The Punjab Story

Tavleen Singh, Sunil Sethi, Subhash Kirpekar, Shekhar Gupta, Mv Kamanth, Khushwant Singh, Lt Gen Jagjit Singh Aurora, Amarjit Kaur

Description

6 June 1984: The Indian Army storms the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Called Operation Bluestar, the historic and unprecedented event ended the growing spectre of terrorism perpetrated by the extremist Sikh leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his followers once and for all. But it left in its wake unsolved political questions that continued to threaten Punjab's stability for years to come. How, in a brief span of three years, did India's dynamic frontier state become a national problem? Who was to blame: the central government for allowing the crisis to drift despite warnings, or the long-drawn-out Akali agitation, or the notorious gang of militants who transformed a holy shrine into a sanctuary for terrorists? First published two months after Operation Bluestar, The Punjab Story pieces together the complex Punjab jigsaw through the eyes of some of India's most eminent public figures and journalists. Writing with the passion and conviction of those who were involved with the drama, they present a wide-ranging perspective on the past, present and future of the Punjab tangle; and the truth of many of their'conclusions having been borne out by time.

Sujets

• Modern
• Histoire
• Sijismo
• Harmandir Sahib
• Bluestar (bus company)
• Punjab
• Blue star
• Khalsa
• Rebellion
• Operation
• Terrorism
• Sikh
• Revolution
• 21st Century
• Riot
• Kh?ls?
• History
• War
• Rébellion (film)
• Penjab
• Sikhisme
• 1984

Informations

• Publié par: Roli Books
• Date de parution: 10 août 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788174369123
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

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ISBN: 978-81-7436-331-2
Lotus Collection
© Text: Amarjit Kaur, Lt. Gen. J.S. Aurora, Khushwant Singh, M.V. Kamath, Shekhar Gupta, Subhash Kirpekar, Sunil Sethi, Tavleen Singh
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published in hardback in 1984 by Roli Books International
This edition published in 2004 Fourth impression in 2007 The Lotus Collection An imprint of Roli Books Pvt. Ltd. M-75, G.K. II Market, New Delhi 110 048 Phones: ++91 (011) 2921 2271, 2921 2782 2921 0886, Fax: ++91 (011) 2921 7185 E-mail: [e-mail]; Website: rolibooks.com Also at Varanasi, Agra, Jaipur and the Netherlands
Cover design: Arati Subramanyam
While the Publishers have made every attempt to secure permission from the contributors, any oversight is regretted.
ISBN: 978-81-7436-331-2 Rs 295

CONTENTS
Publisher’s Note
Foreword
Genesis of the Hindu-Sikh Divide Khushwant Singh
Akali Dal : The Enemy Within Amarjit Kaur
Terrorist in the Temple Tavleen Singh
Blood, Sweat and Tears Shekhar Gupta
Operation Bluestar: An Eyewitness Account Subhash Kirpekar
Assault on the Golden Temple Complex Lt Gen Jagjit Singh Aurora
Myth and Reality M V Kamath
The Great Divide Sunil Sethi
White Paper on the Punjab Agitation: A Summary Government of India
About the Contributors

Publisher’s Note
U nprecedented in the history of India, the happenings in Punjab in the 1980s have scarred the face of a nation otherwise known for its unity in diversity. The injury inflicted by the secessionists’ demands and the senseless killings were thought to have been cured by the surgical operation which the government carried out in the form of Operation Bluestar in early June 1984. Whether this operation succeeded in achieving its objective is best judged by people who had set the objectives before embarking on it. However, having performed the operation successfully, the government did feel the need for a healing touch.
Punjab then was a major issue and continued to be a point of great debate in the country for some time to come. Many questions were asked: whether the army action was necessary? What was the situation that led to the army operation? Will the healing touch work? Also many rumours were in the air. One man plays up the other man’s statements. Facts become fiction. Most often this is unintentional. The aim of the present volume was to clear the misunderstandings between the two communities of Punjab and bring peace and amity among them.
The Punjab Story attempts to organize a symposium of a group of people who have closely watched and studied the Punjab scenario. Each contributor to this volume has been actively and closely associated with the Punjab issue – whether in protest or in agreement with the government. This book also tries to put forward independent views of eight eminent personalities. The effort is to bring out facts as experienced by these eight contributors and put them in the form of a debate before the reader.
Among the contributors, Smt Amarjit Kaur, then a Member of Parliament, belonging to a former royal Sikh family came out very openly and convincingly for the stand taken by the government. On the contrary, Khushwant Singh, then also a Sikh Member of Parliament, who was on the extremists’ hit list because of his criticism of Bhindranwale, shares his emotions with most Sikhs.
M.V. Kamath, another veteran journalist, felt a sinister movement for Khalistan in the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) when he visited Amritsar way back in 1979 as editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India to do a cover story on the Golden Temple. Through the military mind of Lt Gen J.S. Aurora of the Bangladesh War fame, the reader gets to know of the tactical strategical, and executionary flaws of the army operation.
The scenes of the battle are described by two brave journalists Shekhar Gupta and Subhash Kirpekar whose eyewitness accounts, coupled with scores of the army contacts that they were able to establish, enable them to provide blow by blow accounts. They were perhaps the only journalists to be so closely watching the drama that was Operation Bluestar.
Tavleen Singh, the fiery young journalist who has been covering Punjab since early 1980, had some of the most stunning interviews with the extremists stored in her cassettes which she has revealed in her article.
Sunil Sethi was born and brought up in Amritsar. He travelled extensively throughout Punjab during the last few years and came up with a moving story on the great divide between the Sikhs and non-Sikhs in the state.
Finally, the government’s point of view is expressed here in the form of a summary of the White Paper on Punjab.

Foreword
T wo decades have passed since the vast upsurge of violence in Punjab – the Sikh fundamentalist terrorist movement for ‘Khalistan’ – was quelled. The comprehensive defeat of this terrorist movement is unique in history, leaving behind no ideological lees, no residual rage, no reservoir of sullen hostility. Again and again, since 1993, Pakistan has sought to revive the movement, and has successfully engineered a handful of random incidents, ordinarily against soft targets, but has failed utterly in touching a sympathetic chord among the people of Punjab, particularly the Jat Sikhs, among whom, at one time, the extremists found a majority of their recruits – as, in fact, did the police and security forces.
Indeed, if any evidence of the Khalistani fervour survives, it is among a handful of lunatic expatriates, entirely divorced from the realities of the ground in Punjab. Even this lunatic fringe has been shedding regularly, as some of its leading oddballs crawl shamefacedly back into the country to ‘rejoin the mainstream.’ Others continue to rant ineffectually in their safe havens in Pakistan, or in their adopted countries abroad, increasingly discredited among those who lent them some credence in the past.
Punjab’s recovery from the years of violence has, in many ways, been miraculous. The latter half of the 1990s saw an unprecedented cultural resurgence, one that impacted, through a new range of mass media and television channels, on the entire country. The spirit of Punjab, its economic dynamism, and the will of the people appeared to have emerged unscathed from the trial by fire over nearly a decade and a half of terrorism.
Over this period of the Punjabi revival, I was often asked whether terrorism could ever return to the state, and my answer, invariably, was confidently in the negative. The sheer totality of the defeat of the terrorist forces, in combination with the attendant atmosphere of social, cultural and economic renaissance that followed it, convinced me that the people of Punjab would never allow the nightmare to be repeated again.
Today, I am not as certain of this as I was some years ago. Punjab has, for the past decade, been outrageously misgoverned, with incompetence and rampant corruption standing out as the hallmarks of the successive regimes that have inflicted immense damage on the state since the end of terrorism. Among the worst affected by the irresponsibility and venality of succeeding administrations, have been the Jat Sikh farmers, an