COMMEMORATING HURT: MEMORIALIZING OPERATION BLUESTAR

Abstract

The storming of Sikhism's most sacred shrine, the Darbar Sahib at Amritsar by the Indian army in June 1984 has become a commemorative event in the ritual calendar of the Gurdwara. Memorialized every year in June, Ghallughara Dihara (Day of Genocide) fuses the modern event with medieval Sikh history. The remembrances of Bluestar and its martyrs are primarily viewed as an anti-state ritual, evoking the devastation of the Akal Takht as the hurt remembered. But over time ritual performances have altered the meaning of memorializing, subtly discounting the pre-eminence of particular Khalistani leaders killed in the army action, telescoping them within the generalized category of martyrs. Within Darbar Sahib celebrations a sense of a restoration of ‘order’ and divine authority embodied in the Akal Takht prevail over the memory of charismatic leaders who were central to the movement for Khalistan. Ritual enactments among the Sikh Diaspora in London on the other hand, continue to bracket together claims for asylum with political persecution in the ‘homeland’.

Notes

I am grateful to ICES, Colombo from whom I received a grant under the Project Globalization, national identity and violence: Exploring South Asian masculinities in the new millennium to enable the fieldwork. I am grateful to Rajnish who helped in collection of material in Amritsar. I am very grateful to Mr. H.K. Dua, Editor-in-Chief of The Tribune, Prabjot Singh, Bureau Chief, The Tribune, Navreet Kang, Chief Secretary, Government of Punjab, and many others at the Panjab University for their help and time.

Translation of Var quoted in the text of the paper (translation mine).

• Ballad of Battle

  Hear Ye …

  Then the Sikhs wrote to Zain Khan

  Listen, you agent of the Shah

  Our weapons are not satisfied

  We have to still settle accounts

  We've drunk the blood of enemies

  Even now our swords are restless

  Before you place new demands before us

  Let's settle prior debts

  We destroyed your Sirhind Fort

  With the clash of brick and stone

  We want the revenge of Fathegarh

  Of that ill-famed wall

  Our feet move toward victory

  While we keep the world in view

  Otherwise your proposal of negotiation

  Would be accepted by the Kartar (Creator of the World)

  Notes

  • Singhan: Reference to Sikh Misls at war with the Afghans.

  • Shah: The reference is to the Afghan ruler Ahmed Shah Abdali (and Zain Khan, Subedar of Sirhind and commander of Sirhind Fort). The Sikh confederacies came together to battle Abdali, not always successfully. A bitter battle between the Abdali and the Sikh misls is referred to as the Vadda Ghallughara (the major carnage) in which many non-combatant women and children were also killed.

  • Divar: The reference is to the wall where Guru Govind Singh's young sons Zorawar Singh and Fateh Singh were bricked in alive.

Vars are heroic ballads; some like Chandi di Var are martial poetry, said to have been sung by Sikh soldiers before going into battle. In the contemporary period, Sikh militants went into ‘combat’ missions with vars recorded on their headsets (Mahmood 1997). Poets and bards had an intensely political role in the agitation for Khalistan. At a convention of kavis (poets) and dhaddis (bards) held in early January, 1983, singers endorsed various demands of the Akali Dal and were urged to preach the policies and programs of the Akali Dal among the Sikh masses to create momentum for the Akali agitation (The Tribune, January 12, 1983).

The phrase is one of the translations of the title of Marcel Proust's seven-volume work on involuntary memory.

Knowing his views, Marx perhaps would have been horrified to learn that the place where he sat and wrote his major treatise on capitalism in the British Museum is now a memorial of sorts, gazed upon with reverence by countless academic tourists, partly as a mark of respect for his scholarship but also in the hope that his mental energy, although long dead, is not extinguished and might still infuse the space and flow like a magical force into the mind and pen of the contemporary scholar transforming their work into a luminous masterpiece.

In an opinion poll conducted by a news channel, on the eve of India's sixtieth anniversary of Independence, 44% of the respondents felt that Operation Bluestar and the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 were India's ‘greatest political blot’ (The Hindu, August 13, 2007, p.12).

The term ‘flush out’ is deployed in a multitude of civic and policing contexts; city drains and sewers are flushed out to rid them of dirt and vermin (Corbin 1986). Criminal gangs are ‘flushed out’ from disorderly neighborhoods. The twinning of regulation and purification were critical tropes used in military narratives of Operation Bluestar and the subsequent, more sweeping Operation Woodrose that cleared villages of militants. Television newscasters have seamlessly adopted the term – most recently, news reports announced that radicals in the Lal Masjid in Islamabad, Pakistan, had been ‘flushed out’ (CNN; CNN-IBN July 10, 2007; Hindustan Times, July 11, 2007, p.1). Hindustan Times in fact headlined the army siege and assault on the mosque ‘Pak's Bluestar’ (ibid.).

The imagined demography of Khalistan effectively excluded non-believers as well as patit, or non-observing, Sikhs who did not conform to the code of Rehat Maryada (Sikh way of life enunciated in religious documents and pamphlets). The Anandpur Sahib Resolution which might be viewed as a constitution in the making of this imagined nation, demanded the right over river waters of Punjab; the right to regulate the movement of food grain outside the state (the ‘kanak roko’ [stopping grain export] agitations were an outcome of this demand); the right to carry religiously prescribed weapons like the kirpan (dagger); and so on. The Resolution challenged the Indian Constitution's categorization of Sikhs ‘as Hindu’ (and therefore among other things, not entitled to the special privileges of reservation). The emotive language of disavowal drew simultaneously on scriptural tropes and political disaffection of dissent.

On June 1, 1984 some of the heaviest exchanges of fire between security forces and men inside the Golden Temple resulted in 11 deaths. Six bodies were handed over to the authorities by the SGPC (Shiromani Gurdwara Prabadhak Committee, the body that manages gurdwaras and the activities within them) officials. Amrik Singh, of the All India Sikh Student Federation, a close associate of Bhindranwale, reported to the press that 26 bullet holes from military firing had damaged the Temple complex on June 1 (The Tribune, June 2, 1984). Another report stated ‘As a result of the firing the situation has become explosive in the city … there is a general feeling of scare [sic] among the residents and people are in a state of shock’ (The Tribune, June 2, 1984).

Interview, Lakkha Singh Phadda, of West Drayton, interviewed in September 2006 at Southall Day Center, Southhall, UK. Phadda works in a catering unit at Gatwick, but had been in Amritsar during that fateful week in June 1984. After that experience and the deep outrage it evoked in him, he began to grow his beard and wear a full dastar (turban), even though it created a problem for him at his job at Gatwick Airport.

Interview, June 6, at the Golden Temple, with Deep Singh, 62 years, resident of Village Bhikwind Dara, Khemkaran, Panjab (interview conducted by Rajnish, Research Assistant). In 1984, Diaspora Sikhs of Southall were urged not to celebrate Diwali. Gurcharan Singh the Cultural and Welfare Secretary of the Southall Gurudwara explained that it was customary for Indians not to celebrate festivals in the first year after a death (Southall Gazette, October 26, 1984, p.1), reinforcing the link between personal and architectural loss.

Subsequent events include Operation Black Thunder One and Black Thunder Two (in 1986 and 1988, respectively), when the Golden Temple was again besieged and entered this time jointly by the Army and Police forces. These operations have been less well documented. (But see Sarab Jit Singh, 2002.)

When not using the word in English, Punjabis use the word ‘thes’ or ‘dhakka’, also conveying a sense of bodily injury. The term ‘hurt’ does not exist in law, but ‘hurting the sentiment of community’ is a phrase frequently deployed to argue cases of loss or injury that are not necessarily physical. By profaning sacred space, the occupation of the Golden Temple complex was, and is, viewed as a deliberate ‘hurt’ inflicted on the sentiments and standing of the Sikhs.

Sikhs usually keep their beards groomed and tied. The tying of the beard in specific styles connotes difference within the community. For example, traders are said to tie netting to keep their facial hair in place. Others tie special pieces of cloth over the beard, either tucking the cloth under the turban, or tied in a knot over a truncated turban. Matching turbans, beard cloths and neckties are styles adopted by the urbane.

Motorbikes, a sign of male prowess and wealth among the Punjabi peasantry, were viewed with suspicion by the constabulary as swift get-away vehicles during the entire period of militancy. At various points of time bans on adult males riding pillion were imposed (The Tribune, May 7, 1984). This suspicion was perhaps heightened by the fact that the Punjab police were ill-equipped and feared for their safety. Almost 40% of the constabulary applied for leave during this period (The Tribune, May 14, 1984).

Initiation rituals of amrit chakkna (drinking the nectar) are a vital ritual in the creation of community and incorporating new members. Publicly enacted amrit chakkna initiations were performed throughout the early to mid 1980s as a form of renewal of faith and commitment to the emerging political community of Khalistan. Before he fled to take sanctuary in the Golden Temple, Bhindranwale toured the state and conducted initiation ceremonies; subsequently his father Jasbir Singh Rode also toured villages of Punjab, actively encouraging people to reenact the amrit ritual as a form of a personal pledge to defend the faith.

The forerunner to the Khalistan movement, the Punjabi Suba movement of the 1960s also stressed the right of control over territory and water. The claim to territory has been interleaved with the demands for a substantive federal political structure.

Marayada is a contextual term; it variously connotes honor, way of life, ritual and traditions. Rehat maryada is the code of conduct incumbent on all Sikhs. However, as Uberoi has pointed out, it is the bodily observances of men that symbolically constitute the collective body of community (Uberoi 1996). The hurt to maryada therefore is understood as debasement of mards – men – who sustain and embody maryada.

Operation Bluestar was not the only time the temple complex was entered and taken over by the state in the course of the period referred to as the ‘militancy period’. Its memory, however, is marked because of the simultaneous concurrence of events; it was the Gurpurab – Day of Remembrance – of Guru Arjan Dev and thousands of Sikh pilgrims had gathered in the Temple precincts to celebrate. Many killed in the army action on those two days included such pilgrims. The temple and its sacred buildings also suffered major damage.

For Sikhs, pilgrimages to the Golden Temple on designated days of the ritual calendar or to mark personal life cycle events or for no special reason at all other than because someone ‘felt’ like it, is a performance of membership of the sangat (religious collective). Visits are part of personal and collective memory, recounted and re-performed to produce a sense of community. Religious souvenirs – paintings, charts, books of religious discourses – purchased from the surrounding bazaar shops layer memory with artifact. Bathing in the sacred pool around which the complex is structured, making offerings to the Book housed in the Harmandir (the symbolic center of the sacred complex), singing, listening to scriptural recitations and eating at the langar, the community kitchen of the complex, are all part of creating a sense of sangat, the gathered community of believers. Most of all the sense of community is created by the care of the complex through voluntary ritualized labor – kar seva – through which the monuments are maintained and quotidian tasks performed. Anything from regular sweeping, washing, cooking, to building and repair work in the Temple is done through Kar Seva. Building contractors give of their labor and expertise in a spirit of worship. Throughout the performance of seva (care of a superior being or site) some, although not all, workmen wear ritual clothing of blue turbans and chogas or long shirts denoting the practical as ceremonial, distinguished from the mundane.

Two other prominent proponents of Khalistan were also killed during the Operation. Amrik Singh headed the militant All India Sikh Student Federation, while Shabeg Singh was a decorated Army general who resigned his commission in 1976. Shahbeg Singh was primarily responsible the fortification of the Temple complex and planning the armed resistance. Houses in the narrow gullies surrounding the complex functioned as outposts connected by wireless; soldiers of the Indian army were killed or wounded first by the sniper fire from these outposts, a situation reminiscent of the experience of the colonial British army entering the narrow gullies of Lucknow during the hot May days of the Mutiny of 1857 (Oldenberg 1984).

The exact day and time of Bhindranwale's death is unclear; he is said to have died either sometime on the night of June 5–6 or the night of June 6–7. However, June 6 is designated as the death anniversary of his closest followers (whose portraits are displayed in the Sikh Museum). The anniversary of Bhindranwale's death designated as June 6 has become an occasion for many to mourn those killed in the violence and is literally a death anniversary by extension of other deaths. In Amritsar, people who lost family members participate in the Ghallughara Diwas at the Golden Temple in June of every year. In London placards with the photos of missing and dead kin are displayed in ‘Never Forget’ rallies that mark public commemorations of Operation Bluestar.

The politics of aftermath is punctuated by assassinations that moved across national and global space from the assassination of Indira Gandhi in Delhi (1984), to Pune in western India of General Vaidya, in charge of Operation Bluestar (1986), to Bucharest and the assassination attempt on Julio Ribeiro (1991), the Chief of Police in Panjab whose ‘bullet for bullet’ policy created a new dimension of rule of the modern Indian state.

Uggarwadi was the official term used freely in government statements and in the English-language media, state television and radio broadcasts. The official term stands in opposition to the more popular term Kharku, or freedom fighter. Both terms refer to masculine bodily styles – ugar or ferocious, kharag – honed; its etymological roots drawn from the weaponry – kharag – an iron scimitar.

There is a peculiar imprecision in the commemorations. October 31 is the anniversary of the assassination of Indira Gandhi who was gunned down at her residence, but most official ceremonials of remembrance are conducted at Shakti Sthal where she was cremated on November 4, 1984. The exact date of Bhindranwale death is unclear (until very recently some of his supporters in the seminary refused to acknowledge that he had died at all, declaring that he is chardi kala – in rising spirit). However, it is speculated that he was killed sometime on the night of June 4–5 when the ‘storming’ of the Temple complex began, or the night of June 5–6, when some of the heaviest shelling of the Temple complex occurred. Surprisingly Ghallughara Diwas, Genocide Day, is most fully memorialized on June 6, which may or may not be Bhindranwale's death anniversary. Imprecision argues against memorials as inextricably tied to both place and date a point made by Lowenthal (1979, 121) in his discussions of WWI memorials.

In the absence of a physical memorial to anchor collective memory, the commemoration of Ghallughara Diwas (Day of Genocide) has also become a transnational ritual, and with its movement across space, meanings have shifted.

In 2006, newspapers reported that a Congress worker wanted to build a temple named ‘Indira Dham’ in Jaipur district, where the late leader would be worshipped like a goddess (Times of India, June 12, 2006).

The natural stone monolith streaked with red veins of minerals resembles a flame creating a visual analogy of the eternal flame at martyrs' memorials and the flames that arise from small oil lamps intrinsic to many rituals.

A few rooms in the Safdarjung Road Memorial are dedicated to Rajiv Gandhi who succeeded his mother as Prime Minister, and who was himself assassinated in Tamil Nadu. Rajiv Gandhi and his family lived with his mother at her residence.

This absence is peculiar given that Jallianwala Bagh, the site of the massacre of unarmed pilgrims by Brigadier General Dyer on Baisakhi, 1919, is down the road from the Golden Temple and posters of other martyrs like Bhagat Singh are sold on the pavements in the surrounding bazaar.

However, on June 2, 2005, the Damdami Taksal decided to honor Mr. Apar Singh Bajwa, a retired Superintendent of Police, who had identified the body and then witnessed the cremation of Bhindranwale in 1984 (The Tribune, Amritsar, June 2, 2005). Mr. Bajwa had been the main investigator of the Sikh–Nirankari clash in 1978, in which Bhindranwale was the main accused, and in the course of the investigation Bajwa ‘had met Sant Bhindranwala and leaders of the Taksal hundreds of times … as part of his official duty’ (The Tribune, Chandigarh, May 20, 2001). In an interview with The Tribune reporters, Mr. Bajwa said he was called upon to recognize the body, which he said was injured on the right side of the face and had bled profusely in the abdomen. Bajwa said the Army officers agreed to cremate the bodies of Sant Bhindranwale, General Shabeg Singh, Baba Thara Singh and Bhai Amrik Singh according to Sikh rites at his personal request while the rest of the bodies (more than 800) were cremated en masse. Mr Bajwa said the Army allowed him to cover the body of Sant Bhindranwale with a sheet and pour ghee on it.

Media footage, however, was not confined to an army-orchestrated fantasy; pictures and stories of putrefying debris of bodies and buildings left behind by the army also circulated in news reports.

On the fifteenth anniversary of Operation Bluestar in 1999, there was a clash between the workers of the district Akali Dal and others with plain-clothes police who prevented the former from marching toward the Golden Temple. Newspapers reported that ‘turbans flew … [and] … police in mufti was busy in bundling hardliners into the police vehicles’ (The Tribune, June 7, 1999).

In 2004 Parkash Singh Badal, President, Shiromani Akali Dal, participated in Ghallughara Divas (Genocide Day) for the first time after Operation Bluestar (The Tribune, Amritsar, June 6, 2004).

Rumours that Santa Singh was paid Rupees 1 lac a day by the government flew through the city (Tully and Jacob 1985).

Baba Santa Singh was eventually declared tankhahia (excommunicated) for breach – kurahit – of Rahit, the code of conduct of the Sikh community.

Post Operation Bluestar, with Bhindranwale and other leaders dead and major Akali party leaders jailed, the five High Priests of the major gurdwaras or Sikh shrines became the center of negotiations and conduct of affairs of the community.

Shiromani Gurdwara Prabadhak Committee, the body that manages gurdwaras and the activities within them. Despite their centrality in the management of gurdwaras affairs the Temple complex was not handed over to the SGPC by the army on September 29, 1984, partly because the president of SGPC Tohra was in jail and the SGPC was treated as a highly suspect organization for having given sanctuary within the Complex to Bhindranwale.

Tohra's decision was disputed as one not endorsed by the sangat or the Panth (Giani Kirpal Singh 1999) and therefore not representative of community opinion.

The re-built Akal Takht was opened for ritual prayers on Baisakhi, April 13, 1997.

A shrine to Baba Deep Singh is built in one corner of the parikarma and forms part of the shrines of the complex.

The citation of innocent lives lost was a continuous tenor in Sikh critiques of Indira Gandhi's policies. ‘If the government itself is indulging in the killing of innocents, how can it avoid retaliation?’ declared Kirpal Singh, Jathedar of the Akal Takht in 1984, refusing to acquiesce to Indira Gandhi's demand that the Jathedars issue an edict for Sikhs withdraw support to militants (India Today, October 31, 1984, p.18). Kirpal Singh's assertion was coincidentally published by a leading weekly the day Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her bodyguards.

Not all accounts are consistent about the actual date of Bhindranwale's death; most put it down to the night of June 5–6, 1984, when the heaviest shelling and exchange of fire occurred. The captions under the portraits of Amrik Singh and Subeg Singh [sic] in the Akal Takht Museum, however, designate June 6, 1984, interestingly leaving the date of their birth unspecified. There is no portrait of Bhindranwale hung at the museum.

Ghallughara Diwas was first observed officially by the SGPC in 1995 when Gurcharan Singh Tohra was SGPC President. Until that time, small functions had been held in dispersed Gurdwaras which emphasized the remembrance of disconnected pasts.

Vadda Ghallughara occurred in Village of Kup, near Malerkotia, on February 5, 1762.

Bhindranwale and his followers lived and held court mainly in the Guru Nanak Nivas, one of the main buildings in the Temple Complex.

Most recently, violent controversy surrounded the Baba of another Dera, Baba Ram Rahim Gurmeet Singh of Dera Sacha Sauda, who was shown with a kalgi (egret feather adorning a turban; a sign of royalty and superiority) and a hawk in an advertisement that mimetically replicated the depictions of Guru Govind Singh, whom no person can hope to emulate let alone impersonate. The popular depiction of the Guru is from a twentieth-century painting by Sir Sobha Singh.

Bungas were mansions built by misl chiefs to house themselves and their retinues when they visited the Darbar Sahib (Patwant Singh 1999); the Bungas also served as defensive bastions in times of war, and were thus deployed through the period of the 1984 conflicts.

Amrik Singh (aap ji Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale [mukhi Damdami Takhsal vale] de vadde puttr san. Bhai Sahib Bluestar Action dauran bharti fauj diyan topan ateh tankan da mukabala karde hoye Sri Akal Takht Sahib vicheh Shaheed hoye) and Subeg [sic] Singh (Sri Darbar Sahib Ji upar bharti fauji hamel da dutt ke mukabal kitta. Hari tainka da mukabala karde hoye Sri akal Takht de samneh Saheed pa gaye) killed in the Operation are referred to as Shaheed Bhai, and while the year of birth of both men is noted to indicate the beginning of the life span of this shaheed or martyr (1954 and 1923, respectively), the day and year of death of both are indicated clearly – June 6, 1984; Shaheed S. Beant Singh Ji (1949–October 31, 1984) and Shaeed S Satwant Singh Ji assassins of Indira Gandhi are slightly differently indicated. The caption under the portrait of Satwant Singh executed later in the case, reads ‘phansin the latka ke kattal kitte gaya. Us vakat aap di umar 22 sal si, aap ji pulice vich naukri kardeh san’ (he was made to hang and killed. At the time, his [the respectful plural pronoun aap is used] age was 22 years, and he had a job in the police).

Fenech (2001) also writes about the juxtaposition of recent ‘martyrs’ from the Punjab conflict placed alongside depictions of historical martyrs from the annals of Sikh history in Gurdwaras of the Diaspora.

Ajeet Singh Khera (a former associate of Jagjit Singh Chauhan who declared the independent state of Khalistan in Bayswater, London) ironically said in an interview ‘We've learnt how to die but not to live.’ Interview with Ajeet Singh Khera, September, 2006, Southall, UK.

On November 29, 2007, the SGPC installed a portrait of Bhindranwale in the Central Sikh Museum at the Golden Temple amidst intense controversy. The gesture was read as an attempt to forestall the attempts by radical Sikh orgainzations to install a portrait depicting Bhindranwale armed with weaponry. A newspaper report noted that the low key ceremony was a way of keeping radical organizations at bay (The Tribune, Friday, November 30, 2007, p.1).

Baba Deep Singh was also the founding head of the Damdami Taksal, of which Bindranwale was the head.

Wanggar – announcement; a person who calls the prayer.

In an uncanny mimesis, 1984 street events in Southall replicated sorrow and celebrations enacted in Delhi streets. Post Bluestar, Hindus at the Margaret Road temple offered sweets to passersby and wrote letters to the local newspapers in large numbers. On hearing the news of the assassination of Indira Gandhi, young Sikh men burst firecrackers and Southall sweet shops stayed open all night (Southall Gazette, July 30, 1984, p.8; and November 2, 1984, p.1), reflecting the deep fissures that the Punjab events had driven between the communities of Diaspora.

In 1984, a week after the meetings in Southall, hundreds of coaches bringing Sikh protesters from all over Britain jammed Hyde Park. An estimated 50,000 Sikhs marched in procession. Bhindranwale was proclaimed a martyr by the protest marchers who carried a painting of him at the head of the procession (Southall Gazette, June 15, 1984, p.5).

In June 2007, the UK High Commissioner to India, Sir Michael Arthur, revealed that at least 10 or 12 applications for political asylum from Punjab were sent back every year (The Tribune, June 14, 2007) now that Country Reports of the Home Office have declared that India as a safe and ‘friendly’ country.