Jun
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20th ANNIVERSARY OF OPERATION BLUESTAR
June 5, 2004 | Comments Off on 20th ANNIVERSARY OF OPERATION BLUESTAR
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Indian Army’s attack on the Darbar Sahib (Golden Temple) complex in Amritsar and 41 other Sikh gurudwaras throughout Punjab. The army invaded the complex, the center of Sikh religious and political life, and forty-one other major Sikh gurudwaras with tanks, canons and troops, and imposed a statewide curfew. The government forbade news coverage of the army attacks, expelled foreign journalists, and cut phone lines across Punjab. Eyewitnesses reported that over 10,000 pilgrims and 1300 workers had gathered inside the complex and could not leave before the attack for fear of arrest. The police detained Red Cross volunteers at Jallianwala Bagh, near the Golden Temple complex, preventing them from accessing the pilgrims and workers.
The BBC features the flashbacks of eight people, including a police officer, Sikh pilgrim’s widow, and a former member of the Sikh Student Federation detained without trial for five years. The website also links to a two-part radio program (Part 1: audio, transcript; Part 2: audio, transcript) on Bluestar by Correspondent Mark Tully. Its coverage fails to highlight the attack on the other gurudwaras in Punjab and the systematic human rights abuses perpetrated by the state after 1984. It does discuss how the attack occurred on a religious holiday in the Sikh calendar, when thousands of Sikhs made pilgrimages to gurudwaras, especially Darbar Sahib:
According to the DSP (Apar Singh Bajwa) “a large majority of those who died inside the Golden Temple during Operation Bluestar were common devotees who had come to the shrine on 3 June on the occasion of the fifth Sikh Guru Arjan Dev’s Martyrdom Day…
Mr Bajwa said no attempt was ever made to identify the civilians killed.
Gurjit Kaur lost her husband and 14-year old daughter during the Army attack. She described the years of oppression that followed, leading to the disappearances and extrajudicial executions of other children:
“All I know is they [husband and 14-year old daughter] were among the thousands who were killed by the army that day. We couldn’t even perform their last rites.
“To add to our grief, the police began harassing us because they recovered some pictures of Bhindranwale which my dead husband had once bought.
“My eldest son Kashmir Singh – 22 years and working as a mechanic at a nearby workshop – was picked up and killed. They threw his body in a drain outside the village.
“Intensely angry over the injustices we were forced to suffer, two of my younger sons left home to join militant organisations.
“I did not attempt to stop Jaspal Singh and Tarlok Singh from going away.
“I do not know if they were able to avenge the deaths of my husband, daughter and older son, but some years later – around 1991 – both the boys were shot dead in encounters with the police. [Please see www.punjabjustice.org for a report on over 600 faked encounters.]
“I did not grieve – they had given their lives while serving the cause of the Panth (Sikh community) and the Gurus.
“But the police did not stop at this.
“One day – also in the year 1991 – a bunch of police wallahs came to my house and picked up my younger daughter, youngest son and me.
My daughter and I were locked up in the Jail at Nabha Town.
“But I still do not know what became of my youngest child. Baljinder Singh was only 14 years old.
“He simply disappeared from the custody of the police.
“Twenty years have gone by but I still cry each day. I cannot forget how my entire family was wiped out.
“Those who have seen the blood of loved ones spilt will never forget and I will carry my memories with me to my funeral pyre.
“Today I am all alone. My only surviving child lives with her husband outside Punjab. She does not visit me because the police harass her each time she came here in the past.
“My only remaining wish is to identify the men who killed Baljinder Singh. He was only a innocent little child.
“I want to know what kind of men could bring themselves to murdering a child. I want to know if they made my sweetest child suffer.”
Although the Army claims it asked innocent pilgrims to leave Darbar Sahib before it launched its attack, survivor Gurmej Singh describes how they were forced back into the complex and later tortured and detained without trial:
“On 3 June 1984 a group of young friends from the village decided to accompany me to the vegetable market in Amritsar.
“Since this was the Fifth Guru Arjan Dev-ji’s Martyrdom Day, we also planned to visit the Golden Temple the same afternoon.
“We were all still inside the Temple when the army imposed a curfew. Sensing trouble ahead, we tried to leave via the cobbler’s bazaar, but we were turned back by a group of angry soldiers who ordered us back into the temple complex until the curfew orders were in force.
“Over the course of the next three days and nights, the Golden Temple was converted into a bloody battlefield with bullets raining from every conceivable direction….
“I was among hundreds who were first tortured in a military camp at the Amritsar Military Cantonment and then charged with sedition.
After a full year there, I was shifted out of Punjab, to the Jodhpur Jail in Rajasthan to join 378 others like myself.
“A full five years later, I was released without a trial. The government withdrew its cases against me and I was allowed to return to my family.
“They had by then given me up for dead.
“For the first time I was able to tell my own children the truth about what had occurred at the Golden Temple in the summer of 1984.
“I have spent the past 15 years trying to get some sort of a compensation for the time I was unjustly incarcerated.
“The Indian government was responsible for my suffering and the misery that my family was forced to bear.
The Indian government never instituted an inquiry into the army actions during Bluestar.
Eyewitnesses like Ranbir Kaur, a schoolteacher, described policemen tying the hands of Sikhs behind their backs with their turbans and shooting them at point-blank range. Although the official White Paper cited the deaths of only eighty-three Army personnel and 493 terrorists, eyewitnesses cited figures ranging from 4000 to 8000 people killed, mostly innocent pilgrims. (A Judicial Blackout: Judicial Impunity for Disappearances in Punjab, India. Please see article for footnotes.)
After Associated Press reporter and Indian citizen Brahma Chellaney reported in The Times of London that soldiers tied Sikhs up and shot them at point blank range during the June army attack, the government preliminary charged him with sedition, promoting enmity between religious groups, and deliberate insult to religious feelings. In his early November 1984 order to cancel Chellaney’s bail, Delhi High Court Justice D.R. Khanna accused Chellaney of “zest of sensational mongering and dubious pleasing of foreign bosses” for reporting “a recklessly distorted and highly inflammatory version of the Punjab episode.” Khanna cited the alleged celebration of the Sikhs after the assassination of Indira Gandhi stating that Chellaney’s article, published and read in the UK, created havoc “with the uninformed innocent minds by arousing their religious emotions and possible mass hysteria.” In September 1985, after numerous journalists associations protested, the government finally dropped its prosecution of Chellaney and returned his passport.
In related news, Sikh survivors of the 1984 pogroms against Sikhs protested the inclusion of perpetrator Jagdish Tytler in the Cabinet:
Around 300 victims of anti-Sikh violence in 1984 from Punjab and Delhi on Wednesday burnt the effigies of Congress MPs Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar here and protested against the inclusion of Tytler in the Union Council of Ministers.
The protestors, mainly hailing from Ludhiana, started from Bangla Sahib Gurdwara and wanted to protest near parliament, but were stopped by the police at the Parliament street police station.
ENSAAF will be releasing its report on the November 1984 carnage in a few weeks. With a preface by retired New York Times reporter Barbara Crossette, the report analyzes the affidavits, government papers and arguments filed with the Misra Commission, established to examine the massacre of Sikhs. The report also discusses the impunity that has prevailed for perpetrators of the carnage, and examines the 1984 evidence in the framework of international law regarding crimes against humanity and genocide.
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