Durbar (29 page)

‘Do you think they’re dead?’ I asked in a whisper. In years of covering political violence I had never seen anything like it. I have covered many
communal riots and heard of people being taken away in trucks like animals, but this was the only time I saw it happen with my own eyes.

‘No they’re not dead,’ Sandeep whispered back. ‘Should I take a picture?’

‘No, don’t. There’s a soldier coming towards us…’

‘Jai Hind,’ I said, using a greeting I remembered from growing up as an army child.

‘Jai Hind,’ he answered, looking suspiciously into the car.

‘We have to see General Brar,’ I said firmly, ‘I have an urgent letter for him.’

‘From whom?’

‘From Delhi. It’s an important letter.’

‘Have you driven from Delhi?’ he asked, a note of surprise in his voice.

‘Yes.’ This seemed to convince him that we were carrying an important letter for the General.

‘Follow me,’ he said getting into a jeep.

We followed him through a wooden gate guarded by soldiers, who waved us through when they saw our escort, and arrived at a low building with a wide veranda. On the door that led to a large hall was a sign that said ‘Ops Room’. The hall was neon-lit and on its walls were large blue maps and diagrams in thick blue pencil. A group of army officers stood in front of a map of the Golden Temple listening to a tall, handsome man with thick greying hair who was pointing at something with a wooden stick. When he saw us he stopped and said, ‘What the hell… Who the hell are you and how did you get in here?’

Everyone in the room turned and stared at us.

‘General Brar?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice calm.

‘Yes. Who are you?’

‘Brigadier Amarjit Singh’s daughter. I have a letter for you from him.’

‘How the hell did you get here?’

‘We drove.’

‘From Delhi?’

‘Yes.’

‘How in god’s name did you manage that…’ he said, taking the letter from me.

He read the letter and seemed not to know what to say when he finished. ‘Well,’ he finally said, ‘now that you’re here, what can I do for you?’

‘We were hoping that you might help us get into the Golden Temple… and if you could tell us what happened…how things went. I understand that a group of journalists is arriving from Delhi today and is being allowed into the temple.’

‘Yes. That’s true. Well, I suppose it could do no harm to let you go in,’ he said slowly. ‘I still can’t believe that you managed to drive all the way here without being stopped.’

‘We were stopped,’ I said, ‘but I told them I had a letter for you and that worked.’

‘Bloody fools. Shocking lapse, shocking lapse… Put that camera away, young man. No pictures. Not even in the temple. Understood?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Sandeep said putting his camera down on the table.

‘Tea?’ the General asked indicating that we should sit.

‘Please, that would be lovely. Is the temple very badly damaged?’

‘Yes. And what is sad is that it needn’t have been if we had been allowed to spend a month using military intelligence to find out what was going on. We were forced to depend on those bastards in civilian intelligence and they couldn’t even tell us how many entrances there were to the temple. If we had known we wouldn’t have lost so many men.’

‘Is the Sant dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did he die?’

‘Crossfire. Early in the morning on the second day he walked out of the Akal Takht with General Shabeg and Amrik Singh, and they fell.’

‘Did the fighting stop instantly after that?’

‘It did. But we lost a lot of men…and the Akal Takht is badly damaged. We had to use tanks and heavy artillery. It was a mess.’

‘In the villages they say the Sant is still alive. Where is this rumour coming from?’

General Brar frowned and looked wearily at his officers. ‘This is a problem,’ he said, ‘we’re not sure how to deal with it. He is dead. We had the body identified by his brother before it was cremated. But we know this rumour is going around the villages and it worries us. We fear that it is being spread to create an uprising, to get Sikhs to start marching on Amritsar.’

‘But there’s twenty-four-hour curfew, and tanks on all the highways.’

‘Yes. But if they came out in really large numbers we wouldn’t be sure what to do and firing into the crowd would only make things worse. It is a problem. Damn these politicians – they create these problems…’

‘But the strategy for the attack would have been made by the army. Right?’

General Brar seemed not to hear my question and continued talking about how the army had been let down badly by civilian intelligence. ‘I don’t know really… What can I say except that we are really angry about the number of men we lost because civilian intelligence was so poor. Had we known how many entrances there were we would never have gone in through the main entrance which was so heavily fortified. We lost more than a hundred men in the first few minutes. The intelligence failure was so great we didn’t even know how many men we were dealing with. And there are still snipers in the temple.’

‘So, it’s risky for us to go in?’

‘Oh, you can go in. We will send you with an armed escort but whatever you write be careful not to incite any religious tension. Please, you will have to promise me that there will be nothing written that will cause alarm or communal tension.’

‘Promise.’

In Amritsar the curfew was total. It was late afternoon and an oppressive, merciless heat hung over the empty city like a shroud. In the bulletproof interior of the armoured car, I felt like I was being boiled alive. Sweat poured so profusely out of every pore of my body that I stopped trying to dry it. I noticed that Sandeep was in the same state, but the soldier driving us and the young officer who sat beside him seemed unaffected. From the small, darkened windows I caught glimpses of armed soldiers lining the streets and dogs lying in every patch of shade they could find. There was not a civilian in sight and not even one policeman.

We drove up to the main entrance of the Golden Temple. The clock tower entrance, as pilgrims call it. There were two tanks parked in front of it. One had its gun pointing toward the temple’s concourse, and the other towards the silent, empty square. The shops that sold religious artifacts were closed, as were the teashops and the little shops that sold Punjabi
shoes and a bewildering variety of electrical goods. Sandeep tried taking a picture of the empty square but the young officer stopped him. He pointed to windows above the shops and said, ‘Be careful, we’re not sure if there are still snipers hiding up there.’

‘How would they have got out of the temple?’ I asked.

‘There were several exits from the temple and once the battle for the Akal Takht was lost, many of the terrorists escaped through them and are still hiding in the city.’

‘So in a sense it was a failed operation.’

‘I don’t know about these things,’ he said with a frown. ‘We are here to defend the country and we did our best.’

Sandeep and I took off our shoes before walking down the white marble steps that led to the temple’s concourse. The soldiers did not bother to do so. The steps were burning hot because the red jute matting that usually covered them was no longer there, but I hardly noticed my burning soles because of the stench that filled the air. The soldiers covered their noses with handkerchiefs.

‘Rotting bodies. There are hundreds still in the basement of the temple. We haven’t been able to get them out because we don’t know the entrances and we are afraid there could still be shooters down there. They were using the granaries as a base to attack us. You see those holes under the stairs? The first attack came from there as our men walked down. We lost a lot of men.’

Inside the temple grounds, we turned left automatically to make the usual clockwise perambulation of the sacred tank and it was then that I saw the first signs of what had happened. In one corner of the concourse lay an enormous pile of bloodstained clothes. Huge clouds of flies hovered over it and settled on the patches of blood. The clothes were brightly coloured and among them were sandals in pink and blue, some very small.

‘There were women and children caught in the fighting?’ I asked the lieutenant.

‘What if there were?’ he said calmly. ‘These people were traitors. They were the enemy. Do you know how many men we lost?’

‘No,’ I said, unable to take my eyes off the pile of clothing. I found myself mesmerized by a tiny pair of sandals with Mickey Mouse’s face on them.

‘Officially we admit to only 700,’ he said angrily, ‘but at least twice that number died. We lost nearly 200 men in the first five minutes.’

‘Didn’t you know where the fortifications were? Didn’t anyone give you a map of the temple?’

‘A map of the temple,’ he laughed derisively. ‘A map? What a luxury that would have been. Forget about fortifications. Believe me when I tell you that we didn’t even know how many entrances there were to the temple.’

‘The temple looks completely undamaged,’ said Sandeep shading his eyes.

‘Yes,’ said the Lieutenant, ‘we lost a lot of men trying to save it. We had orders from the top not to return fire if it came from the temple.’

‘Did it?’

‘It was hard to tell from where I was,’ he said, ‘there was a lot of smoke and it was dark. During the day they would hold their fire. But the fighting was mostly around the Akal Takht. That’s where the Sant and the General were hiding. We couldn’t save the Akal Takht.’

When we had walked fully around the temple, the remains of the Akal Takht became visible. Where there had once been a fine building of white plaster and golden domes there now was a blackened shell. When we got closer I noticed traces of the frescoes on the ceiling. Despite not being a religious Sikh I was horrified by the damage and the young officer must have seen this.

‘We had no choice,’ the lieutenant said, seeing the expression on my face, ‘we had to use tanks. There was no other way.’

‘It was a political symbol,’ I said for want of anything else to say. ‘It will cause a lot of anger among the Sikhs.’

‘Yes. There’s no doubt about that. We’ve already had trouble with Sikh troops.’

‘Were they used in the fight for the temple?’

‘No. There have been mutinies in regiments elsewhere. But they’re under control now.’

‘What about ordinary Sikhs? There could be trouble across Punjab when they hear that the Akal Takht has been blown up.’

‘Yes. But the temple is going to remain closed till the Akal Takht is rebuilt. Orders have already been given by Mrs Gandhi.’

Patches of dried blood stained the white marble of the concourse and the water in the sacred tank around the temple looked muddy.

‘Why is the water this colour?’ I asked, feeling a little foolish after asking the question.

‘That’s blood,’ the lieutenant said, ‘there are bodies in the tank. It will have to be drained. And look over there, right in front of the Akal Takht… That is where we found the bodies of General Shabeg and the Sant and you know that fellow who was the student leader.’

‘Amrik Singh.’

‘Right.’

‘How did they die?’

‘We’re not sure… They walked right into the area where the firing was heaviest. It didn’t make sense to us. The bodies were so mutilated it was hard to recognize them.’

It was later, on other trips to Amritsar, from talking to priests and those who remained of Bhindranwale’s army, that I pieced together the final moments of Operation Blue Star. Those who stayed till the end said that on the last day of the fighting the Sant came out of the Akal Takht, saw the damage done to it because of him and it was then that he, General Shabeg Singh and Amrik Singh resolved to ‘sacrifice themselves’ because they knew that the Sikh community would never forgive them if they lived. So on the morning of 6 June they walked out of the Akal Takht and directly into the line of fire. Those of the Sant’s companions who were still alive and in the Akal Takht disappeared quietly into the city from one of the many routes out of the temple that the army had no information about.

It soon became clear that the operation to save the Golden Temple had been a disaster. It was clear to the army, to journalists and to most political analysts. What never became clear was who was responsible for what happened. Was it Mrs Gandhi’s powerful coterie of bureaucrats? Was it Rajiv and his friends? Was it a combination of both? Why had a woman so famous for her sense of political timing got the timing so badly wrong? Far from ending the Punjab problem Operation Blue Star served to dangerously exacerbate it and to deepen the divisions between Hindus and Sikhs. As far as I can remember none of these things were discussed in the Indian press because there was a sort of unspoken consensus that Mrs Gandhi had been right in doing what she did, that she had been
forced to send the army into the Golden Temple because there were no options left.

When I got back to Delhi I was asked by an American friend, Mary Anne Weaver, who worked for the
Sunday Times
, London, if I would write a piece on what I had seen in Punjab. She would have written it but foreign journalists were not allowed into Punjab at the time. I wrote an article based on what I had seen in the villages on the way to Amritsar, saying that we were probably seeing the beginning of the real Punjab problem rather than the end of it. And, since it was for a British newspaper, I compared it with Britain’s problem in Northern Ireland. It appeared under a headline that read something like ‘The Seeds of India’s Ulster’.