Two Interesting Articles !

[Raju]

C O M M E N T A R Y

The bitter truth

Everything started from when Indira Gandhi decided to prop up Bhindranwale against the Akalis.

11 August 2005: While the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, tried to be statesman-like in his speech in Parliament yesterday, he could not resist taking digs at the Akalis, and painting the Congress leadership as having unalloyed love for the Sikhs. “But please,” he said at one point, targeting the Akalis, “do not say things which will drive a permanent wedge between the valiant Sikh community and the national mainstream.” A short bruiser course in current events, if not contemporary history, is in order here to correct some distortions flowing from the PM’s statement, and there is no point saying he did not intend those distortions. He did.

While it is true that the Akalis played a role in intensifying Khalistani terrorism, and it is also a fact that the former PM, P.V.Narasimha Rao, and the ex-Punjab Police chief, K.P.S.Gill, played a huge role in terminating the violence, it cannot also be denied that the Frankenstein of Bhindranwale, who set the course of mayhem and bloodshed in the state for over fifteen years, was the creation of Indira Gandhi.

For those who remember those times, this would be like reliving it all. Mrs Gandhi could never forgive the Akalis for opposing the Emergency, and joining the first Janata government of Morarji Desai. Political writers often say she brought no vendetta to politics after she returned to power in 1980, but that is not true. The mainstream, or to be more accurate, the national opposition, may have been spared an Emergency-type witch-hunt again, but the Akalis caught the brunt of her ire. In her rage against the Akalis, she was assisted by two men, Zail Singh to an extent, but more dangerously and viciously, Darbara Singh.

Akali politics has always flirted with the Panth, and to produce a division in this, Mrs Gandhi, aided by her Punjab advisers, created the cult of terrorism. Bhindranwale and his supporters were first permitted open displays of arms, then leniency was shown despite his role in the murder of the Nirankari Baba, and between 1981 and Operation Bluestar in June 1984, the agencies stockpiled the Golden Temple with weapons, although it was made out that Pakistan had been smuggling them in.

There is no doubt that Pakistan actively intervened in Khalistani terrorism, but it was significantly after Operation Bluestar, when the entire Sikh community was outraged by the armed assault on the Golden Temple. Bhindranwale’s slide to extremism was a slow process from being a village preacher, and at one point in 1981, when Rajiv Gandhi had just entered politics, and could be reasonably taken to understand nothing of politics, leave alone politics intermeshed with religion, he incredibly voted Bhindranwale as a saint. There were many then, stalwart politicians of the Congress and opposition, who were shocked at Rajiv’s certificate, and it only served to boost Bhindranwale’s megalomania.

It is hard to say what Mrs Gandhi hoped to achieve by propping up Bhindranwale to the pinnacle of extremism, unless it was with the object of controlling him, and thereby exercising control on Sikh religious and politico-religious politics. The first part she achieved, and he became such a feared and forbidding extremist figure, with a supremely credible posture of defying the Centre, that he attracted Akali leaders of all hues, from Parkash Singh Badal down, and even Farooq Abdullah, who cannot be said to have a stake in Punjab politics, visited him for his blessings. Apart from all this, Bhindranwale courted the press, and the press courted him.

Trouble began when Mrs Gandhi and her advisers embarked on the second mission, to control Bhindranwale, but by then, he had become a monster. What started as a political game to teach the Akalis a lesson became a national security nightmare. The very arms that the agencies were instructed to smuggle into Golden Temple now began to threaten the peace in Punjab and the security of the state. A Punjab Police DIG, A.S.Atwal, was killed in April 1984 at the gates of the Golden Temple, right after he had finished his prayers. The police were forbidden to enter and arrest the killers.

In the successive months, there were clear indications that Bhindranwale was fortifying himself, and it was building up to a situation where the Golden Temple would have had to be stormed. There is a view in the military, that if Atwal’s killers had been taken from within the temple, Bhindranwale would have stood down, but unbelievably, Mrs Gandhi did not want that. She was preparing for the final humiliation of a community by storming its most sacred place.

This was the shameful start up provided to Khalistani terrorism that PM Manmohan Singh does not wish to focus on. Being part of the Congress party, and beholden to Sonia Gandhi for making him PM, he is selective about his history, and issues warnings to the Akalis, but that is a twisted remembrance of past events. If truth is too painful to recount, at least don’t dress it up. If Bhindranwale had not been propped up, if the Golden Temple had not been desecrated with Operation Bluestar, Mrs Gandhi would not have been assassinated, the Congress party would have had no reason to organise the massacre of Sikhs, and conceivably, there would have been no terrorism in Punjab, which put it behind by more than a decade.

Terrorisms usually have strong causal factors, but Khalistani terrorism had none that was easily distinguishable. If you cannot sell a cause easily, there is usually no cause to sell. Soon after he returned from hiding in Pakistan, this writer met Professor Sohan Singh, the so-called ideologue of the Khalistani movement. He barely made sense about his cause, although there was no doubt about his personal suffering. It was amazing that the movement sustained so long. Before long though, it became a criminal movement, and the terrorists looted the towns and raped the Punjab countryside. Doctors in districts were forced to perform abortions on terrorist rape victims. It is all this that forced the people of Punjab, in the main the Sikhs, to make a final stand against terrorists.

But it is clear, that without the lionisation of Bhindranwale, none of this would have happened. Manmohan Singh cannot hope to prevent history’s tragic repetition by being selective in his narrative. Truth is bitter, but it is best told as it is.

[Raju]

72 hours, 21 years

Lesson from Nanavati: you can no longer brush the past aside, it always comes back to haunt

SHEKHAR GUPTA

Posted online: Saturday, August 13, 2005 at 0000 hours IST

I suspect each one of us who covered the anti-Sikh riots as reporters in November 1984 has a persistent nightmare. Some still wake up in cold sweat as images of half-burnt bodies in Trilokpuri appear again and again. Some cannot shake of the image of helpless widows, their men and children killed, their houses burnt, pleading for help from a police that only looked the other way.

I have a couple of mine, too. One is of defiance. A group of Sikh taxi drivers outside Imperial Hotel on Janpath decided to protect themselves as the state — South and North Blocks, Rashtrapati Bhavan and Parliament are less than a kilometre away — had chosen to abdicate all responsibility. They picked up chains, sticks, iron-rods, just stones and decided to take on the mobs. On the afternoon of November 2, I was with a small group of reporters that witnessed this remarkable incident. A mob of several hundred would converge on the taxi stand shouting the by-now-familiar slogan: khoon ka badla khoon, Indiraji hum sharminda hain, tere qatil jinda hain (blood for blood, Indira we are ashamed, your killers are alive). But the small group of taxi drivers, instead of fleeing, challenged them with what looked like a whole motor workshop converted into an armoury — they had even plucked out fenders from their Ambassadors. A dozen assaults were mounted, each was beaten back and soon enough many helpless bystanders, including us reporters, were cheering. All it took were a few brave men to keep at bay a mob of the kind that was looting, pillaging and killing in many parts of the city, unquestioned, unchallenged and often helped by a police force that looked more complicit than even Modi’s in Gujarat, 2001. In Gujarat at least the police opened fire several times, killing Hindus and Muslims. Here you found Delhi policemen openly talk of the need to teach the Sikhs a lesson. Only in Paharganj did we see some police firing. But, as it turned out, the story here was that some armed Sikhs (“Khalistani sympathisers”) were apparently hiding in a house. So two groups of Delhi policemen and one of CRPF were firing at it. It was so farcical, entirely comical — except there was a real fear of some reward-seeking policemen getting caught in this competitive friendly fire.

My other nightmare is a beautiful house at the corner of Chiragh Dilli and Panchsheel Park, next to where the flyover came up later. The house burnt furiously as perhaps no other, even in those three days of arson. There was no provocation, just that word had spread that it was owned by a Sikh family. The family, fortunately, escaped the mobs. But the looted house, set on fire, lit the night brutally in what you thought was safe, upper-crust South Delhi. The mobs, on the other hand, had just realised that while there were easy killings available in poorer, more congested, areas, real “value” in terms of loot, was in well-to-do areas.

I remember that burning house, the towering column of smoke that dominated an already blackening sky, as I drove past it on my Enfield one afternoon, riding the pillion behind me two neighbours — India Today colleagues, one of them expecting her first child soon, as we were expecting our second. Both our boys are twenty now, and final year college students. They represent a whole new generation of Indians born after that dreadful tragedy which has already voted in one state and one national election. But those that suffered in those 72 hours of hell are still awaiting justice. Those that were responsible for it have still escaped the supposed long arm of justice, or retribution. That burning house is my most persistent nightmare. It was never rebuilt. It was believed the owners sold it and migrated to Punjab. Or at least that is what was believed rather easily at that point in a city dominated by people who had already seen one Partition.

Partition, in fact, was the dominant metaphor in the rumour mill. Your next door neighbour would tell you of trains loaded with Hindu bodies coming in from Punjab. There was talk of mass rape and mutilation of women. Then you asked a few questions on the source of the rumour and the answer usually was, “I didn’t see, but my brother saw a train, or probably my brother’s friend’s neighbour”. There was no truth in any of them. No such thing even happened. And truth to tell, even the most vicious rumours never succeeded in turning Hindus against their Sikh neighbours. In one colony after another you saw vigilante patrols at night with residents carrying hockey sticks, cricket bats and even shotguns, not to ward off any attacks from marauding Sikhs but to protect their own Sikh neighbours. Ordinary people like us in middle-class localities ignored all rumours and maintained peace. Even when Delhi Police officially joined the rumour business by giving currency to wild rumours that Sikh militants had poisoned water supplies. In many areas we saw police vans making announcements asking people to avoid municipal water that may have been poisoned.

These were no communal riots of the kind you often see, or saw in Gujarat, where neighbours turn on neighbours. In every locality, from tony Panchsheel Park to the Govindpuri slum, the killer mobs came from elsewhere. Somebody had got them together, told them where to go and target the Sikhs. Most important, they were promised the police won’t interfere. And that was a promise Delhi Police kept for a good 72 hours. I remember driving around Govindpuri on my motorbike, skirting burning bodies, a hundred fires, big and small, raging around the place, and at the local police station they told you nothing had happened, nobody had died, everything was in control. Or the odd policeman would chide you. What’s wrong with you presswallas? Are you Khalistani sympathisers? Reporters like me had limitations in terms of how extensively one could document all this because I then worked for a fortnightly (India Today). But several newspaper reporters, notably Rahul Bedi, Sanjay Suri and Joseph Maliakan of the Indian Express, did stellar and courageous work tracking and documenting this, day after day. Without their contribution, so many inquiries and commissions would have failed to name even these few names.

The points that intrigued me for a long time afterwards were, if mobs had all come from “elsewhere”, who were these people? Who got them together, and what was in it for them? Finally, how did the killings stop abruptly? It was clear soon enough that the mobs comprised mostly jobless lumpens, collected by political mafiosi on the promise of easy loot and pillage. One of the most shameful chapters in that story was how Delhi Police, under pressure a few days after the riots, declared a ‘voluntary disclosure scheme’ whereby you could bring back any goods you may have looted and deposit them in a police station with no questions asked.

The killing, however, stopped all of a sudden the moment a few army APCs appeared. No mobs fought with the army, there was very little firing. Just the message that the army was out and police “protection” no longer available now, and the mobs lost their will. It was, after all, not like the Partition, or even Gujarat, 17 years later. This was not the case of a community turning on another in blind fury, willing to face bullets, lathis, anything. This was “good-time” mobs who melted away the moment they saw some challenge.

That is why those of us who covered the riots, and many more who carried out relief or citizens’ investigations subsequently, generally believe that what we saw over those murderous 72 hours were not Hindu-Sikh riots but Congress-Sikh riots. Or, rather, Delhi Congress-Sikh riots. Too many small time Congress politicians, who had built their careers organising crowds for Sanjay and then Indira Gandhi, decided revenge was naturally expected of them. So what is the difference between collecting an Emerge- ncy-type crowd to chant slogans in support of the 20-point programme, or a pogrom of the Sikhs which also brought the promise of loot.

If there is one thing that has emerged with the Nanavati Report and its aftermath, it is that political parties have to accept their past will continue to come back and haunt them. They cannot, as in the past, use brute force to sweep all questions under the debris. The Congress is not the only party to have done so. If Advani and Vajpayee, after making such solemn speeches last week, recall what their own party did with the Srikrishna Commission in the Bombay riots of 1992, they will be ashamed too. And, hopefully, they will remember that when Justice Nanavati delivers his findings on Gujarat, 2001.

Write to sg@expressindia.com

http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=76143

[Gupt daasan daas]

i have a question veer je

y did u post this

bhula chuka maf

[sikh supreme]

With respect raju.....take every article written by Indians with a pinch of salt... this is a same nation which yesterday did not sign up to anti-genocide agreement with russia, usa, brazil being the other objectors.

Indian journalists always want to blame pakistani involvement and "khalistani terrorism" yet they do not even see what role their own secruity agencies played in forming terrorist units to gave a bad image of khalistan armed groups.

I will post evidence if you wish...in how the highest commands of Punjab police formed REAL terrorist groups by using criminals to pose as Sikh militants and kill innocent people. Read bullet for bullet by julieo riberio who has alot of Sikh blood on his hands but does admit how he was allowed to form "sikh" terror groups not only fight Sikh Seperatists but kill innocents in the process.

These games are played by desperate and tyrannical regiemes and it wont change unless people force the change. When the people of Punjab and the rest of Indian union wake up to who the terrorists in their midsts are... then the shadow of terrorism will be dispelled.

[Raju]

Indian journalists always want to blame pakistani involvement and "khalistani terrorism" yet they do not even see what role their own secruity agencies played in forming terrorist units to gave a bad image of khalistan armed groups

True, and there is evidence mentioned in the first article on how the govt agencies helped in creating terror. The first article was written by a Singh himself, whereas the second article was written by Shekhar Gupta who is widely believed to be a person with a leftist-slant and thus can be depended to give a true account of events.

Punjab police officials also carried out a lot of personal vendetta on the guise of combating terrorism since centre had given them a free hand to strike at terrorists who were created by the centre itself.

y did u post this

It's sort of a re-education for myself and for those here who were born after 84. We must never sweep history under the carpet, because that can happen only at the cost of the future.

[Gupt daasan daas]

ok raju veer je

the things that happened 84 and before

u wil hear many versions

gov will say sant je was a congress man, a prop

but truth is this fight had been going on for a long tme

sant kartaar singh je was one who in taksal started fight agsint nakli nirankaris for there slandering of guru je

and sant je wasnt even a khalistani

u shud listen to there speeches

no one was almost khalistani

it was after 84 it rose, themovment

because sant je said if u atttack harimander sahib, u will lay the foundation of khalstaan

u shud prob go to the source and read and listen tot he speeches

sant je had nothing to hide

indra asked t meet him

he said come meet me in public

they didnt hold no private meetings

there was nothin goin on with sant je in the background

these lies are trying to make sant je look bad, and are lies veer je

u can look at the facts and see that

:)there was no khalstanee movement, in full power, befor 84

thas all lies

there was only demand of rights

sant je didint want to split the land that the sikhs died for, more than 9 percent of indian shaheeds were sikhs

y wud they want to divide the land the shed blood for?

but sant je did mak one thing clear

if u attack harimander sahib, u will lay the foundations for khalstaan

bhula chuka maf

[Raju]

Gupt daasan daas veerje, to generate a clap, one has to use both hands.

Ofcourse the force of one hand could be more than the other, but it has to be two hands nevertheless.

Being in India I am well aware of the govt's version of things but even in the govt's version I am not too familiar with the preceeding events and I am also clueless about the story from the other side.

Since such uncomfortable events are always prone to being brushed under the carpet, I am a sucker for details and news from unimpinched sources. As you can see the two articles above are not exactly govt versions of events, I thought it worthy of a read.

[Gupt daasan daas]

i understnad veer je:)

but to really understnad if sant je was congress, we must look at sant je himself

and look at wat they did, aske for, etc

and we will see if they were gov or not:)

bhula chuka maf

[Raju]

One more article in the series:

C O M M E N T A R Y

Half an apology

Manmohan Singh is a good man, but he does not represent the Congress party.

16 August 2005: When is an apology not enough? Either when it is not meant, or when it becomes a plank of convenience, usually election-oriented, or when the apologist does not reflect the sentiments of his/ her own political formation, but speaks out of personal conviction. In the third category falls Manmohan Singh’s apology to the nation and to the Sikhs for the massacre of 1984, and it is not enough.

For one, if there was a genuine change of heart in the Congress Party, which stands accused of organising the massacre, it would not have buried the Nanavati Commission report for six months, and only table it in Parliament because the rules demanded, and because its Left allies in the UPA had absolutely insisted upon it. As for the rules, don’t bet on them, the Congress leadership would have manufactured a way to not table the report.

Second was the shame of the Action Taken Report. It is obscene to even call it that. The ATR let off the man against whom there was “credible evidence” of organising and instigating the riots, Jagdish Tytler, because Nanavati wrote of his “very probable” involvement. Anyone who knows the rudiments of English will tell “very probable” means some involvement, not nothing at all, and we are here not judging the degree of involvement anyhow. Either someone was in on the massacre, or he was not, and Nanavati has pointed the finger at Tytler. He pointed the finger at Sajjan Kumar, a feebler finger perhaps, but there is no scope for acquittal here too. Murder is murder.

So the Congress leadership did not permit tabling the Nanavati report till it was forced to, and even then, it acquitted the two main massacre accused in the ATR. Not once in these twenty-one years has the Congress apologised for the massacre, and to the end, until the prime minister’s apology, it defended its past, it put a lock of silence on the misdeeds of its senior leaders. And when the PM apologised, he was forced to do so by the revulsion expressed throughout the country at the defense of mass murderers. The weight of public opinion moved him to apologise. One can take the charitable view that he did say sorry, that he heeded public opinion, but that is not the point.

When Manmohan Singh apologised, he was speaking for himself. On his own, he associated the Congress party with his apology, and in full public glare, the party could not shy away from his stand. But to this day, the Congress leadership has not apologised, and there is good reason to believe that even the belated exit of Tytler was forced by the PM, who could no longer face shame in Parliament, and be reviled by his community. His speech in Parliament, hinting that Tytler & Co would go, was made at his own behest, catching the Congress leadership by surprise, and to the last, Tytler held out. The fact that the PM was speaking for himself was also indicated by Tytler handing his resignation to Sonia Gandhi and not Manmohan Singh.

This is not the place to dredge up the fact that Manmohan Singh is not the government, but the PM never has been the Congress party, and in a sense, he is delinked from the 1984 massacre, because he was not in politics then. So what is the true value of his apology if the Congress party does not mean it? What his apology though has done for him is to increase revulsion for him in the Congress party. Jagdish Tytler, never the most civil man, has been badmouthing the PM, and his communal colour has been exposed in his attack on Sheila Dikshit in a recent television interview. So what meaning does any apology have if the Congress party does not make it, and Sikh leaders are cherry-picked for abuse?

But there are two other issues which flow from there. One is that public opinion will no longer condone the protection of 1984’s mass murderers. The Congress has been put on notice on this issue and in general. Unless it brings the murderers of 1984 to justice, it will be increasingly crippled with the burden of the anti-Sikh riots. There is a new blot on its name, and it will not erase. Through the anti-riot issue, general anger against the government is also being channeled, and this government is losing the faith of people sooner than the two-and-a-half years, the half-term mark, it usually takes.

The second thing that flows out is a very good thing, that protection of minority rights has become a central issue for the majority community, and this is a spontaneous happening, not arrived at some seminar. The Sikhs, although a religious minority with a distinct and distinguished identity, have been, were, and remain, part of the Indian mainstream, and no insidious effort to separate them would be tolerated. Meritocracy made General J.J.Singh the army chief, and Arjan Singh deserved becoming Marshall of the Air Force before him. If anybody can take credit for it, it is the Indian Constitution, which protects religious freedoms.

Sikhs have felt hurt that Manmohan Singh, in his eminent decency, should apologise, but not the Congress leadership, but the flip side is the country is with them in their hurt. What this proves, if any further proof is needed, is that the Congress party does not reflect the feelings of the country, and does not heed public opinion. It was this same disconnect which lead Indira Gandhi, while in power, to impose Emergency. Add now this to the already explosive contradictions within the UPA, and what do we have? The consequences look frightening in the coming months.