IX SURRENDER AND RELEASE —OF BHINDRANWALE
1981 Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, accused of various charges under sec. 302 / 307 IPC etc. surrendered to police on 20th Sept. 1981, when a crowd of ‘‘at least two lakhs*had assembled at Gurdwara Gurdarshan Prakash at Mehta Chowk,
Lakh = 100,000 9 near Amritsar. He was subsequently released in acquittal of all charges, by the Chief judicial magistrate.
(Sunday, Calcutta dated Oct. 4, 1981— —cover story)
The provocative and fiery Hindu response to this is also picturesquely chronicled in the same issue of the Sunday magazine: ‘‘On June 29, 1981 a Hindu procession through Amritsar shouted slogans like ‘‘Kacha, Kanga te Kirpan, Sab ko bhejo Pakistan’, and “Sir tepagri rehannahideni, muh te makhi behan nahi deni’, that is, the Sikhs will be exterminated or driven out to Pakistan.
(Sunday : Oct. 4, 1981, cover story)
X APPEAL TO REASON
1982 Sant Harchand Singh Longowal, President Shiromani Akali Dal and Chief of the dharma yudha— universally acknowledged as a man of God and peace, made a personal appeal to all members of Indian Parliament in a succinct Open Letter for the redressal of the Sikhs’ grievance and for JUSTICE. The reply was a resounding silence! Even Sikh MP’s mostly prisoners of the one person party (Indira Gandhi’s Congress (I) Party), joined the conspiracy of silence.
XI THE STERILE NEGOTIATIONS
A series of half-hearted consultations was carried out, which the Sikh leaders attended in demonstration of their sincerity and with a view to arousing the conscience of the government as well as the opposition. These proved abortive.
The Prime Minister is never tired of alleging that every time government has tried to bring about a settlement, the Akali Dal has wriggled out by putting forward new demands. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The Anandpur Sahib Resolution has remained the sheet anchor of the Sikh case. There has been no deviation from it at any time. Even the issue relating to Art 25 of the Constitution viz. the clubbing of Sikhs with Hindus, Jains and others, has not only been a live issue ever since the framing of the Constitution but is inherent in the Open Letter to MP’s by Sant Harchand Singh Longowal, President Shiromani Akali Dal.
XII THE UPSURGE
1983 In his book, ‘Why Men Rebel’, the American author Ted Robert Gurr has argued that political violence is a consequence of a significant gap developing between the expectations of a given group and the willingness of authority to concede them. This sense of aspirational deprivation, and of desperation, led the extremist fringe to indulge in acts of violence and reprisals.
XIII UNAVOIDABLE ?
1984 After the unexpected nocturnal assault on the Golden Temple, and the indiscriminate killing of the inmates, the government propaganda machine has churned out all sorts of reasons for the desperate action, their favorite and that of Mrs. Gandhi— has been that the action was unavoidable and undertaken as the last resort.
XIV ENDLESS DITHERING
One would like to ask: Did the Prime Minister ever try to establish a direct dialogue with Sant Harchand Singh Longowal? If she could appeal to the Tamil terrorists in Sri Lanka, could she not address Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindran- wale—who, at least, was a religious leader of some consequence in the words of her son, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi?
Instead, the Prime Minister dithered and double-talked for most of the preceding 18 months.
The Prime Minister has, time and again, palmed off the Sikhs in chance remarks, at odd places and times, declaring that the Sikhs’ religious demands have been met and—for example—many tobacco vendors have been carted away from the city of Amritsar, treating the Sikhs as school children and displaying contempt for the revered Sikh leaders.
The “‘last resort’ theory could perhaps hold water if the Government had given a month’s, or even a_ week’s, ultimatum to the leadership, after conceding the key demands of the Sikhs; then an alert could doubtless be sounded for the identified terrorists to surrender.
Instead, the army gave only a blunt warning at sunset on June 5, after it had besieged the sacred precincts, clamped a tight curfew (that declined passes even to doctors on emergency call) and readied their tanks, mortars, machine guns and other armour for a war-like attack.
Sporting Chance
Instead of giving a sporting chance of assurance of safe passage, to innocent pilgrims and Sewadars (staff members) and raagis (minstrels) the army bluntly demanded their surrender, for the sin of being inside the holy shrine at that natural and Godly hour.
XV NIGHT OF THE GENERALS
June 5 was indeed the night of the generals. The army top brass has been quoted as saying that they went in the Golden Temple with heavy hearts and ‘‘prayers on their lips’’.
It were better if the generals did not talk so glibly and interminably about their gory deeds done in prayerful moods! The sacred precincts have, since the killing, been repeatedly used for propaganda. The generals’ prayers are mismatched with the blood of innocents spilling on to the parikrama (the marble promenade surrounding the Golden temple tank) and into the holy Sarovar (tank) !
XVI DEADLY HARDWARE ?
But let us revert to the terrorists and their deadly hardware allegedly smuggled from Pakistan. Each day the army claims to have discovered a fresh cache of arms despite initial claims that they had ‘‘cleansed’’ the complex of all armament. It is patently unbelievable that the 18-month-long siege of the Golden Temple by para military forces when every one was given a thorough body search and bayonets thrust in wheat bags intended for free kitchen (langar) had permitted large, sophisticated weapons like anti-tank guns, LMG’s to be smuggled in. The inference is inescapable that government have engineered and vastly exaggerated the arms recovery. Curiously, according to a UNI report datelined Delhi, June 20, Mrs. Gandhi “reiterated that the government knew that some arms had been smuggled from across the border.’’ Yet, in mid-May a high power Indian delegation visited Pakistan, met President Zia and the Foreign Minister of that country without breathing a word about any such smuggling activity and returning to India after hammering out an agreement on, of all things, tourism!
Regrettably the government has not yet identified the terrorists among the thousands who had been gunned down. Whether the forty that the Home Minister had named before the Parliament a few weeks earlier were among the dead, we have no means of knowing. Surprisingly, there are no injured persons, only the dead who cannot speak. The Government has practically destroyed all evidence by mass-cremating the bodies, not having the elementary human decency to let the relatives come and claim them — or, at least, their ashes! Granted that there were some undesirable elements taking refuge, that they had weapons, even some sophisticated ones — which when cornered, they used with deadly accuracy to defend themselves and their citadel. But was this reason enough for an army division to mount a warlike operation, desecrate and destroy the sacred shrines and to kill everybody in sight? Has the army not, since the holocaust, continued to shoot every Sikh who raised a hand or a slogan in protest in Amritsar and everywhere else in Punjab — while government machinery conveniently dubbed him as a terrorist?
The Bangladesh war of 1971 ended in 16 days. Then the Indian Army marched out. But in 1984, even after six weeks, the Army is still ensconced in the holy shrine and a Union Cabinet Minister had to eat a humble pie for suggesting its withdrawal.
The use of military forces in circumstances such as these, against a proud and patriotic people, and their historic religious places, is unparalleled in the history of the civilized world. Even the ignominious Jallianwala Bagh incident of 1919 in the same city of Amritsar pales into insignificance.
June 8, 1984
“The siege had by now been laid for 60 hours……the generals knew they were running out of time……the key constraint was the growing mob violence around Amritsar and in the whole area of Punjab west of Beas. As word of the siege spread, thousands of people began gathering……trying to converge on the town to defend the temple. As helicopter-borne reconnaissance patrols scoured the country side, looking for even the smallest gathering of people, hundreds of wireless sets in the region repeated the alarming message from the police chiefs, asking all officers to ‘‘shoot at sight anyone seen on the streets and at once fire at the mobs.” (Shekhar Gupta reporting in India Today,
June 30, 1984)
XVII TRADITION OF CHIVALRY
The Sikh tradition is one of chivalry, not terrorism. During the invasions of Ahmad Shah Abdali and Nadir Shah Durrani in the 18th Century, when Sikhs were being hunted down in a bid to exterminate them, they had time and again risked death in order to rescue Hindu women abducted by the marauders and to restore them to their families. Protection of the oppressed and innocents has been the Sikh norm. Sikhs abhor violence for its own sake. Therefore the actions of a few constituted retaliation for documented police atrocities and were the exceptions, not the rule.
The Government, both in the State and the Centre, has failed to pin down, judicially and in accordance with the law of the land, most of the murders on any specified person or persons. Yet the government has been maligning the Sikhs in general and Sant Bhindranwale and his followers in particular in sweeping terms.
With a largely unsympathetic — even hostile — press, even ordinary crime is being attributed to Sikh ‘“‘terrorists’’, until it has become an obsessive preoccupation with all controlled media.
XVIII BLITZKRIEG OF FALSE PROPAGANDA
Such has been the force of the blitzkrieg of the government propaganda that a psychosis is being created in the public mind against the Sikhs. When the extremist fringe declared, in mid-1982, that they would disrupt the IX Asian Games, every (and we mean ‘‘every’’) Sikh travelling to Delhi by road, rail or air was subjected to humiliating body search and most were simply told to forget about going to Delhi.
Since then, road blocks have multiplied all over Punjab and Haryana, even Rajasthan where ONLY Sikhs are subjected to harassing police high-handedness, except that, now, these barriers are manned by military and para military forces too willing to shoot a Sikh at the smallest pretext or resistance. The following day a front page news item would, in all likelihood, routinely announce the death of another suspected terrorist! Government propaganda has tried to brand the Sikh leadership as secessionists and spread the canard that the terrorists within Darbar Sahib complex had planned to set up an independent state, Khalistan.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Neither the Shiromani Akali Dal nor the martyred Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale has ever supported the demand for Khalistan hitherto voiced by a small number of individuals. While the Government is on record in the Parliament that such is indeed the case, they have stubbornly and regrettably clung to their unfounded suspicions about the Sikhs.
XIX SUSPICION
It is this baseless suspicion which made the government introduces the visa system for travel to India by residents of the Commonwealth countries, in a precipitate manner, in disregard of the infinite hardship that such a restriction will entail, for Sikhs are the main target of this discriminatory measure.
XX UNREST IN ARMY
One cannot close this statement without referring to the mutiny in the Army or, more precisely, the desertions. The Government has, for once correctly, characterized these desertions as impulsive action and denied that there was any deep seated conspiracy to create disaffection.
Despite this Judgement the deserters, many of them teenage recruits, have been simply gunned down, instead of being won back. Worse still, they have been, in some instances (reference PTI news, dated Varanasi June 11, 1984), brazenly and remorselessly described as terrorists! The news agency journalism could not have descended to any lower depths of deception. Indeed, as of today, much of the propaganda about Sikhs is naked falsehood masquerading as truth.
One hopes better sense will prevail and the distraught deserters will not be treated vindictively.
XXI CONCLUSION
While the Sikhs shall never forgive or forget the sacrilege and massacre at the Golden Temple, they appeal to the conscience of the people of India and the democratic World to consider the foregoing facts, to have an introspection and heart searching and to bring pressure on the authoritarian Indian Government to vacate all the Sikh places of worship, to stop the wanton killing of the Sikhs and cease spreading half-truth and untruths about their religion and traditions, to make amends for the desecration and destruction of the holy places and concede their just demands and, above all, to ensure them untrammeled freedom of life, liberty and the practice of their religion and culture, as guaranteed by the United Nations Human Rights Charter
