Durbar (28 page)

Two days before Operation Blue Star began Punjab was put under twenty-four-hour curfew. Journalists who managed to get to Amritsar before the curfew were woken by soldiers in the early hours of the morning and ordered on to military buses that transported them across the Punjab border. Only two journalists managed to stay on in the city but saw very little. When they finally succeeded in sneaking out of their hotel rooms,
the battle for the temple was over and the army was ‘mopping up’. One of them managed to dodge soldiers and curfew to get within the outer perimeter of the Golden Temple and wrote the first article that revealed how badly the attack had been botched up. In the
New York Times
he wrote that he had seen Sikh men lined up in bazaars and shot in the back of their heads by soldiers of the Indian Army. I did not hear about this article till much later. Indian newspapers carried news from Amritsar that had been given to them by military officials, so in Delhi’s newspaper offices there was not the slightest clue that Operation Blue Star had not been a resounding success.

Three days after the attack Kewal Sahib decided that it was time for me to try and go to Amritsar. The administration of the state had been handed over to the army in an undeclared imposition of martial law. So I went first to Chandigarh. My father knew the Army Commander, General Mehta (whose first name I no longer remember), from his army days, and gave me a letter of introduction. The plan was to try and persuade him to give us a curfew pass. I had heard from other journalists that without a curfew pass there was no possibility of getting to Amritsar. Those who had tried to enter the state without one had been arrested and sent home as soon as they crossed the Punjab border.

Sandeep and I arrived in Chandigarh as a hot, white dawn was breaking. It was too early to go to army headquarters, so we stopped for a shower and breakfast at the Mount View Hotel. The restaurant offered through its large glass windows a lovely view of the Himalayan foothills and everything seemed peaceful and serene, and very removed from what was happening in Amritsar. Sandeep and I ordered a ‘traditional Punjabi breakfast’; enormous parathas stuffed with potatoes and cauliflower, which we ate with yoghurt. Sandeep had a theory that one paratha was so nourishing that it provided sustenance all day. He sensed we had a long day ahead of us and may not find food at all later.

After breakfast we drove to army headquarters. It was a place of unnerving orderliness. The red gravel in the long drive looked as if it had been clobbered into obedience. The bricks that lined the drive were placed at exactly the same angle and were painted white in exactly the same way. The trees stood as if at attention and their leaves looked as though they had been freshly polished. The colonial bungalow that served as the headquarters for the Army Commander had a wide veranda with
doors that led to high-ceilinged offices with large desks and neatly placed furniture. In a large ante-room to the Army Commander’s office we met his aides, two young officers in impeccably pressed uniforms, who sat drinking tea out of china cups.

Sandeep seemed so intimidated that he had the look of a frightened intruder.

‘Stop looking so nervous,’ I whispered. ‘At the very most we’ll be thrown out.’ Then in my bossiest voice I asked to see General Mehta.

‘Do you have an appointment, madam?’ one of the officers asked politely.

‘Of course not. I’ve just driven from Delhi and I want to discuss details of my visit to Punjab.’

‘Are you a reporter?’

‘Yes.’

‘No reporters are allowed to go to Punjab.’

‘I am. You can check with the General. I know him well and I have a letter for him from my father.’

The young officer was impressed enough by my demeanour to take my message to the General. Within minutes a tall, bald, middle-aged man with a big moustache and a blustery manner came noisily into the room and confronted me with a friendly but firm reprimand, ‘What on earth are you doing here, young lady? And how is the Brigadier?’

‘Very well. He sends you regards and this letter.’

‘Well, well,’ he said, taking the letter from me, ‘come into my office and have a cup of tea.’

We followed him into a large, orderly room that smelled of furniture polish. The General settled himself behind an enormous desk that did not have a single piece of paper on it. He opened my father’s letter, read it and chuckled. ‘The Brigadier says we did a good job in Amritsar,’ he said. ‘That is a good endorsement from a fine soldier. He asks me to help you in any way I can. How can I help you?’

‘We need a curfew pass to go into Punjab.’

‘That is the one thing I cannot give you. No reporters are allowed just yet.’

‘I know that but there is a press party coming from Delhi this morning. They are flying in with the President. We would like to join it. That’s all. I’m sure that won’t be a problem.’

‘It will be a problem. The reason why they are flying straight from Delhi to Amritsar and then flying out again is because we don’t want reporters wandering about the countryside making trouble in the villages.’

‘What trouble could we possibly make?’

‘You could start asking a lot of silly questions and that would be trouble, especially at the moment since mopping up operations in the villages are still going on.’

‘Mopping up?’

‘Yes. Now drink your tea and get on back to Delhi. There is not a chance that I can allow you into Punjab.’

‘But what are these mopping up operations?’

‘I can’t talk about them,’ he said impatiently.

‘All right, General. Thank you for seeing us…we’ll be off then.’

It must have been something about the cheery way I said this that made him suspicious, because he gave me a funny look and said, ‘Now, listen here, young lady. I’ve known you since you were a baby and I will have no hesitation in taking you over my knee and spanking you if I hear that you’ve been trying to sneak into Punjab. Nobody is going to Punjab until we say so. Got it?’

‘Got it,’ I said with what I thought was a sweet smile.

‘Right ho. Right ho,’ said the General, ‘but I warn you that I will not make any concessions. You will be arrested if you go into Punjab.’

We said goodbye and as we drove out of army headquarters I told Sandeep that I had a cunning plan. ‘Our best bet is to take a circuitous route to Amritsar via Moga instead of going through Jalandhar, which is the usual route.’

‘We can try,’ he said uncertainly, ‘but you do know that yesterday some journalists tried going into Punjab and were arrested?’

‘They tried going through Jalandhar?’

‘Yes. There were tanks blocking the highway.’

‘I am willing to bet that they wouldn’t have bothered to block the Moga route. Nobody goes to Amritsar that way because it takes twice as long.’

‘All right. We can try. But please remember this is the army we’re dealing with, not some inefficient civilian administration.’

We went back to the Mount View Hotel, drove around the city to make sure we were not being followed, and then took the road to Moga.

As soon as we crossed into Punjab we could see why the army was refusing to allow journalists in. Even in this relatively peaceful part of the state there were soldiers everywhere, and military vehicles with machine guns on the roofs. It was like entering a war zone. Soldiers stood at bus stops and checked passengers before they boarded and every time they saw a young Sikh man they pulled him out of the queue.

There were hardly any private vehicles on the road but surprisingly nobody stopped us. There was no curfew on the highway, and life seemed to be carrying on as normal until we drove off the main road into a village that we remembered from an earlier trip. We wanted to talk to ordinary rural Sikhs to get a sense of how they felt about the army being sent into the Golden Temple. We chose this particular village because its name was familiar. There had been a massacre here, or a police atrocity, neither of us could be sure which. On the surface things seemed normal. Green fields, houses built in disorderly fashion along narrow lanes, a bazaar that smelled of boiling milk, and a teashop in which a group of bearded old men sat on wooden benches drinking milky tea out of long steel glasses. It was only when I looked twice that I realized what was wrong with this idyllic Punjabi scene. There were no young men in sight; not one.

When I asked one of the elders about this he said, ‘They’ve disappeared. They’ve all gone to Pakistan.’ Then he went back to reading his newspaper.

‘What is the news from Amritsar?’ I asked.

‘Oh, only that they’ve blown up the Durbar Sahib and thousands of Sikhs have been killed.’

‘What about the Sant?’

‘He is alive,’ said one of the others. ‘He escaped, and he is going to come back and lead the movement for Khalistan. Sikhs will not be able to live with Hindus after this. We will not tolerate this insult to our religion.’

‘What do you plan to do?’ I asked. ‘We are planning to march to the Durbar Sahib and take it back from the army,’ said an old man with watery eyes and shaking hands.

‘Oh? How? There’s curfew across the state.’

‘We have our ways,’ he said mysteriously, ‘we have our leaders. You may not see them but they are here.’

In the next village we heard more stories about young men having left for Pakistan and old men planning a march to Amritsar to ‘take back’ the Golden Temple. Most Sikh men in Punjabi villages at that time were
ex-soldiers. When merit was the only criteria for recruitment, Sikhs, Rajputs and Jats got in more easily because they tend to be tall and well-built. When the trouble started in Punjab it was these ex-soldiers, many in their late thirties and early forties, who trained young men in the use of weapons.

We stopped in other villages and it was the same story everywhere. The same tales of ‘atrocities’ in Amritsar and rumours that Bhindranwale was still alive. I remember being slightly frightened by it all because the Sant had in death become larger than he had ever been in life. I sensed that this would be the beginning of India’s real Punjab problem.

Around dusk we got back on the highway because we needed to reach Moga before dark. We were stopped just before we entered the town. There was a tank blocking the road, with a group of jumpy young soldiers beside it. I noticed there were no officers with them and decided that the only way forward was to behave as officiously as possible. I ordered them to lift the barricade because I was in a hurry to get to Amritsar. When the questions began, I pulled out my father’s letter, waved it in their faces and told them that I had an urgent message for General Brar. It was a serious name to drop because General K.S. ‘Bulbul’ Brar was directly in charge of Operation Blue Star. But it worked and they let us pass.

In Moga, which was then a small, overgrown village of a town, we got a room for the night in the best hotel. It reeked of oily food and dodgy sanitation, but the rooms were tolerably clean and we were too tired to complain. We planned to leave at 4 a.m. to get to Amritsar in the early hours of the morning when we knew curfew was being briefly lifted to allow people to stock up on food. By around 6 a.m. the next morning we got to the Harike Bridge over the Beas river. This was the last barricade before entering the city limits of Amritsar. It was a hot, hazy morning and the river looked like a depleted, muddy drain. Parked diagonally on the bridge, blocking all passage, was a tank and beside it a khaki tent in which a neatly dressed young lieutenant sat drinking tea out of a tin mug. A look of amazement spread over his face when Sandeep and I appeared.

‘Good morning,’ I said cheerfully.

‘Good morning,’ he replied with a frown.

‘We need you to move your tank so we can get our car through. We’re in a hurry to go to Amritsar,’ I said with a confident smile.

‘Nobody is allowed to go to Amritsar.’

‘We are. We were supposed to be with the press party that is arriving at the Golden Temple at 11 today. We missed the plane so we drove instead and I have a letter for General Brar.’

‘Who from?’

‘My father.’

‘May I see it?’

‘Sure.’

He took the letter in his hands, examined it carefully and asked if it was a personal letter. I said it was and, incredibly, he handed it back to me and asked politely if we would like a cup of tea. We accepted joyfully and chatted to him about the ‘success’ of the army assault on the temple and the treachery of Sikh soldiers who had mutinied in regiments across the country. Then we shook hands and were on our way.

When we got into the car Sandeep said with a deep sigh, ‘I tell you, Tavleen, I don’t know what to say. Which fool was it who said women face disadvantages in journalism? If I had been alone I would have been arrested for sure.’

‘Well, there have to be some advantages to being a woman,’ I said, thoroughly pleased with myself, ‘but I’m quite surprised that we pulled it off so easily.’

‘What’s the plan now?’

‘I think we should actually try and find General Bulbul Brar because he is the only one who will be able to get us into the temple.’

‘Right. How?’

‘I suggest we ask for his headquarters at every barricade we pass. I’m sure they will tell us.’

The next barricade we were stopped at was inside the city. It was a police barricade and the mere mention of the General was enough for them to point us in the right direction. In an hour or so we arrived in an isolated suburb of Amritsar. The streets were empty and it was unnervingly quiet. We were about to stop to find someone to ask for further directions when we saw a truck filled with blindfolded Sikhs lying prostrate in the back. Their turbans had been taken off and used to blindfold them and their long hair fell in untidy coils. Their hands were tied behind their backs. They lay one on top of each other like dead bodies.