Durbar (45 page)

‘How many people are dead?’

‘The truth is we don’t know,’ he said, looking around to see if anyone was listening. ‘We only know that there are bodies inside because we can see them from one of our lookout posts.’

‘Can I see?’

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘come with me.’

He took me into a building with a narrow staircase that led to a small room at the top. From its barred window there was a view of the courtyard of the temple’s kitchens. It was empty but for the body of an elderly man who lay on his back with his arms held up. He was in rigor mortis and in his hands there were two rotis. He appeared to have been trying to get to the kitchen building when he was shot.

‘Crossfire,’ the policeman explained. ‘They were firing from that building that you see on the other side of the courtyard and we were returning fire from here. The old man was one of the first to be hit.’

‘Are there other pilgrims inside? He looks too old to be a militant.’

‘There may be. We don’t know much. We only know that there are several shooters inside and since yesterday morning they have shot at us every time we have tried to go in.’

‘What would happen if I tried to go in?’ I asked without any real plan to go into the temple, and it surprised me when he seemed eager that I should.

‘Well, if they let you in because you’re press you might be able to bring us some information. But we can’t take responsibility for your safety. You go at your own risk.’

‘All right,’ I said, not feeling very brave but certain that unless I went into the temple I would have no story to file. A press conference by the police commissioner was no story at all for a Sunday newspaper in London. So I decided to take my chances and go into the Golden Temple. I entered from an entrance that led to the temple’s kitchen and saw two more bodies. This scared me and I was about to turn back when I heard shouts from the veranda of the kitchen. A group of elderly pilgrims sat huddled together looking terrified.

‘Help, please help us. We have had no food or water for twenty-four hours,’ an old man with a long white beard said in a quavering voice. With him were three old women and another old man. I ran across the forecourt towards them, trying to ignore the possibility of being killed in crossfire.

When I got to the veranda I tried to reassure the terrified pilgrims. They could come back with me, I promised, as soon as I found out what was going on inside the Golden Temple. There was no shooting going on so I decided to push my luck and try to get to a room outside which the militants had optimistically hung a board that said ‘Khalistan Headquarters’. The ‘headquarters’ had come up after Operation Blue Star and it was here that I always came when I wanted information on militant activity. To get to ‘Khalistan Headquarters’ I needed to go all the way around the temple and had got only halfway, as far as what is called the Manji Sahib entrance, when I heard the sound of a gong and saw a group of young men running towards the steps I had just come down. They were carrying a white sheet with something heavy inside it.

Realizing that I could get as much information from them as from the Khalistan office I shouted to attract their attention. I think I yelled ‘Press, press!’ or something equally inane but loud enough for them to hear. I admit that the gong had frightened me into wanting to get out of
the temple as quickly as possible so I was more than a little relieved to see this small gang of Khalistani fighters. There were four of them and one of them waved to me cheerfully, indicating that I should join them. Just as I reached them I heard the gong sound again.

‘Is that the end of the ceasefire?’ I asked the stocky young man who had waved.

‘Could be. Who knows?’ he said with a grin.

‘Does this mean I am in some kind of danger?’

‘Not as long as you’re with us. Come.’

They laughed and led me to a narrow red-brick tower that was as old as the temple. These towers are called
bunga
in Punjabi and were once used for military purposes, as lookouts and for storing weapons. The entrance to the tower was a dark, windowless square space that smelled musty and damp. The steps leading up to the top of the tower looked disused. The young men I was with had about them a sort of mad exhilaration, like children playing a game. Their eyes shone and they talked excitedly about how they were winning the battle. ‘We will take the temple back and hoist the Khalistan flag in a few days.’

‘How many of you are there?’

‘Countless. It’s the army of the Guru and that army has countless warriors.’

‘You know that you can’t take on the Indian state…the army. You know what happened last time.’

‘They won’t be stupid enough to send the army in again,’ said the stocky young man confidently, ‘and if they do then the army of the Guru will only grow and grow.’

‘Can you tell me your names? Which group do you belong to?’ I asked, remembering that I was here to try and get some information.

‘We belong to the army of Guru Govind Singh and we have no names,’ the man said. They laughed.

‘Right. Well, listen, there are some elderly pilgrims trapped in the kitchen. Can you assure me that if I come back with the Red Cross you will let them come out with me?’

‘Yes. No problem.’

‘And can we take the bodies out?’

‘No problem.’

‘Are there any inside the temple?’

‘Not that we know of.’

The stocky young man said that if I wanted to see some action I should stay with them and watch the ‘fireworks’ at night. I decided I had seen enough action for the moment and went back into the courtyard and tried to persuade the elderly pilgrims to leave with me but they said they were too scared to – unless I could guarantee that the ceasefire really was a ceasefire. I told them truthfully that I could not guarantee anything as I was not sure and promised to return for them. Then I ran back across the open courtyard, keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for the best.

The policeman who had encouraged me to go into the temple was waiting for me at the barricade and with him was someone else who could have been his superior. I told them I had not been able to get any information yet but needed to go back in with the Red Cross to rescue some pilgrims. They were interested only in the militants.

‘Didn’t you see anything inside? Didn’t you meet anyone?’

‘Well, I met this group of militants carrying a sheet full of guns…they’re in that tower over there. The red brick one.’

‘Did you get any names?’

‘No. They said they were soldiers in Guru Govind Singh’s army and had no names.’

‘Can you describe any of them?’

‘The one who did most of the talking was a small, stocky man with a happy face. He was confident that they were winning.’

‘Did he have a scar under his right eye?’ I thought for a minute and remembered that he did, a scar that looked like a knife wound.

‘Yes. He did.’

‘Then that’s Penta. Madam, you will have to come with us and speak to the DG Sahib. This is important.’

The director general of police was K.P.S. Gill, who was then nowhere near as famous as he was to become some years later when he ended the insurgency in Punjab by using against the insurgents the same brutal methods they used against his policemen. I told Gill about the pilgrims trapped in the temple and asked if it was safe for me to go back with the Red Cross and rescue them. He said that he would ensure there was no firing from his side. So I went back into the Golden Temple with a handful of other journalists. Among them was Satish Jacob from the BBC. I told them that I may have met Penta but like me they seemed not to know who he was. It was only when I got back to Delhi that I found
out that he was one of the new generation of terrorists who had been inspired to join the Khalistan movement after the pogroms that followed Mrs Gandhi’s assassination.

Since there was now an official ceasefire it seemed stupid not to go as far as the Khalistan Headquarters to get detailed information on this new insurgency. So back we went using the route I had taken earlier along the concourse of scalding white marble. Even with the assurance of a ceasefire we were scared and kept glancing up at the many windows behind which snipers could have been hiding. After what seemed like a very long walk we arrived at the little brown door under the sign that said Khalistan Headquarters.

Stooping, we entered the small, bare room with its green-washed walls. There was a mattress on the floor and pictures of Sikh gurus on the walls. On the mattresses sat a group of armed men wearing the short knickers and long kurtas favoured by Sikh priests, the symbolic kirpan hanging by their sides. Their beards were untrimmed and greasy and they wore black turbans. I recognized one of them as the spokesman of the Khalistan ‘government’. Unlike the men I had met earlier in the tower this group looked nervous and scared. They denied that the new battle had been started by them and indicated, without actually saying so, that they would be happy to surrender if that could be arranged without them losing face. It was clear from the way they talked that they did not want another long and bloody battle for the temple. They were just not sure how to avoid it.

As it turned out, it would be another ten days before they would be able to come out of the temple because some of the other groups wanted to fight till the end. This new phase of the struggle for Khalistan did not have a Bhindranwale type of leader leading it. There were several groups of militants led by smaller leaders who usually made it into the national newspapers only when one of them was shot dead. The second generation of militants who made up the new army of Khalistan were in many ways more dangerous because after the Sikh massacres in Delhi and Rajiv’s justification of them there were real reasons for anger in the Sikh community.

The second battle for the temple was called Operation Black Thunder and it was fought by the government with a strategy very different from
the first. Specially trained commandos arrived from Delhi and surrounded the temple complex but only opened fire if there was firing from inside the temple. They wore black combat fatigues, carried sub-machine guns and had about them an air of such menace that even journalists were afraid to engage them in conversation. When someone tried, they responded with silence, continuing to keep their eyes fixed on targets inside the temple. If anyone was seen moving inside the temple grounds they opened fire. If there was any shooting from inside they responded so aggressively that by the fifth day there was no more shooting.

By the tenth day white flags were raised above the golden dome and a small group of defeated, dirty men filed out and gathered in a courtyard beyond the temple’s kitchen. There were no more than sixty of them. Among them I spotted Penta. A photographer from
India Today
, Pramod Pushkarna, saw me looking at him and gave me a questioning look. I signalled with the slightest nod that it was the man I had met earlier. We left immediately afterwards but no sooner did we step into the street outside than a huge commotion erupted. We rushed back to find that Penta had killed himself by swallowing a cyanide capsule. Khalistani militants had started carrying these capsules on strings around their neck in imitation of the LTTE. Within days Pramod received the first death threat. A man who did not reveal his identity said ‘they’ had seen him and me identify Penta and that this had caused him to commit suicide so we had better watch it.

I did not know whether to take the threat seriously, so I went to the home minister, Buta Singh, to ask if I needed police protection. He listened carefully to my story and at the end of it said that I might draw more attention to myself if I had police bodyguards. So what should I do, I asked, and he suggested that if I was worried about my small son becoming a target then I should make sure that he changed the route he took to school every morning. That was the only succour he could offer.

It seemed like surreal advice but everything about Delhi was beginning to seem surreal to me. I would come back from covering a war or a communal riot in which hundreds of innocent people had been killed only to end up at the same dinner parties, listening to the same sort of inane ‘political conversations’ that the denizens of Delhi’s drawing rooms specialized in. These conversations would usually be about the issue that had made headlines in that morning’s newspapers. Everyone would have some banal
view and this would pass as political analysis. Or I would end up in some government office meeting officials to try and explain to them how serious the situation was in wherever I had been and they would indulge me as if I were a precocious child telling them things that they knew long ago. I found myself getting increasingly disenchanted with the sort of people who were in charge of ruling India and at the same time I began to understand better how the simplest political problems had been allowed to grow to enormous proportions just by being handled wrongly.

B
y the middle of Rajiv’s term as prime minister I started asking myself why things had gone so wrong for him. How had he squandered the largest mandate in Indian democratic history so quickly? It was in trying to answer this question that I began to wonder whether the problem was that he had entered politics not as someone who had a real interest in public life but as a prince. Had Sanjay Gandhi not been killed would Rajiv have been in politics at all? And had Sanjay not been Mrs Gandhi’s son would Sanjay have been in politics? Would they not have spent their lives oblivious to India’s gargantuan economic and political problems? And in asking these questions I became aware for the first time, at least consciously, of the dangers of dynastic democracy. If Rajiv had not understood how much hope Indian voters had invested in him was it not so much his fault as the result of his desire to ‘help Mummy’ rather than the people of India?