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By June 1984, the situation had reached an explosive point as terrorist activity escalated. Fear and panic were spreading among Hindus in Punjab with an increasing number leaving the state. More and more gurudwaras were being fortified and turned into arsenals. One of the most worrisome features of the situation was the increasing Hindu-Sikh divide in Punjab and the spread of Hindu communalism in the rest of the country, especially in North India. A warning came from Haryana when anti-Sikh rioting broke out in February. By the end of May, it was clear that decisive action against terrorists could no longer be put off and that the use of drastic force to flush out the terrorists holed up in the Golden Temple and other gurudwaras had become necessary. And so, finally faced with a dead end so far as political manoeuvres were concerned, the Government of India undertook the military action, code-named Operation Blue Star. Operation was hastily conceived, undertaken without adequate information and proper planning and poorly executed, with the result that its political and emotional cost proved to be far higher than its planners had anticipated. On 3 June the army surrounded the Golden Temple. It entered the Temple on 5 June. There it found that the terrorists were far greater in number and also far better armed than the government sources had assumed. Rather than lasting an hour or two, as a surgical operation, the military operation turned into a full-scale battle, with the army having to deploy tanks in the end. What was worse, over a thousand devotees and temple staffs were trapped inside the Temple and many of them died in the crossfire. Moreover, the buildings in the Temple complex were severely damaged, with the Akal Takht being virtually razed to the ground. Harmandir Sahib, the most hallowed of the Sikh shrines, was riddled with bullet marks, even though the army had taken special care at the cost of the lives of its soldiers not to damage it. Among the dead were Bhindranwale and many of his followers. Following Operation Blue Star, the terrorists vowed vengeance against Indira Gandhi and her family for having desecrated the Golden Temple. On the morning of 31 October 1984, two Sikh members of her security guard assassinated Indira Gandhi. Earlier she had rejected her security chief’s suggestion that all Sikhs be removed from her security staff with the comment: ‘Aren’t we all secular.’ The assassination of the popular prime minister, in an atmosphere of heightened communalization of North India during 1981-1984, led to a wave of horror, fear, anger and communal outrage among the people all over the country, especially among the poor. This anger took an ugly and communal form in Delhi and some other parts of North India, where anti-Sikh riots broke out as soon as the news of the assassination was announced and the highly exaggerated rumour spread that many Sikhs were celebrating the event. In particular, for three days from the evening of 31 October itself mobs took over the streets of Delhi and made Sikhs targets of their loot and violence. There was complete failure of the law and order machinery in giving protection to Sikhs and their property. The three-day violence in Delhi resulted in the death of over 2,500 people, mostly Sikhs, with the slums and re-settlement colonies of Delhi being the main scenes of carnage. Rajiv Gandhi succeeded Indira Gandhi as prime minister on 1 November 1984. In January 1985, the major jailed leaders, including the Akali Dal President, H.S. Longowal, were released. A month later Rajiv Gandhi ordered an independent judicial enquiry into the November riots. |
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