The Punjab Story Read online

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  ISBN: 978-81-7436-331-2

  Lotus Collection

  © Text: Amarjit Kaur, Lt. Gen. J.S. Aurora,

  Khushwant Singh, M.V. Kamath, Shekhar Gupta,

  Subhash Kirpekar, Sunil Sethi, Tavleen Singh

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  First published in hardback in 1984 by

  Roli Books International

  This edition published in 2004

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  ISBN: 978-81-7436-331-2

  Rs 295

  CONTENTS

  Publisher’s Note

  Foreword

  Genesis of the Hindu-Sikh Divide

  Khushwant Singh

  Akali Dal : The Enemy Within

  Amarjit Kaur

  Terrorist in the Temple

  Tavleen Singh

  Blood, Sweat and Tears

  Shekhar Gupta

  Operation Bluestar: An Eyewitness Account

  Subhash Kirpekar

  Assault on the Golden Temple Complex

  Lt Gen Jagjit Singh Aurora

  Myth and Reality

  M V Kamath

  The Great Divide

  Sunil Sethi

  White Paper on the Punjab Agitation: A Summary

  Government of India

  About the Contributors

  Publisher’s Note

  Unprecedented in the history of India, the happenings in Punjab in the 1980s have scarred the face of a nation otherwise known for its unity in diversity. The injury inflicted by the secessionists’ demands and the senseless killings were thought to have been cured by the surgical operation which the government carried out in the form of Operation Bluestar in early June 1984. Whether this operation succeeded in achieving its objective is best judged by people who had set the objectives before embarking on it. However, having performed the operation successfully, the government did feel the need for a healing touch.

  Punjab then was a major issue and continued to be a point of great debate in the country for some time to come. Many questions were asked: whether the army action was necessary? What was the situation that led to the army operation? Will the healing touch work? Also many rumours were in the air. One man plays up the other man’s statements. Facts become fiction. Most often this is unintentional. The aim of the present volume was to clear the misunderstandings between the two communities of Punjab and bring peace and amity among them.

  The Punjab Story attempts to organize a symposium of a group of people who have closely watched and studied the Punjab scenario. Each contributor to this volume has been actively and closely associated with the Punjab issue – whether in protest or in agreement with the government. This book also tries to put forward independent views of eight eminent personalities. The effort is to bring out facts as experienced by these eight contributors and put them in the form of a debate before the reader.

  Among the contributors, Smt Amarjit Kaur, then a Member of Parliament, belonging to a former royal Sikh family came out very openly and convincingly for the stand taken by the government. On the contrary, Khushwant Singh, then also a Sikh Member of Parliament, who was on the extremists’ hit list because of his criticism of Bhindranwale, shares his emotions with most Sikhs.

  M.V. Kamath, another veteran journalist, felt a sinister movement for Khalistan in the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) when he visited Amritsar way back in 1979 as editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India to do a cover story on the Golden Temple. Through the military mind of Lt Gen J.S. Aurora of the Bangladesh War fame, the reader gets to know of the tactical strategical, and executionary flaws of the army operation.

&nbs
p; The scenes of the battle are described by two brave journalists Shekhar Gupta and Subhash Kirpekar whose eyewitness accounts, coupled with scores of the army contacts that they were able to establish, enable them to provide blow by blow accounts. They were perhaps the only journalists to be so closely watching the drama that was Operation Bluestar.

  Tavleen Singh, the fiery young journalist who has been covering Punjab since early 1980, had some of the most stunning interviews with the extremists stored in her cassettes which she has revealed in her article.

  Sunil Sethi was born and brought up in Amritsar. He travelled extensively throughout Punjab during the last few years and came up with a moving story on the great divide between the Sikhs and non-Sikhs in the state.

  Finally, the government’s point of view is expressed here in the form of a summary of the White Paper on Punjab.

  Foreword

  Two decades have passed since the vast upsurge of violence in Punjab – the Sikh fundamentalist terrorist movement for ‘Khalistan’ – was quelled. The comprehensive defeat of this terrorist movement is unique in history, leaving behind no ideological lees, no residual rage, no reservoir of sullen hostility. Again and again, since 1993, Pakistan has sought to revive the movement, and has successfully engineered a handful of random incidents, ordinarily against soft targets, but has failed utterly in touching a sympathetic chord among the people of Punjab, particularly the Jat Sikhs, among whom, at one time, the extremists found a majority of their recruits – as, in fact, did the police and security forces.

  Indeed, if any evidence of the Khalistani fervour survives, it is among a handful of lunatic expatriates, entirely divorced from the realities of the ground in Punjab. Even this lunatic fringe has been shedding regularly, as some of its leading oddballs crawl shamefacedly back into the country to ‘rejoin the mainstream.’ Others continue to rant ineffectually in their safe havens in Pakistan, or in their adopted countries abroad, increasingly discredited among those who lent them some credence in the past.

  Punjab’s recovery from the years of violence has, in many ways, been miraculous. The latter half of the 1990s saw an unprecedented cultural resurgence, one that impacted, through a new range of mass media and television channels, on the entire country. The spirit of Punjab, its economic dynamism, and the will of the people appeared to have emerged unscathed from the trial by fire over nearly a decade and a half of terrorism.

  Over this period of the Punjabi revival, I was often asked whether terrorism could ever return to the state, and my answer, invariably, was confidently in the negative. The sheer totality of the defeat of the terrorist forces, in combination with the attendant atmosphere of social, cultural and economic renaissance that followed it, convinced me that the people of Punjab would never allow the nightmare to be repeated again.

  Today, I am not as certain of this as I was some years ago. Punjab has, for the past decade, been outrageously misgoverned, with incompetence and rampant corruption standing out as the hallmarks of the successive regimes that have inflicted immense damage on the state since the end of terrorism. Among the worst affected by the irresponsibility and venality of succeeding administrations, have been the Jat Sikh farmers, and at least some among these proud people have been driven to suicide by debt and a deteriorating rural economy. The resolution they seek to their problems, nevertheless, still lies fully within the democratic political order – despite its attendant frustrations – and the militancy of the past finds no supporters today. But the rampant corruption, ineptitude and lack of imagination that has characterized the political and bureaucratic establishments in successive administrations, cutting across party lines, since the assassination of chief minister Beant Singh, and the continuing failure to meet even the minimal aspirations of the young and underprivileged, now make it difficult to entirely exclude the possibility of a revival of the politics of extremism and violence, though such an eventuality may not be realized in the near future.

  It is useful at this time, consequently, to remind ourselves that it was precisely this pattern of venality and neglect, combined with some of the gravest and most unprincipled political misadventures by the leadership of that time – both at the state and national level – that had given rise to the terror towards the end of the 1970s. For many, it is still a matter of complete amazement that Punjab, with its booming economy and a people so generous and open-hearted, could have been seduced by the narrow-minded and mean-spirited ideology of communal ghettoization that went by the name of ‘Khalistan.’ But those who have closely studied the dynamic of the emergence and consolidation of the terror in the early 1980s will understand that a comparable failure of political imagination, in combination with a sustained pattern of administrative incompetence and cynical manipulation, can bring about future disasters as well.

  Looking back today, the terrorism of those early years appears simple and unthreatening, compared with what was to follow, and one wonders at the myth-making that created the immensely larger-than-life image of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. In hindsight, Operation Bluestar was possibly the single most significant act of political overreaction and military incompetence that gave a lease of life to a movement that could easily have been ended in the mid-1980s. The redundancy of Operation Bluestar was, in any event, demonstrated in 1988, when Operation Black Thunder – originally called the Gill Plan by Rajiv Gandhi, when I first outlined it to him at his residential office, and which was accepted by him in toto – once again defenestrated the Golden Temple of the terrorist presence, this time without the disastrous consequences that Bluestar had provoked. Black Thunder and the counter-terrorism campaign that followed put the terrorists to flight by the end of 1989; but politics intervened once again, and vacillation, the failure of political imagination, and the outright incompetence of the national leadership at the highest level, again wasted the advantage that had been gained through the enormous sacrifices of the security forces. Thousands of lives were still to be lost on both sides of the battlelines before sense eventually prevailed, and the last phase of the counter-insurgency campaign brought the terrorists to their final defeat.

  And yet, twenty years after Bluestar, and more than a decade after peace was restored to Punjab, the state has little to show for those thousands of lives wasted on both sides of the conflict. Punjab and the Punjabis today appear to have been cast into an endless political purgatory, with the same discredited leadership that led them into the torments of the 1980s and the early 1990s resurfacing. Nowhere on the political horizon is their any sign of political vision or of a leadership that could steer the destinies of the state in a direction that conforms to the aspirations of its people. And the expectations of the people of Punjab far outstrip not only the vision of their leaders, but possibly the highest aspirations of any other people in the country. The Punjabi seeks a level of prosperity that would not even be imagined by most other people in India. And the growing hiatus between these burgeoning expectations, and the capacity of the political and administrative system to meet them, is a matter for great and immediate concern.

  There has been little serious effort to examine and understand the contours of the very complex Punjab experience – both at its best and its worst. In the absence of such examination and understanding, there is little hope of transformation. The present collection of writings reflects the direct experience of those who lived through the terror in Punjab. To this extent, it may be coloured by their proximity to those historical and troubling events. This immediacy, however, lends the writings in this volume an authenticity and worth that would be difficult to locate in the works of academics, distanced from the events they analyze. This volume is a record of history in the making, and is consequently indispensable for anyone who seeks to understand the ‘troubles’ in Punjab.

  K.P.S. Gill

  New Delhi, June 2004

  Genesis of the Hindu-Sikh Divide

  KHUSHWANT SINGH

&
nbsp; Sikhism was born out of Hinduism. All the ten Sikh gurus were Hindus till they became Sikhs. The Granth Sahib which Sikhs regard as the ‘Living Light’ of their gurus can be described as the essence of Vedanta. Nevertheless like other reformist movements Sikhism broke away from its parent Hindu body and evolved its own distinct rites of worship and ritual, its own code of ethics, its separate traditions which cumulatively gave it a distinct religious personality

  The founder of the Sikh faith, Guru Nanak (AD 1469-1539) was a Kshatriya of the Bedi (those who know the vedas) sub-caste. When he was 30 years old he had a mystic experience after which he announced his mission with the simple statement: ‘there is no Hindu, there is no Mussalman.’ The statement could be interpreted in different ways. It could mean that there were no basic differences between Hinduism and Islam. Or that followers of neither religion were true to their faiths. Or that all human beings were the same and dividing them into different religions was pointless. However, during the same mystic experience, Guru Nanak is said to have received orders from God to preach a new faith: ‘Nanak, I am with thee. Through thee will My Name be magnified. Go into the world and teach mankind how to pray. Be not sullied by the ways of the world, let your life be one of praise of the word (naam), charity (daan), ablution (ishnaan), service (seva) and prayer (simran).’ Guru Nanak spent the remaining years of his life travelling to different parts of India and West Asia. His last years were spent in village Kartarpur where he set up a dharamsala (place of religion). Large numbers of peasants became his shishyas (disciples) from which the word Sikh is derived. For his rustic followers he summed up his message in three simple commandments: kirt karo (work), naam japo (worship) and wand chako (share what you earn).