India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  The two men who attacked me left me. I began to walk to a clinic. People were looking at me. Blood was oozing out of my trousers. The people who were looking were helpless. If they had helped me, they would have incurred the wrath of the terrorists. And then I asked a cycle-rickshaw-wallah – a lot of them there, outside the Golden Temple – to take me to a doctor, and then two Sikhs helped me. I later learned that the two men who had helped me were communists.

  ‘But I should also mention that Bhindranwale condemned the attack. He told some journalists that he didn’t believe in daggers – he believed in guns. And two of his main aides telephoned me at home to express their regrets. They said they were not behind the attack.

  ‘Then I was posted to the East by my paper, but deviously, for my safety.’

  Dalip, another reporter, told of what happened after the Golden Temple had been occupied by Bhindranwale.

  ‘People stopped going to the Golden Temple. Both my neighbours stopped going, though they wanted to. People were angry about what was happening in the Temple, but the Sikh political party never condemned the desecration of the Temple by Bhindranwale and his guns. The Sikh political party were fighting a joint agitation with Bhindranwale from the Golden Temple, and they were afraid of him. He was a killer. He didn’t worry about Hindu or Sikh – once you opposed him, you would be on his hit list.

  ‘I was witness to one killing he ordered. I was sitting in Room 47 on the third floor of the Guru Nanak Niwas. This was one of the rest houses in the Temple where he used to stay with his followers. There were armed men sitting all around, eight, 10 people. This was in the middle of 1983. Suddenly one guy entered. He was a middle-aged Sikh, in shirt and pyjamas, and he was looking glum. His hair was cut and his beard was cut awkwardly. He started talking to Bhindranwale: “Santji, this is what Bichu Ram, a police inspector, has done to me. He took me to a police station and desecrated me. He cut my hair and my beard.”

  ‘Bhindranwale immediately asked one of his aides to take down all the details. Fifteen days or so later this Bichu Ram, in charge of one of the police stations, was shot dead.

  ‘The second way of operating, of ordering killings, was to pronounce the names of people whom he wanted killed from a public platform. He did this from the 19th of July 1982 till June 1984. He would make a speech. Always against Mrs Gandhi, Giani Zail Singh [the Indian President], and Darbara Singh, the chief minister of Punjab. And he would say these people should be taught a lesson for having harmed the Sikhs. Afterwards he would talk against some local police officers. And many of the people whose names he spoke would be later killed. Bachan Singh, a senior police officer of Amritsar, was killed, together with his wife and daughter.

  ‘I used to talk to Sikhs. But by and large Sikhs did not come forward to condemn the happenings in the Golden Temple. They were blaming New Delhi – everything was being done by New Delhi. They were never criticizing Bhindranwale and his men. Whenever terrorists were killed the Sikhs were very upset – they spoke of fake encounters. Whenever the terrorists killed innocent people, I never heard my neighbours expressing regret.’

  Dalip had Sikh connections; this explained some of his passion.

  I said, ‘Someone who knows Sikhs well has told me that there was something wrong with the way Bhindranwale and his followers looked. They had the eyes of disturbed people. Was it a kind of communal madness, you think?’

  ‘It’s the minority fear, the persecution complex, the death wish. It’s a new religion. It has produced great generals and great sportsmen. But it hasn’t produced great religious thinkers to strengthen the religion. Nothing happened after Guru Gobind Singh set up the Khalsa in 1699. Since 1699 it has produced no great thinkers.

  ‘It’s madness, it’s fanaticism. It can’t really be explained. It’s the tragedy of the Sikh religion that in the post-independence era a man like Bhindranwale has come to be accepted as the most important Sikh leader since Guru Gobind Singh. He was called in his lifetime by many Sikhs the 11th Guru. And he really was a product of Mrs Gandhi. She built him up to fight the Sikh party, the Akalis.’

  ‘Why did educated people give their support to Bhindranwale?’

  ‘Frustration.’

  ‘When did you first see him yourself?’

  ‘The 24th of July 1982. In the Golden Temple. The famous Room 47. I was checked by his bodyguard. Guns in the Temple were seen for the first time in 1982, and it’s a perversion of the religion.

  ‘He arrived in the Golden Temple on the 20th of July 1982. He left it dead on the sixth of June 1984. He harmed the Sikhs the most, the Sikh religion the most. He harmed Punjab, and he harmed India.

  ‘The aides questioned me, and when I told them I was a journalist, they smiled and were very happy, and they immediately escorted me inside.

  ‘I greeted him. He was sitting on a string bed, and he was nicely dressed up, wearing that long white cotton gown going down to his knees, and that blue turban. And his revolver hung from a belt around his waist. He had angry eyes – you asked about the eyes. He looked lean and hungry, the type of people who are dangerous. He said, “Who are you?” Very dictatorial. I said, “I’m a journalist.” I gave him the name of the weekly I worked for, and I mentioned that I was also the correspondent for a Canadian paper. “Do you want to interview me?” “No, I’ve just come for your darshan.” ’

  Darshan is what a holy man offers when he shows himself: the devotee gets his blessing merely from the sight, the darshan, of the holy man.

  ‘He was very flattered. He smiled and he laughed. He had been very serious when I entered.

  ‘I found an old lady handing over to him bundles of currency notes, and she also removed one or two of her gold rings and handed them over to him. Standing over the old lady was an old man, who I learnt later was General Shabeg Singh.’ Major-General Shabeg Singh: cashiered in his mid-fifties for embezzlement, and now acting as Bhindranwale’s military adviser.

  ‘Shabeg was lean and thin, middle height, very fair, wearing spectacles, flowing beard, white beard, white pyjama and kurta. He was smiling. I shook hands with him. He said, “I’m General Shabeg Singh. I led the Mukti Bahini in the Bangladesh war.” I said, “Sir, you are a general. How did you get attached to Bhindranwale?” I needed copy for a colour story – my first day in Amritsar. His reply was, “I see spirituality in his eyes. He is like Guru Gobind Singh.”

  ‘I came out of the Golden Temple a sad man, wondering about the fate of the community, wondering about the general’s reply, comparing Bhindranwale with Guru Gobind Singh. I was very sad when I sat at the typewriter. Because I was not impressed by Bhindranwale. I knew he was not Guru Gobind Singh. I knew he was just being used by the Indira Congress to harm the rival Akali party in Punjab. He was an ordinary man on whom greatness was being imposed. Why should the community accept him? Why should General Shabeg Singh not judge him as a man? Why were people just impressed by his angry looks and the armed men around him? He was not an intellectual, not a thinker, and he was not a pious man.’

  Dalip meant, I suppose, that Bhindranwale wasn’t really a man of God. But what were the noticeable religious aspects of the man? There must have been many.

  ‘He was a vegetarian, a lover of music. He would go to the Golden Temple water tank every morning at three and listen to the music played by the blind musicians from inside the main shrine. They play on the harmonium and recite the scriptures. That music is soothing, divine – and I give him full marks for wanting to be part of that. You feel the presence of God when that music is played in the silence, and there are no people around. He did that every morning for one hour. And he was not a womanizer.’

  The vegetarianism, the love of music, the early rising, the sexual control, were run together in this account to give an idea of the austerity of the man that so impressed people in the early days, when he went out preaching and urged people to be like their father, the Guru.

  Dalip said, ‘He made himself a monster.’ Monster: it was the word people
used of the later man. ‘He began to think he would rule the country or rule Khalistan. He wanted to rule something. He accepted the compliment when people told him he was like Guru Gobind Singh. Subconsciosly, Bhindranwale began imagining himself to be Guru Gobind Singh – a reincarnation of the 10th Guru.

  ‘I will give you two more pictures of him. The first is from the middle of 1983. A colleague on an Indian daily did a big story saying that Naxalites had entered Bhindranwale’s camp. I checked out my colleague’s story and found it was all right, and I extended it with inquiries from my own sources. Bhindranwale hated the story in the daily, but I learned about that only later. The day after my own story came out, I went to see Bhindranwale. That was my practice, to go and see him after things about him by me were printed.

  ‘The same room in the Temple. Room 47. Now I can open the door and go in coolly – everybody knows me now. I took along a friend with me, someone from the medical college. The moment I open the door of Room 47, I see the angriest look in his bloodshot eyes. They were red eyes when he was angry, which often he was. And I got the message. There were eight or nine of his armed admirers in the room, and two journalists were interviewing him.

  ‘He started shouting at me, in crude Punjabi, at the top of his voice: “How dare you compare me with thieves and scoundrels and lumpens?” That is what he thought Naxalites were. He continued shouting at me in this way for three minutes, and then he ordered one of his men to bring the copy of the magazine with my story. And I, the magazine’s correspondent, stood in front of him like a schoolchild who has offended the teacher. I couldn’t utter a word – I was so afraid: I could see the guns around, and I knew he could kill me if he wanted to.

  The magazine arrived. He handed it to me. He had cooled down a bit, but he was still very angry. He asked me to translate what I had written into Punjabi. I pleaded that I wasn’t good at translating from English into Punjabi. He cooled down more. And then, to my amazement – I realized how shrewd he was – he signalled to me, while he was sitting on his string bed – I was no more than four feet away – to come closer to him.

  ‘He wanted me to come closer to him, and when I went closer to him on his string bed, he pulled my head down and he whispered into my ears. “You are like a younger brother to me,” he said in Punjabi, whispering, “and still you write against me.”

  ‘The meeting ended, and I came out of the room with my friend, the man from the medical college. He had wanted to see Bhindranwale, and had asked me to take him, because as a journalist I could go in and out of Room 47. I apologized to my friend for the shock treatment.

  ‘I didn’t meet Bhindranwale for a couple of days after that. I felt most uncomfortable. I didn’t know how to report him. I knew one had to be critical of him, but it was so difficult to be sitting in Amritsar and to attack him. For a few months I kept quiet.

  ‘But the magazine wanted stories, and in October 1983 I did a story saying that Bhindranwale was losing his popularity, that not many people were coming to see him. The magazine played it up: ‘The Sant in Isolation’, a full two pages, with a big photograph of that big man in his white cotton gown, half smiling, half frowning. And, as usual, after my story appeared, I went to see him.

  ‘He was having a walk on the terrace of the rest house, the Guru Nanak Niwas. Not many people were there – 40, 50, mostly his followers. He started walking with me. Obviously he didn’t know about the story. That was the last time I had a friendly chat with him. The next day I went again to see him, accompanying a Canadian TV team as an interpreter. He had learnt about the story by then, and in full public view, on the same terrace of the Guru Nanak Niwas where he had walked with me alone the day before, he told me that if I didn’t stop writing against him, then I wouldn’t be alive. He said this in Punjabi, in symbolic language. Sannu uppar charana anda hai. “We know how to take you up.”

  ‘After this I stopped seeing Bhindranwale. I didn’t report on him. I didn’t do any critical story. I was afraid. On the 23rd of December 1983 he shifted from the Guru Nanak Niwas to the Akal Takht, from the rest house to a sacred building. I went with some local journalists to see him. He was sitting on the floor – 50, 60 people with him. Some fruits and sweets lying near by. He gave me a piece of sweet and a banana, and he made some sarcastic remark, which I don’t recall. Obviously he didn’t like me any more. Some weeks later a colleague was stabbed outside the Temple. This didn’t have anything to do with Bhindranwale, but in the atmosphere of fear nobody went to the aid of the stabbed man. They just stood and watched him bleed. I asked my paper to move me somewhere else.’

  Just as Gurtej, talking of the fields and harvest, fell into a kind of lyricism, so I felt that Dalip, talking of the morning music in the Golden Temple, had spoken with a special reverence for the sacredness of the old site. I asked how shocking Operation Bluestar, the army action at the Temple, had been to him.

  ‘Bluestar itself was not shocking to me. What was shocking was the manner in which it was done. It was a very bad operation. I thought Bhindranwale and his men could have been caught easily without bloodshed. I felt sorry for the 93 soldiers who were killed. They chose such a bad day to catch Bhindranwale. And they didn’t even catch him.’

  He was killed on 6 June; and General Shabeg was killed. Many other people with him managed to leave the Temple before the army action. They lived.

  Kuldip was one of those who had been with Bhindranwale right up to the end, but had somehow lived. He had been in hiding for five years. ‘It’s a hard life, an ascetic life, moving from place to place. The police always get to find where you are, and then you have to move.’ He had been active in the All-India Sikh Students Federation: a strange name, because the group was known for its violent inclinations, and the prominent people in it were not really young, and could be considered students only in the broadest way.

  Kuldip was about fifty, but he looked older. His face was creased and lined, with a further network of thin worry-lines, speaking of internal stresses even below those stresses connected with his life on the run. He dressed in the palest colours – his turban was of the palest brown – as though he wished not to draw attention to himself. Those colours, the lined face, and the small, quiet eyes suggested a deeper withdrawal.

  He came an hour earlier than we had arranged, and he came straight up to my hotel room. He had to wait while I finished a long telephone call. He didn’t seem to mind waiting. He sat quietly in the armchair, and I found it hard to believe that the quietly dressed man sitting in the hotel room was the ‘activist’ I had been told he was. It even occurred to me that he might have been from the police. When we began to talk, I asked him about his life on the run.

  He said, ‘So many people who are with me have been tortured to death and killed. Hundreds have been killed in false encounters. They are being killed for the freedom of the human race.’

  The freedom of the human race?

  He meant that. The current Sikh movement was intended ‘to undo the political and social injustice of the world.’ The goal was ‘political power guided by Sikh religious principles and Sikh religious force’. The ultimate goal was ‘a universal religious system, a universal spiritual system, universal humanistic values’.

  ‘This is just the microcosmic experiment in the Punjab. Already we had in the time of the kingdom of Ranjit Singh this experiment in Punjab. We would like to recover the Sikh system of that time, the Sikh system of the 19th century, before the annexation of the Punjab by the English. And we want to apply that system to the whole of the world.’

  I wasn’t prepared for the language. Perhaps, then, he was or had been a student, exposed to the language and views of someone like Kapur Singh.

  How did he define the Sikh 19th-century system?

  ‘A secular system, a socialistic system also, a Sikh socialistic system. The main point is having the Sikh religious and political system along with the socialism. Religion and spirituality are intrinsically inseparable parts of the human person
ality. Similarly, the urge to dominate, to have political power, is also part of the human personality. This is so in animals, in birds also. And why not in human beings? Animals have got their leaders, the birds have got their leaders. Similarly, Khalsa [the Sikh brotherhood, as established by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699] wants to be the leader of the world, as it has got the inseparable elements of that leadership in its character.’

  He thought that the goal would be reached in 10 or 15 years. At the moment the struggle was going badly. ‘There is no discipline. There is no central leadership. We have lost control, and this thing is now going in favour of the government. Some of these anti-social elements are semi-religious people attracted by the emotional aspect of the movement. They are not deeply read, and they don’t have regard for the deeply read and educated people, because these deeply read people don’t believe in killing people aimlessly. No doubt there are some government agents also involved, and the blame is being put on the Sikhs. But our group’ – the Sikh Students Federation – ‘has not so many bad elements, comparatively.’

  He had been born in a part of the Punjab that had gone to Pakistan in 1947, at the time of the partition. ‘My great-grandparents were generals in the army of Ranjit Singh. My ancestors fought in both Anglo-Sikh wars, 1843, 1849. One was commander of 300 men, and so was the other. Around 1900 half the family got converted to Islam. They fell in love with some Muslim girl, and got converted. Our parents felt bad about it.’ In 1947 the Sikh part of the family came over to India, to a part of the Indian Punjab that later became part of the state of Haryana. They had about 80 acres there. ‘One-tenth of what we had in Pakistan. This was the price of our sacrifice for freedom.’

  I asked whether it was irrigated land. Water was such a talking point in the Punjab: there was such resentment (in spite of the Punjab’s own green, rich fields) of the water of the rivers of the Punjab going to other states.