"Memorial to Bluestar, Badal should control hardliners by S. S. Dhanoa" in The Tribune, June 15, 2005, 11, appears to be a product of at least a confused mind. What is proposed is a memorial to the victims of the armed forces' attack on the Darbar Sahib Amritsar and thirty-eight other shrines spread all over the Punjab in the scorching summer of 1984. No memorial to the army attack, with whatever code-name it goes, is intended. Badal in the expression, is projected as a shepherd tending to goats and sheep. The tragedy of the Sikhs and the Punjab originates in the mindset which at best considers the Sikhs to be dumb driven animals and at worst the sacrificial cattle whose only purpose of existence is to fill the Kali's bottomless bowl with their blood. There are no hardliners and `moderates' in the Sikh body politic. The only distinction is between those who have sufficiently enticed by the mammon to have become collaborators and those who still stand for dignified existence for the Sikhs in de-colonised India after 1947.

To acknowledge that he is trying to spearhead the movement to destroy the relevance of the Sikh thesis in modern times would be a difficult proposition for Dhanoa to accept. It is more difficult to refute it logically if he is honest in his professions. Adopting the will of the majority as the voice of conscience has come spontaneously to his kind of people. It is an attitude which is materially most satisfying to people with a flexible conscience. They flourish in a short-sighted order rushing ahead in blind fury to establish its peculiar kind of imperialism in the garb of universally accepted norms of social and political behaviour. They appear to relish the prospects of imposing their will on other nations and minorities. This hides many crudities and becomes a badge of their superiority of thought and they barge ahead with the enthusiasm of new converts, regardless of the long term adverse consequences for the particular society they seek to be sub-serve or the world order. The material harvest that individual cronies reap is always kept in mind and becomes a propelling force turning them into crusaders for the cause of false gods they seek to propitiate. Something of the sort has happened to Dhanoa, whose career has seen no setback since the sixties of the last century when as Divisional Commissioner in Dhanbad, he bailed out the district officials who had cut off the hair and beard of Sikh truck driver from the Punjab. His crime was that he could not find the road condition suitable to allowing their vehicles to go ahead.

The Home Minister had been cornered in the Lok Sabha and could not respond adequately to the extremely highhanded and barbaric behaviour of his district officials. With the consummate cunningness of an accomplished courtier, Dhanoa marched off the concerned officials to Takhat Patna Sahib where he invited them to hurl the most grotesque insult wrapped into an apology at the unsuspecting random sangat assembled there. It enabled the Home Minister to claim that the `problem had been solved to the satisfaction of all concerned.' The brutality of the happening was completely overshadowed by the sham masterminded by Danoa. His masters were completely happy and have so far kept him happier than most civil servants of his station. In return, Dhanoa has been practising that rewarding art of destroying ones own kind practised for centuries by the trained black bucks and kites that lure their kind into snares set up by butchers. This activity has been mentioned by the Guru in Var Asa. Very significantly, the third treacherous animal that finds mention along with the other two, is the shikdar very roughly translatable to a medieval Division Commissioner.

Badal Dal "opened its doors to Hindus" not recently but in 1995 at its Moga conference. It was done in total reversal of the ethos of the Sikh political party established to safeguard Sikh interests. Since 1947, the year of decolonisation, the permanent cultural majority has been becoming more and more hostile to and intolerant of other nations and minorities sharing the country with them. The need of the hour, the guarantee that the national psyche will develop on the secular lines talked of in the constitution of the country, has increasingly become dependent upon the sturdy political parties expressive of the spirit of the minorities and federating units. To promote the cultural concerns of the minorities and other nations appears to be the only prescription for retaining sanity. It is more so in an environment which has become increasingly hostile and dangerous because the permanent cultural majority has progressively developed hatred and intolerance for other nations sharing the country with them.

Those familiar with the dynamics of justice and the rigorous discipline of history know full well that the oppressor's version is always as farthest removed from truth as it is possible for a proposition to be. "Killer gangs operating from the Golden Temple complex" is certainly not the gospel truth. Those who have watched the unfolding of history from a comparative vantage point down to the persons having regard for commonsense, have also heard of Sant Longowal's counter assertion that the `killer gangs operated from the police stations in the state.' To support this we have the 41,000 cash bounties officially paid by the government of the day to efficient official killers. The figure is from the US State Department Report for 1994. This fact is also on the record of the Legislative Assembly of the state and reputed human rights bodies like Amnesty International. Besides we have objectively recorded statements of the killer gangs unearthed from time to time. We have the confessions of the Kala Santokha gang freely made to foreign journalists to the effect: `we get our weapons from the police, we have identity cards (he showed some to the press, photocopy of one was printed) to get us out of difficulty, we have authority to kidnap, kill as many people as we like, authority to steal vehicles, demand ransom' and so on. Several such statements of the involved gangs are in existence. As this is being written, facts about Ajit Singh Poohla gang patronised by the state and authorised to kidnap, torture and kill people at will are coming to the surface. On nine acres of land in the heart of Chandigarh the capital of the Punjab and Haryana, this criminal had poppy plantation and was free to sell the products. Chandigarh is a Union Territory governed directly by the government of India.

Those who have been regularly visiting the Darbar Sahib from 1901 to 1984 know well that the entire complex was full of government intelligence personnel, their agents and collaborators. Outside the complex uniformed and fully armed security persons controlled every egress and ingress to the Darbar. During the entire period (1981 to 1995) no one was ever apprehended either going for the kill or coming back after having made one. There was no one in the complex against whom the government had registered any serious criminal case.

Existence of killer gangs in the central Sikh shrine cannot be used as justification for the attack by the armed forces. Firstly because it is a verifiable fact that there were no such gangs there; and also because the armed forces' attack was not on the Darbar alone. They simultaneously attacked thirty-eight other shrines all over the Punjab. It is no ones case that there were similar squads there also. When this charade was in its initial stages of invention, the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee offered to surrender any wanted criminal. The government provided no names. Eminent politicians and journalists were invited to the Darbar complex to see for themselves whether the charge could be laid in earnest. The author of this article took Khanna, the editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India and his two young daughters to the complex and aided him in inspecting any place that he desired to see. Such visitors invariably found that the government charges were baseless. The attack on the Darbar was deliberately scheduled on the martyrdom day of Guru Arjan, the builder of the shrine, when devotees were expected to throng in great numbers. To top it all, curfew imposed around the shrine was relaxed to allow devotees to come in for the celebration and was again clamped when a sufficient number to satisfy the blood thirst of the forces were conceived to have been trapped inside. Giani Zail Singh, the then commander-in- chief of these forces has confirmed in his autobiography after duly ascertaining the facts, that no warning was issued to the pilgrims assembled there to leave the complex before the brutal business of gruesome massacre was commenced by the armed forces.

A linear view that the attack took place because there were killer squads present in the complex is riddled with more holes than a sieve. Any honest writer depicting the event knows that there were many complexities built into the situation. The civil administration had offered to arrest Sant Bhinderanwale without much ado. It was he who was advertised as the fountainhead of militancy in the state. The offer was not accepted. The author sat with Sant Jarnail Singh atop the main Langar building for several hours on April 29, 1984. Within seventy yards of us were two Central Reserve Police posts overlooking the roof. Were it deemed necessary to kill the Sant, it was possible to do it any time without causing harm to a single other person. The perceived motives of those who ordered the attack are by now well documented and have a far different, and a much more sordid tale to tell. Pursuing this matter further will establish beyond doubt that "leaders of the Sikhs had" no "contributory role in generating various events that brought about" the attack. Someone, who wanted to give a bloody nose to the Sikhs, had precisely laid down the order of precedence of events. One event followed the other as it was ordained by her and her accomplices, which included certain Akali leaders.

Quoting Guru Hargobind's example is a travesty of facts. The Guru was a sovereign man, in fact "the True King." He had a regular militia although it was used for defence purposes only; he was in a position to give battle anywhere he pleased. He fought two more battles at distant places. Sant Jarnail Singh Bhinderanwale was a citizen of a state which had an army to defend itself. He had no criminal case pending against him. At one time when he was accused of a definite crime, he did surrender. He had a right to expect that if he was indeed wanted, he would be asked if not invited to surrender. He would have done it immediately. This is not what the rulers wanted. Their entire game-plan would have been thoroughly upset had that happened. They were playing for much higher stakes. Their electoral prospects would be brightened throughout the country if they showed that the Sikhs had been defeated and their shrines razed. They had assiduously arranged it that way sparing no effort. They wanted the Sant to be a sitting duck confined to a fixed location. They and their agents created conditions to have it their way. They had behind them the power of the modern state of India's size to do as they liked.

According to the most reputed jurists including Ram Jethamalani, at one time India's Law Minister, Sant Jarnail Singh had the right of self defence. A person exercising that right is under an obligation to defend himself when and where he is attacked. He cannot choose to fight at the venue that suits him most. The dastardly attack came when he was inside the shrine. Sant's right to self defence became a glorious opportunity to `fight for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his" God. The Sikhs will ever be grateful that he engaged "the fearful odds" and acquitted himself well in the eyes even of the attacking generals. If any group of people in Sikh history deserve a memorial it is this man and his devoted friends. He brought to life the most daring deeds in Sikh history and repeated the feat of Gurbax Singh Nihang and his thirty companions who defied the might of the Afghan conqueror at the same spot. Like him he went gloriously to his martyrdom. The last fifty steps that he took were the most inspiring in modern Sikh history. If ingratitude, described by Bhai Gurdas as the most demeaning of human inflictions, has not completely sunk into the psyche of the Sikh people, they shall construct a memorial to him at the place they deem fit.

The Sant did not move into the Akal Takhat of his own free will. He was pushed into that location by the combined might of the Akali leaders who were taking directions from the Congress government at the centre and with whom they were collaborating as all records and subsequent events unmistakably point out. To be more precise, he was pushed out of the inn on the other side of the road and forced into the Akal Takhat by the armed might of the Babbar Khalsa patronised by the Akali Dal through Bibi Amarjit Kaur. The Babbars were armed with deadly weapons supplied by Dhirender Brahmchari the high flying guru of the prime minister herself from his own gun factory in Jammu. Later the Babbars, taking their weapons with them, escaped through the siege laid by the armed forces to the Darbar complex. Had the Sant refused to shift, he would have had to fight a full fledged gun battle with the Babbars with unpredictable consequences. Those who held the remote control used it well to arrange things as they best suited the holder's interests. It is futile to blame the Sant who had less than forty- five untrained followers in the complex teeming with enemies of all kinds and many varieties.

That Bhinderanwale occupied "the Akal Takhat as his abode" is an assertion of the motivated. It is a statement without basis. At the Akal Takhat there was a residential quarter. Sant Fateh Singh `the incarnation of Hindu-Sikh unity' and the head of the Akali Dal which now claims to be Badal Dal, lived there at a crucial times. The author of this article had met him there several times during his spurious fast unto death. He also photographed him there along with the false `living martyrs' who were under a sacred vow to follow him in death and also alone, lying comfortably on a bed. He used to have a double bed which almost filled the entire room he was occupying. In January 1984, the same person met Sant Jarnail Singh in a smaller room. His bedding was lying neatly folded on the floor. The bigger room was occupied by his immediate companions who too used to sleep on the floor. Even the throne room in a Gurdwara is sometimes so used at many places and no objection has ever been taken to it. There is no concept of the `sacred spot' at which a devotee cannot rest in times of need. That he there by detracted from the sacredness of the place is tantamount to discovering a new doctrine in Sikhi. It is succumbing to the enemy propaganda on the issue raised for defaming the Sant.

It is very naïve to suppose that there would have been no attack "if till even the 5th June Bhinderanwale had moved out of the" Darbar complex. Bhinderanwale had no means of knowing what was actually planned. The Akalis knew it and wanted to see the Sant surrender. That was the only way of wiping him out of the public mind. They knew his essentially peaceful nature and his religious priorities. They had calculated that he would prefer to surrender. This is the information that they had fed to Indira Gandhi. The army generals had come expecting surrender within an hour at the most. This is the conviction that they shared with the civil administration. To the last Indira Gandhi kept up with her `double think double speak' promising in the parliament and making solemn statements outside that she would not attack the Darbar. Just when she was about to implement the bloodiest decision of her life inspired by the storm of hatred arising within her, she had announced on the radio, "shed hatred not blood." Through private channels she kept on assuring the Sant to the last that she would affect a compromise with him and none other. It is futile to say that the Sant should have come out of the complex to give battle. He was in the complex to agitate and not to engage in armed conflict. In the circumstances then prevailing he had no initiative left to him and no choice of action, particularly during the last days.

In February 1984 or so Sant Longowal asked this author to convey the following message: `Santji! ask your followers to clean and oil their weapons. You should at least be able to fire a shot or two in resistance.' Turning to your author in almost a theatrical aside he has said, `it is our Babbars who are doing all the killings.' Bibi Amarjit sitting besides him had nodded emphatically. Then with his eyes dancing slyly in his sockets, he had added, `while he is hogging all the credit, his people have never killed even a sparrow with the weapons that they love to flaunt publicly.' Very next month a statement to this effect both by Longowal and Bibi Amarjit Kaur had appeared in the Sant Sipahi then published by an Akali Member of the Indian Parliament. Except his immediate followers and friends, everyone around Sant Bhinderanwale was busy setting up a stage for his ignominious surrender. They themselves were playing in the hands of the master puppeteer who knew where her interest lay. Sant wanted to live in the serai, he was not allowed to. Had he wanted to leave the complex, he would have been forced into remaining there.

The assertion that "he could get away with challenging Badal and almost silenced Longowal from questioning him" is absolutely true. Longowal had seen that he and his Dal stood "isolated in India" and amongst the Sikhs all over the world. He lived to see a day when most of the members of his Akali Dal and the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee elected on the Dal ticket had walked out on him and had reposed faith in Sant Jarnail Singh. Longowal and his Dal were widely recognised to be a coterie of collaborators and the Sikh masses had said goodbye to the entire outfit. In killing Sant Bhinderanwale, the Indian armed forces had killed the only person who at that time solely represented the Sikh people the world over. It was the second execution of Baba Banda Singh Bahadur. Even in itself, it constitutes the most sordid tale of extreme highhandedness. It constitutes ample evidence of the extent of hatred and contempt that pervades the heart and soul of the permanently hostile permanent cultural majority for the entire Sikh people, in decolonised India.

Attack on the Darbar has "alienated many Sikhs" is a low tone euphemism and that "the appointment of Manmohan Singh has failed to assuage (the Sikh hurt) fully even now" is another sentence which is nearest to truth. The absolute truth is that the permanent cultural majority will henceforth be always looked upon as constituting a bunch of unbalanced degraded bullies who at the slightest provocation turned the might of a state upon the Sikhs who have been in the forefront of defending them, their religion and country for five centuries at a heavy cost. Expressions such as, "misgivings in the minds of the people of the Punjab" are jaundiced expressions in that context and are designed to mitigate the enormity of the criminal act.

It may very well be true that Badal Dal is raising the issue of the memorial "as a sort of a trial balloon for political fireworks, without being very serious about it." Such people, by being false in heart, soul and conscience are doing their utmost to wipe out Sikhi which in essence, regards "truthful living as superior to Truth itself." The world abounds in such people of easy conscience who are fully prepared to abandon righteousness for a material gain although that is the only basis of spiritual life. Presumably Dhanoa can recognise them from a mile away – birds of feather -- are they?

(Dhanoa on Memorial: Political Religious statements: June 17, 2005)