the courtyard. (The opposite side was for the cattle or buffaloes.) Some of them were ‘sipping tea’. A little after nine there was a commotion in the courtyard, and someone called out from there: ‘The one who has come from Jodhpur, and poses as a religious man – he should come out.’

Joga thought at first that some villagers were calling, but then the tone of the voices convinced him that they were ‘the boys’, ‘the Singhs’. ‘The Singhs’: the word here wasn’t simply another word for Sikhs. It meant Sikhs who were true to their baptismal vows; and in these villages it had grown to mean men from one or other of the terrorist gangs. ‘Singhs’ was the word Joga used most often for the men who had come that night. The other word he used was
atwadi
, ‘terrorists’. Only once did he say
munde
, ‘the boys’.

Joga was holding Buta’s son on his lap. As soon as he decided that the men who had come were Singhs, he hid with the child below the cot.

Buta, the eldest brother, went to the door of the room. The men outside had called for the man who had come ‘from Jodhpur’. Jodhpur had a meaning: Buta, with 200 or 300 others, had been detained in the fort at Jodhpur as a suspected terrorist for more than four years, from June 1984 to September 1988 – just eight
months before. Buta had been detained because he had been in the Golden Temple at the time of the army action, and he was known as a religious follower of Bhindranwale’s. Buta admitted being a follower; but he said he wasn’t a terrorist. He was in the Golden Temple that day, he said, because he had taken an offering of milk for the anniversary of the martyrdom of the sixth Guru, executed on the orders of the Emperor Jehangir in 1606.

This was the man, only thirty-two, but already with many years of suffering, his life already corrupted, who went and stood at the door and looked out at the many muffled men in the courtyard.

The leader said, ‘Who is Buta Singh?’

‘I am Buta Singh.’

‘Come with us. We want you. We have come to take you.’ And the man who spoke said to one of his Singhs, ‘Tie his hands.’

Some of the men made as if to seize him by the arms. Buta said, ‘I won’t, I won’t.’ There was a scuffle, and two of the Singhs fired. A bullet hit Buta just below his ribs on the right side, and he fell backwards into the room. Buta’s mother threw herself on her son, saying to the men, ‘Please don’t kill.’ Buta’s brother Jarnail and Buta’s wife Balwinder also fell on Buta. The Singhs pulled away Balwinder by her hair from her husband, and they fired again with their AK-47S. Buta hadn’t been killed yet; but he was killed now, with his mother and his brother. Buta’s grandmother was wounded, and was to die in a few days.