Blue Star was ill-planned, badly executed

Ramesh Inder Singh

Former Chief Secretary, Punjab

THE year 1984 was cataclysmic. Its defining moments — Operation Blue Star, assassination of the Prime Minister and the anti-Sikh pogrom — determined the internal discourse and history of the nation as probably no other year has since Independence.

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission to fix the responsibility of all concerned would have lent finality and closure.

The lapse of 40 years has not helped to heal the hurt. The perceived non-delivery of justice to the victims and non-closure of the tragedy still haunt. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission to fix the responsibility of all concerned — the political elements, state actors, militants and killer mobs — would have lent finality and closure through a judicial process and reconciliation.

Was Blue Star avoidable? Then Central Government projected it as an imperative action to eliminate militancy. Armed militants had usurped the shrine, fortified it with weapons and challenged the legitimacy of the constitutionally established polity. Would there have been any need to mobilise the Army had there been no armed militants and fortifications in the temple — so runs the argument.

The perception of the devout, however, is different. Blue Star is viewed as a premeditated desecration of the holiest shrine with the political objective to polarise the nation to secure votes in the parliamentary elections that were a few months away. One has to only look at the election campaign for the eighth Lok Sabha to understand this. Advertisements underpinning polarisation, like “Will the country’s border finally be moved to your doorstep” or one showing a Sikh taxi driver, with a poser to the readers — “Do you feel safe in the taxi?” — dotted the election campaign.

Catastrophic happenings often obscure objectivity, particularly in matters of faith. In the case of Blue Star, however, by now, certain facts are well-established and undisputed. To recapitulate, the Shiromani Akali Dal had launched a morcha on August 4, 1982, in support of its 10 demands — a mix of religious, political, economic and inter-state issues; it was daily courting peaceful arrests. Till June 1984, about 1,70,000 workers had courted arrests. There was hardly any village out of 12,000-odd in Punjab from where people had not contributed. The Akalis believed, in retrospect naively, that if they choked the jails with people, the Centre would be forced to concede their demands.

The nearly two years of the agitation were interspersed with 26 negotiation conclaves, some of these attended by the Prime Minister and Opposition leaders. At least on two occasions, an understanding was reached, but the Centre withdrew at the last minute. It seems that the government had made up its mind against a political settlement and a Cabinet sub-committee decided in May 1984 for a military solution. Pranab Mukherjee’s note of caution was brushed aside by the PM: “Pranab, I know of the consequences… The decision cannot be avoided.”

The Chief of Army Staff was ordered by the PM on May 25 to march on to Amritsar, while a façade of negotiations was sustained by inviting Akali leaders for talks with a group of Union ministers on May 29. An understanding was arrived at, only to be retracted later by the Union ministers, saying “Madam does not agree.”

Then Governor BD Pande was directed to requisition the Army and a formal order was issued by the Punjab Home Secretary on June 2. The troops carried out operations at the Golden Temple and 42 other gurdwaras. Pande had pleaded against the Army action and later confirmed that the PM “did not want a political settlement”.

Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, after the government backed out of two proposed meetings with him, including an aborted rendezvous with Rajiv Gandhi, cautioned his followers: “Keep having negotiations but also have your preparations complete.” The preparations were for an armed struggle that ran parallel to the peaceful morcha of the Akali Dal.

The militants called it ‘hakkan di hinsa’ or violence to secure their rights. To them, violence and consequential police reprisal were also a type of dialogue with the State, though by other means. Since the militants lacked legitimacy, they fell back on what scholar Mark Juergensmeyer called “meta-morality that religion provides”.

The violence accelerated. Pakistan stepped in to train and arm the militants. The State appeared ineffective, if not complacent. Weapons, including machine guns, now fortified the temple and if then Punjab Police chief Pritam Singh Bhinder is to be believed, “they (read weapons) were not intercepted because there were oral instructions ‘from the top’ until two months ago not to check any of the kar sewa trucks”.

The troops surrounded the temple on the night of June 3. The Army made no attempt to negotiate with the militants to make them come out of the temple. Major Gen Shabeg Singh, who led the militants, was an instructor at the IMA when Maj Gen Brar, who commanded the Army troops, was a cadet — both knew each other well. Had they talked, probably a bloody tragedy may have been averted — but these are ifs of which history is made. The militants fought, as Lt Gen VK Nayar, who served as GOC, Western Command, wrote, “because they were given no option”.

The intervening night of June 5 and 6 was horrific. The Akal Takht, the historical symbol of Sikh sovereignty and struggle against Mughal and Afghan tyranny, was in ruins. About 330 security personnel and around 780 civilians, including pilgrims who were in the temple to commemorate the martyrdom day of Guru Arjan Dev, died. Private property beyond the western end of the temple suffered collateral loss, with shells overshooting the intended target. About 160 shops and 15 houses were destroyed.

What was achieved? The troops liquidated a few hundred armed militants. However, it was a pyrrhic victory. Blue Star sowed the seeds for an ethno-national struggle, triggering greater violence. The nation was at war with itself, with soldeirs, some of them armed, abandoning barracks at many places. The militants were soon back in the temple and declared Khalistan in April 1986 from its precincts. Operations Black Thunder (1 and 2) had to be conducted.

The ill-planned and badly executed Blue Star, without politically addressing the Punjab problem, proved disastrous. The Rajiv-Longowal Accord could have shown the way forward, but it was never honoured.

Punjab suffered humongous losses. About 30,000 people died in a decade of violence. The state slipped from the number one position to below 15th among states on most of the socio-economic parameters. The ethno-national movement is dead, but it still resonates with a microscopic element abroad, raising concerns in India.

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