India (79 page)

‘I will give you two more pictures of him. The first is from the middle of 1983. A colleague on an Indian daily did a big story saying that Naxalites had entered Bhindranwale’s camp. I checked out my colleague’s story and found it was all right, and I extended it with inquiries from my own sources. Bhindranwale hated the story in the daily, but I learned about that only later. The day after my own story came out, I went to see Bhindranwale. That was my practice, to go and see him after things about him by me were printed.

‘The same room in the Temple. Room 47. Now I can open the door and go in coolly – everybody knows me now. I took along a friend with me, someone from the medical college. The moment I open the door of Room 47, I see the angriest look in his bloodshot
eyes. They were red eyes when he was angry, which often he was. And I got the message. There were eight or nine of his armed admirers in the room, and two journalists were interviewing him.

‘He started shouting at me, in crude Punjabi, at the top of his voice: “How dare you compare me with thieves and scoundrels and lumpens?” That is what he thought Naxalites were. He continued shouting at me in this way for three minutes, and then he ordered one of his men to bring the copy of the magazine with my story. And I, the magazine’s correspondent, stood in front of him like a schoolchild who has offended the teacher. I couldn’t utter a word – I was so afraid: I could see the guns around, and I knew he could kill me if he wanted to.

The magazine arrived. He handed it to me. He had cooled down a bit, but he was still very angry. He asked me to translate what I had written into Punjabi. I pleaded that I wasn’t good at translating from English into Punjabi. He cooled down more. And then, to my amazement – I realized how shrewd he was – he signalled to me, while he was sitting on his string bed – I was no more than four feet away – to come closer to him.

‘He wanted me to come closer to him, and when I went closer to him on his string bed, he pulled my head down and he whispered into my ears. “You are like a younger brother to me,” he said in Punjabi, whispering, “and still you write against me.”

‘The meeting ended, and I came out of the room with my friend, the man from the medical college. He had wanted to see Bhindranwale, and had asked me to take him, because as a journalist I could go in and out of Room 47. I apologized to my friend for the shock treatment.

‘I didn’t meet Bhindranwale for a couple of days after that. I felt most uncomfortable. I didn’t know how to report him. I knew one had to be critical of him, but it was so difficult to be sitting in Amritsar and to attack him. For a few months I kept quiet.

‘But the magazine wanted stories, and in October 1983 I did a story saying that Bhindranwale was losing his popularity, that not many people were coming to see him. The magazine played it up: ‘The Sant in Isolation’, a full two pages, with a big photograph of that big man in his white cotton gown, half smiling, half frowning. And, as usual, after my story appeared, I went to see him.

‘He was having a walk on the terrace of the rest house, the Guru Nanak Niwas. Not many people were there – 40, 50, mostly his
followers. He started walking with me. Obviously he didn’t know about the story. That was the last time I had a friendly chat with him. The next day I went again to see him, accompanying a Canadian TV team as an interpreter. He had learnt about the story by then, and in full public view, on the same terrace of the Guru Nanak Niwas where he had walked with me alone the day before, he told me that if I didn’t stop writing against him, then I wouldn’t be alive. He said this in Punjabi, in symbolic language.
Sannu uppar charana anda hai
. “We know how to take you up.”

‘After this I stopped seeing Bhindranwale. I didn’t report on him. I didn’t do any critical story. I was afraid. On the 23rd of December 1983 he shifted from the Guru Nanak Niwas to the Akal Takht, from the rest house to a sacred building. I went with some local journalists to see him. He was sitting on the floor – 50, 60 people with him. Some fruits and sweets lying near by. He gave me a piece of sweet and a banana, and he made some sarcastic remark, which I don’t recall. Obviously he didn’t like me any more. Some weeks later a colleague was stabbed outside the Temple. This didn’t have anything to do with Bhindranwale, but in the atmosphere of fear nobody went to the aid of the stabbed man. They just stood and watched him bleed. I asked my paper to move me somewhere else.’

Just as Gurtej, talking of the fields and harvest, fell into a kind of lyricism, so I felt that Dalip, talking of the morning music in the Golden Temple, had spoken with a special reverence for the sacredness of the old site. I asked how shocking Operation Bluestar, the army action at the Temple, had been to him.

‘Bluestar itself was not shocking to me. What was shocking was the manner in which it was done. It was a very bad operation. I thought Bhindranwale and his men could have been caught easily without bloodshed. I felt sorry for the 93 soldiers who were killed. They chose such a bad day to catch Bhindranwale. And they didn’t even catch him.’

He was killed on 6 June; and General Shabeg was killed. Many other people with him managed to leave the Temple before the army action. They lived.

Kuldip was one of those who had been with Bhindranwale right up to the end, but had somehow lived. He had been in hiding for five
years. ‘It’s a hard life, an ascetic life, moving from place to place. The police always get to find where you are, and then you have to move.’ He had been active in the All-India Sikh Students Federation: a strange name, because the group was known for its violent inclinations, and the prominent people in it were not really young, and could be considered students only in the broadest way.

Kuldip was about fifty, but he looked older. His face was creased and lined, with a further network of thin worry-lines, speaking of internal stresses even below those stresses connected with his life on the run. He dressed in the palest colours – his turban was of the palest brown – as though he wished not to draw attention to himself. Those colours, the lined face, and the small, quiet eyes suggested a deeper withdrawal.

He came an hour earlier than we had arranged, and he came straight up to my hotel room. He had to wait while I finished a long telephone call. He didn’t seem to mind waiting. He sat quietly in the armchair, and I found it hard to believe that the quietly dressed man sitting in the hotel room was the ‘activist’ I had been told he was. It even occurred to me that he might have been from the police. When we began to talk, I asked him about his life on the run.

He said, ‘So many people who are with me have been tortured to death and killed. Hundreds have been killed in false encounters. They are being killed for the freedom of the human race.’

The freedom of the human race?

He meant that. The current Sikh movement was intended ‘to undo the political and social injustice of the world.’ The goal was ‘political power guided by Sikh religious principles and Sikh religious force’. The ultimate goal was ‘a universal religious system, a universal spiritual system, universal humanistic values’.

‘This is just the microcosmic experiment in the Punjab. Already we had in the time of the kingdom of Ranjit Singh this experiment in Punjab. We would like to recover the Sikh system of that time, the Sikh system of the 19th century, before the annexation of the Punjab by the English. And we want to apply that system to the whole of the world.’

I wasn’t prepared for the language. Perhaps, then, he was or had been a student, exposed to the language and views of someone like Kapur Singh.

How did he define the Sikh 19th-century system?

‘A secular system, a socialistic system also, a Sikh socialistic system. The main point is having the Sikh religious and political system along with the socialism. Religion and spirituality are intrinsically inseparable parts of the human personality. Similarly, the urge to dominate, to have political power, is also part of the human personality. This is so in animals, in birds also. And why not in human beings? Animals have got their leaders, the birds have got their leaders. Similarly, Khalsa [the Sikh brotherhood, as established by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699] wants to be the leader of the world, as it has got the inseparable elements of that leadership in its character.’

He thought that the goal would be reached in 10 or 15 years. At the moment the struggle was going badly. ‘There is no discipline. There is no central leadership. We have lost control, and this thing is now going in favour of the government. Some of these anti-social elements are semi-religious people attracted by the emotional aspect of the movement. They are not deeply read, and they don’t have regard for the deeply read and educated people, because these deeply read people don’t believe in killing people aimlessly. No doubt there are some government agents also involved, and the blame is being put on the Sikhs. But our group’ – the Sikh Students Federation – ‘has not so many bad elements, comparatively.’

He had been born in a part of the Punjab that had gone to Pakistan in 1947, at the time of the partition. ‘My great-grandparents were generals in the army of Ranjit Singh. My ancestors fought in both Anglo-Sikh wars, 1843, 1849. One was commander of 300 men, and so was the other. Around 1900 half the family got converted to Islam. They fell in love with some Muslim girl, and got converted. Our parents felt bad about it.’ In 1947 the Sikh part of the family came over to India, to a part of the Indian Punjab that later became part of the state of Haryana. They had about 80 acres there. ‘One-tenth of what we had in Pakistan. This was the price of our sacrifice for freedom.’

I asked whether it was irrigated land. Water was such a talking point in the Punjab: there was such resentment (in spite of the Punjab’s own green, rich fields) of the water of the rivers of the Punjab going to other states.

‘Irrigated land, but not so rich.’ One brother farmed the family land; one had become a teacher, another wanted to be a lawyer. It
was the Sikh pattern: all the middle-class people I met had their connection with the land still, and many could think themselves back easily into old peasant passions. ‘Now we’ve got used to Haryana,’ Kuldip said. ‘But we are not so well-to-do. We’re just hand-to-mouth.’

I asked him about his career.

‘In the early days I wanted to become an engineer, just out of love of the word “engineer”. But I failed in mathematics. Then I wanted to become a lecturer in chemistry or physics. The life of a lecturer seemed to me very easy, very peaceful.’

I understood him. His words took me back to my own beginnings, to my own uncertainties, when (just the second person in my family to go a university) the life of the university did seem to me peaceful and protected, and I wanted to prolong my time there.

Kuldip said, ‘But I failed there too. I got poor marks. At that time I was twenty-five. I was teaching practical science in a college. Then I wanted to be an advocate, but that line I didn’t like. Then I got attracted to English literature. I was now thirty. This study of literature fascinated me. I did an M.A. in English literature at a university. It took two years. I got a job as English lecturer in a college.’

‘How did you support yourself when you were doing all that studying?’

‘At first my parents were giving me money.’ This would have been money from the land. ‘Then I supported myself, and then for some time I supported my brother who was younger to me.’

For some years, since his mid-twenties, he had been in touch with a well-known holy man, whom he thought of as his ‘revered father’. ‘I used to listen to him. Other people were also there around him. This was in the town of Sirsa. Then I got attracted to the study of religion. But I liked the study of literature better than the study of religion. Literature is real. Religion is obscure. The Sikh Gurus made the study of religion like the study of literature.’ I thought he meant by that that the Sikh scriptures were like literature: the important Gurus were also poets.

When he was nearly forty, then, he got another job, as a research fellow in a college department. That was when he was claimed first by politics and then by Bhindranwale’s movement. ‘He promised to bear the whole expenses of the English daily which we were planning to start in Chandigarh.’

When I had asked Dalip what he thought attracted people to Bhindranwale, he had said, ‘Frustration.’ I hadn’t absolutely understood what he meant. But now, from what Kuldip told me about his wandering, stop-and-start, and still unresolved career, I began to understand a little more about these men from farming communities who had been cut loose from one kind of life, and were without conviction or vocation in the new world.

I asked him, ‘What attracted you to Bhindranwale?’

‘His magnetic personality.’

‘Did you think he had angry eyes?’

‘No, spiritual eyes. Of course, he had the anger of a lion – when he got angry. The movement was very well under control until Bluestar, and this worried the government.’

‘Was he a tyrant? Did he want to be a ruler?’

‘He wasn’t a tyrant. He followed the principles of the Guru. The Gurus gave orders in battle to kill the enemy. But I shouldn’t put it like that. The Gurus had no enemy: enmity was thrust on them. Similarly, enmity was thrust on that man.’

What about storing guns in the Golden Temple? Wasn’t that contrary to the religion?

‘In Sikhism nothing is wrong with guns in the gurdwaras, provided they are not used unjustly. Guru Gobind Singh sometimes personifies God Almighty with the mystical names of weapons. There are so many verses where he praises the strength of arms as he praises God Almighty.’

‘I’ve heard that Bhindranwale began to think he was Guru Gobind Singh.’

‘Sometimes in congregations he used to recall the doings of the Guru. He was close in spirit to the Guru. In the Sikh religion anyone who truly follows the edicts of the Guru is said to become so close to the Guru that he becomes the Guru, and the Guru becomes he.’

He told me about Bhindranwale’s last days.

‘I was living with him in the Temple from the 29th of March 1984 to the sixth of June 1984. I last saw him on the fifth of June. In the evening. We talked about the situation. He was firm. He inspired me with courage. Everybody there was prepared for anything. General Shabeg was standing outside. He sent me to Santji.