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The Searching Eye
When some in the bureaucracy and the Central and state intelligence agencies and the police force join in an unholy nexus, then an insider’s view exposing it needs to be read with some seriousness and soul searching by all well-meaning members of Indian society, and especially its majority community who also lost out in goodwill and brotherly camaraderie in the mayhem that followed. In those troubled days political parties led by ambitious, scheming and selfish leaders who sold out their badly truncated once-powerful state for party and personal gain were hardly competent enough to stem the tide of racial hatred and suspicion that followed the meteoric rise and pre-planned fall of Bhindranwale, and a dubious first in annals of military history of an army attacking a place of worship. That Harmandir Sahib could easily have been cordoned off and the senseless killings of pilgrims and others avoided, was a course that Mrs Gandhi and others of her camp choose not to follow. The book exposes the complicity between Giani Zail Singh and Sanjay Gandhi in "grabbed (ing) the opportunity to exploit his (Bhindranwale) potential and set him up as a political foe to the Akalis", the deliberate propaganda created over the Anandpur Sahib Resolution (three variations) which was always for more autonomy and not a Khalistan state, the rivalry between Zail Singh and CM Darbara Singh. The role of Home Minister Narasimha Rao, PC Alexander and LG Delhi P G Gavai in the late moving in of the Army when Sikhs were being massacred after the assassination of Mrs Gandhi, are many of the incidents that have now passed into history but have not been entirely forgotten by the Sikh masses. In an epilogue the author surmises that "the Akali leaders did not have the will to stand up for the Sikh cause"; " it is also a matter of common knowledge in Punjab that politicians of all hues, the administrators and police officers, irrespective of their rank and status, have cornered much of the accretions from smuggling ,extortion, and murder-for-money"; and that "Punjab will move on amidst chaos and corruption" and that "the ghost of terrorism will continue to haunt us". Strong words these, but then it is Grewal’s book and he may well have a view to ponder over considering the sparring presently going on between the Akalis and the Congress in these state elections. Grewal’s account is explosive in places. He writes about the ‘Third Agency’, ‘a special operations cell of the government’, and Shankaran (Shanks) Nair head of the Research and Analysis Wing of Cabinet Secretariat. After the June ‘84 attack on the Golden Temple Grewal confronts Shanks Nair: "You should not have been a party to its desecration. I can’t believe that you led your men to prepare the ground for the assault and your men executed that poor country bumpkin". There is scathing reference to many others individuals who were in powerful positions in those days. Grewal who was in the thick of the action in the top echelons might wish to possibly examine his own stand and contribution as a senior functionary in resolving the Punjab crisis. This is a hard-hitting account where the reader though forming his own opinion, will certainly pause and reflect on "the self-serving politicians, their avaricious foot soldiers, and selfish and spineless bureaucrats", as Grewal speaks of the Indian ‘political jungle’ of his time. Grewal’s scissor sharp account of scheming politicians and an only too willing bureaucracy that messed up the fair land of Punjab makes for engrossing reading for minds that are not biased or warped up.
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THE account of a senior
Bihar cadre Sikh IAS officer posted as a Joint Secretary in the Home
Ministry at New Delhi in the 1980s when Punjab was up in strife and
flame, and a ring-side view of how the self-created ‘problem’ was (mis)handled
by its mentors at the Centre and from within the state, does make for
interesting reading for those interested in fathoming the intrigues of
some of our politicians at the helm of affairs of the nation state at
the time.