The Pakistani Spectator

1984 is singlled out as annus horribilis in India; the year which saw the ruthless storming of the Golden Temple – holiest of the Sikh shrines by the Indian Army in Jun, the elimination of Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale demanding restoration of Sikh political demands and the assassination of Indira Gandhi at the hands of her Sikh body guards on 31 Oct.

The assassination of the megalomaniac Indian leader rent asunder the façade of Indian secular ethos; berserk Hindu mobs led by well known Congress leaders embarked on a no holds barred pogrom of Sikhs and the lingering communal wounds still haunt the Indian polity in an unprecedented manner.

By 1984 Indira Gandhi had turned into a despot who thought that the Sikh demands for realization of their genuine political grievances had made them a security threat for India. When she came to power for the second time in 1980, Punjab was getting restive. It was a time when stirred by a strong sense of communal alienation the movement of separatism had begun to take roots in Punjab. Akali Dal, the Sikh political Party in Punjab had become vocal in strongly articulating the Sikh grievances and provided a platform for mobilizing heightened Sikh political aspirations. True to her Machiavellian character, she sought to defeat the movement through division and manipulation. Little did she know that her much abhorred tactics were inexorably shaping the scenario of her tragic death. To diffuse the intensity of the Sikh activism, she sought a counter to arrest the gathering momentum of the Akali Dal in the messianic figure of Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. In a classic case of a monstrous creation turning upon its creator, Bhindranwale, instead of becoming an instrument to Indira Gandhi’s manipulative designs, turned out to be a man of his own and to her consternation emerged as an uncontrollable force. His radical expression of Sikh grievances along with the demand for a separate homeland made him the center of the gathering storm with all shades of Sikh radicals gravitating to his call. He garrisoned himself in the Golden Temple and turned it into the nerve center of Khalistan movement.

Indira Gandhi failed to gauge the scale of Sikh alienation and Instead of charting a political course, sought to defeat the threat through unleashing the force of arms. With this objective in view, Operation Blue Star was launched on June 4 1984. When the assault came to end, the two hundred years old and the most sacred of the Sikh shrines, including its sanctum sanctorum, the Akal Takht, lay devastated. A treasure of sacred and historic documents and priceless religious heirlooms, treasured for centuries, got lost in dust and smoke. According to the Indian Government’s white paper, 493 Sikh militants were killed inside the shrine and more than 1500 arrested. Foreign journalists who witnessed the attack believed that the casualties during the assault were not in hundreds but in thousands. By committing the ultimate sacrilege of the holiest of the Sikh shrines, Indira Gandhi had in effect signed her own death warrants; her assassination remained just a matter of time and opportunity.

Sikh retribution caught up with Indira Gandhi on 31 October 1984 when her trusted Sikh bodyguards, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh assassinated her, as she walked to her office from the residential quarters. Her death were followed by large scale anti Sikh riots during which the Indian Government played the role of a silent spectator permitting the bloodthirsty Hindu gangs to indulge their lust for Sikh blood. Informed of the Sikh pogrom, Rajiv Gandhi failed to give orders for protection of the Sikhs by state machinery making his famous remarks justifying the riots; “When a big tree falls the earth shudders.” Encouraged by tacit approval of Rajiv Gandhi and the Hindu establishment, goons belonging to Congress Party led berserk mobs that roamed the Sikh neighborhoods, putting houses to torch and killings Sikhs including young children and boys. Worst kinds of atrocities were committed in Delhi neighborhoods where police remained a silent spectator to the Sikh pogrom permitting mobs a free hand in venting their diabolic rage. It was only when Army was ultimately called in to quell the riots that a semblance of normalcy returned. When the riots subsided, 10000 Sikhs had been killed and innumerable gurdawaras demolished to dust.

Sikh backlash to this provocation was quick and ruthless. Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale got etched in the Sikh folklore as a ‘shaheed’ and a hero and elevated in veneration to the status of a ‘Sant’. Anti Sikh violence gave a boost to the demand for Khalistan and a full-fledged insurgency picked up inside Punjab extending to attacks on Indian assets in foreign lands. Air India’s plane was blown up on June 23, 1985 which killed all its crew and 329 passengers. Sant Harchand Singh Longowal, who signed the Rajiv-Longowal Accord on 29 July 1985, was killed just three weeks later while praying inside a gurdwara. Gen A.S.Vaidya, who was Indian Army’s Chief of Staff when Operation Blue Star was launched, was gunned down in Pune in August 1985. Chief Minister Beant Singh was blown up along with twelve others by a suicide bomber on July 31 1995 at Chandigarh for letting down the Sikh Cause.

Indian Government ratcheted its violent campaign to bring Sikhs to heel. Not only were Sikh separatists demanding separate homeland killed in fake encounters but thousands of innocents also lost their lives to state brutality. The number of Sikhs killed in this campaign remains a guess to this day.

The bodies of those killed were disposed of through cremation in state crematoriums to obliterate any trace of state sponsored terrorism. In 1996 the Supreme Court of India upheld a finding by the Central Bureau of Investigation that 2097 bodies alone were cremated in three crematoriums on police orders without proper notification or documentation. The extermination of Sikhs during 80s and 90s has formed a bleeding wound that has traumatized the Sikh community despite passage of two decades. The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab” published by the South Asia Forum for Human Rights in Katmandu. 31 Oct this year marks the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the subsequent bleeding of Sikh nation in a professedly secular India. Despite the passage of considerable time and institution of eleven commissions to find out the guilty, no one has paid for the crimes committed against the Sikh Nation.

This is no black mark in isolation; 6 December 1992, subsequently, saw the tearing down of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya and the pogrom of Muslims in Gujarat in the spring of 2002, where more than 3000 Muslims were butchered by the Hindu mobs, remains a benchmark that equals the Sikh agony in 1984.