1984
It Is Time to Probe Indira Gandhi and Her Role in
The Crimes of 1984
HARTOSH SINGH BAL
On the night of June 4, 1984, the Indian Army attacked the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar, at the centre of which are two of Sikhdom‘s two main shrines: the Harmandar Sahib and the Akal Takht.
Code-named Bluestar, the controversial operation ran into stiff resistance from Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his band of resistance fighters bent upon defending the honour of the Sikh Nation.
The Indian Army brought in armoured vehicles and heavy artillery and the ensuing damage to the shrine left a community and a country at odds. It took a decade for peace to be restored to Punjab, it has taken much longer to even consider the possibility of reconciliation.
The basic question of how the country blundered so badly that night has still not been answered.
Who was responsible for planning the botched up sequence of events that unfolded on that night and why have India has failed to address the question of responsibility in straightforward fashion? Why does India believe that some issues are best left as they are, even as they continue to fester?
Yesterday, British PM David Cameron ordered a probe after recently declassified documents suggest that the UK played an active role in planning the actual operation.
Made public by Labour MP Tom Watson, the documents do not just seem to reveal the extent of British involvement, they also raise serious questions about how Indira Gandhi went about conceiving this operation.
Is it not time that we in India should consider a public probe into what transpired?
Consider what the documents reveal.
In a letter, written by Margaret Thatcher's private secretary from 10 Downing Street to Brian Fall, private secretary to then foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe: "Thank you for your letter of 3 February [1984] about the Indian request for advice on plans for the removal of dissident Sikhs from the Golden Temple. The Prime Minister is content that the Foreign Secretary should proceed as he proposes."
The other letter made public, dated 23 February 1984, is written by Fall to his counterpart under the Home Secretary:"The Indian authorities recently sought British advice over a plan to remove Sikh extremists from the Golden Temple in Amritsar ... an SAD (sic) officer has visited India and drawn up a plan which has been approved by Mrs Gandhi ... the knowledge of the SAS officer's visit and of his plan has been tightly held in India and in London."
Clearly then, if the documents are authentic, and they certainly seem to be so, Indira Gandhi had already approved of a plan to remove Bhindranwale from the Golden Temple as early as February 1984. Yet, the person who commanded the operation, Lt General KS Brar, was first told about the operation less than a week before it was carried out.
In an interview, Brar has said,"I caught the morning flight from Delhi to Chandigarh. I arrived in Chandimandir and told my wife that I'll be back in the evening and we'll catch the flight (to Manila). I'm rushed to the operations room. Maps on the wall and I'm still wondering what's going on. I am told,"You know the situation in Amritsar is very bad" and I said yes."
"The Brigadier General Staff gave me a briefing and it appeared to me that I am being sent off to carry out an operation. So in the middle of all those briefings I said, "I am proceeding abroad tonight. I have been sanctioned annual leave for my honeymoon." And so he looked at General Dayal and they whispered to each other and then he said, Bulbul, your leave is off. You go another time. There's an aircraft waiting outside to take you to Amritsar. Give orders to your division to move from Meerut to Amritsar immediately. I give you 36 hours to settle down there and make your plans and I shall come there for my first briefing ..."
"So I got to Amritsar and got my staff and we got down to making plans. I didn't even know the layout of the Golden Temple. I had never been there, so I did a quick reconnaissance, met the local civil administration, the police. They weren't of any help, as they were defunct for many months. Bhindranwale was in full control. They weren't able to give me any information about what was happening inside the GoldenTemple."
Once the operation was launched Brar said, "I won't say we underestimated them but the information given to us indicated that there were not so many people and that they didn't have the type of weapons that they should. Intelligence was lacking."
What was the government and the Army doing between the end of February and the end of May? How come not even the plans of the temple complex were available? No intelligence seems to have been gathered, and if the SAS officer had suggested a plan what happened to it? What were the political machinations Indira Gandhi was involved in while the actual details of the operation were seemingly ignored for three months? Why could the Indian government not even ensure that the operation was not carried out at a time when the complex was full of pilgrims because of an important high holiday?
So far we have been given to believe that matters unravelled so quickly in Amritsar that Indira Gandhi had no choice but to respond in haste. This effectively gave the Army little time to come up with a coherent plan.
But if it is true that the operation had been cleared and planned as far back as February 1984 none of this stands, and Indira Gandhi stands accused of near criminal culpability for pushing the country into one of its worst crises since Independence.
There are those who will claim we should let such matters rest. But the ham-handed operation led to a mutiny in the Army, the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the mass killing of innocent Sikhs in Delhi and several other parts of India as well as the rise of an insurgency in Punjab that was, perhaps, the most violent challenge to the Indian state since 1947.
How do we ignore and pretend to forget the culpability of our own government in India in such events?
[Courtesy: First Post. Edited for sikhchic.com]
January 15, 2014
Conversation about this article
1: Jamie Gieher (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada), January 15, 2014, 12:10 PM.
Many Hindus refer to her as 'mother India'. How appropriate! Just look at the mother, and then look at the progeny. Well met ... mother and lemming-nation. Certainly qualifies the lot as THE Banana Republic, the most useless and redundant of them all. The world would be a better place without them.
2: GC Singh (USA), January 15, 2014, 12:12 PM.
Not only in 1984, but the collaboration and collusion between the British and Indian governments was on full display again in New Delhi and London. Reacting to the discovery of the documents, Indian Foreign Ministry's "Muslim" spokesman was used to whitewash its lies and then the tried and trusted minion Gen Brar was brought out of hiding and paraded all over the media to weave his own web of lies. He claims he was brought in at the very last moment before the 1984 attack, yet he says he knows exactly what happened or did not happen during the months long planning that preceded the attack! He dutifully patted India on the back, stating that they were quite capable of handling it themselves and that labor MP Watson was merely playing to the gallery. And lo and behold! Within hours of Brar's media appearance, David Cameron was in parliament quoting Gen Brar and underplaying any British role in Operation BlueStar.
3: Sunny Grewal (Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada), January 15, 2014, 2:07 PM.
Well, it must have been nice for General Brar that the first time he visited his religion's most holy shrine was after he demolished it.
4: Sunny Grewal (Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada), January 15, 2014, 2:19 PM.
I would like to retract my earlier statement. I find it highly unlikely that a Sikh born in India has never been to the Golden Temple. If every kid born on foreign shores has at least seen the Harmandar Sahib once in their life, I doubt that there are many who are born in India and have not seen it. As always, Brar is lying once again ... even on this little point.
5: Kanwarjeet Singh (USA), January 15, 2014, 5:40 PM.
Am I the only one noticing this? Thousands of Sikhs were murdered and raped in 1984 - result: many Sikhs left India and settled abroad (not all of course). Just like Guru Nanak when he said to the good people, 'ujjarr jao' ('may you be dispersed'). The evil ones were to stay put. Delhi is now filled with a lot of riff-raff from Haryana and beyond. These same people are raping their own. Delhi and surrounding areas have the highest crime rate against women, highest burglary rate, not to mention the uncivilized culture of most of the residents. So, call it a blessing in disguise for most Sikhs (unfortunately not all) and the curse of the 'sins of their fathers' for those that applauded June 1984 and stood by in Nov 1984 watching the tamaasha of the pogroms. These Indians are domed to live with their own demons.
6: H. Kaur (Canada), January 15, 2014, 8:36 PM.
You are deluded if you think any Indian enquiry would even attempt to be truthful or just. "The country", you say? Hm-m-m. It's the dirty, evil hellhole our wretched leaders of the 1940s condemned Sikhs to live in.
7: N Singh (Canada), January 15, 2014, 11:14 PM.
So, if India acted alone, as claimed by Brar, then India and Indira Gandhi and minions like him alone are guilty of the crimes against humanity! Interesting that of all of India's army officers he is the only one to ever harp on about 1984. This man is really a disgrace to the uniform and needs to be tried a la Nuremberg for crimes against humanity and, if found guilty, hung from the neck like any common criminal. Death by firing squad as per military custom would be too good for him. It is difficult to imagine that any Sikh woman ever gave birth to a deformity like him and KPS Gill.
8: Gurpal (United Kingdom), January 16, 2014, 4:38 PM.
Kanwarjeet and N Singh - very powerful words indeed! Ujjarr jao, ji!
9: Kaala (Punjab), January 22, 2014, 8:54 PM.
Indira Gandhi did not act alone. She had the support of both the Communist Bloc led by the USSR and the Western Bloc led by US/UK who were competing for trade contracts to boost their sinking economies and these champions of human rights were more than willing to look the other way at the genocide of Sikhs who offered no economic value to them.