India (78 page)

The point about the
Express
obituary must have been that Gurtej adhered strictly to his Sikh vows. Kapur Singh had written a big book about the significance of Sikh vows; Gurtej had given me a copy of the book. And now – leaving to one side the question of his life underground after Bluestar – he told a story to explain the 10th Guru’s injunction to his followers against having relations with Muslim women.

‘One of the stories appearing in one of our Sikh texts,
The Fundamentals of Sikhism
by Sewa Dass, relates to a person who had been forcibly converted to Islam in the 1700s. He went to the Guru, who was presiding over the congregation, and said, “I have been forcibly converted.” “How have you been converted?” “I’ve been made to eat cow’s meat.” “That doesn’t make you a Muslim.” “I’ve been circumcised.” “That can’t make anybody a Muslim.” “I’ve been made to repeat the Kalma.” “That’s the name of God. It doesn’t make you a Muslim.” Somebody in the congregation was surprised. He asked the Guru, “How does one become a Muslim then?” And the Guru said, “By marrying a Muslim woman, or having such relations with her.” The implication is that marriage is a voluntary act. “If you
accept
that you are a Muslim, then alone you become a Muslim.” This is how the Guru comforted the man.’

As much as any story of martyrdom, this story from the final years of the last Guru speaks of the persecution and anguish and violation out of which the Sikh military brotherhood was born. Though that wasn’t the point Gurtej made: Sikhism, in his interpretation, was a religion of prophecy and revelation.

When I asked him what had supported him during his time underground, he said, ‘I was thinking I was suffering with my people. There was another consolation: this was the period I turned most to my scriptures. The main theme of the scriptures is that
one lives in the world in such a fashion that one becomes acceptable to God. And I thought I was doing that. I did a lot of reading and writing. So my time underground was instructive. One could contemplate the nature of things.’

That was what you said about your Roman Catholic boarding school, your schooldays away from home. So your time underground was like a repeat of your childhood?’

Gurtej said, ‘I don’t know whether character is destiny or destiny is something in its own right. But things do develop which put you in situations that develop you in a definite direction.’

One cause of grief during this time underground was the death of Kapur Singh, at the age of seventy-five. Gurtej had known and loved Kapur Singh for 20 years. The cantankerousness which had irritated Gurtej at their very first meeting was something he now smiled at, as he smiled at other quirks of the man: his liking for his food, his love of ice cream. He could eat a pound at a time. He used to say to Gurtej, ‘You must eat ice cream. It’s good for your liver.’

Gurtej said, ‘He was a rather stout man, not very tall, with thick-rimmed glasses. Always a pen or two with him, looking every bit a scholar, with a book or magazine tucked under his arm, always.’

Kapur Singh had carried his grievance about his dismissal from the ICS for embezzlement for nearly 40 years; he had kept it fresh. The grievance hadn’t fatigued Gurtej or raised any doubts in him. He said, ‘The idea of injustice is there in every Sikh.’ And he was still ready to fight that particular side of Kapur Singh’s case. Gurtej had become like a member of Kapur Singh’s family; it distressed him that he couldn’t be with the old man at the end.

‘Finally I was able to get some sort of protection from the High Court. I had applied to the High Court saying that the sedition case against me was false, and the intention of the government was to harass me and harm me physically. The court granted me seven days’ time to appear in the lower court and sign my petition and ask for bail. And I did that. I am still technically on that bail.’

This was why, a few months before, Gurtej had been able to visit Kapur Singh’s brother, when that brother was dying. The family, Gurtej said, belonged to a sect of Sikhs who, since the days of the first Guru, traditionally became mendicants and teachers – and this was perhaps one factor in Gurtej’s admiration of Kapur Singh.

‘His father was a small landowner – about 20 acres or so. The other son was totally uneducated. He remained a farmer all his life – while Kapur Singh was educated at Cambridge University. In lieu of this, the younger son got 10 more acres of land. The younger brother was on his death-bed when I met him last year, and he complained that Kapur Singh’s relatives were trying to snatch those extra 10 acres from him.’

Gurtej, Kapur Singh, Bhindranwale: they were all men of farming families. Great events had claimed them; but below all the passions – about faith and purity – there were elemental things that could take men further back: to a deathbed anxiety about 10 acres of land.

Sanjeev Gaur, the Amritsar correspondent for the
Indian Express
, was attacked and stabbed one day in Febuary 1984 just outside the Golden Temple.

There was an old pickpocket of Amritsar who had become a political activist, first for the Indira Congress, and then as a member of the All-India Sikh Students Federation. I wrote a story about this pickpocket for the
Express
. The day the story was published I went to the Golden Temple, and he gave me a very dirty look. My source told me I should be careful.

‘A fortnight later I was stabbed by two young boys, one wearing a saffron turban. They asked my name first, and then they started hitting me. Five times they stabbed me in the thigh. And I heard another voice saying, “Drag him inside.” I thought that was the moment of death, because I had been reporting for the last month or so about the discovery of five bodies in gunny sacks in the gutters of the Golden Temple – people killed by the terrorists inside the Temple. The people killed were mostly Sikhs – suspected by the terrorists to be police informers.

The two men who attacked me left me. I began to walk to a clinic. People were looking at me. Blood was oozing out of my trousers. The people who were looking were helpless. If they had helped me, they would have incurred the wrath of the terrorists. And then I asked a cycle-rickshaw-wallah – a lot of them there, outside the Golden Temple – to take me to a doctor, and then two Sikhs helped me. I later learned that the two men who had helped me were communists.

‘But I should also mention that Bhindranwale condemned the attack. He told some journalists that he didn’t believe in daggers – he believed in guns. And two of his main aides telephoned me at home to express their regrets. They said they were not behind the attack.

‘Then I was posted to the East by my paper, but deviously, for my safety.’

Dalip, another reporter, told of what happened after the Golden Temple had been occupied by Bhindranwale.

‘People stopped going to the Golden Temple. Both my neighbours stopped going, though they wanted to. People were angry about what was happening in the Temple, but the Sikh political party never condemned the desecration of the Temple by Bhindranwale and his guns. The Sikh political party were fighting a joint agitation with Bhindranwale from the Golden Temple, and they were afraid of him. He was a killer. He didn’t worry about Hindu or Sikh – once you opposed him, you would be on his hit list.

‘I was witness to one killing he ordered. I was sitting in Room 47 on the third floor of the Guru Nanak Niwas. This was one of the rest houses in the Temple where he used to stay with his followers. There were armed men sitting all around, eight, 10 people. This was in the middle of 1983. Suddenly one guy entered. He was a middle-aged Sikh, in shirt and pyjamas, and he was looking glum. His hair was cut and his beard was cut awkwardly. He started talking to Bhindranwale: “Santji, this is what Bichu Ram, a police inspector, has done to me. He took me to a police station and desecrated me. He cut my hair and my beard.”

‘Bhindranwale immediately asked one of his aides to take down all the details. Fifteen days or so later this Bichu Ram, in charge of one of the police stations, was shot dead.

‘The second way of operating, of ordering killings, was to pronounce the names of people whom he wanted killed from a public platform. He did this from the 19th of July 1982 till June 1984. He would make a speech. Always against Mrs Gandhi, Giani Zail Singh [the Indian President], and Darbara Singh, the chief minister of Punjab. And he would say these people should be taught a lesson for having harmed the Sikhs. Afterwards he would
talk against some local police officers. And many of the people whose names he spoke would be later killed. Bachan Singh, a senior police officer of Amritsar, was killed, together with his wife and daughter.

‘I used to talk to Sikhs. But by and large Sikhs did not come forward to condemn the happenings in the Golden Temple. They were blaming New Delhi – everything was being done by New Delhi. They were never criticizing Bhindranwale and his men. Whenever terrorists were killed the Sikhs were very upset – they spoke of fake encounters. Whenever the terrorists killed innocent people, I never heard my neighbours expressing regret.’

Dalip had Sikh connections; this explained some of his passion.

I said, ‘Someone who knows Sikhs well has told me that there was something wrong with the way Bhindranwale and his followers looked. They had the eyes of disturbed people. Was it a kind of communal madness, you think?’

‘It’s the minority fear, the persecution complex, the death wish. It’s a new religion. It has produced great generals and great sportsmen. But it hasn’t produced great religious thinkers to strengthen the religion. Nothing happened after Guru Gobind Singh set up the Khalsa in 1699. Since 1699 it has produced no great thinkers.

‘It’s madness, it’s fanaticism. It can’t really be explained. It’s the tragedy of the Sikh religion that in the post-independence era a man like Bhindranwale has come to be accepted as the most important Sikh leader since Guru Gobind Singh. He was called in his lifetime by many Sikhs the 11th Guru. And he really was a product of Mrs Gandhi. She built him up to fight the Sikh party, the Akalis.’

‘Why did educated people give their support to Bhindranwale?’

‘Frustration.’

‘When did you first see him yourself?’

‘The 24th of July 1982. In the Golden Temple. The famous Room 47. I was checked by his bodyguard. Guns in the Temple were seen for the first time in 1982, and it’s a perversion of the religion.

‘He arrived in the Golden Temple on the 20th of July 1982. He left it dead on the sixth of June 1984. He harmed the Sikhs the most, the Sikh religion the most. He harmed Punjab, and he harmed India.

‘The aides questioned me, and when I told them I was a journalist, they smiled and were very happy, and they immediately escorted me inside.

‘I greeted him. He was sitting on a string bed, and he was nicely dressed up, wearing that long white cotton gown going down to his knees, and that blue turban. And his revolver hung from a belt around his waist. He had angry eyes – you asked about the eyes. He looked lean and hungry, the type of people who are dangerous. He said, “Who are you?” Very dictatorial. I said, “I’m a journalist.” I gave him the name of the weekly I worked for, and I mentioned that I was also the correspondent for a Canadian paper. “Do you want to interview me?” “No, I’ve just come for your
darshan.
” ’

Darshan is what a holy man offers when he shows himself: the devotee gets his blessing merely from the sight, the darshan, of the holy man.

‘He was very flattered. He smiled and he laughed. He had been very serious when I entered.

‘I found an old lady handing over to him bundles of currency notes, and she also removed one or two of her gold rings and handed them over to him. Standing over the old lady was an old man, who I learnt later was General Shabeg Singh.’ Major-General Shabeg Singh: cashiered in his mid-fifties for embezzlement, and now acting as Bhindranwale’s military adviser.

‘Shabeg was lean and thin, middle height, very fair, wearing spectacles, flowing beard, white beard, white pyjama and kurta. He was smiling. I shook hands with him. He said, “I’m General Shabeg Singh. I led the Mukti Bahini in the Bangladesh war.” I said, “Sir, you are a general. How did you get attached to Bhindranwale?” I needed copy for a colour story – my first day in Amritsar. His reply was, “I see spirituality in his eyes. He is like Guru Gobind Singh.”

‘I came out of the Golden Temple a sad man, wondering about the fate of the community, wondering about the general’s reply, comparing Bhindranwale with Guru Gobind Singh. I was very sad when I sat at the typewriter. Because I was not impressed by Bhindranwale. I knew he was not Guru Gobind Singh. I knew he was just being used by the Indira Congress to harm the rival Akali party in Punjab. He was an ordinary man on whom greatness was being imposed. Why should the community accept him? Why
should General Shabeg Singh not judge him as a man? Why were people just impressed by his angry looks and the armed men around him? He was not an intellectual, not a thinker, and he was not a pious man.’

Dalip meant, I suppose, that Bhindranwale wasn’t really a man of God. But what were the noticeable religious aspects of the man? There must have been many.

‘He was a vegetarian, a lover of music. He would go to the Golden Temple water tank every morning at three and listen to the music played by the blind musicians from inside the main shrine. They play on the harmonium and recite the scriptures. That music is soothing, divine – and I give him full marks for wanting to be part of that. You feel the presence of God when that music is played in the silence, and there are no people around. He did that every morning for one hour. And he was not a womanizer.’

The vegetarianism, the love of music, the early rising, the sexual control, were run together in this account to give an idea of the austerity of the man that so impressed people in the early days, when he went out preaching and urged people to be like their father, the Guru.

Dalip said, ‘He made himself a monster.’ Monster: it was the word people used of the later man. ‘He began to think he would rule the country or rule Khalistan. He wanted to rule something. He accepted the compliment when people told him he was like Guru Gobind Singh. Subconsciosly, Bhindranwale began imagining himself to be Guru Gobind Singh – a reincarnation of the 10th Guru.