1984 is singlled out as annus horribilis in India; the year which saw
the ruthless storming of the Golden Temple - holiest of the Sikh
shrines by the Indian Army in Jun, the elimination of Sant Jarnail
Singh Bhindranwale demanding restoration of Sikh political demands and
the assassination of Indira Gandhi at the hands of her Sikh body
guards on 31 Oct.

The assassination of the megalomaniac Indian leader rent asunder the
façade of Indian secular ethos; berserk Hindu mobs led by well known
Congress leaders embarked on a no holds barred pogrom of Sikhs and the
lingering communal wounds still hauntthe Indian polity in an
unprecedented manner.

By 1984 Indira Gandhi had turned into a despot who thought that the
Sikh demands for realization of their genuine political grievances had
made them a security threat for India. When she came to power for the
second time in 1980, Punjab was getting restive. It was a time when
stirred by a strong sense of communal alienation the movement of
separatism had begun to take roots in Punjab. Akali Dal, theSikh
political Party in Punjab had become vocal in strongly articulating
the Sikh grievances and provided a platform for mobilizing heightened
Sikh political aspirations. True to her Machiavellian character, Indra
Gandhi sought to defeat the movement through division and
manipulation. Little did she know that her much abhorred tactics were
inexorably shaping the scenario of her tragic death. To diffuse the
intensity of the Sikh activism, Indra Gahdhi sought a counter to
arrest the gathering momentum of the Akali Dal in the messianic figure
of Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. In a classic case of a monstrous
creation turning upon its creator, Bhindranwale, instead of becoming
an instrument toIndira Gandhi 's manipulative designs, turned out to
be a man of his own and to Indra Gandhi, consternation emerged as an
uncontrollable force. His radical expression of Sikh grievances along
with the demand for a separate homeland made him the center of the
gathering storm with all shades of Sikh radicals gravitating to his
call. He garrisoned himself in the Golden Temple and turned it into
the nerve center of Khalistan movement.

Indira Gandhi failed to gauge the scale of Sikh alienation and Instead
of charting a political course, sought to defeat the threat through
unleashing the force of arms. With this objective in view, Operation
Blue Star was launched on June 4 1984. When the assault came to end,
the two hundred years old and the most sacred of theSikh shrines,
including its sanctum sanctorum, the Akal Takht, lay devastated. A
treasure of sacred and historic documents and priceless religious
heirlooms, treasured for centuries, got lost in dust and smoke.
According to the Indian Government's white paper, 493 Sikh militants
were killed inside the shrine and more than 1500 arrested. Foreign
journalists who witnessed the attack believed that the casualties
during the assault were not in hundreds but in thousands. By
committing the ultimate sacrilege of the holiest of theSikh shrines,
Indira Gandhi had in effect signed her own death warrants; her
assassination remained just a matter of time and opportunity.

Sikh retribution caught up with Indira Gandhi on 31 October 1984 when
her trusted Sikh bodyguards, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh
assassinated her, as she walked to her office from the residential
quarters. Her death were followed by large scale antiSikh riots during
which the Indian Government played the role of a silent spectator
permitting the bloodthirsty Hindu gangs to indulge their lust for Sikh
blood. Informed of the Sikh pogrom, Rajiv Gandhi failed to give orders
for protection of the Sikhs by state machinery making his famous
remarks justifying the riots; "When a big tree falls the earth
shudders." Encouraged by tacit approval of Rajiv Gandhi and theHindu
establishment, goons belonging to Congress Party led berserk mobs that
roamed the Sikh neighborhoods, putting houses to torch and killings
Sikhs including young children and boys. Worst kinds of atrocities
were committed in Delhi neighborhoods where police remained a silent
spectator to theSikh pogrom permitting mobs a free hand in venting
their diabolic rage. It was only when Army was ultimately called in to
quell the riots that a semblance of normalcy returned. When the riots
subsided, 10,000 Sikhs had been killed and innumerable gurdawaras
demolished to dust.

Sikh backlash to this provocation was quick and ruthless. Jarnail
Singh Bhindranwale got etched in the Sikh folklore as a 'shaheed' and
a hero and elevated in veneration to the status of a 'Sant'. Anti Sikh
violence gave a boost to the demand for Khalistan and a full-fledged
insurgency picked up inside Punjab extending to attacks on Indian
assets in foreign lands. Air India's plane was blown up on June 23,
1985 which killed all its crew and 329 passengers. Sant Harchand Singh
Longowal, who signed the Rajiv-Longowal Accord on 29 July 1985, was
killed just three weeks later while praying inside a gurdwara. Gen
A.S.Vaidya, who was Indian Army's Chief of Staff when Operation Blue
Star was launched, was gunned down in Pune in August 1985. Chief
Minister Beant Singh was blown up along with twelve others by a
suicide bomber on July 31 1995 at Chandigarh for letting down theSikh
Cause.

Indian Government ratcheted its violent campaign to bring Sikhs to
heel. Not only were Sikh separatists demanding separate homeland
killed in fake encounters but thousands of innocents also lost their
lives to state brutality. The number of Sikhs killed in this campaign
remains a guess to this day.

The bodies of those killed were disposed of through cremation in state
crematoriums to obliterate any trace of state sponsored terrorism. In
1996 the Supreme Court of India upheld a finding by the Central Bureau
of Investigation that 2097 bodies alone were cremated in three
crematoriums on police orders without proper notification or
documentation. The extermination of Sikhs during 80s and 90s has
formed a bleeding wound that has traumatized theSikh community despite
passage of two decades. The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab"
published by the South Asia Forum for Human Rights in Katmandu. 31 Oct
this year marks the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Indira
Gandhi and the subsequent bleeding of Sikh nation in a professedly
secular India. Despite the passage of considerable time and
institution of eleven commissions to find out the guilty, no one has
paid for the crimes committed against theSikh Nation.

This is no black mark in isolation; 6 December 1992, subsequently, saw
the tearing down of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya and the pogrom of
Muslims in Gujarat in the spring of 2002, where more than 3000 Muslims
were butchered by theHindu mobs, remains a benchmark that equals the
Sikh agony in 1984.

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