The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous (7 page)

When it came to Operation Blue Star, I believe Indira Gandhi was misled. From my years of acquaintance with her, I know that she had no prejudice at all against any community—not against Muslims, not against Sikhs. She consulted people about handling Bhindranwale and got contradictory advice from different sides. She didn’t trust President Zail Singh, so she turned to the army. She was assured by senior officials that once the army went in and surrounded the Golden Temple, no fight would be put up and Bhindranwale would surrender. I know that when she went to the temple two or three days after the operation, she was horrified because bodies were still floating in the sarovar and there were bloodstains that were being cleaned up. She turned to Major General K.S. Brar and asked, ‘What is all this?’ She had believed the army when she was told that there would be no fighting.

I was still a Member of Parliament when Mrs Gandhi was assassinated on the morning of 31 October 1984. Despite my differences with her, I was deeply distressed to hear of her dastardly murder at the hands of her own security guards, both Sikhs. She had many shortcomings, but perhaps that alone was what made her human. She may not have been a likeable person, but she was, in her own way, a woman to be loved and admired.

Through the 1970s and ’80s, Hindu-Sikh tensions continued to bedevil the Punjab. They came to a head with the rise of Sikh fundamentalism under Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who led terrorist activities aimed against Punjabi Hindus in the early 1980s.

In an attempt to get better acquainted with Punjab politics, I decided to go to Amritsar on the day the Akalis launched their Dharam Yudh Morcha in 1982. I had strong reservations about it. In the morning, I met leaders of the Congress and the BJP. In the afternoon, I walked up to the Manji Sahib Gurdwara adjoining the Golden Temple to listen to Akali leaders and take in the scene. There must have been over 20,000 Sikhs sitting on the ground and another five to ten thousand standing around. On the dais, beside the Granth Sahib, sat the elite of the Akali party: Sant Harcharan Singh Longowal, Jathedar Tohra, ex-chief minister Prakash Singh Badal, ex-finance minister Balwant Singh, ex-Members of Parliament Balwant Singh Ramoowalia and Nirlep Kaur, as well as the sitting MP Rajinder Kaur. The shining star of the galaxy was Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.

Tohra spotted me standing in the crowd and sent two men to fetch me. Very reluctantly, I allowed myself to be dragged along and found myself seated in the front row between the Granth Sahib and the microphone. Most of the speeches that followed were directed at me. I find it very painful to sit on the ground and had to keep shifting my position to give relief to my aching knees and bottom. As one fiery speech followed another, the crowd became restless and clamoured for Bhindranwale. At last he came to the microphone, amid thunderous cries of ‘Boley So Nihal—Sat Sri Akal!’ He was a tall, lean man with an aquiline nose, fiery eyes and a long, flowing beard. In his left hand he held a silver arrow, the sort seen in pictures of Guru Gobind Singh and Maharaja Ranjit Singh. A bandolier charged with bullets ran across his chest. He had a pistol attached in its holster and held a four-foot-long kirpan in his right hand.

Bhindranwale had never seen me. I heard him turn to one of his cronies and ask: ‘Eh kaun hai?’—who is he? I heard my name mentioned. He knew about me and what I had written against him. I had issued instructions that the prefix sant (saint) was not to be used with his name in any reference to him in the paper I edited. An Australian pressman had told him that I thought that Bhindranwale was aiming to become the eleventh Guru of the Sikhs. ‘If that fellow really said that,’ Bhindranwale had replied, ‘I will have him and his family wiped out.’ The Australian had quickly recanted in order to save our lives.

Like those of the others, Bhindranwale’s speech too was addressed to me. ‘I don’t know this Sardar Sahib sitting near my feet,’ he started. ‘They tell me he is the editor of some English paper called the
Hindustan Times
. I can’t speak English. I am told he writes that I create hatred between Sikhs and Hindus. This is a lie. I am a preacher. I go from village to village, telling Sikhs to come back to the path of the tenth Guru. I tell them to stop clipping their beards, to refrain from taking opium and smoking tobacco, I baptize them into the Khalsa Panth.’ There were loud cries of ‘Sat Sri Akal’ to express approval at this. Bhindranwale warmed to his theme. ‘If I had my way, you know what I would do to all these Sardars who drink whisky-shisky every evening? I would douse them in kerosene oil and set fire to the bloody lot.’ The announcement was greeted with prolonged cries of ‘Boley So Nihal—Sat Sri Akal’. It was ironic that the vast majority of the audience applauding him were Sikh Jats notorious for their addiction to hard liquor. I turned to Badal and Balwant Singh, both of whom had taken Scotch at my home and said, ‘What Chief Minister Darbara Singh has been unable to do with all his police, this chap will do with one matchstick.’ They sniggered.

Over time, Bhindranwale’s speeches became more acerbic and contemptuous of Hindus. He would refer to Mrs Indira Gandhi as ‘Panditan di dhee’ or ‘Bahmani’—‘that Pandit’s daughter’ or ‘the Brahmin woman’. Hindus were ‘dhotian, topian waley’—‘those who wear dhotis and caps’. In one speech, he exhorted every Sikh to kill thirty-two Hindus—not thirty-one, not thirty-three, only thirty-two, he said—in that way, the entire population of Hindus would be accounted for.

Through the course of my attempts to document the recent history of the Punjab and Sikhs, the one thing I have been unable to understand to my satisfaction is the phenomenon of Bhindranwale. When he first burst onto the Punjab scene, I had dismissed him as one of the hundreds of rustic preachers who are found all over a countryside where sants are a dime a dozen. By the time he entrenched himself in the Golden Temple complex and launched his anti-Hindu tirades, I was describing him as a ‘demented hate-monger’. I do not know why more Sikhs did not denounce him as a homicidal maniac.

During the days when he was making his hateful utterances, I called on Sant Longowal, nominal head of the Dharam Yuddh Morcha, in his room in the offices of the SGPC. The meeting did not yield much copy; I sensed that he was unhappy with Bhindranwale but was unable to do anything about him. Bhindranwale was entrenched in the Akal Takht, and his armed bodyguards had the run of the Golden Temple complex and were more than eager to bump off anyone their leader wanted out of the way. I asked Longowal why he allowed Bhindranwale to say nasty things about Hindus from the sacred precincts of the Akal Takht. Longowal replied, ‘O tay saada danda hai’—he is our stave [to hit the Congress government with].

The Bhindranwale chapter in Indian history is a perfect illustration of the disastrous results of not keeping politics separate from religion. Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was a creation of the Congress and the Akalis. Indira Gandhi was advised by President Zail Singh that this small-time ‘kattar’—hardline Sikh preacher—should be built up as a leader to counter the ruling Akalis in Punjab. But soon enough, the Akalis tried to woo Bhindranwale away from their rivals and propped him up. In time, he became a monster who would turn around and destroy the very people who created him and plunge Punjab and much of the country into chaos.

How is it that a man who had so little to say that made sense and said so much that was hateful came to gain so much popularity? The Congress tried to exploit his popularity; so did the Akalis. Both parties were thoroughly mauled by him. Longowal’s ‘saada danda’ belaboured both the Akalis and the Congress government.

Perhaps the most plausible explanation of the Bhindranwale phenomenon comes from a compilation of essays,
Punjab Today
, edited by Gopal Singh of Himachal University. A paper on Sikh revivalism by Pritam Singh of Punjab University gives the background of the conditions which made the Bhindranwale phenomenon possible. Believe it or not, most of it was due to the prosperity that came with the Green Revolution. With prosperity came degeneration—the spread of uncontrolled alcoholism, smoking, drug addiction, gambling, pornography, fornication. The worst sufferers of this degeneration were women and children—wives and offspring of peasants who could not smoothly digest their prosperity. On this scene arrived Bhindranwale, preaching against such Western evils and carrying on a vigorous campaign of ‘Amritprachaar’.

Bhindranwale’s popularity among Sikhs has an interesting lesson for our times, when Hindu fundamentalists are becoming increasingly popular among middle-class Hindus who are materially better off now than they have ever been.

Everywhere he went, Bhindranwale baptized Sikhs by the thousands and made them swear in front of congregations that they would never again touch alcohol and drugs and so on. These baptized Sikhs did not break their oath. Money previously squandered was saved. Time previously wasted in drunkenness or being stoned was spent on more careful tillage—bringing more money. It was the women and children, their menfolk suddenly reformed, who first acclaimed him as a saviour and a saint. To this image, Bhindranwale added the macho gloss of a tough man: bandolier charged with bullets across his hairy chest, pistol at his hip, in his hand a silver arrow. The crowds loved him when he mocked Indira Gandhi and referred to the Central Government as ‘bania-Hindu sarkar’. Unemployed young men who passed out of college but could not be absorbed into their ancestral farming business were impressed by his fiery speeches and became his followers.

When Bhindranwale shifted to the Golden Temple and his goons began killing innocent people, his admirers dismissed the allegations as government propaganda—to them, he was a good guy. Even as Hindus were being pulled out of buses and shot and transistor bombs were going off in crowded markets all over northern India, Sikh pride was at its height.

As tension mounted in Punjab and the killing of innocents at the behest of Bhindranwale increased, the Central Government realized that its options were closing; it had to somehow get hold of Bhindranwale again (he had been arrested earlier on charges of murder and released at a time and place of his choosing). By now, Bhindranwale and his military advisor, General Shahbeg Singh, had converted the Akal Takht into a fortress and a variety of arms had been smuggled in by trucks carrying rations for the gurdwara kitchen. The government had left it too late, and a violent confrontation was fast becoming inevitable.

On many occasions, I warned the government against sending the army into the Golden Temple because it would rouse the wrath of the entire Sikh community. ‘You don’t know the Sikhs,’ I once told Home Minister P.C. Sethi, a peace-loving Jain. ‘They can be like a swarm of hornets. You put your head in their nest and you will be stung all over your face.’ He assured me that the government had no intention of sending the army into the temple. So did Mrs Gandhi, more than once.

It is not known for sure when Mrs Gandhi came around to the view that she had no option but to order the army into the Golden Temple, and who her advisors were at the time—though the names of Rajiv Gandhi, Arun Nehru, Arun Singh and Digvijay Singh have come up. There is no doubt that President Zail Singh was kept in the dark. When Mrs Gandhi persuaded him to put Punjab under military rule, she did not tell him that she had decided to order the army to clear the temple of Bhindranwale and his armed followers—when it came to Punjab or Sikh affairs, she did not trust Gianiji.

It is also unknown who chose the date when operations should commence. Without the foggiest notion of Sikh traditions, they settled on 5 June 1984 as the day to launch the operation—it was the death anniversary of Guru Arjun Dev, the founder of the Harmandir Sahib, a day when hundreds of thousands of Sikhs were expected to come on pilgrimage from remote areas.

Alternative methods of getting at Bhindranwale were not considered seriously. He could have been overpowered by a band of commandos in plain clothes; the temple complex could have been cordoned off; the people inside deprived of rations and access to potable water and forced to come out into the open to surrender or be picked up by snipers. It would have taken a couple of days longer but would have been comparatively bloodless.

As it happened, the army stormed the Golden Temple with tanks, armoured cars and frogmen, with helicopters hovering overhead to give directions. The battle that ensued lasted two days and nights. In the crossfire, almost 5,000 men, women and children perished. The Akal Takht was reduced to rubble by heavy gunfire; the central shrine, which both parties had declared hors de combat, was hit by over seventy bullets; the entrance had a large portion blasted off; archives containing hundreds of handwritten copies of the Granth Sahib and hukumnamas (edicts) issued under the signatures of the Gurus were reduced to ashes. Even Mrs Gandhi, who had been assured that the operation would not last more than two hours, was horrified at the extent of damage caused to sacred property and the horrendous loss of lives.

I regarded Bhindranwale as an evil man who deserved his fate. But Operation Blue Star went well beyond the slaying of Bhindranwale: it was a calculated and deliberate slap in the face of an entire community. Despite my indifference, and even hostility, to religion, I had no doubt in my mind that I should reaffirm my identity with my community—I decided to return my Padma Bhushan to the government.

In light of the Indian Army’s actions, I was willing to concede that Bhindranwale had met his end like a warrior, but I also heaved a sigh of relief—I hoped that we had heard the last of him. But I was wrong.

A few months later, on 31 October 1984, Indira Gandhi was slain by one of her Sikh bodyguards. Terrible results followed. In towns and cities across the Indo-Gangetic plain and down to Karnataka, frenzied mobs, often led by Congress leaders, took a heavy toll of Sikh life and property. In Delhi alone, over 3,000 Sikhs were burnt alive and over seventy gurdwaras wrecked.

For years, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale’s portrait at the Golden Temple has drawn large crowds. Photographs of him and cassettes of his speeches sell by the thousands. To a sizeable section of Sikhs, he has become an ‘amar shaheed’—eternal martyr—who laid down his life for the Khalsa Panth. He continues to be venerated as Sant Baba Jarnail Singhji Khalsa Bhindranwale.