Operation Blue Star

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File:Blue star akal takht.jpg

Akal Takht building after Operation Blue Star

The Indian Army attacked the Harmandir Sahib complex, along with 37 other gurduārās simultaneously, in June 1984. This assault was code-named, Operation Bluestar.

Details

For over a year, the Indian army had been preparing for an attack on the terrorists hiding within Darbar Sahib. The state sought to “make out that the Golden Temple was the haven of criminals, a store of armory and a citadel of the nation’s dismemberment conspiracy.”

The role of the Third Agency

The Surya magazine published a special report detailing how the Third Agency, a special intelligence outfit created by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Secretariat, R. Shankaran Nair, was instrumental in smuggling most of the arms inside the Darbar Sahib. “One week before the Army action, Punjab police had intercepted two truck loads of weapons and ammunition in the Batala sub-division of Gurdaspur district. But the officer of the Third Agency, in-charge of Amritsar, persuaded the director-general of police (DGP) to release them and send them along safely to the Golden Temple.” There are claims that Sikh leaders such as Dr. Jagjit Singh Chohan, Harchand Singh Longowal, Didar Bains, Ganga Singh Dhillon, much of the Akali Dal leadership, and others were complicit in the attack on the Golden Temple.

Invasion takes place on a major Sikh holiday

According to plan, the Indian army invaded the temple in an assault that was code named “Operation Blue Star” on 5 June, 1984 to coincide with the martyrdom day of Guru Arjan. It is common knowledge that this gurpurab (commemoration of Guru Arjan’s martyrdom) attracts an unusually large number of Sikh visitors to the temple, just like a large number of Muslims visit Mecca during the month of Ramadan. Ram Narayan Kumar notes, “Operation Blue Star was not only envisioned and rehearsed in advance, meticulously and in total secrecy, it also aimed at obtaining the maximum number of Sikh victims, largely devout pilgrims unconnected with the political agitation.”

The scale of the attack

Cynthia Kepply Mahmood, describing the scale of the attack, writes:

"When it attacked the Golden Temple complex at Amritsar in 1984, containing the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, the ostensible aim was to rid the sacred buildings of the militants who had taken up shelter inside. But the level force used in the attack was utterly incommensurate with this limited and eminently attainable aim. Seventy thousand troops, in conjunction with the use of tanks and chemical gas, killed not only the few dozen militants who didn’t manage to escape the battleground but also hundreds (possibly thousands) of innocent pilgrims, the day of the attack being a Sikh holy day. The Akal Takht, the seat of temporal authority for the Sikhs, was reduced to rubble and the Sikh Reference Library, an irreplaceable collection of books, manuscripts, and artifacts bearing on all aspects of Sikh history, burned to ground. Thirty-seven other shrines were attacked across Punjab on the same day. The only possible reason for this appalling level of state force against its own citizens must be that the attempt was not merely to “flush out,” as they say, a handful of militants, but to destroy the fulcrum of a possible mass resistance against the state."

The targeting of civilians during the attack

The most disturbing aspect of the operation was the targeting of civilians by the Indian army. Contrary to the army Lt. General K. Sundarji’s statement—“We went inside with humility in our hearts and prayers on our lips”-—for the invading troops “every Sikh inside was a militant.” Mark Tully, in his famous account of the invasion, writes: “Karnail Kaur, a young mother of three children…said, ‘When people begged for water some jawans told them to drink the mixture of blood and urine on the ground.’” Tully records an eye-witness account by Bhan Singh, the then SGPC Secretary:

"I saw about thirty-five or thirty-six Sikhs lined up with their hands raised above their heads. And the major was about to order them to be shot. When I asked him for medical help, he got into rage, tore my turban off my head, and ordered his men to shoot me. I turned back and fled…Sardar Karnail Singh Nag, who had followed me, also narrated what he had seen, as well as the killing of thirty-five to thirty-six young Sikhs by cannon fire. All of them were villagers."

C.K.C. Reddy, while writing on the army action notes:

"The whole of Punjab and especially the Golden Temple Complex, was turned into a murderous mouse trap from where people could neither escape nor could they seek succor of any kind...The bodies of the victims of military operation in Punjab were unceremoniously destroyed without any attempt to identify them and hand them over to their relatives...The most disturbing thing about the entire operation was that a whole mass of men, women, and children were ordered to be killed merely on the suspicion that some terrorists were operating from the Golden Temple and other Gurdwaras. There had been no judicial verdict of guilt against definite individuals who had been taking shelter in the Golden Temple."

The Sikh remembrance of the attack as a holocaust

The Indian army’s invasion of the Golden Temple, which is remembered as a ghalughara (holocaust) by Sikhs, claimed as many as “7,000 to 8,000” lives according to some eyewitness accounts. While there is ample evidence to show that Bhindranwale was fighting for the demands articulated in the Anandpur Sahib Resolution and not for the separate state of Khalistan, the Indian army’s invasion was not seen by the Sikhs as “a security operation but a clash between two nations, the first ‘war for Khalistan’”. As Joyce Pettigrew puts it:

Timeline

Eyewitnesses say that the army deployed tanks, armed personnel carriers, rocket launchers, heavy machine guns and helicopters. Many of the buildings surrounding the Temple were reduced to rubble. The damage inside of the temple complex was severe. The Harmandir Sahib received many bullet holes. The book itself was hit by a bullet.

The militants (Kharakus) in the temple appeared to be armed with machine guns, anti-tank missiles and rocket launchers and resisted the army's attempts to dislodge them from the shrine. The militants also appeared to have planned for a long occupation of the shrine having arranged for water from wells within the temple compound, and had stocked food provisions that would have lasted months. Thus it is a difficult point as to whether the Army could have waited out the militants, cut off electricity, water etc in order to ensure a peaceful non-violent end without the loss of life and desecration of the temple; this was the siege approach taken by Rajiv Gandhi five years later, in Operation Black Thunder.

The fighting between the militants and the Indian military continued throughout the night. Major General Brar, made the decision to bring in tanks to support the military in hopes of finishing the operation before dawn. After two days of heavy fighting with the assistance of superior military equipment the Indian military was able to bring most of the Harmandir Sahib complex under its control.

Despite the government's claims that only extremists were killed other reports claim that many innocent visitors, pilgrims and priests were killed in the cross-fire. Water, electricity and telephone links to the Harimandir Sahib were cut off.

On June 18, 1984 Christian Science Monitor reported: -" For five days the Punjab has been cut off from the rest of the world. All telephone and telex links are cut. No foreigners are permitted entry and on Tuesday, all Indian journalists were expelled. There are no newspapers, no trains, no buses- not even a bullock cart can move."

The success in emptying and depoliticising the temple was marred by the damage to the temple building and the death of civilian worshipers caught in the fire.

Operation Blue Star led to an estrangement between the Indian Central government and large portions of the Sikh community. It was considered by many Sikhs as a great insult because of the use of force at their holy place, on one of the most holiest of days. The later assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards was said to be in response to desecrating the temple. The assassination triggered Anti-Sikh riots broke out in North India killing as many as 4000; and then militancy in Punjab lasted for more than a decade in which many thousands more, civilians, terrorists and security personnel, were killed.

Later on numerous Kar Sevaks volunteered to rebuild the Harmandir Sahib, turning down an offer to do so by the government.

Operation Bluestar was followed by Operation Woodrose, in which the Indian government expanded their operations in Punjab.

References and notes

Mahmood, Cynthia Keppley, “Dynamics of Terror in Punjab and Kashmir,” Jeffrey A. Sluka, ed., Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, p. 77.
Swami, Subramaniam, Imprint, July 1984, p. 7-8. Quoted in Kumar, Ram Narayan, et al, Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab, Kathmandu: South Asia Forum for Human Rights, 2003, p. 34. (Hereafter, Reduced to Ashes.)
Bajaj, Rajeev, K., “Dead Men Tell No Tales,” Surya, September 1984, p. 9-10.
Kumar, Ram Narayan, et. al., Reduced to Ashes, p. 34. For full details, see Surya cover story, ibid, p. 13.
Singh, Professor Gurtej, IAS, Chakravyuh: Web of Indian Secularism
Kumar, Ram Narayan, et. al., Reduced to Ashes, p. 34. For full details, see Surya cover story, ibid, p. 35.
Mahmood, Cynthia Keppley, “Dynamics of Terror in Punjab and Kashmir,” Jeffrey A. Sluka, ed., Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, p. 77.
Quoted in Brar, K.S., Operation Blue Star: The True Story, New Delhi: UBSPD, 1993, p. 74.
Kumar, Ram Narayan, et. al., Reduced to Ashes, p. 38.
Tully, Mark and Jacob, Satish, Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle, New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 1985, p. 170.
Reddy, C.K.C., et. al., Army Action in Punjab: Prelude & Aftermath, New Delhi: Samata Era Publication, 1984, p. 46-48
For a range of number estimates, see Kumar, Ram Narayan, et. al., Reduced to Ashes, p. 38.
Singh, Gurharpal, Ethnic Conflict in India: A Case-Study of Punjab, New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 2000, p. 114.

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Details

Timeline

References and notes

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