Behind Closed Doors

Karl Marx had once said: ‘Religion is the opiate of the masses.’ In the dying decades of the twentieth century, religion became the breeding ground of extremism and separatist terrorism in Punjab. The situation reminded me of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s words: ‘After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.’

The period 1979 to 1991 was a crucial one in my professional career. I was then a special correspondent of the Indian Express when Punjab was in the vice-like grip of foreign-backed separatist terrorism and when Akali politics was in turmoil.

A few years before the Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale-led terrorist violence in Punjab assumed serious proportions, efforts were initiated to resolve the interstate disputes between Punjab and Haryana. (Bhindranwale began as a Sikh preacher who, along with his followers, later took control of the Golden Temple Complex at Amritsar: the holiest shrine of the Sikhs. He started fortifying the complex after he was forced to move from the Guru Nanak Niwas to the Akal Takht on 15 December 1983.)

Leaders of different factions of the Akali Dal as well as some Congress and non-Congress leaders, including Chandrashekhar¹ and Inder Kumar Gujral,² acted as mediators and tried to resolve the disputes, but without much success.

In early February 1983, before the tripartite talks – among the Centre, the Akalis and the leaders of the opposition parties – could commence, a secret meeting was arranged at a Congress leader’s farm house near Delhi. Those present were Arun Singh,3 Captain Amarinder Singh⁴ and the Akali leaders Ravi Inder Singh and Balwant Singh. After five minutes of their arrival, Rajiv Gandhi (then a Congress MP) also turned up. No clear picture, however, emerged on how to find a solution to Punjab’s complex situation.

Given the fact that a secret meeting had taken place, nobody was surprised when the first tripartite meeting held later (in late February 1983) among the Centre, the Akalis and the leaders of the opposition parties ended in a deadlock. A number of formulae were suggested but without any viable outcome.

The Central leadership was apparently not interested in finding immediate solutions to Punjab’s problems at the time of the tripartite talks. The contention was that the Akalis were frequently shifting their stand on their demands and that no solution could be evolved at the cost of Haryana and Rajasthan. At one stage, Indira Gandhi told Chandrashekhar that the Akalis had refused to come to Delhi to hold talks with her. Factional divisions within the Akali Dal and the Centre’s inability to concede some of the Akalis’ demands led to the failure of these efforts. These developments made Punjab’s complex problem even more difficult to resolve.

The first five decades of Punjab’s post-independence history have been marked by two tragic phases. The first phase saw the Hindu—Sikh divide caused by the Master Tara Singh-led agitation for the formation of the Punjabi Suba and an equally aggressive opposition to it by some right-wing Hindu organizations. The second was the more-than-a-decade-long period that witnessed militancy and separatist terrorism.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, in the early 1950s, Master Tara Singh launched the Punjabi Suba movement demanding a Sikh-majority state within the framework of the Indian Constitution. The undeclared object was to have a state where the Akalis, claiming to be the ‘sole representatives of the Sikhs’, could come to power. Such a state, however, did not come into existence in the then-prevailing situation. But the demand for a Sikh-majority state sowed the seeds of separatism, which nourished by the fundamentalists and religious extremists and later backed by Pakistan, sprouted (in the 1980s) in the form of a demand for ‘Khalistan’ – a separate country for the Sikhs. It needs to be borne in mind that such a demand was not made by the 1973 Anandpur Sahib Resolution of the Akali Dal leadership, then made up of moderates. (Anandpur Sahib is a place in Punjab’s Ropar district.)

The pro-Khalistani Gajinder Singh (who was among the hijackers of an Indian Airlines plane to Lahore, Pakistan, on 29 September 1981), was named ‘minister for agriculture’ in the clandestine government that was formed by the West Germany-based Dal Khalsa’s mukh panch (chief) on 11 June 1984.

In early 1980, even as efforts were on to resolve Punjab and Haryana’s interstate issues through talks, Congress leaders, including Giani Zail Singh and Sanjay Gandhi, are believed to have propped up the then relatively young and obscure fundamentalist preacher Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale who reportedly also supported some Congress candidates in the elections. It did not take him long to turn into a Frankenstein to haunt his creators. The USA’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) later used him as a pawn for promoting their strategic interests in the region.

The fifth volume of the series entitled A Centenary History of the Indian National Congress (Academic Foundation, Delhi, 2011) also made critical observations about the role Giani Zail Singh played, first when he was Punjab chief minister (1972–77) and then as Union home minister (in 1980), in promoting religious extremists and terrorist elements in Punjab.

The militants (operating from their Golden Temple Complex bastion) were extremely angry with me because of the relentless criticism of their violent actions and killing of innocent people in my columns. I got an anonymous telephone call (in late 1982) warning me that, along with the names of other well-known journalists (such as Arun Shourie, M. J. Akbar, Prem Bhatia and N. C. Menon), my name too was on the militants’ hit list. I also received threatening letters. In one such letter (undated) written in English purportedly by a person describing himself as my ‘friend’, I was informed that ‘a meeting of the Sikh Students’ Federation was held at Amritsar on 11 December 1982 which deputed some persons to eliminate you and your family. Being a friend I felt that I should inform you to leave Chandigarh for some time. As I was in the meeting I cannot disclose my name. It may happen this month or in the first week of January 1983’.

From the language and the tenor of the letter, I suspected it to be the handiwork of persons close to the state’s ruling Congress leadership, which was unhappy with me because I had found fault with the government’s handling of the situation in Punjab.

Some months later, I received another undated letter written in Punjabi (Gurmukhi script) by one describing himself as a spokesman of the pro-Khalistan militant body: the Dashmesh Regiment. It warned me that ‘if you do not stop writing against the Sikhs (militants) you would also meet the fate Lala Jagat Narain had met’. (As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Lala Jagat Narain had been shot dead by militants near Ludhiana on 9 September 1981.) His son, Ramesh Chander, who succeeded his father as editor of the Hind Samachar Group’s newspapers, was also shot dead by the militants on 12 May 1984. The second letter prompted me to change my view about the first letter. I began to believe it was perhaps also written by a militant ‘friend’.

It was alleged that Bhindranwale skilfully used his connections with Gurcharan Singh Tohra for achieving his goal. Tohra, the president of the SGPC, was responsible for maintaining peace and harmony in the Golden Temple Complex. Moreover, Tohra, being the appointing authority of all priests (including the head priest), claimed to have overruled the indignant Giani Kirpal Singh and permitted Bhindranwale to shift to the Akal Takht.

One of the reasons that prompted Bhindranwale to leave the Guru Nanak Niwas was the apprehension that Longowal (who was instrumental in inviting him to stay in the Golden Temple Complex) could be physically harmed by his (Bhindranwale’s) armed cohorts, something he wanted to avoid.

After moving into the Akal Takht, Bhindranwale fortified the Golden Temple Complex with light and heavy arms and turned it into his bastion for launching a separatist campaign. Thereafter, the Akali leadership could never muster the courage to force Bhindranwale and his armed men to leave the Akal Takht.

Apart from the Congress and the Akali leaders who tried to use Bhindranwale for fulfilling their political objectives (before he converted the Golden Temple Complex into a fortress), sections of the Punjab Police are also believed to have helped him in procuring arms, which was quite an alarming development. They acted as a conduit for clandestinely smuggling in sophisticated light and heavy weapons into the Golden Temple Complex. They, in fact, had developed vested interests in such an activity, which had become a quick means of amassing wealth.

Giving details of the case, Vohra informed me that Ajay Pal Singh Mann, a former senior superintendent of police (SSP), Amritsar, who was later posted as commandant Punjab Armed Police (PAP), Jalandhar, had helped in the smuggling of arms into the Golden Temple Complex. After checking thirteen kar sewa trucks carrying material for the langar (community kitchen) within the complex, Mann left the place without checking the fourteenth truck. The unchecked truck carried sophisticated weapons, including two anti-tank grenade launchers, Sten guns and ammunition. These items had been smuggled from Pakistan through the border at Khem Karan (about 60 km from Amritsar). The last truck was the one the aforementioned White Paper referred to.

It was proposed to dismiss Mann from service and also arrest him. The Punjab Home Department officials claimed that Mann ‘owned huge assets’. Later, overruling reservations by a senior officer, the Punjab Government sacked Mann. This was the first case in Punjab of a senior IPS officer being given the boot.

The last two decades in the Punjab have witnessed two extremes: The Green Revolution and gun-wielding, bomb-throwing killer squads. The Green Revolution, ushered in by the state’s hard-working and predominantly Sikh peasantry in the mid-1960s, has made India almost self-sufficient in food. The emergence of Sikh extremist killer squads in the beginning of the 1980s symptomizes the spread of religious fundamentalism, from Muslim-dominated West Asia, Iran and Pakistan to Sikh-dominated Punjab. It has created another flashpoint, a potential threat to the integrity of the country, on its sensitive western border.

Though a variety of historical, religious, economic and extra-territorial factors have also contributed, the current explosive situation in the state is really the culmination of a tussle for power. Since 1947, various sections of the Sikh leadership in the two main parties, the Congress and the Akali Dal, have been battling for supremacy. While successive Akali leaders have been exploiting the susceptibilities of the deeply religious and tradition-bound Sikh community to achieve their objective, the Congress has overwhelmingly depended on the support of the Hindus and Harijans [now called Dalits] – and only partly on the Sikhs – to retain or capture power in the Punjab.

In their ‘no-holds-barred’ struggle for power, certain sections of both the Congress and the Akali Dal have been mobilizing secessionist elements and religious fanatics to play the game. It is no longer a secret that after the Emergency, some Congress leaders encouraged the pro-Khalistan Dal Khalsa to embarrass the Akali-dominated Punjab government. Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale – leader of the religious extremists, who does not go anywhere without a group of armed followers – was also made a pawn in pursuing this objective. It is another matter that he later became a militant ally of the Akali leaders who are now repeating the performance of their Congress rivals.

Here is the second excerpt:

RS 1.13 LAKH BANK ROBBERY IN LUDHIANA

ONE KILLED, FIVE HURT IN SHOOTOUTS, GRENADE ATTACKS

EIGHT SHOT DEAD BY EXTREMISTS

CHIEF MINISTER DARBARA SINGH RESIGNS [on 10 October 1983]

CENTRAL RULE IN PUNJAB

PUNJAB, CHANDIGARH UT [union territory] DECLARED DISTURBED AREAS

JAIL OFFICIAL KIDNAPPED – TRADER SHOT DEAD

FOUR NIHANGS [armed sikhs in dark blue attires] KILLED IN ENCOUNTER

ARMED FORCES GIVEN WIDE POWERS

TERRORISTS KILL FIVE IN CHANDIGARH

GRENADE LOBBED AT CHANDIGARH POLICE STATION

SECURITY TIGHTENED AT [punjab and haryana] SECRETARIAT

SI [subinspector] SHOT DEAD IN AMRITSAR

SABOTEURS BEHIND TRAIN ACCIDENT – DEATH TOLL 17, 125 INJURED

SWOOP ON EXTREMISTS IN FIVE DISTRICTS

SANGRUR [a place in south-eastern punjab] BANK LOOTED

These are some of the headlines which have appeared in the newspapers (in a chronological order) last month [October 1983].

It is a different Punjab today. There is no field of activity which has not been affected by the escalating terrorist violence in the state. Trade and business have been badly hit with traders from outside dreading visits to the state. The reduced inflow of migratory labour from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar poses a threat to the state’s agricultural economy.

After the murder of six bus passengers on 5 October, which forced the Centre to impose president’s rule, followed by the derailment of the Sealdah Express at Mandi Gobindgarh which killed 17 persons, road and rail travel has become a hazard. Though people have not stopped going to cinema houses or other places of entertainment, their number has dwindled considerably. Filmgoers, who are particularly concerned about personal safety, buy tickets for seats near the back of the theatre as there is less risk of being hit if somebody rolls a grenade down the aisle.

In the bigger cities, the crowds in the bazaars start thinning soon after dusk – an increasing number of people want to avoid remaining outdoors late at night. Fear runs high despite constant patrolling by men belonging to the Punjab Police and the paramilitary forces.

This feeling of insecurity is not just confined to the Hindu-dominated urban areas. It also pervades the countryside, which has a high concentration of Sikhs, though for different reasons. The fear of the killer squads riding two wheelers haunts urban dwellers while, in the rural areas, ordinary criminals have begun to take advantage of the current lawlessness thereby injecting an increasing sense of insecurity in the already troubled state.

The most disturbing aspect of the present situation is that a sense of mistrust has developed between the Hindus and the Sikhs, particularly in the cities. One can smell the tension.

Chaos attracts foreign interference. The present situation in Punjab seems to be ideal ground for Pakistani mischief-making. Although there is no concrete evidence available yet, intelligence agencies suspect that money and material are flowing into Punjab in vast quantities from across the border. The arms being smuggled are believed to include those supplied to the Afghan refugees by the US to fight the Russians [Soviets]. The gun running and spying are mostly done by smugglers who have contacts on both sides of the border. There are also reports that well-trained Pakistani spies are operating in the garb of Sikhs.

1 Chandrashekhar (a former Congressman) went on to become the prime minister of India on 10 November 1990.

² Gujral (also a former Congressman) became the prime minister of India on 21 April 1997.

³ Arun Singh was inducted as minister of state for defence in 1985 in the Rajiv Gandhi Government.

⁴ Captain Amarinder Singh went on to become chief minister of Punjab on 26 February 2002.

⁵ During Operation Bluestar (3 to 8 June 1984), the Indian Army (upon instructions from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi) entered the Golden Temple Complex in order to flush out Bhindranwale and his armed followers. (See also Chapter 15.)

⁶ The Akal Takht (literally meaning immortal throne) is the highest seat of temporal authority of the Khalsa. Khalsa refers to the community of fully initiated Sikhs to which boys are admitted after attaining puberty.