July 1987: Reports from a different India
Posted: July 08, 1987
FATEHABAD, India -Terrorists
thought to be Sikh separatists attacked two more buses yesterday,
killing a total of 34 people, mostly Hindus, and bringing to 74 the
number of people shot to death in two days of highway ambushes.
On Monday, gunmen killed 40 bus passengers, nearly all of them Hindus, in Punjab state.
Police
said five extremists struck about 8:30 p.m. yesterday on National
Highway No. 10 in Haryana state, which borders Punjab. The attack
occurred about six miles from Fatehabad, a small market town in India’s
wheat belt, and about 150 miles southwest of Chandigarh.
The
attackers used a car and a jeep to block a bridge to stop one bus,
police said. They boarded the vehicle, began dragging out passengers,
and had killed four when a second bus came by from the opposite
direction, headed for New Delhi.
The terrorists then rushed across to the second bus and opened fire with automatic weapons, killing 30, police said.
When
the gunmen turned their attention to the second bus, survivors on the
first fled across nearby fields. Most of the dead were Hindus, and 15
people were wounded, authorities said.
Police said they believed
that yesterday’s attacks were carried out by the same group that staged
Monday’s ambush, in which several gunmen forced a bus driven by a Sikh
to stop on the main highway from Chandigarh to Delhi. They then drove to
a secluded spot before opening up on the passengers.
In that
attack, one gunman apparently was shot accidentally by his comrades. His
body was found later in an abandoned getaway car.
Punjab Police
Chief Julio F. Ribeiro told reporters that the bus driver in Monday’s
attack was detained for questioning. Ribeiro said that ammunition
recovered at the massacre site showed that the militants used
Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifles.
Yesterday was the fourth time
in a year that Sikh gunmen had targeted bus passengers. In attacks in
July 1986 and in November, a total of 38 people, mostly Hindus, were
killed. No arrests have been made in those attacks.
The massacre
Monday was the worst since extremists began a campaign five years ago to
establish an independent Sikh nation in Punjab.
Sikhs slightly
outnumber Hindus in Punjab. Officials say the random killings of Punjabi
Hindus are intended to drive them out of the state and in turn prompt
retaliatory Hindu killings of Sikhs elsewhere in India that would force
Sikhs to flee to Punjab.
In June 1984, the army attacked Sikh
militants holed up in the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, the Golden Temple at
Amritsar, killing hundreds. Four months later, Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi was killed by Sikh assassins, and her son, Rajiv, took over.
In
a statement after Monday’s slaughter, Gandhi said, “This atrocity
should redouble our resolve to fight against the extremists.”
He
took direct control of Punjab on May 11 when he fired the state’s
moderate Sikh government for failing to stem terrorist violence.
But
his seeming inability to manage the deteriorating situation in Punjab
was a key factor in the rout that his Congress-I Party suffered last
month in Haryana state elections. A peasant-dominated party swept to
power in Haryana in an anti-Gandhi backlash.
More than 500 people have died in separatist violence so far this year. About 640 were killed last year.
All three buses ambushed in the last two days were operated by Haryana
Roadways, the state transportation company. Yesterday, Haryana followed Punjab in suspending nighttime bus services.
Frustrated
officials in New Delhi said it was virtually impossible to prevent
attacks on buses, thousands of which are on the roads every day.
“You just can’t really be watching all the roads and all the buses,” one said.
Home
Minister Buta Singh, a Sikh and India’s top internal security official,
went to Chandigarh to visit wounded survivors of Monday’s attack and
called it “a brutal murder of human values.”
Political leaders in
the states of Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and Jammu and Kashmir
called for general strikes to protest the bus killings. Schools were
ordered closed in Haryana and shops in Chandigarh closed after the first
attack.
The right-wing and predominantly Hindu Bharatiya Janata
Party, defying a police ban on public assembly in New Delhi, said it
would organize a march on Gandhi’s heavily guarded residential compound
in the south of the capital city today.
After last night’s
attacks, security forces across northern India were put on maximum alert
and the army was placed on standby to assist police in preserving calm
in New Delhi, the scene of previous backlash attacks by Hindus on Sikhs.
attackers used a car and a jeep to block a bridge to stop one bus,
police said. They boarded the vehicle, began dragging out passengers,
and had killed four when a second bus came by from the opposite
direction, headed for New Delhi.
The terrorists then rushed across to the second bus and opened fire with automatic weapons, killing 30, police said.
When
the gunmen turned their attention to the second bus, survivors on the
first fled across nearby fields. Most of the dead were Hindus, and 15
people were wounded, authorities said.
Police said they believed
that yesterday’s attacks were carried out by the same group that staged
Monday’s ambush, in which several gunmen forced a bus driven by a Sikh
to stop on the main highway from Chandigarh to Delhi. They then drove to
a secluded spot before opening up on the passengers.
In that
attack, one gunman apparently was shot accidentally by his comrades. His
body was found later in an abandoned getaway car.
Punjab Police
Chief Julio F. Ribeiro told reporters that the bus driver in Monday’s
attack was detained for questioning. Ribeiro said that ammunition
recovered at the massacre site showed that the militants used
Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifles.
Yesterday was the fourth time
in a year that Sikh gunmen had targeted bus passengers. In attacks in
July 1986 and in November, a total of 38 people, mostly Hindus, were
killed. No arrests have been made in those attacks.
The massacre
Monday was the worst since extremists began a campaign five years ago to
establish an independent Sikh nation in Punjab.
Sikhs slightly
outnumber Hindus in Punjab. Officials say the random killings of Punjabi
Hindus are intended to drive them out of the state and in turn prompt
retaliatory Hindu killings of Sikhs elsewhere in India that would force
Sikhs to flee to Punjab.
In June 1984, the army attacked Sikh
militants holed up in the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, the Golden Temple at
Amritsar, killing hundreds. Four months later, Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi was killed by Sikh assassins, and her son, Rajiv, took over.
In
a statement after Monday’s slaughter, Gandhi said, “This atrocity
should redouble our resolve to fight against the extremists.”
He
took direct control of Punjab on May 11 when he fired the state’s
moderate Sikh government for failing to stem terrorist violence.
But
his seeming inability to manage the deteriorating situation in Punjab
was a key factor in the rout that his Congress-I Party suffered last
month in Haryana state elections. A peasant-dominated party swept to
power in Haryana in an anti-Gandhi backlash.
More than 500 people have died in separatist violence so far this year. About 640 were killed last year.
All three buses ambushed in the last two days were operated by Haryana
Roadways, the state transportation company. Yesterday, Haryana followed Punjab in suspending nighttime bus services.
Frustrated
officials in New Delhi said it was virtually impossible to prevent
attacks on buses, thousands of which are on the roads every day.
“You just can’t really be watching all the roads and all the buses,” one said.
Home
Minister Buta Singh, a Sikh and India’s top internal security official,
went to Chandigarh to visit wounded survivors of Monday’s attack and
called it “a brutal murder of human values.”
Political leaders in
the states of Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and Jammu and Kashmir
called for general strikes to protest the bus killings. Schools were
ordered closed in Haryana and shops in Chandigarh closed after the first
attack.
The right-wing and predominantly Hindu Bharatiya Janata
Party, defying a police ban on public assembly in New Delhi, said it
would organize a march on Gandhi’s heavily guarded residential compound
in the south of the capital city today.
After last night’s
attacks, security forces across northern India were put on maximum alert
and the army was placed on standby to assist police in preserving calm
in New Delhi, the scene of previous backlash attacks by Hindus on Sikhs.
Source: http://articles.philly.com/1987-07-08/news/26201308_1_sikh-militants-punjabi-hindus-independent-sikh-nation
Posted: July 09, 1987
FATEHABAD,
India — They lay on slabs of ice in the front corridor of the general
hospital, lifeless men and boys who only hours before had been on the
wrong bus at the wrong time.
At first there were 32 of them, so
many that the floor was covered with fresh blood. By yesterday afternoon
more than half were gone, claimed by relatives for cremation.
The
wiry corpses were the latest victims of the war raging between militant
Sikhs and India’s Hindu-dominated central government.
India — They lay on slabs of ice in the front corridor of the general
hospital, lifeless men and boys who only hours before had been on the
wrong bus at the wrong time.
At first there were 32 of them, so
many that the floor was covered with fresh blood. By yesterday afternoon
more than half were gone, claimed by relatives for cremation.
The
wiry corpses were the latest victims of the war raging between militant
Sikhs and India’s Hindu-dominated central government.
They
were gunned down Tuesday night – apparently by Sikh terrorists – on two
buses just outside this parched market town 150 miles northwest of New
Delhi. Were it not for a similar bus slaughter Monday, in which 40
passengers died, the killing would have been the bloodiest civilian
massacre since the beginning of the Sikh terror campaign.
The two
incidents touched off a round of revenge violence in several Indian
cities yesterday. Six Sikhs were reported killed, including one
Fatehabad merchant who was burned to death.
In addition to the
sheer numbers of dead, the Hindus were outraged because the Tuesday
massacres were the first outside the Sikh-dominated state of Punjab,
where militants have been fighting for five years to establish an
independent Sikh nation. That massacre was in neighboring Haryana state,
which is predominantly Hindu and increasingly anti-Sikh.
Fatehabad
is in Haryana, and 90 percent of its residents are Hindu. Although they
and their Sikh neighbors have lived amicably for years, the peace was
shattered yesterday morning.
Hindu rioters stormed Sikh-owned
shops and businesses, gutting about 15 of them, police said. A mob
chased a Sikh merchant and burned him to death, said Munish Chandra
Gupta, Haryana’s home minister. News photographers saw Hindus
dispassionately watching the victim’s death throes.
Seven Hindus in the town were injured when a Sikh storeowner opened fire on a mob coming to torch his business.
The
violence ended with the arrival of government soldiers, who imposed an
immediate curfew, emptying the streets and filling the town with an
eerie, frightened silence.
By mid-afternoon, shops were shuttered,
and soldiers patrolled the streets in convoys with their Sten guns
pointed outward. Occasionally a civilian could be seen scurrying across a
road on some errand before he was ordered back indoors.
Fires continued to smolder at a gas station and a general store, adding to the brutal heat and dust of India’s dry season.
Parked
in front of the hospital were the two buses attacked in Tuesday’s
massacre, one driven there by its uninjured driver and the other by a
16-year- old boy who survived the massacre by hiding under a seat.
Through a translator at a hospital, the terrified youth, Zile Singh, gave this account:
It
had just become dark as the bus traversed a plain – fertile when wet,
but now parched by the blazing, pre-monsoon sun – when it had to stop at
a small irrigation bridge, several miles outside Fatehabad, because a
car or jeep was in the way.
Four men stormed the bus, brandishing
weapons. They did not wear the turbans or long beards that usually
characterize Sikhs, but no one in Fatehabad appeared to doubt that they
were Sikhs.
The four then told two Sikh passengers to collect the
passenger’s valuables. Then, three women at the back of the bus were
ordered to come forward and take off their clothes.
After they had
done so, the boy said, the terrorists opened fire, ultimately killing
27 people on the bus and injuring two dozen, as well as killing a taxi
driver who stopped at the bridge. The women were abused, but no women or
children were among those killed.
Singh crouched under the seat
for about 10 minutes, then peered cautiously out. When he saw one of the
wounded people moving, he climbed into the driver’s seat and drove the
bus to the Fatehabad hospital.
He was not aware that a few minutes
later the terrorists attacked another bus at the same place, spraying
it with machine-gun fire and killing four people. The driver of the
second bus also brought his passengers to the hospital.
As news of
the latest killings spread, anti-Sikh violence exploded across Haryana
and another Hindu-dominated state in northern India, Uttar Pradesh.
Three
Sikhs died in Haryana, police said. Two more were slain in Rishiskesh,
the Himalayan Hindu city on the banks of the revered Ganges River in
Uttar Pradesh, the United News of India reported.
At least 25
Sikhs were injured in mob violence in Rishikesh, and at least 62 were
injured in Haryana and elsewhere in north India.
Along Highway 10
in Haryana, roving mobs of Hindus could be seen as shimmering objects in
the distance through the heat waves coming off the blacktop road. They
stopped and surrounded cars, peering in, wild-eyed and shouting, at
their occupants, hoping to find Sikhs they could kill with the bricks
and thick wooden clubs they carried.
Convoys of soldiers patrolled
the road, the major one in the state, trying to halt the cycle of
killing. Along the road the burning skeletons of trucks waylaid by the
mobs attested to their ferocity.
Back in the hospital, about a dozen men injured in Tuesday’s attack lay on hastily assembled cots in a hot, dusty side room.
Government
officials and dignitaries arrived at regular intervals to witness the
carnage. They were escorted over the corpses in the center hall and past
the mounds of bloody clothing left in the corridors.
Because the ice under the bodies was melting, they also had to endure a terrible stench.
“We
must do something with the bodies quickly,” said Kuldeep Kumer, chief
medical officer of the hospital. “It is a terrible thing, but if they
are not picked up by tomorrow morning, we will have to take them out
ourselves to have them cremated.”
were gunned down Tuesday night – apparently by Sikh terrorists – on two
buses just outside this parched market town 150 miles northwest of New
Delhi. Were it not for a similar bus slaughter Monday, in which 40
passengers died, the killing would have been the bloodiest civilian
massacre since the beginning of the Sikh terror campaign.
The two
incidents touched off a round of revenge violence in several Indian
cities yesterday. Six Sikhs were reported killed, including one
Fatehabad merchant who was burned to death.
In addition to the
sheer numbers of dead, the Hindus were outraged because the Tuesday
massacres were the first outside the Sikh-dominated state of Punjab,
where militants have been fighting for five years to establish an
independent Sikh nation. That massacre was in neighboring Haryana state,
which is predominantly Hindu and increasingly anti-Sikh.
Fatehabad
is in Haryana, and 90 percent of its residents are Hindu. Although they
and their Sikh neighbors have lived amicably for years, the peace was
shattered yesterday morning.
Hindu rioters stormed Sikh-owned
shops and businesses, gutting about 15 of them, police said. A mob
chased a Sikh merchant and burned him to death, said Munish Chandra
Gupta, Haryana’s home minister. News photographers saw Hindus
dispassionately watching the victim’s death throes.
Seven Hindus in the town were injured when a Sikh storeowner opened fire on a mob coming to torch his business.
The
violence ended with the arrival of government soldiers, who imposed an
immediate curfew, emptying the streets and filling the town with an
eerie, frightened silence.
By mid-afternoon, shops were shuttered,
and soldiers patrolled the streets in convoys with their Sten guns
pointed outward. Occasionally a civilian could be seen scurrying across a
road on some errand before he was ordered back indoors.
Fires continued to smolder at a gas station and a general store, adding to the brutal heat and dust of India’s dry season.
Parked
in front of the hospital were the two buses attacked in Tuesday’s
massacre, one driven there by its uninjured driver and the other by a
16-year- old boy who survived the massacre by hiding under a seat.
Through a translator at a hospital, the terrified youth, Zile Singh, gave this account:
It
had just become dark as the bus traversed a plain – fertile when wet,
but now parched by the blazing, pre-monsoon sun – when it had to stop at
a small irrigation bridge, several miles outside Fatehabad, because a
car or jeep was in the way.
Four men stormed the bus, brandishing
weapons. They did not wear the turbans or long beards that usually
characterize Sikhs, but no one in Fatehabad appeared to doubt that they
were Sikhs.
The four then told two Sikh passengers to collect the
passenger’s valuables. Then, three women at the back of the bus were
ordered to come forward and take off their clothes.
After they had
done so, the boy said, the terrorists opened fire, ultimately killing
27 people on the bus and injuring two dozen, as well as killing a taxi
driver who stopped at the bridge. The women were abused, but no women or
children were among those killed.
Singh crouched under the seat
for about 10 minutes, then peered cautiously out. When he saw one of the
wounded people moving, he climbed into the driver’s seat and drove the
bus to the Fatehabad hospital.
He was not aware that a few minutes
later the terrorists attacked another bus at the same place, spraying
it with machine-gun fire and killing four people. The driver of the
second bus also brought his passengers to the hospital.
As news of
the latest killings spread, anti-Sikh violence exploded across Haryana
and another Hindu-dominated state in northern India, Uttar Pradesh.
Three
Sikhs died in Haryana, police said. Two more were slain in Rishiskesh,
the Himalayan Hindu city on the banks of the revered Ganges River in
Uttar Pradesh, the United News of India reported.
At least 25
Sikhs were injured in mob violence in Rishikesh, and at least 62 were
injured in Haryana and elsewhere in north India.
Along Highway 10
in Haryana, roving mobs of Hindus could be seen as shimmering objects in
the distance through the heat waves coming off the blacktop road. They
stopped and surrounded cars, peering in, wild-eyed and shouting, at
their occupants, hoping to find Sikhs they could kill with the bricks
and thick wooden clubs they carried.
Convoys of soldiers patrolled
the road, the major one in the state, trying to halt the cycle of
killing. Along the road the burning skeletons of trucks waylaid by the
mobs attested to their ferocity.
Back in the hospital, about a dozen men injured in Tuesday’s attack lay on hastily assembled cots in a hot, dusty side room.
Government
officials and dignitaries arrived at regular intervals to witness the
carnage. They were escorted over the corpses in the center hall and past
the mounds of bloody clothing left in the corridors.
Because the ice under the bodies was melting, they also had to endure a terrible stench.
“We
must do something with the bodies quickly,” said Kuldeep Kumer, chief
medical officer of the hospital. “It is a terrible thing, but if they
are not picked up by tomorrow morning, we will have to take them out
ourselves to have them cremated.”
Source: http://articles.philly.com/1987-07-09/news/26198088_1_independent-sikh-nation-fatehabad-haryana
PS: I was raised in the same town (Fatehabad). But by the time, I could follow the happenings, Punjab’s insurgency
had ended. But my Mother recalls armed Khalistan militants visiting her village
(in Rajasthan) every evening for area domination, while my father barely escaped a militant attack in Abohar
(Ferozepur District of Punjab). Apart from State and political actors
inside Punjab, ordinary Sikh community outside Punjab and ordinary Hindu community inside
Punjab feared for their lives all through 1980s & early 1990s- thousands of families had to leave their ancestral
places (Hindus out of Punjab, Sikhs out of India
or into Punjab). At the height of militancy, our family too bought some land deeper inside
Rajasthan, just in case the shit hit the fan-which thankfully didn’t happen. Nevertheless, The brutal
insurgency and counter-insurgecy dragged on for
years, ending only by Mid 1990s.
May-day(s) were quite the Pay-day(s)
A message from the desk-clerk’s desk.
May was supposedly a decent month for BP, no doubt driven by some election news somewhere in far-off Brown land. This was the third month in a row that we have crossed the 200 postings mark.
The Bosses have made it known that they are not displeased with the page-view counts or whatever other indices that are used to benchmark our performance. Normally this would lead to some idle chatter about bonus and what not amongst the working classes…but what with zero hour contracts and all that, the revolutionary spirit is sadly lacking.
However we comrades are always ready to march out the door if an inspirational leader comes by. Just thought we would let you know.
On the human resources front we have been blessed with a bright, young chap who is an elite (comes from an exclusive educational background) yet rooted in the soil that we all love. We have great expectations….yet it must be said…yeh dil mange more. You lazy bums (sorry most honored readers) why dont you step up and contribute a bit as well?
BTW if there are any suggestions for improvement please pass them on and we will try our best to get the curry condiments and floral arrangements just right.
To end this message, we must give our usual, awe-struck salaams and kurnish-es to the one and only Doctor Sahib. A single post of the Great Man is approaching has touched 7000 page-views (with no slowing down in sight). It is always a pleasure to watch (and learn from) the master at work. Thanks to all others who have contributed as well.
Finally, we did make an appeal on the spam that has infected the comments. For such a smart, happening site this is the only fly in the ointment. Hopefully the management will get the heavy artillery out and do the needful.
warm regards
The Master Spy comes in from the cold
When we read about Indian officialdom (as well as in team sports) the focus is almost always on the people who are bumbling and stumbling. This is unlike Pakistan, where the officials (mostly from military background) as well as sports-persons are considered to be highly focused and motivated in their jobs.
Doval, spent six years in Pakistan in the Indian High Commission…. he
once disguised himself as a Muslim and went to a dargah in Lahore for an
evening of qawwali. Pakistani intelligence officers were tailing him
and, after some time, one of them crawled next to Doval to whisper that
his fake beard was dangling loose, forcing him to beat a hasty retreat.
To name just one organization, ISI is considered to be miles ahead of RAW. Yes, there is lot of envy on the Indian side and the common explanation is that it is ideology which drives Pakistanis (as opposed to greed and egoism slowing down Indians).
The only times when India has come through convincingly is the 1971 Bangla war under the command of JS Aurora, S Maneckshaw, R Jacob, and S Singh and the 2011 ICC World Cup under the command of MS Dhoni. There have been some remarkable civilian officers: Damayanti Sen and Durga Nagpal, Ashok Khemka and Amit Khare, but they are considered to be exceptions which prove the rule.
It is thus a pleasant surprise to know of a successful spy, the best of the lot. Meet Ajit Kumar Doval who will be the National Security Advisor for this administration. Even in the short bio that follows, one notices plenty of the same bumbling/stumbling noted above, but also some remarkable successes taken at considerable personal risk.
……
Four or five men huddled together in a Delhi hotel room. They were
going through travel arrangements. Three of them were to leave for Dubai
a little later to execute one of the most audacious operations by
Indian intelligence agencies.
The plan was to smuggle in two
sharpshooters into the Grand Hyatt hotel near Dubai airport. The
marriage of the daughter of Dawood Ibrahim, India’s most wanted don,
with Pakistani cricketer Javed Miandad’s son had been solemnised in
Pakistan. A post-wedding feast was being organised at the hotel. Indian
intelligence believed Dawood would attend it and saw an opportunity to
take him down. The task was outsourced to the Chhota Rajan gang. The
calculation was that neither Indian operatives nor Chhota Rajan’s
gangsters could have pulled it off on their own; together, they stood a
better chance.
..
The sharpshooters, Farid Tanasha and Vicky Malhotra, had arrived in
India and were tested, briefed and trained at several locations. This
could not have been an ‘official’ operation, so a retired Intelligence
Bureau (IB) officer was conscripted to coordinate it. The officer was
giving last-minute instructions when DCP Dhananjay Kamalakar of the
Mumbai crime branch burst in with his men, his firearm drawn. Ignorant
of the ‘plan’, the Mumbai crime branch had intercepted Tanasha’s calls
and reached Delhi. They had decided to take the sharpshooters by
surprise.
The retired IB officer began to scream, but Kamalakar refused
to back off. By the time the air was cleared, the sharpshooters missed
the flight and the plan was abandoned. This incident finds mention in
Hussain Zaidi’s book From Dongri to Dubai. Zaidi writes that the Times of India
reported on a retired IB officer’s involvement with gangsters and
identified him as Ajit Doval—now India’s National Security Advisor
(NSA)—but Doval denied the incident. He told the Mumbai Mirror he’d been watching a football match at home.
…
Doval, 69 years old and an IPS officer of the Kerala cadre, is
India’s best-known spy—okay, mostly inland spy. He’s that rare police
officer who has won the Kirti Chakra, a military award. Incidents in his
professional life are the stuff of legend and films. In recent years,
Doval has worked closely with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his
Gujarat CM days, attending strategy sessions and briefings in Ahmedabad.
He is known as a hardliner on terror and Pakistan, his views
articulated in a number of articles in journals and mainstream media.
More controversially, he believes Ishrat Jahan, the college student from
Mumbai killed in a fake encounter in Ahmedabad, was a terrorist. He has
been critical of the CBI for implicating a retired IB special
director, Rajendra Kumar, in the case.
…
While his appointment as NSA, given his involvement with the BJP and
Modi, was expected, he has detractors in the security establishment and
the MEA who wonder if a hardcore operations man can ever be an ideal
NSA. But they too acknowledge Doval is an outstanding intelligence
operative. He has also served in Pakistan and London. But his critics
say Doval may have an eye for detail and the ability connect dots but
not the ability to see the large picture and deploy diplomatic skills.
…
Doval makes no bones of his belief that it was a colossal mistake to
appoint former diplomats as NSAs. Three of the four NSAs before him were
retired IFS officers. The only intelligence officer to make the cut was
M.K. Narayanan, who had a hand in the appointment of Doval as the
director of the IB in 2004. Turf wars between diplomats and intelligence
officers are not unknown and the first NSA, Brajesh Mishra, is known to
have had trouble with the IB, the turf guarded zealously by then home
minister L.K. Advani. But Doval’s special relationship with Modi, his
detractors fear, would overshadow not just the intelligence agencies but
also the MHA and the MEA. The more charitable view is that this is
precisely the arrangement the new prime minister may have had in mind.
Like most spy stories and legends, it is difficult to sift fact from
fiction. His detractors claim Doval himself crafted many of the tales
about him. But what remains indisputable is that Doval did play a
sterling role in restoring peace in Mizoram. Posted at Aizawl, he
assiduously cultivated the insurgents, often inviting them over for
dinner at his home. For over two years, Doval recalls, his wife cooked
pork for the heavily armed guests who she thought were part of a
patriotic push. He is also said to have walked once from Aizawl to deep
inside Kachin in China to establish contact with Mizo insurgents. The
leader and commander of the Mizo Liberation Army, Laldenga, is said to
have acknowledged that Doval had won over six of his seven commanders,
leaving him no option but to strike for peace.
Doval’s reputation acquired legendary proportions after he apparently
posed as an ISI officer and went inside the Golden Temple for a
rendezvous with Khalistani terrorists. It is claimed he stayed inside
for several weeks, helping terrorists mine the periphery with dud
explosives he had taken inside. The subterfuge lulled the terrorists to
believe they could blow up advancing troops while the government, secure
in the knowledge that the explosives were fake and threats issued from
the temple empty, planned Operation Black Thunder to storm the temple
again and flush out the terrorists in the summer of 1988.
…
His role in the rescue of the Romanian diplomat Liviu Radu, abducted
by the Khalistan Liberation Force from Delhi, also finds glowing mention
among his admirers, though some accounts hold that the KLF released
the diplomat after they found no mention of the kidnapping in the
international media. With Romania making no move to release Khalistani
terrorists arrested following the attack on the Indian ambassador Julio
Ribeiro in Bucharest, the abductors felt they needed to kidnap a
diplomat from one of the superpowers before they could hope to exert
pressure. Radu, therefore, was released and put on a train to Delhi.
…
But other accounts hold that Doval spearheaded the rescue, leading
teams into Punjab and taking out one kidnapper after the other. The
kidnappers were changing hideouts every ten hours, but Doval and his
team, according to these accounts, used honey-traps to good effect, till
the last surviving kidnappers panicked and released the diplomat.
…
Doval, who spent six years in Pakistan in the Indian High Commission,
does seem to relish relating his adventures as a spy. He has hinted at
his fondness for disguise, for example. He is quoted as saying that he
once disguised himself as a Muslim and went to a dargah in Lahore for an
evening of qawwali. Pakistani intelligence officers were tailing him
and, after some time, one of them crawled next to Doval to whisper that
his fake beard was dangling loose, forcing him to beat a hasty retreat.
…
His role as a negotiator at Kandahar, where Indian Airlines flight
IC-814 was hijacked with 160 passengers, is another high point of his
career. Doval and Nehchal Sandhu, also to become a director,
Intelligence Bureau, later, are credited to have engaged the hijackers
for over 110 hours, negotiating the release of hostages and stalling
their demand for the release of 36 terrorists held in Indian prisons.
According to one account, one of the hijackers would speak for 15
minutes from the cockpit of the hijacked plane while Doval would reply
in kind, speaking for the next 15 minutes. While India did have to
finally release three terrorists, including Maulana Masood Azhar, the
negotiators are believed to have done a good job.
…
As he occupies the office next to the prime minister, Doval, credited
with building up IB’s counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism
capabilities, can be trusted to rush in where his predecessors feared to
tread.
……
Link: http://www.outlookindia.com/printarticle.aspx?290878
…..
regards
How India voted: National Election Study 2014
Some conclusions culled from the survey:
- Modi’s candidature helped NDA: 1 in every 4 respondents who voted for NDA said they would not
have voted for the coalition had Modi not been the prime ministerial
candidate - It was the upper castes, OBCs, and the tribals-who together won the day for BJP
- Upper Caste consolidation in favor of BJP reached 1998 level, while Muslim vote share for Congress remained steady
- BJP recorded her largest ever Muslim voteshare but by and large, Congress and the rest retained their Muslim Voters
- Highest ever Young Voter Turnout: Compared to the national average of 66.6%, turnout among first-time voters (18-22 years) and ‘other young voters’ was 68 %. In past, the turnout among young voters has always been lower compared to the average national turnout. So this is a big deal. The increase in turnout among first-time voters was visible in both rural and urban constituencies and cut across gender.
- In the BJP win states, Support for the party cuts across young and old: The biggest shift among first-time voters in favour of the BJP could be
seen in Madhya Pradesh followed by Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and
Rajasthan. But, in other States where the party registered an impressive
victory — Bihar, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Chhattisgarh —
it received more support among voters of the age group 23-25 and among
other middle-aged voters compared to first-time voters - A thin ‘majority’ mandate: Before 2014 elections, the lowest vote share of a “majority” party was
41 % . Compared to that, BJP’s share of 31 per cent is pretty low.
Operation Bluestar
Written by Hamid Hussain on this 30th anniversary of the operation:
Operation Blue Star
Hamid Hussain
June 05 is the thirty year anniversary of the Indian army operation to clear militants from the Sikh religion’s holiest temple in Amritsar. This was the culmination of chain of events simmering for several years. In late 1970s, conflict between center and Punjab, internal power struggle among Sikh political elite, poor economic conditions of rural Punjab and assertion of Nirankaris (a sect of Sikhism considered heretic by orthodox Sikhs) resulted in rapid escalation of violence in Punjab. In early 1980s, Sikh agitation took an ugly turn and a group of militant Sikhs under the leadership of a charismatic leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale upped the ante. In December 1983, fearing arrest, Bhindranwala with few hundred armed supporters moved into the Golden Temple complex. Armed militants occupied many buildings of the Golden temple complex. Many wanted militants found refuge in the temple and in April 1983, in an audacious move militant shot dead Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of police Jullundhar range Avtar Singh Atwal inside the temple. Several police officers including Inspector Bicchu Ram and Deputy Superintendent Police (DSP) Gurbachan Singh were also assassinated by militants. In June 1984, Indian government decided to send troops to the Golden Temple complex to clear it out of militants. After a bloody fight, temple was cleared resulting in heavy casualties.
Count Down to Conflict
Prime Minister Indira Ghandi, two Sikhs in Delhi; President Giani Zail Singh and Union Home Minister Buta Singh, Punjab Chief Minister Darbara Singh, Akali Dal leaders Harchand Singh Longwal and Parkash Singh Badal, Gurcharan Singh Tohra; head ofShiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC); an organization responsible for the administration of Sikh houses of worship and militant leader Jarnail Singh Bhindrawale were key players in this conflict. Former Chief Minister of Punjab Zail Singh and Sanjay Gandhi supported Bhindrawale to weaken Akali Dal. When Bhindrawale was arrested on charges of inciting murder, Zail Singh now Union Home Minister arranged for his release without due judicial process. Bhindrawale was now seen as a hero who had won a showdown with the center and his views hardened as his popularity increased. Zail Singh also thwarted Chief Minister Darbara Singh’s efforts to curtail militant activities. Bhindrawale’s opponent Sikh leaders were now fearful for their lives. Longwal fearful for his life especially when Bhindrawale moved to the Golden Temple complex hostel which also housed offices of Akali Dal and SGPC, used another splinter militant group Babbar Khalsa to push Bhindrawale’s followers from the hostel into Akal Takht. When law and order situation deteriorated in Punjab, Punjab Chief Minister was sacked and President Rule was imposed in Punjab.
Militant Leadership
‘The best place to die is the highest place of your religion and a place connected with your ancestors and this place where we are standing has got both the qualities, so this is the best place to die.’ Major General ® Shahbeg Singh at Golden Complex
Three to six hundred supporters of Jarnail Singh were the core group of militants and most radical. Small number of Sikhs belonging to Babbar Khalsa, All India Sikh Student Federation (AISSF) led by Amrik Singh and Dashmesh Regiment were also armed. There were about one dozen close confidants of Jarnail Singh and they were assigned different tasks. Rachpal Singh was Bhindrawale’s secretary and Dalbir Singh political advisor. An inner security ring of about half dozen hard line militants guarded Bhindrawale and Gurmukh Singh was in charge of weapons. Four deserters from Punjab police Kabul Singh, Gurnam Singh, Sewa Singh and Amarjit Singh joined Bhindrawale at Golden Temple complex. Near the end of 1982, more than 5000 ex-servicemen gathered in Golden Temple for a convention. More than one hundred and seventy above the rank of Colonel including retired Major Generals Shahbeg Singh and Jaswant Singh Bhullar were among the ex-servicemen. Majority of ex-servicemen were advocates of use of non-violent means to achieve objectives but few like Shahbeg and Bhullar came under the influence of Bhindrawale. Bhullar left India just before the operation but Shahbeg was in Golden Temple at the time of operation. He was responsible for the fortifications and placement of machine guns and snipers at strategic positions at Golden Temple.
Civilian Administration
In early 1980s, central government responded to deteriorating situation in Punjab by changing top positions of provincial administrative machinery. From 1981 to 1984 there were six governors; Jaisukh Lal Hathi (September 1977 – August 1981), Aminuddin Ahmad Khan (August 1981 – April 1982), Marri Chenna Reddy (April 1981 – February 1983), Anant Prasad Sharma (February 1983 – October 1983), Bhairab Dutt Pande (October 1983 – June 1984) and K. T. Satarwala (June 1984 – March 1985). In the same time period the top police post of Director General of Punjab Police was shuffled four times; Birbal Nath, C. K. Sahni, Pritam Singh Bhinder and K. S. Dhillon. In four year time period, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) of Amritsar post was shuffled six times; A. S. Atwal (September 1981 – April 1982), Surjit Singh Baines (April 1982 – July 1983), Sarabjit Singh (July 1983 – October 1983), Ajay Pal Singh Mann (October 1983 – March 1984), Sube Singh (March 1984 – June 1984) and Bua Singh (June 1984 – August 1985).
Former Cabinet Secretary and West Bengal Governor Bhairab Dutt Pande was transferred to Punjab and he became head of the government as province was under President’s rule. New Delhi appointed four advisors to governor including Shivandar Singh Sidhu, Harbans Singh, P. G. Gavi and Gajjala Jagathpathi. However, all four advisors either quit or recalled as they advocated a political settlement rather than use of force. Later, Chief of Staff (COS) of Western command, Lieutenant General Ranjit Singh Dayal was appointed Security Advisor and Surendranath of Indian Police Service (IPS) advisor of law and order to governor.
Provincial bureaucracy of Punjab was headed by Chief Secretary K. D. Vasudeva, Amrik Singh Pooni was Home Secretary, Deputy Commissioner (DC) of Amritsar was Gurdev Singh and city magistrate was S. S. Dhillon. Army was suspicious that Gurdev had sympathies with militants therefore he was replaced on June 03, 1984 with Ramesh Indar Singh. Ramesh was a Bengal cadre officer then serving as director of rural development in Punjab and this was his first district appointment (later he was transferred to Punjab cadre and served as Principle Secretary to Chief Minister and Chief Secretary). Director General Police (DGP) of Punjab was Pritam Singh Bhinder and Inspector General (IG) of Criminal Investigation Department (CID) was Harjit Singh Randhawa. Police officers of Amritsar district included Superintendent Police (SP) Sital Das, Deputy Superintendent Police (DSP) city Opar Singh Bajwa, SP CID Harjeet Singh, DSP CID Sudarshan Singh and M. P. S. Aulakh was Assistant Director Intelligence Bureau (IB). Director General (DG) Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) was Ram Swarup Sharma, Inspector General (IG) Border Security Force (BSF) was B. K. Tirpathi, Director General (DG) BSF was Birbal Nath and DIG BSF in Amritsar was G. S. Pandher (he was sent on leave on June 05 due to his objections to the operation and replaced by Chaturvedi). By early 1984, civilian administration was completely ineffective due to political inertia, interference and collapse of police morale.
In Delhi, a group of serving and retired senior intelligence officers of Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) was advising Prime Minister Indira Ghandi. This group included chief security advisor Rameshwar Nath Kao (first Chief of RAW), N. F. Santook (former head of RAW) and Girish Chandar Saxena (head of RAW). Political leadership provided legal cover to security forces by passing several acts. These included National Security Act 1980, Punjab Chandigarh Disturbed Area Act 1983, Armed Forces (Punjab and Chandigarh) Special Power Ordinance in October 1983, Terrorist Activities and Disturbed Areas (TADA) Act 1984 and Terrorist Affected Areas (Special Courts) Act 1984. No Sikh political leadership could acquiesce with centre’s plan therefore Punjab was put under direct center rule in October 1983.
Army Action
‘We went inside with humility in our hearts and prayers on our lips’. Lieutenant General K. Sunderji
Chief of Army Staff (COAS) was General A. S. Vaidya and he assigned the operation to GOC-in-Chief Western Command Lieutenant General K. Sundarji. Western Command with its headquarters at Chandimandar planned and conducted the operation. Chief of Staff (COS) of Western Command Lieutenant General Ranjit Singh Dayal was the architect of the operation. Western Command consists of three Corps; II with headquarter at Ambala in Haryana, IX at Yol; Himachal Pardesh and XI with headquarter at Jallandhar. XI Corps commanded by Lieutenant General Gauri Shankar and consisting of 7 Division based in Ferozpur, 9 Division based in Meerut and 15 Division based in Amritsar was assigned the task of internal security of Punjab.
There were three components of the military operation. The main operation was to clear the Golden Temple complex and it was supported by two other operations. One operation was focused on clearing other Gurdwaras in the state where militants had taken refuge. Operation Rose Wood was aimed at sealing of Indian border with Pakistan to prevent escape of militants across the border and prevent any assistance to militants from Pakistan side. However, neither political leadership prepared the army nor army leadership prepared its own troops to reorient for internal security duty. In April 1984, XI Corps went ahead with its normal Corps exercise and troops were in training area when exercise was shortened and on May 27, troops were ordered back to their permanent locations. 9 Division commanded by Major General Kuldip Singh Brar was given the task of clearing the Golden Temple and he was informed about the operation only few days before the planned date. Brar’s Deputy GOC was Brigadier N. K. ‘Nikki’ Talwar and Colonel Administration was Colonel E. W. Fernandez. Jallandhar based 350 Infantry Brigade consisting of 9 Kumaon, 10 Guards, 12 Bihar and 26 Madras and commanded by Brigadier D.V. Rao was assigned the task of clearing temple complex. Brigade was supported by paratroopers from 1 Parachute Regiment and Special Frontier Force (SFF). 15 Division commanded by Major General Jagdesh Singh Jamwal was in support role in Amritsar and along with other troops sealed the border with Pakistan in Operation Wood Rose. Deputy GOC of 15 Division was Brigadier ‘Chikky’ Diwan, GSO Intelligence was Lieutenant Colonel Adarsh K. Sharma and Colonel Administration was Colonel Onkar Singh Goraya.
Troops involved in the operation belonged to 1 Parachute Regiment commanded by Lt. Colonel K.C. Padha, 10 Guards commanded by Lt. Colonel Israr Rahim Khan, 12 Bihar commanded by Lt. Colonel K.S. Randhawa, 26 Madras commanded by Lt. Colonel Panniker, 9 Kumaon commanded by Lt. Colonel K. Bhaumik, 15 Kumaon commanded by Lt. Colonel N.C. Pant, 9 Garhwal Rifles and 10 Dogra,. All infantry battalions belonged to 9 Division with the exception of 9 Garhwal Rifles from 15 Division. Artillery was commanded by Colonel E. W. Fernandez, Armored Personal Carriers (APCs) and BMPs of 8 Mechanized Battalion and tanks of 16 Cavalry were used in the operation. Paramilitary troops of Border Security Force (BSF), Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and Special Frontier Force (SFF) also participated in the operation. SFF was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Chowdhury and controlled by Cabinet Secretariat. 15 Kumaon and two companies of 9 Garhwal Rifles under the command of Deputy GOC of 15 Division Brigadier A.K. ‘Chikky’ Dewan were reserve.
General K. Sundarji established his tactical headquarters at Chandimandar. 9 Division tactical headquarters was on the rooftop of a building near Golden Temple. Later, Sunderji moved to the division tactical headquarters. 350 Brigade headquarters was established at Kotwali and later moved to Brahm Buta Akhara when it was cleared of militants. Military operation consisted of three phases. Phase I was to clear militants from buildings surrounding the complex and this phase started on June 03. Phase II code named SHOPS was to eliminate or capture militants from the complex. This phase also included plans to quickly extinguish fires and repair any structural damage to the holy site. This is supported by the fact that three fire assault teams from 60 Engineer battalion were assigned for this task. Phase III code named FLATS was mopping up remaining pockets of resistance all over the state. A separate operation code named METAL was to secure the holiest place of Harmandar Sahib. A group of commandos was to swim through the sarowar (sacred pool that surrounds the holiest place) and secure Harmandar Sahib.
Map is from Golden Temple Complex website; http://www.goldentempleamritsar.org/images/guide-map-of-golden-temple-amritsar.jpg
12 Bihar commanded by Lt. Colonel K.S. Randhawa and troops of BSF and CRPF were used to seal all entry and exit points to the complex and provide cover to all assaulting troops. All formations assembled at their launch positions around 7:30 pm and operation was launched around 10:30 pm (about half an hour late than original time of 10:00 pm). The operation at Golden Temple complex was divided into three phases. Phase I was main assault to neutralize militants, Phase II mopping up and Phase III securing of hostels and complete control of the complex and handing over all prisoners to other units. Different units were launched from different entrances to kill or capture militants. 26 Madras from southern (Langar side) entrance to secure southern and eastern wings, I Para from eastern Ghanta Ghar entrance to secure Akal Takht (later this objective was taken away from 1 Para and it was tasked to only secure Darshni Deodi and Harmandar Sahib), 10 Guards from eastern Ghanta Ghar entrance to secure Akal Takht and northern wing and SFF from main north-western entrance to secure Akal Takht and western wing.
Akal Takht was heavily fortified and manned by hard core militants associated with Bhindrawale. Major General ® Shahbeg Singh had placed observers and snipers on high towers and placed gun positions at multiple levels in such a way that it created a wide kill zone. The assault by 10 Guards and 1 Para came to a standstill with heavy casualties. One of the first casualties was a Sikh officer of 10 Guards Captain Jasbir Singh Raina who lost his both legs. The plan of Operation METAL by commandos was abandoned as they could not move forward to swim through sarowar to secure Harmandar Sahib. Akal Takht was taken out of 1 Para responsibility and they were now assigned the task of securing Darshni Deodi right in front of Akal Takht. Advance of 26 Madras was stalled due to heavy fire from machine guns placed on lungar hall and Gurdwara Manji Sahib. Militants belonging toBabbar Khalsa and some from AISSF were manning these positions. When troops found themselves in a kill zone due to well placed militant gun positions and their advance stopped, then tanks and APCs were requisitioned. Initially main purpose was not to use the firepower but to use headlights of tanks to blind the militants and use APCs and BMPs to provide cover for troops. Total eightVijayanta tanks of 16 Cavalry then part of 15 Division were used. Four tanks supported commandos while four supported 26 Madras. Eleven APCs/BMPs of 8 Mechanized Regiment were used. Four BMPs supported 10 Guards and commandos and three APCs and four BMPs supported 26 Madras. The lamps of tanks didn’t last long and one APC was hit by a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) and disabled.
Militants were posted on few high buildings overlooking the entire area especially water tower and two high towers; Ramgarhia Bungas. Sniper fire from these positions caused significant casualties of security forces. Neutralization of these commanding positions required use of heavy weapons. In view of stiff resistance from militants and slow progress, around 11:30 pm, an ad hoc force consisting of the reserve of two companies each of 15 Kumaon and 9 Garhwal Rifles along with elements of 26 Madras was launched from western Atta Mandi Gate. In the meantime, about thirty commandos under the command of Major P. C. Katoch tried to secure Darshni Deodi in front of Akal Takht but suffered many casualties. A second assault by another team of thirty commandoes led by commanding officer of 1 Para was launched which also suffered heavy casualties. Of the sixty five commandos seventeen were killed and thirty one injured but they were able to secure Darshni Deodi . SFF team of about fifty also suffered heavily losing seventeen. A company commander of 15 Kumaon Major B. K. Misra was killed while B Company retreated after suffering seven killed and twenty three wounded. By that time, Brar had received authorization from Delhi to use tank fire to neutralized militants entrenched in Akal Takht. Brigadier Chikky Diwan asked for one more chance to clear militants before the use of tanks. A small ten man team of 26 Madras led by Lieutenant Jyoti Kumar Dang was divided into two teams. One team was led by Subedar K. P. Raman Ravi. When this effort also failed with only three members of team surviving, then it was decided to use tank fire. Two tanks fired about twenty shells at Akal Takht that silenced the opposition. The remainder militants trying to escape from Akal Takht were killed and several surrendered. When the firing finally stopped, Bhindrawale and Major General ® Shahbeg Singh laid dead along with scores of militants and large number of innocent civilians caught in the firefight.
Tank fire resulted in fire at Sikh archives where other treasures were also kept. Colonel Goraya was aware of the importance of securing this Sikh heritage but not sure about troops operating against the militants. There was only one Sikh regiment in Amritsar; 2 Sikh Light Infantry (SLI) commanded by Lieutenant Colonel D. D. Singh. Goraya called the commanding officer and arranged for a ten man guard of 2 SLI under the command of a Naib Subedar to guard the Sikh treasures. Goraya’s concern was not unfounded as later it was discovered that some men of 26 Madras were engaged in looting. Later, Major General Jamwal made sure that all items returned.
Hostel complex around lungar hall had hundreds of rooms. 9 Kumaon and two companies of 15 Kumaon were assigned the task of clearing hostel complex. Major H. K. Palta; a company commander of 9 Kumaon escorted Akali leaders from Guru Ram Das Sarai to a MES bungalow.
Later, 10 Dogra relieved 9 Kumaon and continued the mopping up operation. In an unfortunate incident 10 Dogra’s medical officer Dr. Captain Rampal was snatched by militants while attending to injured soldiers. 10 Dogra tried a rescue mission but Rampal was killed by militants. In the phase III of the operation, 19 Mahrata Light Infantry (MLI) commanded by Officiating Commanding Officer Major Jagjit Singh (he was later arrested and tried by court martial for hiding weapons) arrested militants at Damdami Taksal without violence. 10 Assam commanded by Lieutenant Colonel S. K. Sharma arrested militants from a Gurdwara in Talwandi without any bloodshed.
The exact number of causalities is controversial. Army suffered significant casualties due to frontal assault and well placed defenses of militants in the buildings creating ‘kill zones’. Security forces suffered eight three killed including four officers, four Junior Commissioned Officers (JCOs) and seventy five other ranks. Two hundred and forty eight were wounded including thirteen officers, sixteen JCOs and two hundred and nineteen other ranks. 10 Guards suffered nineteen killed and fifty three wounded, 1 Para seventeen killed and thirty one wounded, 26 Madras fourteen killed and forty nine wounded and 15 Kumaon seven killed and twenty three wounded. The exact number of Sikhs both militants and civilians killed in the operation is hotly debated. Indian government claimed that four hundred and ninety two were killed including thirty women and five children and eighty six wounded. Sikhs claim that thousands were killed.
Militarily, there was poor planning and coordination at several levels. Two main commanders on the spot; Brar and Jamwal were both from the same battalion 1 Mahrata Light Infantry but didn’t get along well. Jamwal’s division was based in Amritsar and familiar with the operational area but he probably saw it as a slight that operation was assigned to 9 Division. 9 Division was chosen as government wanted a Sikh officer to lead the operation to avoid the allegation that Hindu soldiers were attacking the holiest place of Sikhs. 9 Division was not familiar with the operational area as there was no time for preparation, briefing or reconnaissance about a very difficult and unconventional task. A delicate balance was needed where Sikh troops were not used for the fear that they may refuse to attack their holiest place but two Sikh officers; Brar and Dayal were put in the forefront. In defense of Brar, he was not given the option of taking his time for planning and reconnaissance before launching the operation.
Many criticized the conduct of military operation with the benefit of the hindsight. Main objections include;
– Timing of the operation
– Conduct of operation
– Use of tank fire
– Failure to anticipate reaction of Sikh soldiers
June 05 was the martyrdom day of a Sikh guru and large numbers of devotees were inside the temple. Sikh leadership had called for non-payment of taxes from June 05 and army feared that Bhindrawale may announce establishment of Khalistan on that day. Army had to finish the operation quickly as they feared that thousands of angry Sikhs from villages may descend on Amritsar on hearing the news of attack on Golden Temple. Many suggest that army should have cut off water and electric supply of the Golden Temple and forced militants to surrender. Thousands of devotees visit Golden Temple and such action was bound to cause reaction. Few months earlier in Moga, police laid siege to a cluster of Gurdwaras and cut off water and electric supply when they were fired upon from these Gurdwaras. Sikh leaders had threatened to send ‘martyr squads’ to free these Gurdwaras. One can easily imagine the kind of reaction from a prolonged siege of Golden Temple. Army used tank fire only against heavily fortified Akal Takht and after suffering heavy casualties. Some Sikh officers suggest that if army had briefed army commanders about operation, they could have talked to Sikh soldiers to allay their concerns. The dilemma for any army commander is how much to share. If he shares information with large numbers, he risks losing the element of surprise and if he restricts information, others are surprised from the fall out.
Post Operation
Fall Out for the Army
Operation Blue Star enraged Sikh community and discontent quickly spread to the army. 9 Sikh stationed at Ganganagar; Rajhastan mutinied on the night of June 07, 1984. Soldiers broke into the armory and fired in the air near officer’s residential quarters forcing the officers to hunker down. Over 400 mutinous soldiers commandered battalion’s vehicles including Commanding Officer Lieutenant Colonel I. S. Sabarwal’s jeep and headed to Punjab. Soldiers forced through an armed constabulary check post at Rajhastan-Punjab border killing a constable. 11 Rajputana Rifles and 94 Field Regiment were given the task of intercepting these rebellious Sikhs and they were able to arrest few and later near Govindgarh a clash resulted in many casualties. Over 200 made it to Moga where they were surrounded in a Gurdwara. A force consisting of 3 Garhwal Rifles, 15 Garhwal Rifles, 12 Grenadiers, APCs of 9 Mechanized Regiment and few tanks of 20 Lancers under the command of Brigadier A. S. Bans surrounded the Gurdwara. After tense negotiations soldiers surrendered without further violence. The battalion was disbanded on April 1, 1985.
On June 10, around 1500 Sikh recruits of Sikh Regimental Center at Ramgarh, Bihar mutinied. Subedar Major ran to Commandant Brigadier S. C. Puri’s home to inform him. Puri got in the car along with Subedar Major and on the way picked up Deputy Commandant Colonel Jagdesh Singh and battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel H. S. Cheema. When the jeep came to the center, it was fired upon injuring all occupants. Driver drove the jeep to the hospital where Brigadier Puri died from his wounds. Cheema was not severely wounded and he returned to the center and tried to rally soldiers. Mutinous soldiers and recruits commandeered civilian vehicles and headed towards Amritsar. Near Vernasi, they divided into two groups for their onward journey. Indian army dispatched 21st Mechanized Infantry Brigade along with an artillery unit to put fear of God in Sikh recruits. Second group of rebels was tackled by 20th Infantry Brigade along with some artillery. In the ensuing firefight, thirty five soldiers were killed and others arrested.
In Jammu, one hundred and thirty soldiers of 18 Sikh deserted but later captured by 2 Grenadiers without violence as most deserters were unarmed. One hundred and thirty three soldiers of 14 Punjab Regiment in Pune deserted with their weapons. 13 Mahar intercepted the deserters and later 2 Kumaon clashed with deserters killing many. On June 11, over two hundred soldiers of 3 Sikh stationed in Tripura deserted. They drove their vehicles to train station to head towards Punjab. They had carried with them all the liquor. At the station, most of them got drunk. Commanding Officer Lieutenant Colonel G. S. Kalhoun persuaded them to return to the lines. He allowed them to keep their weapons with them at night and next morning they deposited the weapons and 5 Mahar took charge of the quarter guard. There was unrest in two artillery regiments with significant number of Sikhs. Ninety soldiers of 166 Mountain Regiment stationed in the east and twenty seven soldiers of 171 Field Regiment stationed in Alwar deserted. Soldiers of 5 Sikh (nick named Dastori) were disturbed. Commanding Officer Lieutenant Colonel Gurcharan Singh Brar spent lot of time with soldiers and calmed them down. His main argument was that soldiers should not do anything that could harm century old traditions of the battalion. There was no act of disobedience from Sikhs of armored corps but army leaders were concerned as mutinous armored troops could cause much more damage than infantry troops. 46 Armored Regiment commanded by Colonel B. S. Sandhu sent a tank squadron under the command of Major G. S. Ghumman outside Amritsar with orders to shoot any tanks trying to enter Amritsar.
In the aftermath of the mutiny of Sikh troops, there were two opinions in the army. Non-Sikh officers especially COAS General Vaidya suggested stern measures against mutinous soldiers (an exception was a Sikh senior officer then GOC-in-Chief of Southern Command Lieutenant General T. S. Oberoi) while Sikh officers and some others suggested a lenient approach. Five retired senior Sikh officers including Lieutenant Generals Jagjit Singh Arora (2nd Punjab Regiment), Harbaksh Singh (5/11 Sikh), J. S. Dhillon, M. S. Wadalia and Sartaj Singh protested that the case of mutinous Sikh soldiers was a special one and they should be dealt differently. They met President Zail Singh to convey their feelings. Zail Singh while understanding their concerns suggested that he had no power in this matter. General Vaidya ordered mixing of some single class regiments and in this process 13 Sikh was reconstituted with Sikh, Dogra, Garhwali and South Indian companies. These battalions were nick named ‘Vaidya Battalions’ and later this trend was reversed to some extent.
The Fight Continues
General anger among Sikhs at the desecration of their holiest place provided new recruits for the militants. Later, several small scale operations were carried out primarily by police and paramilitary troops to dismantle militant infrastructure. On April 30, 1986 Operation Black Thunder I under the direction of Director General of Police Punjab J. F. Rebeiro cleared some militants from buildings around Golden Temple. In 1988, some militants again started to take refuge in Golden Temple. Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of CRPF Sarabdeep Singh Virk was shot and wounded and in 1990, SP (Operations) Taran Taran Harjit Singh was assassinated in a bomb blast. On May 06, 1988 Operation Black Thunder II under the command of Director General of Police Punjab K. P. S. Gill swept through Golden Temple complex to flush out militants. In this operation National Security Guards (NSG) under the guidance of its head Ved Marwah (native of Pakistani border town of Peshawar and a career officer of Indian Police Service) and Ajit Doval of IB played the crucial role. A thousand strong Special Action Group (SAG) of NSG participated in the operation. In 1990-91 Operation Rakshak I & II was launched. The most affected areas were Amritsar, Taran Taran, Majithia, Batala and Gurdaspur.
Militants retaliated by targeting police officers and several officers lost their life. In 1987, SSP Arvindar Singh Brar, SP Kanwar Ranbir Singh Gill, DSP Harpal Singh, DSP Tara Chand, DSP Gurcharan Singh and DSP Om Parkash were assassinated. In 1988, Senior Superintendent Police (SSP) Patiala Avindar Singh Brar and Superintendent Police (SP) Headquarters K.R.S. Gill were assassinated by Sikh militants on a jogging trail. In 1988, in Patiala, SSP Sital Das and SP (Detective) B. S. Brar were killed in office. In the same year, DSP Faridkot H. S. Gill was also assassinated. In 1989, DSP Gopal Singh Ghuman was assassinated. In 1990, Commandant 75 Punjab Armed Police battalion Gobind Ram was killed in a bomb blast. In the same year, DSP Baldev Singh and DSP Harjit Singh were assassinated while DSP Surjit Singh Ghuman was killed along with his wife and two guards. In 1991, DIG Border range Ajit Singh was killed in an encounter in Taran Taran and SP of Ropar Jogindar Singh Khaira was assassinated. In 1992, SP (Detective) R. P. S. Teja and DSP Ram Singh and DSP Rupindar Singh were assassinated. There were also life attempts on DGP Julio Rubeiro and Governor Shankar Roy. In August 1985, Harchand Singh Longwal was assassinated and in 1995, Chief Minister of Punjab Beant Singh was killed in a car bomb. This operation was organized by Balwant Singh and Dilawar Singh acted as suicide bomber.
During his two stints in Punjab as head of police, Gill put in place some tough police officers giving them a free hand to tackle the militants. The list included SSP Taran Taran Ajit Singh Sandhu, SSP of Amritsar Izhar Alam, SP Bathinda S.K. Singh, SP Gurdaspur Vivek Mishra and DSP of Taran Taran Jaspal Singh Khalra. In such situations, problems with morale due to target killing of police officers and government’s concern about potential of sympathy of some police officers with their co-religionist militants prompted induction of several officers of paramilitary forces (mainly CRPF and few from BSF) in Punjab. The list includes S.S. Virk, Rakesh Chandra, S.K. Singh, A.K. Pandey, Khubi Ram, S.P.S. Basra, R.C. Sethi and S.K. Sharma. Several of these officers served at SP rank during most troubled times in areas heavily infiltrated by militants at great personal risk. They were later absorbed in Punjab police in 2006 and rewarded with promotion to DIG rank.
Police used many controversial tactics including extra judicial killings. Some former low level police officials with criminal record were quietly hired for the job of infiltrating and in some cases eliminating militants in the countryside. The case of Dalbir Singh is a good example of benefits and risks of this approach. Dalbir was a constable in Punjab police in dismissed in 1983 on criminal charges. In 1986, he was quietly re-hired for a different task and worked undercover. He helped in arrest and elimination of some high profile militants. He was promoted Assistant Sub Inspector (ASI) and earned hefty amounts of head money of militants. He started to engage in criminal activities including extortion and even robberies. After investigation into these allegations, it was decided to remove Dalbir from the force. He was asked to report to the police station in civil lines and interviewed by senior police officers. Dalbir pulled his gun and after killing SSP Sital Das and SP Brar shot himself.
Militancy was finally tackled by Punjab police and this success was due to strengthening of police in numbers, proper equipment and training and selection of good officers to lead the campaign. Punjab police numbers increased from 35,000 to 65,000 by the end of 1989, better weapons and communication equipment were provided and policemen were trained for the job. Punjab police was also strengthened by 6000 special police and 20’000 home guard. Amritsar, Taran Taran, Majithia, Batala and Gurdaspur were the worst affected areas. In Taran Taran alone, about 200 policemen, Special Police and home guard members lost their life. Punjab police and their families paid the price and in the years 1988-92, about 1600 policemen were killed in the line of duty. In addition more than sixty family members of policemen were killed by militants in revenge attacks.
Like any crisis, there were examples of bad handling of a given situation but also many cases where volatile situations were handled by competent men professionally at great risk to their own lives. In Ludhiana, an angry crowd of Sikhs was demonstrating in the immediate aftermath of Operation Blue Star. Brigade commander Brigadier M. M. Lakhera was inclined to fire at the crowd to disperse them. Deputy Commissioner K. R. Lakhanpal dissuaded him and handled the situation at great personal risk.
The human side of the conflict is highlighted by two stories. Bhindrawale’s brother was Subedar Major Harcharan Singh Rhode then serving with 61 Engineers stationed at Jallandhar. Harcaharn visited Akal Takht in his uniform right after the death of his brother at the hands on Indian army. A young boy named Bashir Muhammad joined Punjab police and served as guard of DSP Sukhdev Singh Chahal. Punjab police needed to infiltrate Sikh militant groups and Bashir was chosen for the task. He was allowed to grow hair and beard and then a fake story was leaked that he had escaped from jail with arms and ammunition. He managed to join Babbar Khalsa and started to send reports back to police. He was influenced by the dedication and religious zeal of leaders of the group and decided to convert to Sikhism. He came clean and informed leaders of Babbar Khalsa that he was a police informant but now wanted to join the Sikh cause. He was baptized Sikh and named Lachman Singh Babbar. He was now operating on behalf of militants against security forces. However, Punjab police finally arrested or killed many militants and broke the back of militancy. In view of the precarious situation, Lachman Singh moved to Calcutta with his wife. Police arrested a colleague of Lachman and during interrogation he gave up Lachman’s address. In May 1993, SP Bathinda S.K. Singh and DSP Chahal with two other policemen went to Calcutta and shot and killed Lachman and his pregnant wife in his apartment. This incident caused a row between Punjab and West Bengal provincial governments as these officers went on their own without informing West Bengal police.
Conclusion
Conflict in Punjab evolved over several years resulting from clashes between central and provincial political leadership, internal power struggle of Sikh leaders and especially use of religion for political purposes. The outcome of clash of such volatile forces is never in doubt and Punjab proved to be no exception. Law and order situation was initially not tackled for political expediency and when it spun out of control fear and inertia settled in starting from the top and seeping all the way down. Finally, when government decided to tackle the issue, a short term use of brute force was thought to be the answer. Vicious cycle of incremental increase in force and predictable response of further alienation of Sikhs resulted in a conflict that lasted over a decade. On part of Sikhs, silence of priests of the Golden Temple, political leaders and civil society partly from sympathy and partly due to fear resulted in no vocal opposition to gathering of armed militants and military style fortifications inside the holiest place of Sikh religion. These gave militants wide room for maneuver and expand their influence. Even thirty years later, no Sikh is willing to talk on record against Bhindrawale and he has attained a cult status among a portion of Sikhs.
Operation Blue Star and anti-Sikh riots of 1984 left a deep scar on Sikh psyche. Elimination of militancy and continued political participation in the last two decades brought Punjab back to normalcy but 1984 still evokes deep emotions even among a younger generation of Sikhs born after 1984 especially among Sikh Diaspora.
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Dramatis Personae
Indira Gandhi – In 1984, she was Prime Minister of India and ordered army to flush out extremists entrenched in Golden Temple. On October 31, 1984, she was killed by her two Sikh bodyguards. Beant Singh was killed on the spot while Satwant Singh was later convicted of murder and hanged in 1989. Indira’s assassination enraged Hindus and mobs attacked Sikhs. The worst riots occurred in Delhi where Hindu mobs attacked Sikhs and some estimate that about 3000 Sikhs were killed. Sikhs alleged that many Congress party office holders were directly involved in these attacks. Member of parliament from Delhi Lalit Makan and City Counselor and friend of Rajiv Gandhi, Arjun Das were alleged to have a role in anti-Sikh riots. Makan was married to Gitanjali; daughter of former President of India Shankar Dayal Sharma. On July 31, 1985, Makan and his wife were gunned down near their house and in September 1985, Das was assassinated in his office.
Lieutenant General Srinavas Kumar Sinha – He was commissioned from Officer Training School (OTS) at Belgaum in 1942. He was the best cadet of his course. He was commissioned in 6/9 Jat Regiment. In 1952, he was transferred to 3/5th Gorkha Rifles and he commanded the battalion in 1964. In 1983, he was G-O-C-in-Chief of Western Command. He had objected to the planned operation against Sikh militants in Golden Temple and wanted a different approach. In 1984, he was Vice Chief of Army Staff (VCOAS) and as the senior most officer expected to become Chief of Army Staff (COAS) on retirement of General Krishna Rao. In an unexpected move, government announced appointment of G-O-C-in-Chief of Eastern Command Lieutenant General A. S. Vaidya as new COAS superseding Sinha. Sinha was retired and later served as governor of Assam and Jammu & Kashmir.
General Arun Shridar Vaidya – He was a cavalry officer and commanded Deccan Horse in 1965 war. He was a well decorated officer winning Maha Vir Chakra (MVC) in 1965 war and bar to MVC in 1971 war. In 1984, he was COAS. He retired in January 1986 and moved to Pune. On August 10, 1986, he was driving his car coming back home from the market when two gunmen ambushed his car pumping several bullets in the car and killing him on the spot. In 1986 Sukhdev Singh and in 1987 Harjindar Singh were arrested and charged with murder of Vaidya. Both were convicted and hanged in 1992.
General Krishnaswamy Sundarji – He was commissioned in Mahar Regiment and commanded 1 Mahar. He was G-O-C-in-Chief of Western Command in 1984. He served as COAS from 1986 to 1988. He died of natural causes in 1999.
Lieutenant General Ranjit Singh Dayal – Dayal was a well decorated officer from 1 Parachute Regiment winning MVC in 1965 war. He was Chief of Staff (COS) of Western Command in 1984 and planned Operation Blue Star. In 2005, two Sikh militants were arrested for planning to assassinate Dayal. He died from cancer in January 2012. In 2013, his local Gurdwara refused Dayal’s family request to hold prayers on his death anniversary.
Lieutenant General Kuldip Singh Brar – Brar nick named ‘Bulbul’ is from a military family with three generations serving in Indian army. His grandfather Honorary Captain and Subedar Major Hira Singh served in Indian army. His father Major General Digambar Singh Brar was commissioned from Sandhurst and served with 5/5 Mahrata Light Infantry . Bulbul was commissioned in 1 Mahrata Light Infantry (MLI). In 1984, he was GOC of 9 Division and spearheaded the operation. He retired as Lieutenant General. Sikh militants had sworn that they will kill those involved in Operation Blue Star and Bulbul was on top of the hit list. In India, he is provided extra security protection called Z category protection. On October 02, 2012, when he was walking on a London street, he was assaulted by three Sikhs who tried to slit his throat. He survived and his three assailants Mandeep Singh, Dilbagh Singh and Barjindar Singh were later convicted. He is moved to a secret location and now under Z plus category protection. He is the last surviving among the group targeted for assassination.
Krishan Pal Singh Gill – He is IPS officer of 1957 batch from Assam cadre. He served most of his career in northeast rising to the post of DGP Meghalaya. He also served as IG Punjab Armed Police (PAP), IG BSF – Jammu and DG CRPF. In 1988, he was brought to Punjab to tackle militancy. He served two tenures as Director General of Punjab Police 1988-89 & 1991-95. He crushed militants with ruthless efficiency. He survived at least five assassination attempts. In 1999, Richpal Singh was arrested with explosives in Delhi for planning to kill K.P.S. Gill.
Major General ® Shah Beg Singh – His life story is amazing and provides a window to changing borders and loyalties. He was a graduate of Government College Lahore and commissioned in 2nd Punjab Regiment during the Raj. He joined the elite paratroopers (Ist Para Battalion) as Indian citizen and participated in every war which his country fought. In 1947-48, he fought against Pakistan army in Nawshehra area of Kashmir. In 1962, Indo-China war, he was GSO-Intelligence at IV Corps headquarters. In 1965, Indo-Pakistan war, he commanded 3/11th Gorkha Rifles in Haji Pir sector of Kashmir. Later he commanded 19 Infantry Brigade in Jammu & Kashmir. He also served as Deputy GOC of 8 Mountain division during Naga counter-insurgency operations. In 1971 war with Pakistan, as a Brigadier, he was given charge of Delta sector with headquarters at Agartala to train Bengalis fighting against Pakistan. He was instrumental in organizing Bengali officers and soldiers, who were his former enemies and new friends to help them achieve their independence. He was promoted Major General and served as GOC of Bihar & Orissa. Senior Pakistani POWs were interned at Jabalpur under his command. He got in trouble with Indira Gandhi when he refused to get troops involved in arrest of Jay Prakash Narain agitating against government. He was posted out to UP area Head Quarters where he got into trouble with army authorities. Kumaon Regimental Center was in his jurisdiction and he found that commander of Kumaon military farm gave large sum of money to COAS General Tappy Raina. Court of inquiry found that Tappy received about two hundred thousand Rupees to meet the expenses of his daughter’s marriage. Shahbeg asked Tappy to return the money. Shahbeg was immediately relieved of his command and an inquiry started against him. Later he was charged with various infringements including charges that when he left Jabalpur area headquarter, he received a commemorative plaque worth 2500 Rupees, allowing sale of some items at canteens and cultivated some produce on the grounds of his official residence. He was dismissed from army one day before his retirement date of May 01, 1976 and he was a bitter man.
He joined Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and present at Golden Temple when Indian army launched operation in 1984. He was gunned down by the bullets of the same Indian army which had earlier awarded him two medals of bravery (Param Vashist Sewa Medal and Ati Vashist Sewa Medal). Ironically, his own 1 Para was at the forefront of the assault. He joined British Indian army and fought against Japanese in Burma. In this fight, Punjabi Muslims and Pathans serving in his regiment were his comrades. When India and Pakistan achieved independence, his former comrades became his enemies and he fought against them in 1947-48 and 1965. In 1971, the scene suddenly changed. Now he found new comrades (Bengalis) among his enemies (Pakistanis). He trained Bengalis and helped them fight for their independence. He ended up taking arms against the same flag which he had so proudly carried in so many battlefields. His life was ended not by bullets fired by Japanese, Pakistanis or Bengalis but by the soldiers of the same army which he had so proudly served. What a change in only one lifetime.
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Acknowledgements: Author thanks many for valuable information and corrections. However, author is solely responsible for all errors and omissions.
There are many sources about Operation Blue Star looking from different perspectives. Works by security personnel present their point of view while several works especially videos are sympathetic to militant point of view. A partial list includes;
– Lieutenant General ® Kuldip Singh Brar. Operation Blue Star: the Untold Story.
– K.P.S. Gill. Punjab: The Knights of Falsehood.
– K.P.S. Gill. Endgame in Punjab 1988-1993 in Fault lines, Vol. 1 No. 1
– Julio Ribeiro. Bullet for Bullet: My Life as a Police Officer
– Kirpal Singh Dhillon. Time Present and Time Past: Memoirs of an Unorthodox Top Cop.
-Brigadier Onkar Singh Goraya. Operation Blue Star & After: An Eyewitness Account.
– S. Mahmud Ali. Sikh Separatism in East Punjab in The Fearful State: Power, People and Internal War in South Asia
– Mark Tully. Amritsar: Mrs. Gandhi’s Last Battle
– Cynthia Keppley Mahmood. Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogue with Sikh Militants.
– Apurba Kundu. The Indian Armed Forces ‘Sikh and Non-Sikh Officers’ Opinion of Operation Blue Star. Pacific Affairs, Vol. 67, No. 1. (Spring, 1994), pp. 46-49
– Sumit Ganguly and David P. Idler. India & Counterinsurgency: Lessons Learned.
-Hartosh Singh Bal. The Shattered Dome in The Caravan May 2014.
– Lieutenant Colonel Vivek Chadda’s Low Intensity Conflicts in India: An Analysis.
-Kanwar Sandhu’s documentary about Operation Blue Star released in 2013 is a detailed analysis of the operation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhO5BRsTfl8
Hamid Hussain
May 29, 2014
Sanity strikes in Sudan!!!!
Very good news in a world where a trickle of good news is mostly drowned out by the torrents of bad news.
A woman sentenced to death in Sudan after marrying a Christian could be released within days, according to reports. A senior Khartoum official has told the BBC that Meriam Ibrahim will be freed following worldwide protests about her treatment.
David Cameron has joined Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Tony Blair in condemning the “barbaric” punishment of the 27-year-old, who gave birth to a daughter this week while shackled in her cell.
regards
Hope (in our common humanity) springs eternal as Merriam is saved from certain death. We are sure her family will be immensely relieved. Congratulations to all those who protested and who believed that the protests would work (unfortunately we of little faith did not).
Merriam just had a baby girl as well. Best wishes from the bottom of our heart.
……………….
A woman sentenced to death in Sudan after marrying a Christian could be released within days, according to reports. A senior Khartoum official has told the BBC that Meriam Ibrahim will be freed following worldwide protests about her treatment.
David Cameron has joined Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Tony Blair in condemning the “barbaric” punishment of the 27-year-old, who gave birth to a daughter this week while shackled in her cell.
Ms Ibrahim was raised a Christian by her mother and has refused to renounce the faith.
However, a court ruled earlier this month that she is Muslim because that was her father’s faith.
Her Christian marriage was annulled and she was sentenced to 100 lashes for adultery and death by hanging for renouncing Islam.
Sex outside a “lawful relationship” is regarded as adultery under Sudanese law.
……..
……….
regards
The Golden Temple
As we peruse this report on Operation Bluestar by Hartosh Singh Bal we find even more reasons why religion should stay out of South Asian politics (but then as a liberal atheist we are expected to believe that). At the minimum what is required right now are decent politicians who will not exploit heavenly matters for earthly gain.
…..
The dismal story of Bluestar had been set on its tracks by Sanjay
Gandhi, but it now appears that its disastrous conclusion was the work of his
brother Rajiv, who swept to power with the biggest mandate in Indian history
following his mother’s assassination.
Operation Bluestar was not just Indira Gandhi’s last battle; it was the
first, and perhaps the most disastrous, of Rajiv’s blunders.
By the time the smoke cleared over the Darbar Sahib, hundreds of
innocent bystanders had died.
Bhindranwale lay murdered, and the Akal Takht, where he had set up his
final defiance of Delhi, stood shattered. The operation was followed by the
assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, and the organised
massacre of thousands of Sikhs by Hindu mobs, led mainly by Congress
politicians.
…….. ….
Our opinion (as informed by our relatives who survived in the war zone) is that 1984 was a great crime and happened as part of an action-reaction story (Hartosh does not account for the Hindus who were forced out of buses and summarily shot to death). But as he makes it clear like never before, the desperation of the Royal Family to get back into power in Punjab and how Rajiv Gandhi and his cronies played with fire (which later consumed the family as well). It is clear also that ordinary people matter very little in the scheme of things, with dynasties looking to survive (through a policy of divide and rule) or outstanding egos looking to be fed (by human blood). Justice in its own fashion has been handed out after more than 30 years have gone by. It is too little, too late.
There is one thing also that Hartosh does not tell us about (he is correct in his opinion that the election of the BJP and the destruction of the Congress party is not a good omen for India). If it comes to a full fledged battle, the Sikhs will lose out badly and not just in India. The holy shrines of the Sikhs are spread out all over India and Pakistan. At present there are protests that the shrines are being desecrated in Pakistan. There was a major security incident whereby Sikh protestors converged on the Pakistan Parliament.
Matters have become so polarized in South Asia that it may come to this that minority communities will not be able to survive outside of ghettos (and even imperfectly inside them). Case in point is Rabwah in Pakistan (Ahmadis) and Juhapura in Gujarat (Muslims). It will require statesmen of extra-ordinary stature to overcome the politics of polarization (the Aam Admi Party won in Punjab by associating with a Sikh militant group, see below). Politics for short term convenience and reliance on ideological extremists to get rid of moderates is the bane of South Asia. It must stop right now. We must have peace just to survive (Hartosh talks about the drug menace in Punjab threatening to derail another generation of youngsters after a previous generation has been lost to militancy), if not to prosper.
…………………………..
Following
the Punjab insurgency, which extended from the early 1980s to the mid
1990s, the number of pilgrims to the Darbar Sahib has increased rapidly.
The queues to enter the shrine now extend beyond the causeway; but the
sense of quiet calm remains, though it is at odds with the shrine’s
history. Perhaps no place of worship so central to a major religion in
India has seen as much violence within its premises.
The sarovar was constructed in 1581 by Ram Das, the fourth Sikh guru.
The tank was lined and the shrine completed by the fifth guru, Arjan
Dev, in 1601. By that time, the Sikh congregation had grown large enough
for the Mughal emperor Jehangir to see Guru Arjan as a threat to his
sovereignty. He was arrested in 1606, and tortured to death when he
refused to convert to Islam. For his followers, this first martyrdom in
their incipient faith would become the paradigm for Sikhism’s
relationship with the durbar in Delhi.
The sixth guru, Hargobind, donned two swords to represent a change in
the nature of his leadership—he would be not only a spiritual guide to
his disciples (piri), but also a preceptor in their temporal lives (miri). The weapons form Sikhism’s central symbol, the khanda—a
pair of linked swords. The guru ensured the same symbolism was
reflected in the architecture of the Darbar Sahib. Across from the
causeway, facing the central shrine, which represents spiritual
authority, he constructed the building known as the Akal Takht, the
timeless throne, from where he administered justice like any temporal
authority.
Once the line of living gurus ended with Guru Gobind Singh in 1708, this authority over the Sikhs came to be vested in the jathedar,
or custodian, of the Akal Takht. Through the eighteenth century, as
centralised authority broke down in the Punjab, the Sikhs grew in
strength. Dispersed, led by various men, groups of Sikh warriors would
gather periodically at the Akal Takht to plan and direct their course of
action. Those seeking to contain them would target the Harmandir Sahib
and the Akal Takht.
Each person who has desecrated the shrine occupies an oversize space
in the collective memory of the community. Every Sikh can recount the
story of Massa Rangar, who was appointed the kotwal or ruler of
Amritsar in 1740 and proceeded to host nautch parties in the Harmandir
Sahib, having first removed the holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, from
its place. He was beheaded by two Sikhs, Mehtab and Sukha Singh, who
claimed to be revenue officers coming to deposit a large sum of money.
Even better known is the story of a defender of the faith, Baba Deep
Singh. In 1757, the Afghan emperor Ahmad Shah Abdali, having sacked
Delhi for the fourth time, was waylaid by a Sikh contingent near
Kurukshetra. Angered, he left his son Taimur Shah behind as the governor
of Lahore to take care of this menace. Taimur demolished the Harmandir
Sahib, but the seventy-five-year-old Deep Singh led a contingent of five
hundred Sikhs to take back the complex. By the time he neared Amritsar,
their number had swelled to five thousand. Clashing with a much larger
Afghan army, Deep Singh was injured by a blow to the neck, but continued
to fight his way to the Darbar Sahib, eventually succumbing to his
injuries by the sarovar. On the parikrama, the spot where he is believed
to have fallen is marked by a portrait of him carrying his decapitated
head in one hand, still holding a sword aloft in the other.
The martyrdom of Baba Deep Singh resonates through Sikh history. Two
centuries later, in June 1984, when the Indian Army went into the Darbar
Sahib on orders from prime minister Indira Gandhi, it was to disarm and
dislodge Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who according to tradition was the
fourteenth head of the Damdami Taksaal, an orthodox Sikh seminary once
headed, it is said, by Deep Singh. In the mythology of a faith where the
stories of Massa Rangar and Deep Singh arouse intense and contrary
emotions, Sikhs memorialised both Bhindranwale and Gandhi in accordance
with the roles they had assumed—one the defender, the other a
desecrator.
The trajectory of those two lives, both of which ended violently
thirty years ago, intersected for the first time in 1977, when
Bhindranwale assumed charge of the Damdami Taksaal, and Gandhi was swept
out of power after the Emergency. Nowhere was Gandhi’s decision to
suspend the constitution as strongly contested as in Punjab, and no
party resisted it with quite the ferocity of the Akali Dal, which
represented Sikh interests in the state. Over the next seven years,
Gandhi, Bhindranwale and the Akali Dal would lead three fronts in a
battle in which they faced off, realigned with and schemed against each
other until the very end.
From the moment an Akali Dal government, in alliance with the Janata
Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), took charge of Punjab
in 1977, Gandhi’s politics were guided by her desire to cut the Akalis
down to size. The execution of her wishes was left to her son, Sanjay
Gandhi, and her loyalist, the canny Sikh politician Giani Zail Singh,
who chose Bhindranwale as their weapon. Bhindranwale saw no reason to
refuse their aid; any support for his brand of Sikh orthodoxy was
welcome.
By the time the Congress returned to power in the state in 1980,
Bhindranwale was well on his way to becoming a popular icon,
accumulating so much power that the Akalis, whom he was supposed to be
undermining, ended up turning to him for help. He became the dominant
political force in Punjab: by 1983, he was running a parallel state from
within the Darbar Sahib complex, handing down death sentences and
dispensing rough justice before adoring supplicants. Even the policemen
in Punjab tasked with arresting him were reduced to seeking his
protection.
Bluestar, the military operation to remove Bhindranwale from the
Darbar Sahib, ended this regime—but at the cost of hundreds of lives,
and the credibility of the Indian Army, which subsequently had to deal
with mutinous troops for the first time in the history of independent
India. Although the action has been examined in close detail in the
years following the attack, the lack of planning and intelligence, and
the hurry to carry it out, have never been properly explained.
In February this year, the declassification of intelligence documents
in the UK revealed information about a commando operation inside the
Darbar Sahib that was planned but never executed. Given this evidence, I
revisited several people who had witnessed the events leading up to
Operation Bluestar. In light of these interviews, it is possible to
assemble a more coherent picture than ever before of the Gandhi family’s
political calculations, which were central to the nature of the final
operation. The dismal story of Bluestar had been set on its tracks by
Sanjay Gandhi, but it now appears that its disastrous conclusion was the
work of his brother Rajiv, who swept to power with the biggest mandate
in Indian history following his mother’s assassination. Operation
Bluestar was not just Indira Gandhi’s last battle; it was the first, and
perhaps the most disastrous, of Rajiv’s blunders.
By the time the smoke cleared over the Darbar Sahib, hundreds of
innocent bystanders had died. Bhindranwale lay murdered, and the Akal
Takht, where he had set up his final defiance of Delhi, stood shattered.
The operation was followed by the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her
Sikh bodyguards, and the organised massacre of thousands of Sikhs by
Hindu mobs, led mainly by Congress politicians. In Punjab, militancy
against the Indian state reached levels unprecedented in the years
before Bluestar; it took a decade for a semblance of peace to return.
Over the last thirty years, the debate over Bluestar has played out
between two extreme points of view: that of radicals in Punjab and
abroad, who dwell on the Congress’s role while overlooking
Bhindranwale’s complicity, and that of people in the rest of India, who
tend to focus on Bhindranwale with little sense of the Congress’s
contribution to the tragedy. Many Indians may believe the events of that
June can be consigned to the history books, but their memory remains
alive in Punjab. Many Sikhs continue to view the operation, and the
figure of Bhindranwale, in a markedly different light from the rest of
the country. Without understanding how such distinct perspectives came
to exist, it may be impossible to come to terms with the history of
Bluestar.
– See more at: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/print/4423#sthash.VRumZKHB.dpuf
the Punjab insurgency, which extended from the early 1980s to the mid
1990s, the number of pilgrims to the Darbar Sahib has increased rapidly.
The queues to enter the shrine now extend beyond the causeway; but the
sense of quiet calm remains, though it is at odds with the shrine’s
history. Perhaps no place of worship so central to a major religion in
India has seen as much violence within its premises.
The sarovar was constructed in 1581 by Ram Das, the fourth Sikh guru.
The tank was lined and the shrine completed by the fifth guru, Arjan
Dev, in 1601. By that time, the Sikh congregation had grown large enough
for the Mughal emperor Jehangir to see Guru Arjan as a threat to his
sovereignty. He was arrested in 1606, and tortured to death when he
refused to convert to Islam. For his followers, this first martyrdom in
their incipient faith would become the paradigm for Sikhism’s
relationship with the durbar in Delhi.
The sixth guru, Hargobind, donned two swords to represent a change in
the nature of his leadership—he would be not only a spiritual guide to
his disciples (piri), but also a preceptor in their temporal lives (miri). The weapons form Sikhism’s central symbol, the khanda—a
pair of linked swords. The guru ensured the same symbolism was
reflected in the architecture of the Darbar Sahib. Across from the
causeway, facing the central shrine, which represents spiritual
authority, he constructed the building known as the Akal Takht, the
timeless throne, from where he administered justice like any temporal
authority.
Once the line of living gurus ended with Guru Gobind Singh in 1708, this authority over the Sikhs came to be vested in the jathedar,
or custodian, of the Akal Takht. Through the eighteenth century, as
centralised authority broke down in the Punjab, the Sikhs grew in
strength. Dispersed, led by various men, groups of Sikh warriors would
gather periodically at the Akal Takht to plan and direct their course of
action. Those seeking to contain them would target the Harmandir Sahib
and the Akal Takht.
Each person who has desecrated the shrine occupies an oversize space
in the collective memory of the community. Every Sikh can recount the
story of Massa Rangar, who was appointed the kotwal or ruler of
Amritsar in 1740 and proceeded to host nautch parties in the Harmandir
Sahib, having first removed the holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, from
its place. He was beheaded by two Sikhs, Mehtab and Sukha Singh, who
claimed to be revenue officers coming to deposit a large sum of money.
Even better known is the story of a defender of the faith, Baba Deep
Singh. In 1757, the Afghan emperor Ahmad Shah Abdali, having sacked
Delhi for the fourth time, was waylaid by a Sikh contingent near
Kurukshetra. Angered, he left his son Taimur Shah behind as the governor
of Lahore to take care of this menace. Taimur demolished the Harmandir
Sahib, but the seventy-five-year-old Deep Singh led a contingent of five
hundred Sikhs to take back the complex. By the time he neared Amritsar,
their number had swelled to five thousand. Clashing with a much larger
Afghan army, Deep Singh was injured by a blow to the neck, but continued
to fight his way to the Darbar Sahib, eventually succumbing to his
injuries by the sarovar. On the parikrama, the spot where he is believed
to have fallen is marked by a portrait of him carrying his decapitated
head in one hand, still holding a sword aloft in the other.
The martyrdom of Baba Deep Singh resonates through Sikh history. Two
centuries later, in June 1984, when the Indian Army went into the Darbar
Sahib on orders from prime minister Indira Gandhi, it was to disarm and
dislodge Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who according to tradition was the
fourteenth head of the Damdami Taksaal, an orthodox Sikh seminary once
headed, it is said, by Deep Singh. In the mythology of a faith where the
stories of Massa Rangar and Deep Singh arouse intense and contrary
emotions, Sikhs memorialised both Bhindranwale and Gandhi in accordance
with the roles they had assumed—one the defender, the other a
desecrator.
The trajectory of those two lives, both of which ended violently
thirty years ago, intersected for the first time in 1977, when
Bhindranwale assumed charge of the Damdami Taksaal, and Gandhi was swept
out of power after the Emergency. Nowhere was Gandhi’s decision to
suspend the constitution as strongly contested as in Punjab, and no
party resisted it with quite the ferocity of the Akali Dal, which
represented Sikh interests in the state. Over the next seven years,
Gandhi, Bhindranwale and the Akali Dal would lead three fronts in a
battle in which they faced off, realigned with and schemed against each
other until the very end.
From the moment an Akali Dal government, in alliance with the Janata
Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), took charge of Punjab
in 1977, Gandhi’s politics were guided by her desire to cut the Akalis
down to size. The execution of her wishes was left to her son, Sanjay
Gandhi, and her loyalist, the canny Sikh politician Giani Zail Singh,
who chose Bhindranwale as their weapon. Bhindranwale saw no reason to
refuse their aid; any support for his brand of Sikh orthodoxy was
welcome.
By the time the Congress returned to power in the state in 1980,
Bhindranwale was well on his way to becoming a popular icon,
accumulating so much power that the Akalis, whom he was supposed to be
undermining, ended up turning to him for help. He became the dominant
political force in Punjab: by 1983, he was running a parallel state from
within the Darbar Sahib complex, handing down death sentences and
dispensing rough justice before adoring supplicants. Even the policemen
in Punjab tasked with arresting him were reduced to seeking his
protection.
Bluestar, the military operation to remove Bhindranwale from the
Darbar Sahib, ended this regime—but at the cost of hundreds of lives,
and the credibility of the Indian Army, which subsequently had to deal
with mutinous troops for the first time in the history of independent
India. Although the action has been examined in close detail in the
years following the attack, the lack of planning and intelligence, and
the hurry to carry it out, have never been properly explained.
In February this year, the declassification of intelligence documents
in the UK revealed information about a commando operation inside the
Darbar Sahib that was planned but never executed. Given this evidence, I
revisited several people who had witnessed the events leading up to
Operation Bluestar. In light of these interviews, it is possible to
assemble a more coherent picture than ever before of the Gandhi family’s
political calculations, which were central to the nature of the final
operation. The dismal story of Bluestar had been set on its tracks by
Sanjay Gandhi, but it now appears that its disastrous conclusion was the
work of his brother Rajiv, who swept to power with the biggest mandate
in Indian history following his mother’s assassination. Operation
Bluestar was not just Indira Gandhi’s last battle; it was the first, and
perhaps the most disastrous, of Rajiv’s blunders.
By the time the smoke cleared over the Darbar Sahib, hundreds of
innocent bystanders had died. Bhindranwale lay murdered, and the Akal
Takht, where he had set up his final defiance of Delhi, stood shattered.
The operation was followed by the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her
Sikh bodyguards, and the organised massacre of thousands of Sikhs by
Hindu mobs, led mainly by Congress politicians. In Punjab, militancy
against the Indian state reached levels unprecedented in the years
before Bluestar; it took a decade for a semblance of peace to return.
Over the last thirty years, the debate over Bluestar has played out
between two extreme points of view: that of radicals in Punjab and
abroad, who dwell on the Congress’s role while overlooking
Bhindranwale’s complicity, and that of people in the rest of India, who
tend to focus on Bhindranwale with little sense of the Congress’s
contribution to the tragedy. Many Indians may believe the events of that
June can be consigned to the history books, but their memory remains
alive in Punjab. Many Sikhs continue to view the operation, and the
figure of Bhindranwale, in a markedly different light from the rest of
the country. Without understanding how such distinct perspectives came
to exist, it may be impossible to come to terms with the history of
Bluestar.
– See more at: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/print/4423#sthash.VRumZKHB.dpuf
Following the Punjab insurgency, which extended from the early 1980s to
the mid 1990s, the number of pilgrims to the Darbar Sahib has increased
rapidly. The queues to enter the shrine now extend beyond the causeway; but the
sense of quiet calm remains, though it is at odds with the shrine’s history.
Perhaps no place of worship so central to a major religion in India has seen as
much violence within its premises.
….
The sarovar was constructed in 1581 by Ram Das, the fourth Sikh guru.
The tank was lined and the shrine completed by the fifth guru, Arjan Dev, in
1601. By that time, the Sikh congregation had grown large enough for the Mughal
emperor Jehangir to see Guru Arjan as a threat to his sovereignty. He was
arrested in 1606, and tortured to death when he refused to convert to Islam.
For his followers, this first martyrdom in their incipient faith would become
the paradigm for Sikhism’s relationship with the durbar in Delhi.
…
The sixth guru, Hargobind, donned two swords to represent a change in
the nature of his leadership—he would be not only a spiritual guide to his
disciples (piri), but also a preceptor in their temporal lives (miri).
…
The weapons form Sikhism’s central symbol, the khanda—a pair of linked
swords. The guru ensured the same symbolism was reflected in the architecture
of the Darbar Sahib. Across from the causeway, facing the central shrine, which
represents spiritual authority, he constructed the building known as the Akal
Takht, the timeless throne, from where he administered justice like any
temporal authority.
Once the line of living gurus ended with Guru Gobind Singh in 1708, this
authority over the Sikhs came to be vested in the jathedar, or custodian, of
the Akal Takht. Through the eighteenth century, as centralised authority broke
down in the Punjab, the Sikhs grew in strength. Dispersed, led by various men,
groups of Sikh warriors would gather periodically at the Akal Takht to plan and
direct their course of action. Those seeking to contain them would target the
Harmandir Sahib and the Akal Takht.
…
Each person who has desecrated the shrine occupies an oversize space in
the collective memory of the community. Every Sikh can recount the story of
Massa Rangar, who was appointed the kotwal or ruler of Amritsar in 1740 and
proceeded to host nautch parties in the Harmandir Sahib, having first removed
the holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, from its place. He was beheaded by two
Sikhs, Mehtab and Sukha Singh, who claimed to be revenue officers coming to
deposit a large sum of money.
…
Even better known is the story of a defender of the faith, Baba Deep
Singh. In 1757, the Afghan emperor Ahmad Shah Abdali, having sacked Delhi for
the fourth time, was waylaid by a Sikh contingent near Kurukshetra. Angered, he
left his son Taimur Shah behind as the governor of Lahore to take care of this
menace.
…
Taimur demolished the Harmandir Sahib, but the seventy-five-year-old
Deep Singh led a contingent of five hundred Sikhs to take back the complex. By
the time he neared Amritsar, their number had swelled to five thousand. Clashing
with a much larger Afghan army, Deep Singh was injured by a blow to the neck,
but continued to fight his way to the Darbar Sahib, eventually succumbing to
his injuries by the sarovar. On the parikrama, the spot where he is believed to
have fallen is marked by a portrait of him carrying his decapitated head in one
hand, still holding a sword aloft in the other.
….
The martyrdom of Baba Deep Singh resonates through Sikh history. Two
centuries later, in June 1984, when the Indian Army went into the Darbar Sahib
on orders from prime minister Indira Gandhi, it was to disarm and dislodge
Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who according to tradition was the fourteenth head
of the Damdami Taksaal, an orthodox Sikh seminary once headed, it is said, by
Deep Singh.
…
In the mythology of a faith where the stories of Massa Rangar and Deep
Singh arouse intense and contrary emotions, Sikhs memorialised both
Bhindranwale and Gandhi in accordance with the roles they had assumed—one the
defender, the other a desecrator.
…
The trajectory of those two lives, both of which ended violently thirty
years ago, intersected for the first time in 1977, when Bhindranwale assumed
charge of the Damdami Taksaal, and Gandhi was swept out of power after the
Emergency. Nowhere was Gandhi’s decision to suspend the constitution as
strongly contested as in Punjab, and no party resisted it with quite the
ferocity of the Akali Dal, which represented Sikh interests in the state.
…
Over the next seven years, Gandhi, Bhindranwale and the Akali Dal would
lead three fronts in a battle in which they faced off, realigned with and
schemed against each other until the very end.
….
From the moment an Akali Dal government, in alliance with the Janata
Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), took charge of Punjab in
1977, Gandhi’s politics were guided by her desire to cut the Akalis down to
size. The execution of her wishes was left to her son,
Sanjay Gandhi, and her loyalist, the canny Sikh politician Giani Zail Singh,
who chose Bhindranwale as their weapon. Bhindranwale saw no reason to refuse
their aid; any support for his brand of Sikh orthodoxy was welcome.
….
By the time the Congress returned to power in the state in 1980,
Bhindranwale was well on his way to becoming a popular icon, accumulating so
much power that the Akalis, whom he was supposed to be undermining, ended up
turning to him for help. He became the dominant political force in Punjab: by
1983, he was running a parallel state from within the Darbar Sahib complex,
handing down death sentences and dispensing rough justice before adoring
supplicants. Even the policemen in Punjab tasked with arresting him were
reduced to seeking his protection.
…
Bluestar, the military operation to remove Bhindranwale from the Darbar
Sahib, ended this regime—but at the cost of hundreds of lives, and the
credibility of the Indian Army, which subsequently had to deal with mutinous
troops for the first time in the history of independent India. Although
the action has been examined in close detail in the years following the attack,
the lack of planning and intelligence, and the hurry to carry it out, have
never been properly explained.
….
In February this year, the declassification of intelligence documents in
the UK revealed information about a commando operation inside the Darbar Sahib
that was planned but never executed. Given this evidence, I revisited several
people who had witnessed the events leading up to Operation Bluestar. In light
of these interviews, it is possible to assemble a more coherent picture than
ever before of the Gandhi family’s political calculations, which were central
to the nature of the final operation.
….
The dismal story of Bluestar had been set on its tracks by Sanjay
Gandhi, but it now appears that its disastrous conclusion was the work of his
brother Rajiv, who swept to power with the biggest mandate in Indian history
following his mother’s assassination.
….
Operation Bluestar was not just Indira Gandhi’s last battle; it was the
first, and perhaps the most disastrous, of Rajiv’s blunders.
…
By the time the smoke cleared over the Darbar Sahib, hundreds of
innocent bystanders had died.
….
Bhindranwale lay murdered, and the Akal Takht, where he had set up his
final defiance of Delhi, stood shattered. The operation was followed by the
assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, and the organised
massacre of thousands of Sikhs by Hindu mobs, led mainly by Congress
politicians. In Punjab, militancy against the Indian state reached levels
unprecedented in the years before Bluestar; it took a decade for a semblance of
peace to return.
….
Over the last thirty years, the debate over Bluestar has played out
between two extreme points of view: that of radicals in Punjab and abroad, who
dwell on the Congress’s role while overlooking Bhindranwale’s complicity, and
that of people in the rest of India, who tend to focus on Bhindranwale with
little sense of the Congress’s contribution to the tragedy.
….
Many Indians may believe the events of that June can be consigned to the
history books, but their memory remains alive in Punjab.
Many Sikhs continue
to view the operation, and the figure of Bhindranwale, in a markedly different
light from the rest of the country. Without understanding how such distinct
perspectives came to exist, it may be impossible to come to terms with the
history of Bluestar
…….
Link: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/print/4423#sthash.VRumZKHB.dpuf
…………..
regards
So now they understand (350 years too late)
Rule Britannia!Britannia rule the wavesBritons never, never, never shall be slaves.
Not to worry little Englanders, the sole purpose of EUSSR is to force the Human Rights Act down your uncivilized throats. There will be no stopping of immigration from brown/black lands – your jails are far better than their burnt-out huts. As far as overseas aid is concerned, it is a bribe to sell first-world weapons to third-world despots. Be happy now and suck it up (freedom will be a long time coming).
We are firm believers in maximum devolution of power and hence are sympathetic to claims of UK being crushed by the dictates of imperials from Brussels and Strasbourg. How about considering an apology for UK having
colonized India, causing numerous Holocausts
through man-made famines, collecting trillions in illegal taxes and
confiscated treasures, destroying local industries and enslaving tens of
thousands of soldiers to fight Indians at home and other Europeans
abroad?
….
Link: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/may/30/tories-ukip-newark-by-election-farage-helmer-peoples-arm
….
regards
We all saw it coming…
…we just did not realize how bad things were. The most damning observation by Anand Soondas is the currency of “Hindu truth” vs. “Muslim truth” that has been gaining ground for quite some time. Hindus are now united (mostly) in terms of how fed up they are about muslims.
Finally, though, the marauding Muslims
had been dealt a blow for all of history’s crimes. From Chengiz to Babur
and Jinnah to Dawood, everything had been avenged in one fell swoop.
And for this they gave credit to one man. Narendra Modi. For once a
Hindu had stood up, and how.
We can add the Bangladesh genocide and ongoing ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Pak/Bangla and many others to that long bloody list (see also Tipu Sultan). Never forget, their heroes are our villains.
The Muslims do not really have much with which to retaliate with against this tidal wave of hate: respond with bombs or threats of partition, and the backlash is (will be) overwhelming. The only option is to sue for peace and to live in ghettos (the Sri Lankan model).
Sad to say, this is how things will be, from now on to infinity. Hindus will (have already) disappear from a large part of the South Asian land-mass. The muslims will face the sword of injustice everywhere, in India for just being a muslim, in Pakistan (and Bangladesh) for being the wrong type of muslim.
We actually agree with Arundhati Roy that the new govt does not have an agenda for explicit harm towards muslims, but there are many indirect ways in which the screws can be tightened.
How about Muslims joining hands with the other minorities – the Sikhs, the Jains, the Christians, the Buddhists and the Parsis to face a common threat? Sorry, it is not going to happen. The Christians are secure in their fortresses in the South and in the North-East (except the tribal communities dispersed all over, and even in that case, elite Christians do not have much sympathy to spare) . The Sikhs are already in alliance with the Hindu Brotherhood. The Jains and Parsis are actually pillars of the Brotherhood, they are some of the biggest supporters of Modi.
Not to forget, the Muslims are at fault as well. Everywhere in South Asia, and if history is any guide, there is not one minority community which will feel inclined to be friendly or accommodative towards muslims. If Muslims in India can harass Tibetans because of what is happening to Rohingyas in Burma, then why should any neo-Buddhist feel kindly towards them?
Our only quibble with Anand Soondas is that Congress knows why it failed the Indian people, but it will not have the guts to do a proper introspection and take necessary steps for re-invention. As a wise BPite says, Congress is doomed with the N-G family at the top, and it is equally doomed without them.
…….
Ayodhya is an
unusually sleepy town with a slightly overpowering population of
monkeys. It generally goes about with its existence unmindful of its
place in either ancient or modern history. But the early months of 2002
were different. Its people were then wide awake – a few in anticipation,
a majority in anxiety. Much of India, too, was on its toes.
unusually sleepy town with a slightly overpowering population of
monkeys. It generally goes about with its existence unmindful of its
place in either ancient or modern history. But the early months of 2002
were different. Its people were then wide awake – a few in anticipation,
a majority in anxiety. Much of India, too, was on its toes.
The VHP had
threatened to launch a 100-day yagya to press for construction of the
Ram mandir and, by February 17, sadhus, mahants, sanyasis, party workers
from across the country affiliated to various saffron fronts had begun
converging at Karsevakpuram for the great prayer, to god and to
government. The air crackled with the fire lit by hundreds of
volunteers. Copious amounts of ghee flung into the flames made it seem
like summer inside the camps. Something was bound to singe.
threatened to launch a 100-day yagya to press for construction of the
Ram mandir and, by February 17, sadhus, mahants, sanyasis, party workers
from across the country affiliated to various saffron fronts had begun
converging at Karsevakpuram for the great prayer, to god and to
government. The air crackled with the fire lit by hundreds of
volunteers. Copious amounts of ghee flung into the flames made it seem
like summer inside the camps. Something was bound to singe.
The place had been turned into a fortress, crawling with jawans and
officers from the paramilitary forces and sundry intelligence men in
mufti from the local and central units. There was talk of the army being
called in if the VHP and the akharas did not back down. On the face of
it, they didn’t.
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s repeated
entreaties to everyone to wait for the court’s order on the impossibly
vexed temple tangle were summarily dismissed by the yagya organizers.
Ramchandra Parmahans, the eccentric president of the Ram Janmabhoomi
Trust, often boomed that it was not a matter to be decided by the
judiciary as it concerned faith, the religious sentiments of Hindus. He
accused the BJP of selling out. VHP president Ashok Singhal was equally
vituperative and unmoved. This is India, this is Ram lalla’s birthplace,
he said. “Nothing will stop us from making the structure.”
The momentum kept building up. The fires kept burning. Truckloads of
kar sevaks kept pouring in. To get the logistics right – food and
accommodation, after all, were not unlimited and had to be dispensed
with care – individual groups were advised to stay at Karsevakpuram for a
stipulated period of time and then head home so that everyone
interested in the 100-day programme could get a chance to participate in
what the sadhus were calling a historic turning point for India.
It was one such group returning from Ayodhya that got caught in
Godhra on February 27. Fifty-nine Ram sevaks, many among them women and
children, were locked inside the blazing compartments of the Sabarmati
Express by a Muslim mob to suffocate and burn.
Something was bound to singe.
Those were initial days of
my reporting career and I was posted in Lucknow as the Uttar Pradesh
correspondent for The Telegraph. Though I had come back to base, I
wanted to go to Gujarat to see the train for myself and the trail of
death and destruction it had triggered off. My editor at that paper
finally relented and on the first anniversary of the tragedy, I was on
my way to Godhra. It was February 27, 2003. S-6, the roasted and ravaged
compartment of the Sabarmati Express, was still there at Signal Falia,
the station. It looked sullen and angry at its own fate.
Those were initial days of
my reporting career and I was posted in Lucknow as the Uttar Pradesh
correspondent for The Telegraph. Though I had come back to base, I
wanted to go to Gujarat to see the train for myself and the trail of
death and destruction it had triggered off. My editor at that paper
finally relented and on the first anniversary of the tragedy, I was on
my way to Godhra. It was February 27, 2003. S-6, the roasted and ravaged
compartment of the Sabarmati Express, was still there at Signal Falia,
the station. It looked sullen and angry at its own fate.
In a report from there, I had then written: “In the one year that
has passed, Godhra has changed. Everything is divided — people,
loyalties, business, bus stops, hospitals, schools. Even truth. Inquire
about any incident and you are bound to get a Hindu truth and a Muslim
truth…The Hindu and Muslim populations of this town were already
divided, roughly in half, making it one of the most dangerous and
communally sensitive hotspots in the country. Now, even the geography
seems to have split vertically…
Being a predominantly Muslim locality has
not helped. Business in Signal Falia, which lies next to Godhra railway
station, has collapsed. The rows of shops that lined the wall adjoining
the periphery of the station have been razed. There were 180 shops in
all, the bread and butter of more than 2,000 people. Now, there is only
one long line of rubble.”
Then, in a dispatch dated February 27, 2003: “The platform wore a
deserted look. A quick scan of railway records at Godhra station showed
nobody had bought a ticket to board the Sabarmati Express, scheduled to
arrive at 2 am. Yet railway security officials patrolled the platform
and guards stood outside the station. Five jawans huddled near a bonfire
at the station entrance, listening to the commentary of the
India-England match. As Ashish Nehra took another wicket, they cackled.
At 1.25 am, India’s path to the Super Six stage was looking easier.
“Bas, aaj India match jeet jaye, kal ka kal dekha jayega,” a jawan said
softly…
The train pulled in ahead of time and lingered at the platform
for 15 minutes. The few inside S-6 fidgeted nervously. Suresh Yadav,
travelling with six family members, was not interested in the score.
“Why isn’t the damn train moving” he muttered. His brother, Ramesh, who
was peeping furtively through the closed shutters, didn’t volunteer an
answer. There was a general sigh of relief when the train moved,
hesitantly, at 1.56 am.”
As I left Godhra and returned to Ahmedabad, traveling to a few other
places along the way, there had been one constant refrain from Hindus
everywhere – in Gandhinagar, Vadodara, Surat. “Sabak ho gaya.” (They
have been taught a lesson.) “Garv hai humko.” (We are proud.) Almost all
of them said their anguish had been heightened by the unwillingness of
mainstream political parties and the media to condemn unequivocally and
in categorical terms what was a most inhuman, unthinkable act of
cruelty.
Finally, though, the marauding Muslims
had been dealt a blow for all of history’s crimes. From Chengiz to Babur
and Jinnah to Dawood, everything had been avenged in one fell swoop.
And for this they gave credit to one man. Narendra Modi. For once a
Hindu had stood up, and how. In the ten years since the horrific
violence startled and shocked Indians with its sheer malevolence and
systematic intent, the adulation has hardly ebbed.
had been dealt a blow for all of history’s crimes. From Chengiz to Babur
and Jinnah to Dawood, everything had been avenged in one fell swoop.
And for this they gave credit to one man. Narendra Modi. For once a
Hindu had stood up, and how. In the ten years since the horrific
violence startled and shocked Indians with its sheer malevolence and
systematic intent, the adulation has hardly ebbed.
To some extent, I suspect, this lies at the heart of a fair amount
of support for the Gujarat chief minister and the man who could be the
BJP’s prime ministerial candidate for 2014. Though there is no evidence
yet to prove Modi let the severe reprisals against the Godhra killings
go on unabated – something that would eventually take more than 1200
lives – that’s what common folks believe. And sensing the Hindu
mahapurush sentiment, Modi hasn’t really gone out of his way to disabuse
that notion. If anything, he has worked on that image. His ‘Gujarat
model’, he has quietly and subtly signaled, is not just about keeping
the economy in place.
Introducing the Vibrant Gujarat campaign a year after the
post-Godhra riots was a political masterstroke. This man was a doer.
People could do business with him. Faith and finance came together
perfectly to photoshop further the portrait. Soon, the Tatas were happy,
then the Ambanis, then industry bodies. Even Bollywood. Amitabh
Bachchan, not known to be too finicky while choosing his friends, is
clearly in love with Modi. His ad campaigns have brought in thousands of
more tourists to Gujarat. It helps industry to support, and to be seen
supporting, Modi – a man unlike the passive Manmohan Singh or the
befuddled Rahul Gandhi. It will be a huge bonus if in future he heads
the cabinet in New Delhi and there is need for collaborations with and
investments from governments and business houses abroad.
Some foreign powers seem pleased with
the prospect already and have ended their excommunication of Modi.
Ethics seldom come in the way of enterprise. In the largely scripted
interactions he’s had – at SRCC and FICCI – in Delhi, no one has grilled
him on Godhra. He has instead talked about his vision of India, its
powers – both real and imagined – and its potential. Of how it is a
nation of mouse-charmers. In any case, the Modi juggernaut now ensures
he needn’t go any place where there’ll be uncomfortable questions to
answer. That won’t fit in with the painting under construction – of the
man on a white horse. He is all about ‘listen’, not ‘ask’.
the prospect already and have ended their excommunication of Modi.
Ethics seldom come in the way of enterprise. In the largely scripted
interactions he’s had – at SRCC and FICCI – in Delhi, no one has grilled
him on Godhra. He has instead talked about his vision of India, its
powers – both real and imagined – and its potential. Of how it is a
nation of mouse-charmers. In any case, the Modi juggernaut now ensures
he needn’t go any place where there’ll be uncomfortable questions to
answer. That won’t fit in with the painting under construction – of the
man on a white horse. He is all about ‘listen’, not ‘ask’.
That no data on Modi’s Gujarat outshining the rest of the country
has stood the test of time – or compared better with stats coming out of
some of India’s now-performing states like Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh
and even Bihar (Hooda would insist Haryana, too) – has become
irrelevant and ceased to matter. A TOI article pointed out how there’s
growing unemployment in Gujarat, how women and children don’t do too
well, how dalits are still being victimized, how – far from the promise
of farmers selling petrol – large sections are facing acute shortage of
water.
In 2005, when the US denied him a visa, Modi said he would make
Gujarat such a destination that one day the state will be compared with
America. He said farmers would be like Arab sheikhs and will have crude
oil pouring out of taps in their fields. That hasn’t happened, and most
likely it never will.
But if there is anything equally responsible for the Modi wave
apparently sweeping the nation – fuelled, of course, by a fawning,
amoral industry and a core Hindutva vote bank – it is the disastrous
rule of the UPA government, its PM and an annoying bunch of
Gandhi-worshipping, directionless and out of sync ministers.
On every
front the country has only gone down the ladder in this past one decade.
The economy is in tatters, security is too casual, transparency is
hardly visible and administration is non-existent. The lot of our women
has worsened. Even as I write this, there have been four rapes in Delhi
in the last 24 hours. A 19-year-old was gang raped and a 5-year-old girl
brutalized so badly that she is struggling to stay alive. And this
coming after the Nirbhaya case following which the government had vowed
to increase police presence and patrolling. Only corruption and
disparity have grown. If the number of billionaires and millionaires has
gone up, so have the poor and the hungry.
In the hands of UPA 2, India has seemed too large to handle, too
diverse to unify, too discontented to be mollified. Latest international
rankings show that India fares poorly on all human development
indicators such as education, child mortality sex ratio, environment,
human rights and gender equality. The situation is actually worse than
the indices indicate.
India ranks at 136 out of 187 countries with
comparable data in the Human Development Index. It was at number 94 out
of 176 countries in Transparency International’s 2012 Corruption
Perception Index, slipping from number 72 among 180 countries in 2007.
Our gender inequality index is shameful too – at number 129 out of 147
countries.
From the absence of food security to custodial torture, and
from large-scale displacement of the poor to malnourishment, the Working
Group on Human Rights and the UN recently came out with a damning
report on India’s rights track record. Not taking into account uprooting
due to armed and ethnic conflict, India was estimated to have the
highest number of people displaced annually by ‘development’ projects.
That’s a whole load of bad news.
The other, quite incredible, move by the Congress and its Gandhi
loyalists has been to pitch Rahul as the answer to Modi. They have to
understand that the poor guy is just not interested in the top job. In
fact, he keeps hinting that he’s trapped in a wrong body. For a party
and alliance in disarray, it would be suicidal to have someone so
confused helm it. There can be nothing worse than pushing on stage a
leader who does not want to lead. It sends out all the wrong signals.
Manmohan Singh says he doesn’t discount a third term for himself. That’s
a chilling thought. Even for Congressmen.
If the BJP and its allies do come to power, riding on the back of
Modi’s popularity and the disenchantment with the UPA, the Congress will
know exactly who to blame. The Congress.
Indians haven’t been so despondent, listless and impatient as they
are today. All that large sections of the public want to do is vote out
the present government. But if that rage and hope coalesce into a
movement that’s ready to have Modi as India’s prime minister, the
country, its politics and its people will have a lot to answer – to
itself and to the world watching it. Because then we will never be able
to hold any politician accountable for the wrong that he does or
oversees or fails to stop. And that will be too much of a price to pay –
even if it is in the name of development. Or the promise of it.
regards