The night of June 5-6 1984, shall go down as the blackest in the history of independent India, when a repressive regime, ruling in Delhi, ordered the army to storm the Darbar Sahib (Golden Temple) at Amritsar and some 50 other Sikh Gurdwaras (shrines) throughout Punjab and Haryana. The savagery of the assault is indicated by the officially admitted toll of over 1200 dead in the Golden Temple alone, and the main structure of Sri Akal Takht— ‘‘throne of God’’— blasted into shambles. Because of a virtual promulgation of martial law conditions, total censorship and the government stranglehold on the media, few people in India or abroad seem to be aware of the true magnitude of an operation which turned out to be a mindless massacre of pilgrims, priests and Sewadars (staff-members), too scared to respond to the last-minute army ultimatum for ‘“‘surrender.”’
Never in the annals of Sikhism or the 400 years since the founding of Amritsar by the 4th Sikh Guru, Ram Das has such wanton sacrilege been perpetrated on so massive a scale, trampling under booted foot the religious sentiments of a small but valiant minority that constitutes a bare 2 per cent of India’s population that contributes to its economy and well-being to an immeasurable degree. To fortify itself against the people’s anger and indignation and without any pretense at honesty, the Indian government with deliberate intent used a Sikh general and handful of Sikh officers and men in an ill-concealed manoeuvres to demonstrate to the world that the sanctity of the Darbar Sahib had not been desecrated when, in reality, most of the Akal Takht, the Darshani Deorhi , the Parikrama and practically all buildings constituting the offices of Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee had been blasted with mortars from a solid phalanx of Centurion tanks. What is astonishing is that a Sikh President in Delhi’s Presidential Palace remained a deaf and mute onlooker of the death and destruction, and insensitive to the Sikh anguish at the perfidious intrusion of troops, and an array of public leaders (barring a few honorable exceptions) expressed perverse satisfaction at the ‘‘success’’ of the massively lethal operation.
Few among these henchmen bothered to recall that India’s Home Minister had, in the last session of Parliament, given out the names of no more than 40 terrorists on the government’s ‘‘wanted list’ who, according to him, were suspected to have taken shelter in the Golden Temple complex. Yet even four weeks after the operation, no one has explained why, to snuff out these two score men, an entire army division, aided with tanks and rocket launchers (with helicopter support) was deployed, why not a single wanted man has been identified and the bullet riddled body of Sant Jarnail Singh Khalsa Bhindranwale has been made into the army’s main trophy, along with Bhai Amrik Singh and the much maligned, one time hero of the Bangla Desh war of liberation, Maj-Gen (Retd) Shah beg Singh, why the statutorily required inquest was not held over the dead bodies, why the curfew was not relaxed to permit relatives to identify and claim the bodies and why provisions of the Geneva Convention and International Red Cross were violated in not making a public declaration about details of civilian casualties resulting from military action.
The government continues to harp on the ‘‘last resort’’ ‘theory when they had themselves delayed, for a decade, a solution of the just demands, allowed its stooges to torpedo the negotiations, failed to give timely and adequate warning of the army action and never cared to establish a direct contact with top Sikh leaders in a final bid to resolve the impasse and to avert tragedy. Now, desperately and belatedly, efforts are being made to woo the Sikhs and to spread the untruth that the Akal Takht and the Harmandir should be regarded as two distinct entities and that the latter has remained unharmed, conveniently forgetting their indissoluble link in history and tradition.
In order to put the facts in their proper perspective, the following statement, based on documented and irrefutable events, is offered, in a chronological order, for all men of reason to judge for themselves whether the Sikhs have deserved the bullets when they asked for justice, whether every protest against the government high handedness must mean their being branded as terrorists, whether the Constitution gives the government the license to kill and maim and torture innocents.
