Blue Star was Indira Gandhi’s call

I have no doubt that Great Britain assisted the Government of India to plan and execute Operation Blue Star, the army’s nomenclature for the onslaught in and outside the Golden Temple at Amritsar, to flush out Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his militant followers. The British have tried to prove the point that the Indians scurry to their colonial masters whenever they are pitted against a ticklish situation.

To rub salt into the wounds, the British archives have made public the documents and letters relating to that period to synchronise with the thirtieth anniversary of Operation Blue Star.

The reason why Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sanctioned the operation was the fear she entertained from the militants who used the Golden Temple as their shelter. The then British prime minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, offered military help to Mrs Gandhi to enable her to go ahead with her plan. I have reached this conclusion because of the daily telephone talks they held. Mrs Thatcher herself told me when I was India’s high commissioner in London that they would converse on the affairs relating to India and the UK. They could not be discussing the weather. Sikh militants would have figured in their talks.

However, I rule out the assistance by Special Air Services (SAS) in the operation. Had this been true, the media in the UK and India would have uncovered it in the last 30 years. The operation, as former Lt General K S Brar has claimed, was entirely carried out by the Indian forces.

In any case, the truth will be known when the inquiry ordered by British Prime Minister David Cameron is complete. He wants to go into the role of Mrs Thatcher’s government in the 1984 operation and ‘establish the facts’. Indeed, Mrs Gandhi, before sending the army into the Golden Temple, was frantically seeking opinions from different people on whether to undertake the operation. R K Dhawan, her aide, came to my residence to know my reaction if the troops entered the temple. He indicated specifically that Mrs Gandhi had sent him.

“Don’t you ever think of sending the army because the Golden Temple is the Sikhs’ Vatican,” I warned him. “If you ever did that, the Sikhs would never forget or forgive this sacrilegious act.”

Giani Zail Singh was the president in those days. I would often meet him. He and Mrs Gandhi had become poles apart. So much so that she did not send him any papers, much less the cabinet’s minutes of meetings. This was unconstitutional.

However, she assured him that she would not send the army into the Golden Temple. Constitutionally, the president was the chief of the military. Giani said many a time that he did not like the manner in which she was handling the Sikh problem. I was a member of the Punjab Group, which Inder Gujral, before he became the prime minister, had constituted to bridge differences between the centre and the Akali leadership. The government of India cheated on us. The then home minister, Narasimha Rao, invited us to discuss how to reach a settlement with the Akalis. Little did we realise then that it was a sham exercise because the government had already ordered a military operation.

This was one week before the army entered the Golden Temple. Lt General Brar, who led the operation, told me that he was instructed to undertake the operation two weeks before it actually took place. The operation did not last long, although the army had to use tanks to meet resistance from the militants. Mrs Gandhi had to be consulted since she had specifically instructed not to use tanks.

President Zail Singh was the unhappiest person. No doubt he made a broadcast for restraint and amity, but made it clear that Mrs Gandhi’s government had done an irreparable loss to the Sikh community and its sentiments. Whatever the government’s compulsions, the onslaught on the Golden Temple was not justified. The apology by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi has allayed the disturbed Sikh community only to a small extent.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 27^th,  2014.

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