'Turmoil in Punjab Before and After Bluestar': An insider's account by then Amritsar Collector Ramesh Inder Singh

Manoj Joshi

There are no heroes in Ramesh Inder Singh’s detailed account of one of the most traumatic periods of Indian history. It was perhaps necessary for nearly four decades to pass before such a history of the events in Punjab in the 1980s and 1990s could be attempted. Having allowed time to cool the passions, Singh has provided us an informed, balanced, meticulously detailed and, above all, a fair account of not just Bluestar, but the course of the militancy and its end. This was a monumental task and it has been achieved.

The Punjab situation peaked in the mid-1980s when a witches’ brew of competitive politics fed into the growing sectarian tensions in the state, themselves layered upon the plateauing of the Green Revolution with its attendant high unemployment. At one level, it was a battle of supremacy within the Akali Dal, and on the other the Congress’ hard-ball move to exploit the divisions in Sikh religious politics. Given this, neighbouring Pakistan too got involved in stirring things up.

Singh provides a dispassionate account of what happened at the Golden Temple through Operation Bluestar. As the District Collector of Amritsar, he had a ringside view. Hundreds died, Army personnel, militants, innocent pilgrims trapped in the melee. Some of the most sacred sites of Sikhism like the Akal Takht and the Sikh Library were ravaged. That the Harmandir Sahib survived with just a couple of bullet holes was a miracle in itself. There are aspects which have not figured elsewhere, such as the detailed accounting of those who were killed and the manner of their deaths.

That the Army badly mishandled the mission has been clear for a while. Singh has brought out the alternative and more elaborate plans, such as those mooted by Lt Gen SK Sinha, then GOC-in-C of Western Command, which catered for addressing the religious sentiments and using a dash of psychological warfare.

Instead, displaying a complete lack of understanding “of the public sentiments or the political consequences”, the Army launched “a direct assault on a sacred space”. No effort was made to call for the surrender of those inside the Golden Temple. Instead, the troops, hurriedly inducted and unfamiliar with either the area or the Sikh ethos, were thrown into a frontal assault against well-built defences. The consequences could only have been “death and destruction”.

Singh’s account is that of an insider. On the other hand, this reviewer, who had just taken up his first journalist’s job in New Delhi with The Hindu, was the quintessential outsider whose very first assignment was to report on Punjab in the wake of Bluestar. My crash course on the state, Sikh politics and its cultural and religious ethos was helped along by friends, many of them farmers. Along the way, many things happened, Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the Sikh massacres in New Delhi, Sant Longowal’s assassination, terrorist incidents and so on. But I continued to visit the state till the end of militancy. I recall memorably the elections of February 1992 when the situation was so grim that even the II Corps headquartered in Ambala, usually kept away from internal security duties, had to be deployed to provide security.

Incidentally, the Army, which had so messed up things in Operation Bluestar, played a stellar role in helping bring an end to the militancy through its Operation Rakshak, working in close coordination with the police and the local administration, instead of being at loggerheads with them, as was the case in Operations Bluestar and Woodrose.

Ramesh Inder Singh concludes that “the demand for Khalistan is long dead”. Indeed it had little traction even then. But there remain faint echoes of those times, most recently heard in the election of Simranjit Singh Mann. A handful of extremists survive in Pakistan and an outfit called ‘Sikhs for Justice’ seems to get on the nerves of New Delhi, though it has very little traction amongst the Sikh community.

In the accounting of the professional administrator, it was the lack of good governance, with its attendant shoddy policing and an indifferent criminal justice system, that led to the denouement of Bluestar and its aftermath. What Punjabis need, the author says, is an effective and decisive administration, but also one with a well-honed sense of fairness.