Army Entered Golden Temple 30 Years Ago: Pain Persists Among Sikhs
By Jaspal Singh Sidhu
02 June, 2014
Countercurrents.org
Thirty years have elapsed since the Indian Army attacked the Golden Temple, Amritsar in June’s first week of 1984. The wounds of the tragedy are still afresh so as the anguish and pain persists in the Sikh consciousness. The impact was evidenced in the just concluded parliamentary elections as Arun Jaitley- a heavy weight leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which had supported the Army attack received drubbing in the Amritsar constituency at the hands of Amrinder Singh of Congress, who had resigned from the party and membership of Indian Parliament in protest against the Army entry into the Sikh shrine. Otherwise, the BJP, riding the Modi wave staged a spectacular victory, mauling the Congress, a leader of the ruling UPA alliance for 10 years, to a political insignificance. The Amritsar Lok Sabha seat has 65 per cent Sikh population.
The Sikh intelligentsia, gathered at observe the anniversary at Chandigarh on June first (2014) expressed resentment over the fact that there is no official authentic information available till today about how many civilians were killed, maimed and suffered in that tragic attack, codenamed by the Army as ‘Operation Blue Star’. Bare number and details of those detained in the Jodhpur jail and those ‘captured in ‘POWs’ (prisoners of war) in the Army parlance from the Golden Temple complex were made available. But, there are numerous estimates about the possible number of those were killed, wounded including women and children and taken into custody from within, Darbar Sahib, a reverential Sikh name for the Golden Temple Complex and from other parts of Punjab. And, there is no accurate report of a substantial civil death toll as the Army had stormed 42 gurdwaras (Sikh shrines) in various parts of Punjab simultaneously along with the main Operation in Amritsar, mounted to catch alive or dead Sant Jarnail Singh Bhinderanwale and his around 200 armed followers . The Sikhs are nowhere closer to understanding and are piecing together the events of that cataclysmic period to arrive at what could be the extent of human rights violations and sufferings of thousands of innocents.
Till today, many queries of the Sikhs remained unanswered as; what was political expediency behind the mounting of a full-scale-war on the Sikhs and their religious places and what level of planning went into the Army attack spread over entire Indian Punjab? And, why the Army chose the Sikh Guru , Arjun Dev’s martyrdom day for the attack when thousands of pilgrims throng the Golden Temple? Besides political sanction from the top who were involved in undertaking the key decisions regarding planning and execution at various official levels in the run up to and during the operation? The Sikhs suspect whether the nonchalant official attitude amounting to the denial of equal citizen rights to them? And the Sikhs tend to mull a resemblance, may be far-fetched to many, between the Sikh tragedy of 1984 and that of the Partition of 1947 which took toll of one million human lives and the world’s unparallel violent population exchange of 14 million people with no official acknowledgement till today, from both India and Pakistan sides, of what exactly happened then.
Only official document available on the Amritsar mayhem till day is the White Paper, issued just after the Army attack on July 10,1984. The White Paper was an hurriedly undertaken official exercise meant to suppress and hide the colossal loss of life and property in the operation which was, otherwise, planned as a ‘precise and quick surgical-type military action’ without anticipating the fierce resistance to the Army attack from devout Sikhs, who, following the 300 year old tradition, laid down their lives for preserving the sanctity of the Sikhs’ Sanctum Sanctorum. Also, the White Paper was more of a public relation exercise, perfectly in tune with pre-operation official disinformation campaign, arose out of the political expediency of the ruling Congress to justify and project the ‘operation’ as ‘a clean and unavoidable’ to the vast Indian majority and . Moreover, the Paper was also aimed at thwarting an unsavory and negative propaganda unleashed by the Operation throughout the world raising the question ‘why the Indian Army was used on own citizens?’ And, to some extent it was directed towards mollifying the ruffled feelings of those Sikhs siding with the Indian establishment who, too, had felt extremely hurt and religiously injured by the attack on the Golden Temple—a Mecca of the Sikhs.
Against this background, the Sikhs and most of well-meaning Indian people including human and civil Rights activists never believed what was given out in the White Paper and have continuously been demanding that the government should come out with what actual happened during that the Operation. For instance, the While Paper gave the number of soldiers and officers killed as 83, and 249 injured. Former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, later, stated that upwards of 700 army personnel had been slain. Refuting the White Paper figure of casualties of the civilians in the Operation, late eminent writer Khushwant Singh wrote in his book, the first to be published towards the end of 1984 that, “ There can be little doubt that if a zero were to be added to the official figure of 516 civilian/ terrorist casualties, we would be closer to the actual number of lost lives--- it was certainly in the vicinity of 5000 dead”. The White Paper underlined that
‘’ 592 civilians/ terrorists” apprehended from the Golden Temple Complex.
It was an open secret that in the sweltering heat of the month of June, corpses of hundreds of the Sikhs killed inside the Golden Temple Complex got rotten and were not taken for mandatory post-mortem. And those stinking bodies, emanating foul smell, were heaped up into the garbage trucks of the municipal committee by the sweepers inebriated and bribed by the authorities for doing that arduous job and the trucks with human limbs protruding through broken sheets, passed through the city streets-- in full public view-- to the nearby cremation ground for quick disposal. Post mortem conducted on some of bodies of the Sikh youths by a team of doctors brought from Jalandhar ( a Punjab city) had registered in their reports that hands of some Sikh youths were tied behind their back with their turbans and were shot dead from point blank. It is pertinent to note that most of bodies disposed off as unidentified and in lots with and without post-mortem exercise.
The inmates in the Complex were treated as ‘enemies’ violating the international war conventions and the Red Cross people were not allowed to enter even after the operation was over and the volunteers were detained a kilometer away from the venue of casualties. Several witnesses had affirmed that there were at least 10,000 people inside the Temple Complex including 4000 of them were young people including women and children. An Akali Dal jatha ( the party volunteers) of 1300 workers from Sangrur district including 200 women and 18 children was inside the Complex for courting arrest the next day. Several pilgrims came to the Complex pay their obeisance on Guru Arjun Dev martyrdom day on June 3. But all of them inside the Temple Complex were not allowed to go out after 10. PM on June 3.
Even the authentic list of the 4000 Sikh soldiers, who had left their barracks and marched towards Amritsar, being unable bear the religious injury and shock following the Army attack on Durbar Sahib, a sacred shrine of their faith, has not been officially released till today. And there is no information about how many Sikhs, rushing towards the Amritsar from various parts of the curfew-bound Punjab following the Army attack, were killed, injured and detained. How many milk vendors bringing milk to the city were killed and detained and how many buffalos died during curfew spanning several days in Amritsar city. Similarly, there was no actual information about how many were killed, injured and detained in the Army attack on 42 gurdwaras (Sikh shrines) in Punjab particularly at Patiala, Moga, Mukatsar and Tarntarn urban areas. For example, there were many incidences of inhuman and cruel excesses on the Sikhs which were out of sync to a democratic polity and civilized society. Overzealous authorities had picked up 21 boys between the age of 4 and 12 from the Golden Temple complex during the Operation and sent to the Ludhiana jail listing them under three categories of terrorists—very dangerous, dangerous and potentially dangerous. They were transferred to Amritsar following a writ of ‘habeas corpus’ moved in Supreme Court of their behalf by Smt. Kamal Devi Chattopadhyaya at that time.
The Sikh Reference library housing rare hand-written copies of Granth Sahib (Sikh scripture) and Hukamnama (edicts) were burnt, which according to the recorded statements by many witnesses including archivist in-charge late Devinder Singh Duggal and the SGPC, the archives were set on fire after the Army operation was over. But the White Paper maintained that the library building caught fire in the exchange of fire.
‘Report to the Nation’ brought out by the “Citizens For Democracy’ with foreword by the eminent human and civil rights champion of that time, Justice V.M Tarkunde and Preface by George Fenandes, later to become the Defence Minister of the country, carried interviews of several witnesses coming out with gory details of inhuman excesses. But the facts, laid down in the report, titled as “ Oppression in Punjab” were never contested by New Delhi, instead, the authorities chose to ban that book published towards the end of 1985.
Massacre of the Jallianwala Bagh, located adjacent to the Golden Temple Complex occurred in 1919, about 65 odd years before the ‘Operation Blue Star’ when India was a British colony and Indians were struggling to get freedom from the foreign yoke. Both tragedies took place in the same locale in Amritsar, though at different time and under political dispensations, bear resemblance as far as the excessive and unalarmed firing by the military was concerned .But there is a stark difference between what was the post-attack treatment given to the victims and what action was taken against the perpetrators of inhuman cruelty . In 1919, the terrible firing at the people assembled to protest against the Rowlett’s Act in the Jallianwala Bagh ground, as many as 359 people were killed and 1200 wounded. But those dead were identified and their bodies were handed over to the families for last rites and the wounded were admitted to the hospitals and compensated for the treatment. A Hunter Commission of Inquiry was instituted against the decorated British General Dyer who had ordered the firing on non-combatant people in the protection of the Empire. General Dyer was never exonerated for that avoidable human loss and he died as a disgraced military officer thereafter.
On the other hand, the Amy operation ordered by a ‘democratic government of the Free India’ on the Golden Temple complex used an excessive military might including tanks on the pattern of a country waging war against the ‘aliens’ and the enemy .But the democratic Indian state awkwardly missing that the British empire’s gesture of justice shown to its subjects --not citizens—which went to institute a commission inquiry that had probed the Jallainwala Bagh tragedy and Wilson Churchil, the then British Secretary of War had publically confessed that General Dyer took ‘an extra-ordinary step’. But nothing of that sort and even a single word of consolation has been uttered by the Indian establishment, Parliament on that Army attack. And, its cruel silence over that tends every saner person to conclude that the establishment justifies the operation.
The tragedy of year of 1984 including the November pogrom of the Sikh in Delhi and other places in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination and indifference of the Indian establishment thereafter have been affirming views of some intellectuals that ‘the collective assertion of the Sikh minority as being a ‘separate and distinct nation’ is at odds with the Indian Nation building project based on the Hindu religious-cultural ethos as undertaken by Nehru and Patel at the beginning of Free India. And the rising pitch of slogans like ‘ Bharat Mata ki jai’ and ‘Bande Maatrum’ at public rallies of just concluded parliamentary polls have clearly reflected the Hindutva has become stronger enough to publically vouchsafe that ‘barring the Hindu nationalism, there is no other nationalism’ in India . And the minorities should not in illusion that Indian constitutional democracy could prevail upon the defiant march of Hindutva in any manner.
Contextualizing the Sikhs demands for justice for sufferers of the Army attack on the Golden Temple and for those of the November 84 pogrom, some say, is nothing more than a chimera and brooding over what had happened. For consolation, some other to assert that, ‘the Sikh minority is the victim of unfinished agenda of Indian independence’.
Jaspal Singh Sidhu retired as Special correspondent with United News of India, New Delhi and since then, writing on political, social and economic affairs. He could be reached at ---[email protected]
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