by Mark Tully
The security forces surrounding the Golden Temple were a frustrated lot. For more than a month they had watched as separatists inside the temple complex built fortifications. First the separatists had sandbagged windows and arches, and then, when that provoked no response, they had built brick walls. They had constructed battlements on the top of two towers known as bungas which were higher than any of the police positions. One of these looked down on to the headquarters of the police surrounding the complex, in a building called the Brahambuta Akhara, which belonged to a Sikh sect. To add insult to injury, the saffron flag of Khalistan flew from prominent points of the complex. The police were sure that Sikh militants were once again using the Golden Temple as the headquarters and communications centre for a campaign of terror. They had received many complaints maintaining that extortion, torture and murder were everyday occurrences inside the complex. Several bodies had been found in the drains outside the complex. But the police were not allowed to do anything: they were ordered just to stand by, as mute and humiliated spectators.
Two weeks earlier I had been standing with a sub-inspector of the paramilitary Central Reserve Police on top of one of the buildings overlooking the Golden Temple. He was a big man with a hard face and close-cropped grey hair. His medal ribbons showed that he was an army veteran re-recruited into the police. I pointed to the saffron flag flying from the clock tower and asked him what he thought of it. ‘Sahib, it is very bad for our izzat [honour],’ he replied. ‘These bastards, they are making us look fools. All the people in these alleys jeer at us when we are on patrol and ask, “What are you doing about the temple? Are you just waiting for the army to come and do your job again, like you did four years ago?” But what can we do? We don't have any orders. We could take those bastards out any time if only we were allowed to.’
With the wounding of Virk, there was a very real danger that the discipline which had been restraining the frustrated police would break down and that they would attack the temple complex, orders or no orders. Fearing this, Sarabjit Singh, the soft-spoken Sikh who was district commissioner of Amritsar, rushed to the temple, but he could do nothing to restore discipline. He told me, ‘Firing seemed to be coming from everywhere. I found that AK47 fire was coming from the temple and the police were replying with light machine-guns. No one seemed to have any orders. I stayed for half an hour, but no one was in a mood to stop firing.’ A police officer admitted that his men were enraged, and it was not possible to stop them firing.
When Sarabjit Singh got back to his office, he put the walled city surrounding the temple under curfew. Operation Black Thunder – the second battle of the Golden Temple – had started.
Senior superintendent of police Arora rang his headquarters in Chandigarh and got through to Julio Ribeiro, the former police officer who was now in charge of the Home Ministry in the Punjab government. Ribeiro had until recently been the head of the Punjab police force. He had made his name as an outstandingly successful commissioner of the Bombay police and had then been sent to Punjab when the morale of the police there collapsed because of the casualties they had suffered and their failure to make any impact on the Sikh militants. Ribeiro, although a Christian from Goa in western India, had succeeded in reviving the morale of the predominantly Sikh Punjab police and was respected by its officers.
Arora said to Ribeiro, ‘Virk has been shot and all my boys are mad. You know that Virk is very popular and I can't promise to control my boys. They are demanding to go in and take it out on those bastards. Too much has happened. They've had enough.’
Ribeiro insisted that the young police officer must control his men and keep them out of the temple complex. He promised Arora that some action would be taken, but only after he had consulted the central government in Delhi.
Attacking the temple complex was not a decision that Ribeiro or anyone in the Punjab government could take – the possible consequences were far too grave for that – so he spoke to the home minister in Delhi, to the minister for internal security and to the secretary of the Home Ministry. It was agreed that commandos from the National Security Guards – a new force raised by Rajiv Gandhi to be the SAS of India – would be flown to Amritsar and that Ribeiro would go there himself the next morning to make an assessment of the situation on the spot.
Ribeiro got back to S. S. P. Arora in Amritsar, told him what had been agreed and repeated his order that under no circumstances must any attempt be made to enter the temple complex. Arora said, ‘I'll do what I can to control the situation. I hope it'll be possible, but I have already told you my boys are in a foul mood.’
That night, both sides kept up the firing. The next day – Tuesday – Ribeiro arrived in Amritsar. He did indeed find the police in a foul mood. All his officers favoured entering the temple complex as soon as possible. They claimed that the Sikh community would rise in anger if the shrine was kept under attack for too long. Only the district commissioner, Sarabjit Singh, maintained that there would be no reaction in the countryside. He later explained to me, ‘I was confident there would be no reaction if we went against the separatists in the Golden Temple because I had been going out into the countryside and talking to people. People used to come to my office too, and I had been asking them. I was sure they had no sympathy for the separatists, because of the indiscriminate killings and all the other things that had been happening. The militants were alienated from the people. Short of signing a legal statement on stamped revenue paper, I could guarantee the government there would be no reaction.’
K. P. S. Gill, the man who had succeeded Ribeiro as director-general of the Punjab police, had also arrived in Amritsar. It was to be Gill, not Ribeiro, who would dominate the scene from now on. Ribeiro and Gill were very different. Ribeiro was a tall, bespectacled man with a white fringe of hair round the back of his bald head – an avuncular, mild-mannered figure. He was a devout Catholic and smiled a lot. His relations with the press were excellent, and journalists had built up his reputation for using his brain rather than the brawn preferred by most Indian police officers – they called him ‘Supercop’. But there was a hard side to this apparently soft man. It was Ribeiro who had started the bullet-for-bullet policy, as it was known in the Punjab: he gave the police powers to fire if they were fired on. These powers were sometimes used by officers to disguise the shooting of young men they had arrested but knew the paralysed courts would never convict – ‘false encounters’ as they are known in India.
K. P. S. Gill was not afraid to be known as a hard man. He was a Sikh himself and very proud of it – always wearing a khaki turban when in uniform. A man of few words, to those who didn't know him there was something sinister about this tall, thin police officer, with a white beard and an aquiline nose which dominated his face. He had returned to the Punjab with a reputation for ruthlessness won during his handling of earlier violence in the state of Assam.
Gill and Ribeiro, who was in effect his minister, disagreed about policing policy. Ribeiro told me, ‘Gill is being far too harsh. He thinks only of fighting terrorists, not of fighting terrorism. The police are turning the people against them, and you can't fight terrorism unless the people are on your side.’
Gill felt that he had a better understanding of the Punjab police force than an outsider like Ribeiro. When I asked him about the allegation that he was too harsh, he replied, ‘We have seen the morale of the Punjab police force collapse before. We don't want that to happen again. But I can assure you it will if senior officers don't back up their juniors. They believe that we must keep up the pressure on the militants, and they are the ones who are getting shot at, so I have to support them.’
Ribeiro and Gill had disagreements during Operation Black Thunder, but they have different memories about those disagreements. Ribeiro claimed that Gill supported his officers' demand to go into the temple immediately. But Gill maintained that he too told his men that there was no fear of a Sikh uprising. He said, ‘I knew that 1988 had been a bad year for the extremists. They
had started killing farmers, there had been rapes in the villages, there was the continual extortion of money. The militants had destroyed their own constituency, and the Khalistan movement had lost what support it might have enjoyed in the countryside. The men accepted my reassurance that action would be taken at the appropriate time and in the appropriate fashion.’
Whether Gill wanted to go into the temple complex immediately or not, no decision was made that day. But Gill's assurance that action would be taken was confirmed by the arrival of a contingent of the National Security Guard, which had been practising an assault on the temple complex for several months. One senior police officer suggested that the snipers who were part of the National Security Guard contingent should at least pick off any of the separatist leaders they saw moving around the complex, but the brigadier commanding them refused to allow that without clearance from Delhi, so Ribeiro, Gill and the governor of Punjab flew to Delhi to seek orders from Rajiv Gandhi.
While the police were waiting for instructions from Delhi, District Commissioner Sarabjit Singh was making the civilian arrangements for what he believed would be a long siege. His first problem was to arrange for a regular supply of food and other essential commodities in the area under curfew. By the second day, he told me, his arrangements were working well and he was able to assure Gill that the townspeople would be fed no matter how long the siege continued. Gurjeet Singh, a young Sikh lawyer who lived in one of the alleys surrounding the temple complex, was not impressed by the arrangements, however. He told me that his family did not receive any supplies from the government during Operation Black Thunder.
The second problem that Sarabjit Singh faced was the pilgrims who were stuck inside the temple. Virk had been shot on the day when Sikhs celebrated the accession of Guru Hargobind, who had built the Akal Takht, and so Sarabjit Singh was worried that there would be an unusually large number of pilgrims inside the temple because of the festival. Police intelligence assured him that fear of the militants had been keeping devotees away from the temple for some time now; nevertheless, Sarabjit Singh did not want to risk a repeat of Operation Blue Star, which also started on a Sikh festival day. In that operation, pilgrims were still inside the complex when the battle proper started. Many were killed, and those who survived were rounded up and roughly treated by the army. Some of them were arrested and held without trial for nearly five years – a major cause of the anger in the Sikh community.
Gill agreed to a brief cease-fire to get the pilgrims out – brusquely overruling suggestions that this too should be referred to Delhi – and this was announced over loudspeakers. Sarabjit Singh told me, ‘About 750 people came out. We were not prepared to transport so many, because the CID had told me there were only about 150 to 200 inside. But we were able to rustle up some police buses and other transport. I was afraid that some of the young men might be activists, so we separated them from the others and took them for questioning. We took the women and children to the kotwali [police station], where we gave them bananas and sandals because they had left their shoes at the gate of the temple when they entered.’
The police did indeed find that some of the young men who had taken advantage of the cease-fire had been sent out by the militants to incite violence and to arouse anger against the Golden Temple operation. Later, it also became apparent that not all the non-combatants had taken advantage of the cease-fire.
Rajiv Gandhi chaired the lengthy and difficult meeting in Delhi that night. Once again Ribeiro and Gill differ about what happened. According to Ribeiro, the director-general of police insisted that Operation Black Thunder must be completed within the next two or three days. Gill told me he had never urged the prime minister to ‘go in and get the terrorists’, but he did warn against ‘being over-cautious’. The central-government Intelligence Bureau was wary after the mistakes made in assessing the situation before Blue Star was launched; it insisted that great caution should be exercised this time, because the morale of the militants was very high. Gill totally disagreed with the assessment of the morale of the Sikh separatists, but he did accept that there were lessons to be learnt from Blue Star, and so it was decided that this time all operations should be conducted in daylight and that extremely accurate covering fire should be provided for forces assaulting any part of the temple complex.
The Gill plan, as Rajiv Gandhi described the arrangements which were eventually agreed, provided for the phased occupation of the temple complex. The army's lack of knowledge of local circumstances and customs had been a major disadvantage in Operation Blue Star, so it was agreed that Black Thunder should be a police, not an army, operation. For the same reason, command was given to Gill as the head of the Punjab police force – not to Brigadier Nanda, who was commanding the National Security Guard contingent and whose commandos were to provide accurate sniping and support fire and to be the storm troopers if it was decided to go into the temple. In spite of being in overall command, however, the director-general of police was given virtually no autonomy. He had strict orders not to start on any phase of his plan without first clearing it with Delhi. The meeting broke up at five a.m.
When Gill got back to Amritsar, his first priority was to prevent any of the separatists escaping from the temple complex. He did not want a repeat of the fiasco of what was officially known as Black Thunder One, the operation the last chief minister of Punjab, Surjit Singh Barnala, had mounted, only to find that all the militant leaders had fled. The police were ordered to step up the firing at the complex, so that the Sikhs inside couldn't move. The security belt surrounding the temple was tightened, and the curfew in the old city was strictly enforced – or at least those were Gill's orders.
According to Gurjeet Singh, the young lawyer living near the temple, Gill's curfew was nothing like as strict as the army curfew during Blue Star. ‘During Blue Star,’ he said to me, ‘the army used to shoot on sight anyone in the street. We were not allowed out for twenty days. They searched every house in the area regularly, and if they found a saffron turban like the militants used to wear they would shoot any young man in that house. When some militants did escape from the Golden Temple, the army forced some residents of this area to strip as a humiliation. The officers were not so bad. The jawans, the soldiers, were terrible.’ The young lawyer was convinced he would have been arrested if he had not been able to speak in English to the officers and persuade them that he was not a militant.
Black Thunder was much more relaxed, however. ‘During Black Thunder,’ Gurjeet Singh told me, ‘the Central Reserve Police used to apologize for searching our house, saying it was their duty. We used to give them tea and biscuits. When we came out of our houses, the police used to beg us to go back, saying, “We will be snubbed by our officers.” The atmosphere was quite relaxed. We spent much of the time playing cards on our verandah.’
Thursday saw the only anger in Amritsar against the siege of the Golden Temple, and that was a somewhat contrived anger. Jasbir Singh Rode, the head priest of the Akal Takht, led a march on the Golden Temple, but the police had no difficulty in rounding up the few people he had managed to muster. This strengthened Gill's conviction that there was no need to fear any public reaction to a long siege.
Gill had other worries, though. When he had been in Delhi, he had received the clear impression that, come what may, he would not be allowed to send the commandos into the heart of the complex, and this worried him. He told me, ‘We were concerned about how we could disengage if the pressure tactics didn't work and they didn't surrender. We couldn't go in and get them, but we had to be able to end the operation with our honour intact. The only thing that I could think of was that we would claim we had shot those who shot Virk and so our mission had been accomplished. That was one reason why I was anxious to get the snipers from the National Security Guards into action, picking off anyone who moved on the parikrama.’
Gill maintained that Brigadier Nanda, the commanding officer of the commandos, worked closely with him. The two had played c
ricket together as young men, and this apparently helped. Ribeiro had stayed behind in Delhi to act as liaison officer with the control team Rajiv Gandhi had set up. This was headed by the young minister for internal security, P. Chidambaram – a Harvard-trained lawyer with very little political experience: one of the new school of Westernized young men whom Rajiv Gandhi found it easier to work with than the traditional Indian politicians. According to Ribeiro, Nanda refused to order his snipers to fire until he got orders from Delhi – they didn't start picking off people moving around the parikrama until Ribeiro flew back to Amritsar with Chidambaram's clearance.
On that Thursday, Gill not only started the sniping at the militants but also completed the first phase of the operation to clear the temple complex. Under the Gill plan, the complex had been divided into three sectors. Gill believed that he had been given permission to capture the outer sector – the pilgrims' hostels and offices on the other side of the road running along the eastern wall of the complex. Gill was very anxious to move in there to prevent any escapes from the complex itself and to get new vantage points. He met with no resistance from the hostels and offices, but Delhi was not amused, as Gill told me.
‘I had to fly to Delhi that night to explain myself. The minister for internal security, Chidambaram, argued that it was not in the original plan. I said it was, and I had only gone ahead a little quicker than anticipated. But the job was already done and so no one could say much. I flew to Delhi almost every night of the operation to report progress to Chidambaram, and sometimes to Rajiv Gandhi himself.’
‘Surely,’ I asked, ‘you must have found all the back-seat driving from Delhi very frustrating? You were meant to be in command of the battle.’
‘No, I accepted it,’ Gill replied. ‘After all, whatever you journalists may think, Operation Black Thunder was not a battle: it had a major political dimension. If anything went wrong, it would have had very serious political consequences, so the political leadership had to be involved.’ Gill smiled and went on, ‘Of course, you wouldn't believe me if I said there were never any differences of opinion.’
