Operation Bluestar was a national catastrophe. Its traumatic impact on the country, especially in Punjab, lingers till today. It was the beginning of the Punjab insurgency. Operation Bluestar should have never happened.
With the recent declassification of confidential documents by the United Kingdom’s National Archives under the 30-year rule, details of cooperation between the British and Indian governments have emerged regarding Operation Bluestar — the clearing operation at the Golden Temple undertaken by the Indian Army in June 1984.
Media anchors and political agitators in the country have revived three-decade-old controversies about one of the most dangerously fraught periods in India’s post-Independence history.
Operation Bluestar remains a highly emotive issue. It is difficult to retrospect dispassionately, even after almost three decades. Was a military operation to clear the Golden Temple at all necessary? There are many views on that, none pleasant or palatable. However, what is very clear is that in the overall national interest, Operation Bluestar was a self-inflicted, politico-military trauma that India could well have done without.
And who was to blame for the whole sorry state of affairs that precipitated the situation? A simple question with an easy answer — as always, the blame must rest on the politics and politicians of the time. The Indian Army, on whom much vituperation is invariably directed, was merely an instrument. It was a warhorse carrying out its assigned tasks. Its own professional advice about the advisability of doing so under the dangerously sensitive politico-religious conditions prevalent at that time was brushed aside by the political class.
The overall factors and personalities of the players involved in the drama must never be forgotten. At the time of Operation Bluestar, the President of Pakistan, an ever-hostile neighbour was Gen. Zia-ul-Haq. Before his self-elevation to the supreme national office, Zia-ul-Haq was a serving general of the Pakistan Army that constituted the ruling class in Pakistan.
The Pakistan Army nursed a deep and abiding hatred towards India for the catastrophic humiliation it had suffered in Bangladesh in 1971. The internal unrest in India’s Punjab was just too tempting an opportunity to be passed.
The roots of the deteriorating political situation in India in the 1980s lay in clumsy, ham-fisted handling of the Punjabi Suba agitation by the Indian government as well as the state governments of Punjab and later Haryana.
To counter the Akali Dal and their agitation for Punjabi Suba, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, India’s own Fakir of Ipi, was rumoured to have been sponsored and inducted into the political system by the political hierarchy reigning at the time in New Delhi. If this long-standing perception, vehemently but unconvincingly denied by all concerned, is at all true, it was a devious brinkmanship in the traditions of Chanakya that badly misfired.
Bhindranwale quickly morphed into a Frankenstein figure who turned on his creators and promptly took up residence inside the Holy of Holies, igniting communal tensions over the situation at the Golden Temple and which ultimately pushed the Indian government to the wall, setting the stage for sending the Indian Army into the Golden Temple to carry out Operation Bluestar. The whole situation was simply tailor-made for Pakistan’s grand dreams of “badla”. And Pakistan did not hesitate to exploit the opportunity.
Pakistan threw the full weight of its covert agencies behind the Khalistan movement which sprang up in the immediate aftermath of Operation Bluestar both in the Punjab in India, as well amongst the substantial Sikh diaspora settled abroad, providing sanctuary, support and resources to Khalistani separatists for a campaign to destabilise the Indian state. The unthinkable came to pass — an insurgency broke out inside one of the Indian Army’s traditionally prime recruiting areas.
Operations within the Golden Temple were not only politically sensitive but sentimentally extremely repugnant to all. But the Indian Army, which has handled all of India’s wars since Independence, external as well as internal, with total professionalism, and Operation Bluestar could not be an exception. Therefore, whatever interaction might or might not have taken at that time between the Iron Ladies who were the Prime Ministers of Britain and India, the impression now sought to be created by the media after declassification of the official Indo-British correspondence, that the Indian Army required professional guidance from any source, especially foreign, for the conduct of Operation Bluestar is laughably absurd.
A top secret letter dated February 23, 1984, reads: “The Indian authorities recently sought British advice over a plan to remove Sikh extremists from the Golden Temple in Amritsar… The Foreign Secretary decided to respond favourably to the Indian request and, with the Prime Minister’s agreement, an SAS officer has visited India and drawn up a plan which has been approved by Indira Gandhi. The foreign secretary believes that the Indian government may put the plan into operation shortly.”
Acquisition of intelligence is quite another issue, where interaction with foreign agencies is a continuing process which is nothing extraordinary. But the reported visit to the Golden Temple of a single officer from the British Special Air Service (SAS) is certainly puzzling. What special information could this British officer have provided that would not already have been available with the Punjab police or Indian intelligence agencies? If the Indian government was monitoring the situation, as indeed they must have been, they would have full reports readily available.
Operation Bluestar was a national catastrophe. Its traumatic impact on the country, especially in Punjab, lingers till today. Media images of the tank assault on the Golden Temple left the country in a daze, whose lasting consequences were to be incalculable. It was the beginning of the Punjab insurgency, the first ever inside the Indian heartland. It was an insurgency that ultimately took the lives of Indira Gandhi and countless others. Ram Janmabhoomi, Hazratbal and others were to follow.
Operation Bluestar should have never happened.
The writer is a former Chief of Army Staff
and a former member of Parliament
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