by Mark Tully
Gill had rushed down to supervise the arrests. He pulled two of the men aside and asked whether there was anyone left in the temple. Surprisingly, he didn't recognize the two men as the important militant leaders Nirvair Singh and Malkiat Singh Ajnala. They said three people had still not surrendered. Gill asked them to go back to the Golden Temple and bring out the three who remained. They refused.
Eventually one young Sikh did agree to go back to the Golden Temple, provided Gill sent an official with him. The two men entered the temple, and Gill heard raised voices. Then suddenly three people walked out of the temple. One was a vast man more than six feet tall with the shoulders of an ox and a great barrel of a chest. Gill did recognize him – as Karaj Singh Thande, a former sergeant-major in the army who had deserted after Operation Blue Star. Thande suddenly staggered. The police in their headquarters in the Brahambuta Akhara opened fire in panic and Thande fell to the ground. A second man started running. The police fired on him and he fell down dead. The only one of the three to come out alive was a mentally defective young man who had been caught inside the Golden Temple accidentally. When the body of Thande was recovered, it was found that he had taken cyanide.
Ajnala and Nirvair Singh were kept separate from the rest of the prisoners. Ajnala sat on a wall wearing just a dirty lungi and nursing an ugly open wound in his shoulder. He had been shot taking part in the only escape attempt of the siege. On the day Virk was shot, Ajnala had told Dinesh Kumar that he would give ‘a fitting reply’ if the security forces tried to force the militants out. Two weeks earlier I had asked Nirvair Singh what would happen if the temple were attacked, and he had replied, ‘We will defend it until we die. We will be very happy to die for Khalistan.’
According to Gill, thirty people were killed in the entire operation – most of them shot by the snipers. One hundred and ninety-two people surrendered. The security forces suffered only three casualties – the three men wounded in the attack on the buildings on the edge of the complex.
Gill's triumph was short-lived. On Thursday night he was trying to get a well-earned rest when he was woken to be told that Chidambaram and the home minister, Buta Singh, had arrived in Amritsar and were demanding to see him. That meeting turned into a bitter four-hour row. Chidambaram had issued orders that the filth and squalor inside the Golden Temple should be shown on the government-controlled television, to discredit the Sikh separatists. Gill had questioned the wisdom of that: he said he didn't know what effect it would have on the Sikh mind and he thought it was not worth the risk of causing offence, but the ministers overruled him. When no film appeared on television, the two ministers thought that Gill had deliberately disobeyed them and they had flown to Amritsar to discipline him. It was not until the television producer himself was found that Gill convinced the two ministers that there had been no film because the television team did not have lights.
The two ministers were also livid because Gill had allowed the temple management committee, which was dominated by the Sikh religious party the Akali Dal, into the complex to take an inventory of the gold stored there for the replating of the dome of the Akal Takht. The ministers accused him of handing back the temple to the committee without their permission. Gill argued that the temple had not been handed back. He also asked what the government would have done if the committee had later accused officials or the police of stealing some of the gold.
There was a third argument over Chidambaram's insistence that the security forces should now search the complex. Gill asked him, ‘If the prime minister was so anxious to keep the security forces off the parikrama during the operation, why throw away all the psychological advantage we have won now?’ Chidambaram eventually accepted that argument. A senior civil servant who accompanied the two ministers from Delhi later told me he was ‘reluctantly proud’ of the way Gill stood up to his political masters.
Operation Black Thunder was a major set-back to the pride and the standing of the Khalistan movement. Young men who had so often sworn to defend the Golden Temple with their blood and prided themselves on being followers of the ‘martyr’ Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale were seen on television walking round the parikrama with their hands above their heads and surrendering meekly to the police. The desecration of the Sikhs' most holy shrine was also eventually shown on television – the brass pots full of urine and faeces, the cooking utensils, the clothes and rugs littered all over the stained red carpet, and the arms and ammunition.
Worse was to come for the cause of Khalistan. When the police first interrogated Ajnala, he confessed that two people had been tortured to death and their bodies had been buried in the rubble of the old Akal Takht opposite the residential buildings. He was taken to the mound of masonry and pointed out the position of the bodies. Labourers who were engaged to dig them out eventually discovered not just two but forty bodies. Those at the bottom were skeletons. The young militants claiming to fight for a land where the Sikh religion could flourish in all its pristine purity had defiled the relics of their shrine – relics which pious Sikhs regarded as sacred.
There had been rumours of murder and torture in the Golden Temple complex after the militants regained control of it. Here was proof of murder. Men and women had been killed because they were suspected of being police informers, because they had backed the wrong group of Khalistanis or because they had been relatives of rich men who were getting a little reluctant to respond to extortion. Gurjeet Singh, the young lawyer who lived in a lane just behind the Guru Ram Das hostel, had seen bodies thrown out of the temple and heard the screams of people being tortured. The journalist Dinesh Kumar had once been forced to watch a man roped to a pillar being whipped with a leather thong and then thrashed with a stick in what the militants called their ‘interoga-tion centre’ in the temple complex.
I visited several Punjab villages just after Operation Black Thunder. For the first time, villagers were prepared to speak openly against the militants. In one village, I was told they were a disgrace to Sikhism; in another, that they were worse than common criminals. In a third, I was told that the Khalistan movement had been created by the government to give it an excuse for persecuting Sikhs. A team of academics who also visited the Punjab after Black Thunder wrote in the independent and respected magazine the Economic and Political Weekly, ‘It was only after Operation Black Thunder forced the Khalistanis to surrender that the erstwhile “silent majority” of Sikhs began to voice their misgivings about them.’ The academics also remarked, ‘The Sikhs have made it apparent through their response to Operation Black Thunder that the extremists do not speak for them. If New Delhi is seriously interested in bringing an end to the sufferings of the people of Punjab, then the present popular mood in the state offers it yet another opportunity.’
New Delhi was not interested. Rajiv Gandhi did take some cosmetic measures to woo the Sikhs, but they did more harm than good. He released some of the innocent people who had been arrested by the army during Operation Blue Star, but this just served to highlight the illegality of their detention. He also visited Punjab for the first time in three years, but only to announce some economic measures to help the state – which had the somewhat unfortunate effect of giving the Sikhs the impression that the prime minister thought they were a purchasable commodity. Some Punjab civil servants had advised that during his visit the prime minister should pray in a famous Sikh temple in Govindwal, the town where he announced the government's largesse, but the secularists in Delhi overruled that: ‘There must’, they said, ‘be no pandering to Sikh religious sentiments.’
Chidambaram, in an interview he gave after Operation Black Thunder, blamed the continuing impasse in Punjab on the Akali Dal. He said, ‘The Punjab problem has many dimensions… but most important is the collapse of the moderate leadership.’ When asked whether the central government was not responsible for the collapse of the moderate leadership, Chidambaram replied, ‘The government has always extended its support to the moderates. The collapse has come from within.�
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If Rajiv Gandhi had really been interested in reviving the moderate leadership of the Akali Dal, he should have called an election for the Punjab state assembly. The lure of power would have brought the leadership of the Akali Dal together as it had done in the election Rajiv Gandhi called after the signing of the accord. The politicians who had supported the separatists would have been discredited and so would not have been able to put up a fight. There would have been the almost certainty of Punjab being ruled by a Sikh government again, with all that could have meant for the restoration of the community's confidence in the central government. But then the Punjab problem had been precipitated by Indira Gandhi's desire to break the traditional Akali Dal, in the mistaken belief that this would make Punjab a Congress Party stronghold. Rajiv Gandhi was not about to help the Akali Dal to get back in business.
Eighteen months after Operation Black Thunder when the general election was held, with Punjab still under central-government rule and no major concessions made to the Sikhs, nine out of the thirteen seats in Punjab were won by candidates supported by the separatists. They included the widow and the father of Beant Singh, one of the two bodyguards who had assassinated Indira Gandhi; a senior police officer still under arrest facing charges of involvement in the assassination; and the leader of one of the militant organizations, who was also under arrest. The moderate Akali Dal and the Congress Party were trounced.
The Punjab problem might have been precipitated by Indira Gandhi's desire to break the Akali Dal, but she had been able to get support for this because in India it is only considered respectable to believe in the total separation of religion and politics – as if that has ever been achieved in a society which is still religious. This is taken to mean that it is justifiable to destroy a religious party like the Akali Dal. Those who warned that Sikhs wishing to have a party of their own were ‘communal’ – a threat to secularism – have been proved wrong. If ever a party would have been justified in becoming communal, it would have been the Akali Dal after the massacre of Sikhs when Indira Gandhi was killed. But its leaders did not preach hatred, nor did the Sikh community take revenge.
India is not alone in the world in facing terrorism, nor is it the only country to have used its army to fight terrorists, but Operation Blue Star, and the military rule that Indira Gandhi imposed on Punjab after it, went far beyond anti-terrorist tactics. Her son did not use the army in Punjab, but it was always there in reserve. He did use the paramilitary police, who are now the first line of defence when the government needs to call out armed forces to perform the old colonial function of ‘aid to the civil power’. There has never been any significant political protest in India against the brutal tactics used by the army and the paramilitary police in curbing uprisings or other challenges to the central government's authority, whether in the remote tribal states of the north-eastern hills, in Punjab or now in Kashmir. It is surely because politicians know that they have the ultimate sanction the power to declare war on a section of their own people – that they do not feel bound to look for political solutions to problems. If Indira and Rajiv Gandhi had not known that they could always use the army to suppress the Sikhs, they would never have allowed the situation in Punjab to deteriorate so far that they were both obliged to mount operations against the Golden Temple.
6
COMMUNISM IN CALCUTTA
Joseph Stalin glowered down on the Soviet fraternal delegation attending the thirteenth party conference of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). This must have seemed a particularly unfraternal gesture to the comrades from Moscow. Their Indian hosts knew full well that the Soviets had come with the hope of selling perestroika; they also knew, of course, that Stalin was anathema to Mikhail Gorbachev. The host party did not intend a deliberate slight, but it was determined to send a clear message to its own cadres that, in India at least, Stalin had not been dethroned.
At first sight it might seem strange that a party which has often been described – wrongly in my view – as an Asian version of Eurocommunism should be so concerned about preserving the reputation of the dictatorial Stalin. But communism in India owes a great debt to Stalin. He may have been a dictator, but at least he was a realist when it came to India. Immediately after independence, the Indian communist movement identified the new ruling class as bourgeois compradors – agents of a foreign power – allied with imperialists. They were reckoned to be too enfeebled to stand up to an insurgency, and so the communists committed themselves to installing their system of government by force. But the compradors and the imperialists proved less feeble than the communists had thought, and the people of India did not rally to the red flag. Eventually Stalin intervened. In 1950 he summoned a delegation of three leading Indian communists to Moscow. There he questioned them about their strategy and the help they required from him. The Indian communists displayed a less than convincing mastery of the art of war and were particularly ignorant about the arms required for an insurrection and the difficulties of transporting them. Stalin pointed out that the centre of their insurgency, in the Telengana region in southern India, was too far away from any port for him to be able to help very much. He advised his Indian comrades to drop the insurgency and prepare for the elections due shortly.
The delegates took Stalin's advice, and since then the main elements in the Indian communist movement have stuck to the democratic path. In 1957, the world's first democratically elected communist government came to power in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala, was the venue of that thirteenth party conference.
Once communism had become an Indian movement, not a Soviet one, it was inevitable that the communists would follow the fissiparous pattern of Indian politics. They are continually in flux, with politicians walking out of one party sometimes to join another, sometimes to form a splinter group which they claim is the genuine party, and sometimes to return eventually to the fold from which they strayed.
The communists’ first split was based on serious ideological differences: it was not just the result of frustrated personal ambitions, as happens often in India. What can only be described as the right wing of the party favoured some sort of compromise with the Congress Party – or at least with those whom it identified as progressive elements in that party. The left wing regarded the Congress as irredeemably bourgeois. The right wing also sided firmly with the Soviet Union in the great divide in world communism; the left leant towards China, although it did not commit itself to either side. When the split was formalized in 1964, the left adopted the title of the Communist Party of India (Marxist); the right remained the Communist Party of India.
There were to be more divisions in the movement, but these two parties remained the major contenders for the communist vote. Just to make the whole affair thoroughly Indian, the great divide within the Communist Party has never been final. That, in my view, is not at all surprising in Indian politics. Since their divorce, the Marxists and the Communist Party of India have been partners in several coalition governments in both Kerala and West Bengal, but the Marxists have been far more successful electorally than the pro-Moscow communists. The Marxists’ greatest success has been in West Bengal, which they have ruled continuously since 1977, officially as partners in a Left Front but in practice as very much the dominant partner.
West Bengal is the obvious place to try to start an Indian revolution. During the independence movement, Bengal was the only state where the British faced a serious threat from terrorism. It also produced Subhas Chandra Bose, the most aggressive president the Indian National Congress elected. Mahatma Gandhi was so alarmed by the militant Bose that he prevented him taking office for a second time. West Bengal has a volatile and well-educated middle class. Caste – often seen as the greatest barrier to revolutionary politics in India – plays less of a role in West Bengal than in other major Indian states. Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal, is synonymous with poverty and squalor. I would suggest that Calcutta's bad name is not entirely jus
tified, but there is no doubt that its slums and shanty towns should be fertile ground for revolutionaries. It is therefore strange that, with all this going for it, a party which still reveres the name of Stalin should have provided such a mild and unrevolutionary government.
I went to Calcutta just after the thirteenth party conference of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The papers were carrying reports of a critique of perestroika by the editor of the Marxist, the party's ‘theoretical quarterly’. The editor had complained of ‘a certain ahistorical attitude towards the earlier years of Soviet society under Stalin's leadership’. He had doubts about ‘the appeal to the market’. He was concerned about the stress on encouraging ‘individual initiative and personal gain’, and warned that personal holdings for peasants could not ‘be a permanent feature of the socialist society’. The Marxist's editor would also like to have seen ‘more emphasis on centralized planning’ in the documents and speeches of the last conference of the Soviet Communist Party. He warned Mr Gorbachev not to blame the economic crisis in the Soviet Union entirely on ‘bureaucratism’ – pointing out that the ‘old spirit of socialist consciousness’ had not been ‘continually rekindled’.
Calcutta under the Marxists showed few signs of ‘socialist consciousness’ and all too many signs of ‘bureaucratism’. The party appeared to have abandoned centralized planning in an all-out effort to attract private capital to revive industry in West Bengal. As for agriculture, the Marxists had clearly allied themselves with the peasant farmers. Journalists I met described them as ‘kulaks’ – rich peasants – although that was something of an exaggeration. Life in the capital was continuing in a distinctly laissez-faire atmosphere. The only place I could detect Stalin was on pavement stalls selling his picture alongside those of other noncommunist heroes of Bengal and members of the Hindu pantheon.
