Author Topic: 1984 Sikh Genocide (Read 2309 times)

Tezy_Sandhu · « **on:** June 03, 2010, 08:21:12 PM »

In 1984, the Indian state organized and implemented two devastating massacres of the Sikh population of
India, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Sikh civilians. This was a two part carnage. It
was committed under the guise of an official military crackdown against ʻterrorismʼ (June) and, subsequent,
anti-Sikh pogroms (November).
This document is an earnest attempt to inform the minds and conscience of the world about these horrific
actions of the "worldʼs largest democracy". It presents the untold story of the Indian governmentʼs brutal
punitive crackdown against an aggrieved and agitated community which has campaigned for 50 years for
political, legal and human rights. It highlights the telling facts of how the Sikh community was singled out for
an onslaught of arbitrary arrests, ʻdisappearancesʼ, torture and mass killings.
The first full-scale attack on the Sikhs, code-named Operation Bluestar, commenced on 31st May 1984. It
took the form of 150, 000 Indian army troops being sent to the northern Indian state of Punjab, with
helicopter gunships, tanks and modern weaponry. The state was sealed off from the external world.
Journalists were removed. Telephone lines were cut, preventing internal and external communication.
All news and information was controlled by the Indian government. All independent newspapers and radio
stations were closed down. An indefinite curfew was imposed across the whole of Punjab, with 20
million residents placed in a state of siege and imprisonment.
On June 4th 1984, Indiaʼs Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the Indian Army to invade the Golden
Temple complex in Amritsar, the Sikhsʼ national institution. As it was the anniversary of the martyrdom of the
Sikhsʼ fifth Guru (prophet), Guru Arjun Dev, it was full of thousands of pilgrims. Forty other shrines were
simultaneously attacked using massive fire power. On the pretext of apprehending ʻa handful of
militantsʼ lodged inside the Golden Temple, the Indian Army unleashed a terror unprecedented in postindependence
India.
It took the use of Vijayanta tanks to win the fight for the army. These let loose a barrage highly explosive
shells, which tore off the entire front of the Akal Takht, the temporal seat of the Sikhs, setting off fires in
many of its internal rooms (some of which housed precious historical relics), and badly damaged itʼs dome.
Joyce Pettigrew described the attack “not to eliminate a political figure or a political movement but to
suppress the culture of a people, to attack their heart, to strike a blow at their spirit and selfconfidence.”
News of the attack on the Golden Temple quickly spread despite the curfew. Thousands of people in the
surrounding villages gathered to march to Amritsar to defend the Golden Temple. At Golwand village
Jhubal, a crowd of several thousands gathered with makeshift weapons and began to march the 25km to
Amritsar. Helicopter patrols spotted them and strafed them with bullets without warning. Within minutes
hundreds were dead and wounded.
Crowds gathered at the villages including Ajnala, Rajash Sunsi, Dhandhesali, Fatehpur, Rajpurtan and
Batala in Gurdaspur. A large crowd gathered at Chowk Mehta, HQ of the Damdami Taksal, where the army killed 76 Sikhs and arrested 285. All across the region, wireless sets carried the message from army chiefs
to soldiers to shoot on sight anyone on the streets.
The army continued its task of moving through the villages in the countryside & flushing out alleged
ʻterroristsʼ. The young Sikh men in the villages were lined up in rows; some were stripped and publicly
flogged and accused of being terrorists or withholding information about terrorists. Some were
taken away and sent to interrogation centers, never to be seen again.
With dead bodies laying all around, the vast lake of the Golden Temple Complex was transformed into a
thick red of profuse blood. No attempts were made to provide assistance to the injured or dying. According
to the Christian Science Monitor: “On Saturday, medical workers in Amritsar said soldiers had
threatened to shoot them if they gave food or water to Sikh pilgrims wounded in the attack and lying
in the hospital.”
People were killed like that. No medicine was provided, in fact no medical aid was administered at all. Many
people died in the camps. Neither water nor medicine aid was provided and you could not even donate
blood for the injured in hospitals as it was stated that they were POWʼs and hence no blood transfusions
were permitted. The Army detained volunteers of the Red Cross who wanted to help the injured at the
nearby Jallianwala Bagh.
G.K.C Reddy commented that “Operation Blue Star will go down in history as one of the biggest
massacres of unarmed civilians by the organized military force of a nation.” Further, he added that
ʻthe word unarmed is used deliberately as the disparity in arms on the two sides was so great that those
resisting army invasion of the temple could hardly be termed armed.ʼ
In an effort to destroy a crucial part of Sikh heritage, the army deliberately set fire to the Sikh Reference
Library within the complex, after it had been secured. Irreplaceable copies of Guru Granth Sahib (Holy
Scriptures of the Sikhs); archives of documents from every period of Sikh history and even artifacts from the
lives of the Gurus were reduced to ash. The Toshakhana, treasury, of the Golden Temple was
systematically looted.
The government of India has always maintained that the army action was a ʻlast resortʼ necessary to flush
out terrorists who had collected weapons. But according to Retired Lt-General S.K. Sinha of the
Indian Army: “The Army action was not the ʻlast resortʼ as PM Indira Gandhi would have us believe.
It had been in her mind for more than 18 months. Shortly after the Akali agitation of 1982, the Army
began rehearsals of a commando raid near Chakrata Cantonment in the Doon Valley, where a
complete replica of the Golden Temple complex had been built.”
Itʼs time we ask ourselves, are these the actions of a democracy? Or a fascist, genocidal state?
“Though some will find the analogy with Nazi Germany here too extreme, both the explicit targeting
of Sikhs as traitors following Operation Bluestar and the clear earmarking of Sikh residences and
businesses in the post-assassination carnage speak to an incipient genocidal campaign.”
-Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, Professor of Anthropology
University of Maine, Orono, USA

Author Topic: 1984 Sikh Genocide (Read 2309 times)

Tezy_Sandhu

1984 Sikh Genocide

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