Bhindranwale came to the sanctuary of the Golden Temple in 1982, and he turned it into his fortress and domain. He was thirty-five. Four years before, he had been only a preacher and the head of a Sikh seminary; now he was a politician and a warrior. He was also an outlaw: pursuing a vendetta against the Nirankari sect, whom he considered heretics, he had been accused of murder.
He was a proponent of the pure faith; he was persecuted; he offered his followers a fight on behalf of the faith. He incarnated as many of the Sikh virtues as any one man could possess. He and his followers controlled the Temple. The guns were smuggled in from Pakistan. From the Temple, killings were planned, and bombings, and bank robberies. Not all of these things were done with Bhindranwale’s knowledge; there would have been a number of free-lance actions: the seeds of chaos were right there. The Temple provided sanctuary; it was the safe house. It was not physically isolated from the town; the old town went right up to its walls. Guns and men could come and go without trouble.
In that atmosphere some of the good and poetic concepts of Sikhism were twisted. One such idea was the idea of seva or service. When terror became an expression of the faith, the idea of seva altered.
This is the testimony of one man: ‘Inderjit was a close adherent of Bhindranwale. He was involved in the murder of Sandhu. Inderjit used to come to Darbar Sahib [the Golden Temple] and ask for any seva from Bhindranwale. He had once come to me also and had offered his services for any action. Since I hardly knew him, and he had come on his own to see me, I did not place any trust in him. He was, in fact, a very suspicious-looking character. He had developed friendship with [some people] who used to go out of the Golden Temple complex for committing terrorist actions. Two days after the assassination of Sandhu, Inderjit came to Darbar Sahib. By his exuberant behaviour and boastful talks he made it quite clear that he had a hand in the killing of Sandhu, and that he prided about it.’ Sandhu, in fact, was Inderjit’s next-door neighbour. Inderjit’s service or seva was to give information about his neighbour’s movements to the seven-man killer team. Neighbourliness had no place in this idea of the faith.
Bhindranwale’s military adviser in the Temple was Shabeg Singh. He had been a major-general in the army, and had served with distinction in the Bangladesh war of 1971. Then something had gone wrong: he had been cashiered from the army for embezzlement, but allowed to keep his rank. Revenge had become his religion; Bhindranwale’s cause had become his.
From the witness quoted above, there is this story of how preparations were made to take on the state: ‘As the events were taking place at a very fast pace, it was appreciated that the police entry into the Golden Temple had become imminent. It was decided that the Sikh youth should be mobilized … The decision was taken in March-April 1984. Groups of Sikh youth numbering 30 to 50 came to the Golden Temple for the purpose. In the car-parking space in the Ram Dass Langar’ – one of the Temple kitchens – ‘wooden partitions were erected to lodge them there. In one of the rooms Shabeg Singh used to impart theoretical training about firearms. Demonstrations were given by him and sometimes by a few of us … These groups were treated to inflammatory sermons … The groups used to stay for two or three days. In all, about 8000 to 10,000 youth would have been covered.’
In this way Bhindranwale made himself politically powerful, and he might have made himself more powerful if he had had more time. But the free-lance terrorist actions continued, and in June 1984 the army moved in. The army had underestimated the strength of the defenders; about 100 soldiers died. This was not the end of the matter. Bhindranwale’s followers, and others, occupied the Temple again and made it again a terrorist base. In 1986 the police went in once more; and again after that the terrorists came. In May 1988 the police did what they should have done at the begining: they cut off water and electricity and laid siege to the terrorists within the Temple. Many of the terrorists occupied the central gold-domed sanctum in the middle of the pool. Police marksmen outside the Temple fired at those who tried to get water from the pool. It was the Punjab summer, and very hot. Nearly 200 terrorists surrendered. During the siege the central temple had been defiled, used as a latrine, by the terrorists. Elsewhere in the Temple bodies were discovered of people who had been killed by the terrorists before the police action.
The men who had defiled the central temple had not fought to the end. A Sikh journalist who witnessed the siege was shocked by their surrender. He had been brought up to have another idea of good Sikh behaviour. This idea had already been confounded by some of the terrorist actions. He hadn’t believed that people of his faith would kill women and children; he hadn’t believed that they would stop a bus and kill all the passengers. He had thought, at first, that these stories had been made up by the authorities. And there were people who continued to believe that the men who had surrendered during the siege of the Temple were not Sikhs at all. A pamphlet written by a retired army officer said that the men were ‘government-sponsored … criminals … given Sikh form and apparel and taught rudimentary knowledge of the Sikh traditions.’
The establishing of a Sikh identity was a recurring Sikh need. Religion was the basis of this identity; religion provided the emotional charge. But that also meant that the Sikh cause had been entrusted to people who were not representative of the Sikh achievement, were a generation or so behind.
Bhindranwale had spent most of his life in a seminary in the country town of Mehta Chowk, not far from Amritsar.
At the entrance to the town there were small shops set in bare earth yards on both sides of the road. One shop had this sign, as spelt here: UNIVERSIL EMPLOYMENT BEURO Overseas Employment Consultant. All around were fields of ripe dwarf wheat, due to be harvested in a few days. There were also fields of mustard, and fields of a bright-green succulent plant, grown as animal fodder. Lines of eucalyptus marked the boundaries between fields, adding green verticals to the very flat land: line standing against eucalyptus line all the way to the horizon suggested woodland in places.
Fields went right up to the seminary. The flat land, spreading to the horizon below a high sky, seemed limitless; but every square foot of agricultural earth was precious. The gurdwara or temple attached to the seminary had white walls, and the Mogul-style dome that Sikh gurdwaras have, speaking of the origin of the organized faith in Mogul times. The dome looked rhetorical; it stressed the ordinariness of the Indian concrete block which it crowned. The window frames of the white block were picked out in blue. The main hall of the gurdwara was quite plain, with big-bladed ceiling fans, and a wide railed upper gallery. Coloured panes of glass in the doorways were the only consciously pretty touch.
The seminary building was just as plain. On the upper floor, in a concrete room bare except for two beds, the man who was the chief preacher talked to the visitors. There were no more guns at the seminary, he said; and they took in only children now. Some of those children, boys, came to the room, to look. They wore the blue seminarian’s gown that went down to mid-shin. It was bright outside, warm; the gowned and silent small boys in the bare room, come to look at the visitors, made one think of the boredom of childhood, of very long, empty days. Some idea of sanctuary and refuge also came to one. Many of these children were from other Indian states; some – solitaries, wanderers – seemed to have been converted to Sikhism, and to have found brotherhood and shelter in the seminary. That idea of welcome and security was added to when a big blue-gowned boy brought in a jug of warm milk and served it to the visitors in aluminium bowls.
The chief preacher said he had come to the seminary when he was about the age of the boys in the room. He had left his family home to stay in the seminary: that was more than 20 years ago.
It was in some such fashion that Bhindranwale had come to the seminary. He had come when he was four or five. Twenty-five years later he had become head of the seminary; and five years after that – after he had taken on the heretics among the Sikhs – he had moved to the Golden Temple. There, two years later, he had died.
He was from a farming family, one of nine sons, and he had been sent to the seminary because his family couldn’t support all their children. What could he have known of the world? What idea would he have had of towns or buildings or the state? In these village roads, that ran between the rich fields, there were low, dusty, red-brick buildings, with rough extensions attached, sometimes with walls of mud, sometimes with coverings of thatch on crooked tree-branch poles. Straw dried on house roofs. Shops stood in open dirt yards.
After 25 years in the seminary, he began to call people back to the true way, the pure way. He would go out preaching; he became known. One man heard him preach in 1977 – a year before his great fame – in the town of Gayanagar in Rajasthan. Three thousand people, perhaps 5000, had come to hear the young preacher from Mehta Chowk, and Bhindranwale spoke to them for about 45 minutes. ‘He held them spellbound, talking the common man’s language.’ What was said? ‘He asked people not to drink. He said, “Drinking does you harm, and you feel guilty. Everybody wants to be be like his father. Every Sikh’s father is Guru Gobind Singh. So a Sikh should wear long hair, and have no vices.” There were many references to the scriptures.’
In this faith, when the world became too much for men, the religion of the 10th Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, the religion of gesture and symbol, came more easily than the philosphy and poetry of the first Guru. It was easier to go back to the formal baptismal faith of Guru Gobind Singh, to all the things that separated the believer from the rest of the world. Religion became the identification with the sufferings and persecution of the later Gurus: the call to battle.
The faith needed constantly to be revived, and there had been fundamentalist or revivalist preachers before Bhindranwale. One such was Randhir Singh. The movement he had started in the 1920s was still important, still had a following, could still send men to war against heretics and the enemy. The head of the movement now was Ram Singh, a small dark man of seventy-two, who had been a squadron-leader in the air force.
He said of the founder of his movement, ‘He saw the light. His skin was dark, but when he saw the light he started glowing. He could see the future and also all the things about the past. His skin glowed more than English people’s. He had rosy cheeks – the light emanated from his cheeks. He saw the light when he was twenty-six. He revolted against the British government. This was the Lahore conspiracy case of 1920. He was imprisoned for life.
‘In the jail one day a padre asked him, “You look healthy. You must have good food.” Sant Randhir Singh said to the padre, “I have the worst food.” The padre said, “You look happy. Do you have someone with you, or do you stay alone?” The sant said, “I’m never alone.” The jailer said to the padre, “The man is telling lies. We never put two prisoners together.” So the padre asked the sant again, “Who stays with you?” And the sant said, “Almighty.”
‘When the sant came out in the 1930s – after 16 years in prison – he began to devote his life to singing religious verses, and reading, and administering amrit to others.’
I asked Squadron-Leader Ram Singh, ‘Why is the amrit necessary?’
He said, ‘God is hidden within us. He is a name only – in every human being. When you take amrit, only then you become aware of it – that name comes automatically on your tongue.’
He started on a discourse about amrit. ‘It’s a mixture of pure water and white sugar. The sugar is created out of white sugar and baking soda. It’s heated, so that it swells and foams up, so that, solidified, it forms sugar buns. It is mixed with the water in iron containers, and an iron double-edged sword is moved backward and forward in the mixture. This was initiated by the 10th Guru, Guru Gobind Singh. You give amrit to render the receiver deathless. Iron is a magnetic metal. In that iron vessel in which you mix the amrit you have the greatest concentration of lines of magnetic forces. When a conductor moves across the line of magnetic forces you get an electro-magnetic force. That energizes the sugar buns and water, and to a small extent dissolves the iron in it. So it’s a little iron tonic as well.’
We were talking in his sitting room. There was a carpet on the floor, and a cloth on the centre table, and knick-knacks on hanging shelves: a clock, a small statue of a rearing horse, a china jar, a colour snapshot of a child, a small silver salver (a souvenir of London), and some small painted flower-pieces.
Squadron-Leader Ram Singh was born in 1916. His father was a farmer, and he had gone to some trouble to give his son an education. Ram Singh joined the air force in British times, in 1939. In 1957 he had taken amrit.
Why had he felt the need? Had there been some personal crisis? He said no. He had read books by Sant Randhir Singh, and he had discovered that without amrit one just couldn’t reach God.
He spoke clearly. I felt he wished to be friendly. He had the tone and manner of a reasonable man, a man at peace. He was in a fawn-coloured costume, with a milk-chocolate-coloured cardigan. He wore what looked to me like a head-tie rather than a full turban; it was of a saffron colour. The knife, one of the five emblems of Sikhism, hung in a sheath from a big black cross-band, and it made him look less like a warrior than a bus conductor. His beard was a yellowish grey.
The movement aimed at creating pure Sikhs, and amrit was necessary. ‘After you take amrit, you don’t eat food not cooked by amritdharis.’ People who have taken amrit. ‘That helps to control the five evils: lust, anger, covetousness, ego, family attachments.’
It would also have created the idea of brotherhood. Was that why some people in the movement had become suspect to the government?
He said they had had trouble with a reformist Sikh group who believed in living Gurus: they believed, that is, that the line of Gurus didn’t end with the death of the 10th Guru in 1708. They were a small group, but they were a great and constant irritant. In 1978 one person from his movement had been killed by people from that group, and some people of the movement had gone underground.
But he spoke as one for whom violence was far away. His life was consumed by his faith. He got up – his day began – at midnight. He had a bath, and said his prayers till four. From four till 5.30 he read from the Sikh scriptures. Then he slept until 8.30. That was his life. That was the life that had come to him with the pure faith he had turned to when he was forty-one. It clearly had given him peace.
Just before we left, his son came in. He was a handsome, light-eyed man. He had overcome polio, and was a doctor. He was sweet-visaged; he radiated gentleness; he had all his father’s serenity. He was in government service; he said with a smile that they were currently on strike. The silver salver on the hanging shelf, the souvenir of London, was something he had brought back after a trip to England.
The terrorists lived now only for murder, the idea of the enemy and the traitor, grudge and complaint, like a complete expression of their faith. Violent deaths could be predicted for most of them: the police were not idle or unskilled. But while they were free they lived hectically, going out to kill again and again. Every day there were seven or eight killings, most of them mere items in the official report printed two days later. Only exceptional events were reported in detail.
Such an event was the killing by a gang, in half an hour, of six members of a family in a village about 10 miles away from Mehta Chowk. The two older sons of the family had been killed; the father and the mother; the grandmother, and a cousin. All the people killed were devout, amritdhari Sikhs. The eldest son, the principal target of the gang, had been an associate of Bhindranwale. But a note left by the gang, in the room where four of the killings had taken place – the note bloodstained when it was found – said that the killers belonged to the ‘Bhindranwale Tiger Force’.
The North Indian village tends to be a huddle of narrow angular lanes between blank or pierced house walls. Jaspal village, where the killings had taken place, was more open, simpler in plan, built on either side of a straight main street or lane. It was a village of 80 houses, and was a spillover from a neighbouring, larger village. Eight yea
rs before, some of the better-off people of that village had begun to build their farmhouses at Jaspal, on big, rectangular plots on either side of the main lane.
When we arrived, in mid-afternoon, the people at work on the edge of the village were cautious. We – strangers arriving in an ordinary-looking hired car – could have been anything, police or terrorists: two different kinds of trouble. They frowned a little harder at their tasks, and pretended almost not to see us. It was strange to find that there was no policeman or official in the village, and that less than 48 hours after the murders the village had been left to itself again.
The central lane was wide and paved with brick, and it was strung across with overhead electric lines. The farmhouse walls on either side were flat and low, some of plain brick, some plastered and painted pink or yellow. In an open space below a big tree there were short poles or stakes for tethering buffaloes, and there was a high mound of gathered-up, dried buffalo manure. At various places down the lane – as though the lane also served as a buffalo pen for some of the villagers – there were flat, empty, propped-up carts with rubber tires, and buffaloes and feeding troughs and heaps or pyramids of dung-cakes for fuel. The village ended where the bricked lane ended. Beyond the lane – half in afternoon shadow now, and dusty where not freshly dunged – there was a narrower dirt path, sunstruck, going through very bright fields of mustard and ripe wheat, with tall eucalyptus trees with their pale-green hanging leaves, and crooked electricity poles.
We didn’t have to ask where the house of death was. About 15 women with covered heads were sitting on a spread in the wide gateway. The gateway was painted peppermint green, with diamonds of different colours down the pillars. The two big metal-framed gates had been pulled back: a wrought-iron pattern in the upper part, corrugated-iron sheets fastened to the criss-crossed metal frame on the lower part, the resulting triangles painted yellow and white and blue and picked out in red. At the far end of the farmyard – the vertical leaves of the young eucalyptus trees hardly casting a shadow – the men sat in the open on the ground, white-turbanned most of them, their shoes taken off and scattered about them, a string bed near by. The buffaloes were in their stalls, against the low brick wall, over which the gang had jumped two nights before. Such protection at the front, metal and corrugated-iron; such openness at the back, next to the fields.