India (73 page)

‘This has taken place in the Punjab, but it is going to be extended to the entire country. The attitudes of the people are going to change everywhere, and they are going to expect more and more of their government. The government is deteriorating fast. It will not be able to come up to the expectations of the people, and therefore I see a deep-rooted chasm in the country. Utter chaos. Our government has become a sort of mafia – the politician, the government servant, and the trader, none of them primary producers. They are going to come into conflict with the producers.’

Gurtej gave me copies of some of the papers he had written on the Punjab and Sikh issue. One of the papers, written for a university seminar at the beginning of 1982, might have been the one that had got him into trouble with the administration. It was called ‘Genesis of the Sikh Problem in India’. It reminded me of Kapur Singh’s writing; it was academic in tone, with long sentences and difficult words, and with quotations from the Sikh scriptures in the footnotes. Its primary theme was the separateness of the Sikh faith and ideology from the Hindu; its further theme was that the Punjab was geographically and culturally more a part of the Middle East than of India. The great enemy of Sikhism and the Sikh empire of Ranjit Singh had been – again – brahminism.

‘With nothing more tangible than unflinching faith in the Guru, the Sikhs built up an Empire on the foundations laid by the Guru. They planted the saffron flag’ – saffron also the colour of the Shiv Sena in Bombay, with material in that colour draped on the wall panels of the Bombay Municipal Corporation, and decorated with crossed swords – ‘in the heartland of the customary invaders, humbled the might of China and reduced the god-king of Tibet. Then they turned to liberating India from the English.’ But they were frustrated. ‘The Brahminically oriented forces within and without the Punjab cooperated in destroying the Sikhs who alone held out a promise of the early redemption of India.’

So, with his pastoral memories of his grandfather’s village, the enchantments of harvest and celebration, there was this other dream of glory, based on Ranjit Singh’s short-lived 19th-century kingdom. It was a partial view. But that was to be expected; people all over India, awakening to history and new knowledge of their
place in the scheme of things, refashioned history according to their need.

What was unexpected in Gurtej’s account of his life and beliefs was how much he took for granted. The constitution, the law, the centres of education, the civil service with its high idea of its role as guardian of the people’s rights and improver of their condition, the investment over four decades in industrial and agricultural change – in Gurtej’s account, these things, which distinguished India from many of its neighbours, were just there. There was no acknowledgement that generations of reformers and wise men – refusing to yield to desperate conditions – had created those things that had supported Gurtej in his rise from the village.

With his pastoral memories, his dream of Sikh glory, there was also his idea of religious purity. He applied this idea to the affairs of men, and rejected what he found. Like Papu the Jain stockbroker in Bombay, who lived on the edge of the great slum of Dharavi and was tormented by the idea of social upheaval, Gurtej had a vision of chaos about to come. Papu had turned to good works, in the penitential Jain fashion. Gurtej had turned to millenarian politics. It had happened with other religions when they turned fundamentalist; it threatened to bring the chaos Gurtej feared.

To be baptized was to take nectar, amrit. The Golden Temple was at Amritsar, the pool of nectar. It was said that there had been a pool here known to the first Guru. Sacred sites usually have a history: it was also said that the place was mentioned in a version of the Ramayana, and that 2000 years and more before Guru Nanak, the Buddha had recognized the special atmosphere of the Golden Temple site. The Emperor Akbar, the great Mogul, gave the site to the fourth Guru, and the first temple was begun by the fifth Guru in 1589, the year after the Spanish Armada. In the chaos of the 18th century the Temple suffered much from the Muslims. The Sikh king Ranjit Singh rebuilt it in the 19th century. He gave the central temple its gold-leaf dome. This gold leaf, reflected in the artificial lake, has a magical effect. Even after the battle-marks of recent years the Temple feels serene.

Bhindranwale came to the sanctuary of the Golden Temple in
1982, and he turned it into his fortress and domain. He was thirty-five. Four years before, he had been only a preacher and the head of a Sikh seminary; now he was a politician and a warrior. He was also an outlaw: pursuing a vendetta against the Nirankari sect, whom he considered heretics, he had been accused of murder.

He was a proponent of the pure faith; he was persecuted; he offered his followers a fight on behalf of the faith. He incarnated as many of the Sikh virtues as any one man could possess. He and his followers controlled the Temple. The guns were smuggled in from Pakistan. From the Temple, killings were planned, and bombings, and bank robberies. Not all of these things were done with Bhindranwale’s knowledge; there would have been a number of free-lance actions: the seeds of chaos were right there. The Temple provided sanctuary; it was the safe house. It was not physically isolated from the town; the old town went right up to its walls. Guns and men could come and go without trouble.

In that atmosphere some of the good and poetic concepts of Sikhism were twisted. One such idea was the idea of
seva
or service. When terror became an expression of the faith, the idea of seva altered.

This is the testimony of one man: ‘Inderjit was a close adherent of Bhindranwale. He was involved in the murder of Sandhu. Inderjit used to come to Darbar Sahib [the Golden Temple] and ask for any seva from Bhindranwale. He had once come to me also and had offered his services for any action. Since I hardly knew him, and he had come on his own to see me, I did not place any trust in him. He was, in fact, a very suspicious-looking character. He had developed friendship with [some people] who used to go out of the Golden Temple complex for committing terrorist actions. Two days after the assassination of Sandhu, Inderjit came to Darbar Sahib. By his exuberant behaviour and boastful talks he made it quite clear that he had a hand in the killing of Sandhu, and that he prided about it.’ Sandhu, in fact, was Inderjit’s next-door neighbour. Inderjit’s service or seva was to give information about his neighbour’s movements to the seven-man killer team. Neighbourliness had no place in this idea of the faith.

Bhindranwale’s military adviser in the Temple was Shabeg Singh. He had been a major-general in the army, and had served with distinction in the Bangladesh war of 1971. Then something had gone wrong: he had been cashiered from the army for
embezzlement, but allowed to keep his rank. Revenge had become his religion; Bhindranwale’s cause had become his.

From the witness quoted above, there is this story of how preparations were made to take on the state: ‘As the events were taking place at a very fast pace, it was appreciated that the police entry into the Golden Temple had become imminent. It was decided that the Sikh youth should be mobilized … The decision was taken in March-April 1984. Groups of Sikh youth numbering 30 to 50 came to the Golden Temple for the purpose. In the car-parking space in the Ram Dass Langar’ – one of the Temple kitchens – ‘wooden partitions were erected to lodge them there. In one of the rooms Shabeg Singh used to impart theoretical training about firearms. Demonstrations were given by him and sometimes by a few of us … These groups were treated to inflammatory sermons … The groups used to stay for two or three days. In all, about 8000 to 10,000 youth would have been covered.’

In this way Bhindranwale made himself politically powerful, and he might have made himself more powerful if he had had more time. But the free-lance terrorist actions continued, and in June 1984 the army moved in. The army had underestimated the strength of the defenders; about 100 soldiers died. This was not the end of the matter. Bhindranwale’s followers, and others, occupied the Temple again and made it again a terrorist base. In 1986 the police went in once more; and again after that the terrorists came. In May 1988 the police did what they should have done at the begining: they cut off water and electricity and laid siege to the terrorists within the Temple. Many of the terrorists occupied the central gold-domed sanctum in the middle of the pool. Police marksmen outside the Temple fired at those who tried to get water from the pool. It was the Punjab summer, and very hot. Nearly 200 terrorists surrendered. During the siege the central temple had been defiled, used as a latrine, by the terrorists. Elsewhere in the Temple bodies were discovered of people who had been killed by the terrorists before the police action.

The men who had defiled the central temple had not fought to the end. A Sikh journalist who witnessed the siege was shocked by their surrender. He had been brought up to have another idea of good Sikh behaviour. This idea had already been confounded by some of the terrorist actions. He hadn’t believed that people of his faith would kill women and children; he hadn’t believed that they
would stop a bus and kill all the passengers. He had thought, at first, that these stories had been made up by the authorities. And there were people who continued to believe that the men who had surrendered during the siege of the Temple were not Sikhs at all. A pamphlet written by a retired army officer said that the men were ‘government-sponsored … criminals … given Sikh form and apparel and taught rudimentary knowledge of the Sikh traditions.’

The establishing of a Sikh identity was a recurring Sikh need. Religion was the basis of this identity; religion provided the emotional charge. But that also meant that the Sikh cause had been entrusted to people who were not representative of the Sikh achievement, were a generation or so behind.

Bhindranwale had spent most of his life in a seminary in the country town of Mehta Chowk, not far from Amritsar.

At the entrance to the town there were small shops set in bare earth yards on both sides of the road. One shop had this sign, as spelt here: UNIVERSIL EMPLOYMENT BEURO
Overseas Employment Consultant
. All around were fields of ripe dwarf wheat, due to be harvested in a few days. There were also fields of mustard, and fields of a bright-green succulent plant, grown as animal fodder. Lines of eucalyptus marked the boundaries between fields, adding green verticals to the very flat land: line standing against eucalyptus line all the way to the horizon suggested woodland in places.

Fields went right up to the seminary. The flat land, spreading to the horizon below a high sky, seemed limitless; but every square foot of agricultural earth was precious. The gurdwara or temple attached to the seminary had white walls, and the Mogul-style dome that Sikh gurdwaras have, speaking of the origin of the organized faith in Mogul times. The dome looked rhetorical; it stressed the ordinariness of the Indian concrete block which it crowned. The window frames of the white block were picked out in blue. The main hall of the gurdwara was quite plain, with big-bladed ceiling fans, and a wide railed upper gallery. Coloured panes of glass in the doorways were the only consciously pretty touch.

The seminary building was just as plain. On the upper floor, in
a concrete room bare except for two beds, the man who was the chief preacher talked to the visitors. There were no more guns at the seminary, he said; and they took in only children now. Some of those children, boys, came to the room, to look. They wore the blue seminarian’s gown that went down to mid-shin. It was bright outside, warm; the gowned and silent small boys in the bare room, come to look at the visitors, made one think of the boredom of childhood, of very long, empty days. Some idea of sanctuary and refuge also came to one. Many of these children were from other Indian states; some – solitaries, wanderers – seemed to have been converted to Sikhism, and to have found brotherhood and shelter in the seminary. That idea of welcome and security was added to when a big blue-gowned boy brought in a jug of warm milk and served it to the visitors in aluminium bowls.

The chief preacher said he had come to the seminary when he was about the age of the boys in the room. He had left his family home to stay in the seminary: that was more than 20 years ago.

It was in some such fashion that Bhindranwale had come to the seminary. He had come when he was four or five. Twenty-five years later he had become head of the seminary; and five years after that – after he had taken on the heretics among the Sikhs – he had moved to the Golden Temple. There, two years later, he had died.

He was from a farming family, one of nine sons, and he had been sent to the seminary because his family couldn’t support all their children. What could he have known of the world? What idea would he have had of towns or buildings or the state? In these village roads, that ran between the rich fields, there were low, dusty, red-brick buildings, with rough extensions attached, sometimes with walls of mud, sometimes with coverings of thatch on crooked tree-branch poles. Straw dried on house roofs. Shops stood in open dirt yards.

After 25 years in the seminary, he began to call people back to the true way, the pure way. He would go out preaching; he became known. One man heard him preach in 1977 – a year before his great fame – in the town of Gayanagar in Rajasthan. Three thousand people, perhaps 5000, had come to hear the young preacher from Mehta Chowk, and Bhindranwale spoke to them for about 45 minutes. ‘He held them spellbound, talking the common man’s language.’ What was said? ‘He asked people not to drink. He said, “Drinking does you harm, and you feel guilty. Everybody
wants to be be like his father. Every Sikh’s father is Guru Gobind Singh. So a Sikh should wear long hair, and have no vices.” There were many references to the scriptures.’

In this faith, when the world became too much for men, the religion of the 10th Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, the religion of gesture and symbol, came more easily than the philosphy and poetry of the first Guru. It was easier to go back to the formal baptismal faith of Guru Gobind Singh, to all the things that separated the believer from the rest of the world. Religion became the identification with the sufferings and persecution of the later Gurus: the call to battle.