On June 2nd afternoon, two Sikh student from Delhi wanted to take a train back to their city to appear for an examination on 1st June morning. Although they had come in without any hindrance, it was not possible for them to leave without risking arrest. There were also 1300 Akali workers, including 200 women, who had come to join the program of agitation announced by the Akali Dal. According to eye-witnesses, approximately 10,000 people had gathered inside. Thousands of pilgrims came into the temple without restrictions. There was no curfew in Amritsar that night and the next day. When the firing stopped, a group of Akali volunteers courted arrest. The government of India’s document, called the White Paper on Punjab, released on Jdoes not acknowledge this incident.
The action claimed the lives of eight pilgrims, including a woman and a child, inside the temple complex, and injured twenty-five others. According to Devinder Singh Duggal, in-charge of the Sikh Reference Library located inside the Golden Temple complex and an eye-witness, Bhindranwale’s followers were under strict instructions not to fire a single shot unless and until the security forces or the army entered the holy Golden Temple. The objective of the barrage of firing, which lasted seven hours, was to assess the strength, the training and the preparedness of Bhindranwale’s resistance. Instead of targeting Bhindranwale, the sharp shooters aimed at various buildings, including the main shrine of Harmandir Sahib which received 34 bullet marks. On June 1 afternoon, mixed groups of various security agencies that had occupied the multi-storied buildings in the circumference did open fire against the temple complex when Bhindranwale was holding his audience on the roof of the kitchen building. It should also have been easy for specially trained sharp-shooters, who had positioned themselves on the buildings around the temple, to target Bhindranwale and his armed followers, and to neutralize them. The meetings were open to all, and it should have been possible for a group of commandos to nab him there by using minimal force. Until June 1 1984, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale held his regular public meetings on the roof of the community kitchen inside the Golden Temple complex. The President himself was ignorant about the impending operation. On May 30, President Zail Singh, the Supreme Commander of the Defence Forces, and himself a Sikh, assured a delegation from Punjab that the army had no intention to assault the temple. The Akali leaders could at least have been asked to take steps to ward off the pilgrims in view of the impending military operation. A team of Union Ministers deputed by Indira Gandhi met the top Akali leaders secretly on May 26, two days after the announcement of their new program of agitation.
Punjab should have been placed under a curfew if the government wanted to prevent innocent pilgrims from gathering at the Darbar Sahib in Amritsar and 42 other Gurdwaras throughout Punjab, which the army planned to attack, to celebrate Guru Arjun’s martyrdom day. On May 25, the government used the announcement to deploy 100,000 army troops throughout Punjab, also encircling 42 important Gurdwaras in the State, including the Golden Temple of Amritsar. On May 24 1984, the Akali Dal announced a new program to intensify the agitation from June 3, by blocking transport of Punjab’s food grains to other States, non-payment of all taxes due to the government and regular courting of arrest by Sikh volunteers. The Operation Bluestar was not only envisioned and rehearsed in advance, meticulously and in total secrecy, it also aimed at obtaining maximum number of Sikh victims, largely devout pilgrims unconnected with the political agitation. That is how Brigadier Dyer had explained his intention when the came to Jallianwala Bagh, near the Golden Temple, to disperse an illegal assembly sixty-five years ago on April 13, 19194. The assault, which the Sikhs themselves call the Ghallughara, had been diabolically conceived not only to scathe the Sikh psyche, but also to make the sufficient moral effect from a military point of view on those who were present, but more especially throughout the Punjab. The assault against the Golden Temple, codenamed Operation Bluestar, was launched on June 3, 1984, the martyrdom day of Guru Arjun who, as we earlier observed, had got the foundation of the Temple laid by a Muslim divine four hundred years ago and was the first of the Sikh Gurus to die in defiance of the Mughal Empire. Excerpted from the author’s monopraph submitted to Green College, Oxford, UK (Reuter Foundation Paper 128) * Eminent writer and analyst, author of The Sikh Struggle and The Sikh Unrest & The Indian State, Ajanta Books International, Delhi, 1997. The Ghalughara: Operation Blue Star – A Retrospect