India: A Million Mutinies Now

  We were taken to the farmhouse next door. It seemed a much richer place. The yard was not of beaten earth, but paved with brick, like the lane. It was one of the few houses in Jaspal to have an upper storey. This upper storey was above the entrance. It was decorated with a stepped pattern of black, white, green and yellow tiles, and at the corners there was a regular pattern of half-projecting bricks, for the style. The trailer in the courtyard was to be attached to a tractor: it carried the mysterious, celebratory words that all Indian motor-trucks have at the back: OK TATA. And there was something like a flower garden in one corner of the courtyard: sunflowers, bougainvillaea, nasturtiums, plants that loved the light.

  We sat on string beds in the open, bright room at the left of the entrance. The brick ceiling, which was also the floor of the upper room, rested on wooden beams laid on steel joists. The concrete pillars were chamfered, with bands of moulded or carved decoration, and painted in many colours – an echo here of the pillars of Hindu temples before the Muslim invasions. Everything in this courtyard spoke of the owner’s delight in his property.

  People began to come to us. They sat on the string beds, their backs to the light, or leaned against the painted pillars. The Punjabi costume – elegant in Delhi and elsewhere – was here still only farm-people’s clothes, the smeared and dirty clothes of people whose life was bound up with their cattle. A sturdy woman in her thirties, in a grey-green flowered suit, grimy at the ankles, came with a child on her hip and sat on the string bed. The woman’s eyes were swollen, almost closed, with crying.

  The child who now sat on her lap and held on to her was the seven-year-old son of the eldest brother. The boy had been in the room when his father was killed; he had been saved from the burst of the AK-47 only because another brother had hidden with him under a cot. The boy was still dazed, yet still able from time to time to take an interest in the strangers; occasionally, while people talked, tears appeared in his eyes. He had been put into a clean, pale-brown suit, and his hair had been done up in a topknot.

  The uncle who had saved him was a handsome, slender man of twenty-three. He had dressed with some care for this occasion, all the visitors coming: a blue turban, a stylish black-and-grey check shirt. He began to tell of the events; while he did so a girl cousin came and unaffectedly rested her head on his shoulder.

  The farming day went on. The buffaloes came home, through the front gateway. The heavy chains they dragged rang dully on the bricked yard, and their hooves made a hollow, drumming sound. And village courtesies were not forgotten: water was brought out for the visitors, and then tea.

  Joga was the name of the man in the black-and-grey check shirt. What he said was translated for me then by the journalists with me, and amplified the following day by Avinash Singh, a correspondent of the Hindustan Times.

  The family had had dinner, Joga said, and a number of them were in the room on the living-quarters side of the courtyard. (The opposite side was for the cattle or buffaloes.) Some of them were ‘sipping tea’. A little after nine there was a commotion in the courtyard, and someone called out from there: ‘The one who has come from Jodhpur, and poses as a religious man – he should come out.’

  Joga thought at first that some villagers were calling, but then the tone of the voices convinced him that they were ‘the boys’, ‘the Singhs’. ‘The Singhs’: the word here wasn’t simply another word for Sikhs. It meant Sikhs who were true to their baptismal vows; and in these villages it had grown to mean men from one or other of the terrorist gangs. ‘Singhs’ was the word Joga used most often for the men who had come that night. The other word he used was atwadi, ‘terrorists’. Only once did he say munde, ‘the boys’.

  Joga was holding Buta’s son on his lap. As soon as he decided that the men who had come were Singhs, he hid with the child below the cot.

  Buta, the eldest brother, went to the door of the room. The men outside had called for the man who had come ‘from Jodhpur’. Jodhpur had a meaning: Buta, with 200 or 300 others, had been detained in the fort at Jodhpur as a suspected terrorist for more than four years, from June 1984 to September 1988 – just eight months before. Buta had been detained because he had been in the Golden Temple at the time of the army action, and he was known as a religious follower of Bhindranwale’s. Buta admitted being a follower; but he said he wasn’t a terrorist. He was in the Golden Temple that day, he said, because he had taken an offering of milk for the anniversary of the martyrdom of the sixth Guru, executed on the orders of the Emperor Jehangir in 1606.

  This was the man, only thirty-two, but already with many years of suffering, his life already corrupted, who went and stood at the door and looked out at the many muffled men in the courtyard.

  The leader said, ‘Who is Buta Singh?’

  ‘I am Buta Singh.’

  ‘Come with us. We want you. We have come to take you.’ And the man who spoke said to one of his Singhs, ‘Tie his hands.’

  Some of the men made as if to seize him by the arms. Buta said, ‘I won’t, I won’t.’ There was a scuffle, and two of the Singhs fired. A bullet hit Buta just below his ribs on the right side, and he fell backwards into the room. Buta’s mother threw herself on her son, saying to the men, ‘Please don’t kill.’ Buta’s brother Jarnail and Buta’s wife Balwinder also fell on Buta. The Singhs pulled away Balwinder by her hair from her husband, and they fired again with their AK-47S. Buta hadn’t been killed yet; but he was killed now, with his mother and his brother. Buta’s grandmother was wounded, and was to die in a few days.

  Buta’s father ran out from his room at the front of the courtyard, the street side. He ran across the courtyard to where the men with the guns were. He tried to grab one of the guns. He was killed with a shot to the head.

  After this, the Singhs – there were eight or nine of them – went out of the gateway to the main village lane. Opposite, a little to the right, was the house of Natha Singh, Buta’s uncle, the first cousin of his father. They wanted Natha Singh. When the front gate of Natha’s house wasn’t opened for them, they went around to the back, climbed over the low wall, and they called for him. Natha had five children; the eldest was a polio-stricken girl of fourteen.

  Natha came out when he was called. The gang took him out to the lane, and asked him to take them in his tractor to the house of Baldev. They very much wanted Baldev as well. They had a case against him: Baldev, they said, was an amritdhari Sikh, but Baldev had gone against his vows and had been having dealings with a temple priest in the town of Jalandhar. They didn’t find Baldev when they got to his house, which was just at the end of the lane, next to the fields. Baldev had heard the gunfire and had slipped away; he had had threatening letters before because of his religious practices. So they had driven back in the tractor with Natha, and in the lane, just outside his house, they had shot Natha Singh dead.

  The Singhs had been in the village for half an hour, not more. Then they were gone. It wasn’t until eight hours later, at about 5.30 in the morning, that someone of the family picked up the note the terrorists had left behind – now bloodstained and hard to read. The note said that Buta Singh and Natha Singh had been killed because they had been responsible for the deaths two months before of two terrorists just half a kilometre from the village. There was a price of 30,000 rupees on the head of one of the terrorists killed then.

  The police said that the gang in question wanted Buta to join them. Buta, as a man who had been close to Bhindranwale until 1984, would have given the group some ‘credibility’.

  There was another story as well that the villagers told. Shortly after his release from Jodhpur, Buta – who had taken a B. A. degree while in detention – had applied for a minibus permit. This was part of the government’s plan to rehabilitate people like Buta. Buta went one day to the town of Jalandhar to see about his permit. He didn’t come home at the time he should have done. People in the village made inquiries, and they found that Buta had been arrested by the Central Reserve Police Force in Jalandhar. He was
held for nine days.

  Buta never told anyone what he had been arrested for, or what had happened during the nine days of his detention. All they knew was that Buta was very frightened when he came back, and never wanted to be alone when he went out of the village – to the tubewell or the local market. (Some said that Buta was afraid of being caught by the police again. But this didn’t seem logical. Buta could have been picked up by the police whether he was with a companion or not. A companion, on the other hand, might have deterred an assassin from the gangs.)

  We went at last next door, to the house of death, picking our way past the women sitting in the gateway. They were not keening now; they were sitting as silent as the men in the sunstruck yard – no shade there from the vertical eucalyptus leaves, the afternoon sun seeming in fact to catch the leaves in a kind of glitter. The plastered courtyard wall of the living quarters was painted pink, the pierced ventilation concrete blocks above doorways and windows were peppermint green, like the entrance walls: Mediterranean colours. The doors and windows and the vertical iron bars over the windows were a darker green.

  The bedrooms were at the front of the building, on either side of the gateway. The doors opened into the courtyard, and the back wall (with iron-barred windows) was also the wall of the lane. There were two rooms on the left. In addition to being used as bedrooms, Avinash told me, they would have been used as storerooms, with wheat and rice in gunny sacks. Buta Singh’s father had been sleeping in the room at the corner of the courtyard; it was from there that he had run out.

  The bedroom to the right of the gateway was the principal room of the farmhouse. It was where Buta Singh and his wife slept. It was also the drawing-room. There were no chairs now. The chairs and the centre table, Avinash said, had been removed, because it was known that after the murders visitors were going to come. There were two beds side by side. The bedclothes on them were in disorder. There was an extra bed in the room, together with tin trunks and chests. There was a souvenir of the Golden Temple on a shelf, and Sikh religious calendars on the wall. In Sikh popular art the Gurus are shown with the pupils of their eyes half disappearing below the upper lid, so that more white than usual is seen in the eyeball; this way of rendering the eyes suggests blindness and an inner enlightenment. In this room the pictures made an unusual impression.

  There was a photograph of Buta’s father-in-law, and there was one other photograph, of Buta himself: a studious-looking young man in glasses. The studiousness and the glasses were a surprise, in this setting of the farmhouse and the village. Buta might have cultivated the scholarly appearance; he would almost certainly have been the first man in his family to have received higher education. Buta’s wife, Balwinder, was the only graduate in the village; and no doubt it was her example that had made Buta study for a B.A. degree while he had been in detention in Jodhpur.

  Two or three generations – not only of work, but also of political encouragement, political security, development in agriculture, the growth of a national economy – had led Buta’s family to where it had got. Two or three generations had led to the beginning of an intellectual inclination in Buta Singh. Awakening to knowledge, he would have seen with a special clarity what he had come from. Ideas of injustice and wrongness would have come more easily to him than ideas of the steady movement of the generations; and the fundamentalism of someone like Bhindranwale would have seemed to answer every emotional need, would have appeared like a programme: ennobling complaint and the idea of persecution, offering history as an idea of glory betrayed, and offering for the present the twin themes of the enemy and redemption. That idea had trapped him and swept him away.

  The police said he had been killed because he had refused to join the gang. The note left by the Singhs said he had been responsible for the deaths, by police bullets, of two important terrorists. There might have been truth in both statements. It was part of the wretchedness of the situation, where men had to be blooded into the cause, and, once blooded, couldn’t turn away. He must have suffered. Everyone said that he was a very religious man. He had bought religious primers for his two young sons; he went twice a day to the gurdwara to pray. Such devoutness! In the beginning it might have met an emotional and intellectual need; later, perhaps, it had become just a praying for protection.

  It had ended for him in the next room. The room was at the side of the courtyard. It faced south. The door was open; but, against the pale glare of the dung-plastered courtyard and the sunlit pink-distempered wall, the doorway looked very dark. Inside, in the shadows, brass pots and steel pots glinted on shelves. There were scuff-marks on the floor where Buta and his family had fallen. Not more than 42 hours had passed since then. But the marks might have been made by the people who had come to look. The note left by the killers, when it was found, was soaked in blood. The ground now was black with flies, barely moving.

  Only three days before the killing, Avinash told me later, Buta Singh’s wife, the graduate, had opened an English-medium school in the neighbouring village. It was something she had wanted to do for a long time. ‘I thought my dream had come true,’ she told Avinash. ‘I didn’t know my husband’s return from Jodhpur would spell doom for the family.’

  Across the lane was the house of Natha Singh, Buta’s uncle. His wife couldn’t read. She had five children, the eldest with a disability. She told Avinash, ‘I don’t know what to do. My world is finished.’

  It was for Natha Singh that a new spasm of mourning began when we went outside. To the right of the peppermint-green entrance with the multi-coloured diamond pattern, women were now sitting, now throwing themselves down, on the spot where Natha had been killed, when he had driven the tractor back from Baldev’s house. On both sides of the dung-dropped lane farming life went on: buffaloes held their heads down to the troughs at the side of the lane, against the walls of houses. Taking out these animals, bringing them back, milking them or unyoking them, feeding them, bedding them down – these things gave rhythm and correctness to a day and were followed like religion.

  Two other men from the village had been detained in Jodhpur. While the women keened, and the buffaloes ate, we heard one man’s story. On the very day Ranjit was released from Jodhpur, his brother was killed. Ranjit didn’t say who his brother had been killed by; this suggested that his brother had been killed by ‘the boys’. His brother’s body was found 20 kilometres away from Amritsar – not far from where we were. And so it happened that on the day Ranjit returned home, after four and a half years in Jodhpur, his brother’s body also came home. That had happened just a month before.

  How could they talk so calmly of grief? They had to some extent been prepared by the faith; but they could talk like that because many hundreds had suffered like them. Avinash said that he and other correspondents had seen more than 50 mass killings such as we had heard about that afternoon. Exactly a year and a week before, 18 members of a Rajasthani clan, half of whom were Sikhs, had been killed. The AK-47 was a weapon of pure murder. It could empty a magazine of 32 bullets in two and a half seconds; the bullets sprayed out at many angles, and could kill everyone in a room in those two and a half seconds. In one night in one subdivision of Amritsar 26 people had been killed, including a thirty-day-old baby girl and the ninety-one-year-old head of a family.

  We drove back to Amritsar through by-ways and village-ways, looking at the rich, well-cultivated land. It was still afternoon and bright, still safe. After some time we felt we had lost our way. We were on a dirt road between irrigated fields. We saw two men on a bicycle, one man doing the pedalling, one man on the carrier. The man on the carrier was sitting elegantly, sideways, feet together, but not dangling or hanging down. His shoes were locked together and they were lifted, as though above the dust. When we stopped to ask the way, he slid off, with a practised movement, and offered to come with us, to set us on the road to Amritsar.

  He was as handsome as his posture on the bicycle had suggested. He was a Sikh, with a trimmed beard. The trimmed beard had a mean
ing: it meant he had not taken amrit. He had heard about Buta Singh’s death, and the other murders, and he thought it dreadful. He himself didn’t belong to any of the purely Sikh political groups. He was in business in a small way and he considered himself successful. He enjoyed his success. He had built a house, he said, with toilets and flush system and everything. He had spent four lakhs on this house, £16,000. But he was thinking now that he might have to give up his house and leave the area. He hadn’t taken amrit, and he didn’t intend to. He didn’t think he would be able to live by the strict amritdhari rules, and he didn’t want to get into trouble with the boys, as other people had done.

  In the Sikh catalogue of the torments and martyrdoms of its founding Gurus, the bricking up alive of the two sons of the 10th Guru has a special place. The story – with its echoes of King John and Richard III – has some of the quality of myth.

  The man who orders the execution of the children – boys aged nine and ten – is the Mogul governor of the town of Sirhind. Only one person objects to the cruelty: he is a Muslim nobleman of Afghan ancestry, the Nawab of Malerkotla. Then he pleads for the bodies to be honourably cremated: Muslims are buried, Sikhs and Hindus are cremated. The governor says, ‘All right. We’ll grant you a cremation site. But it will be only as big as what you can cover with gold sovereigns.’ The Nawab agrees. He lays out part of his treasure on the ground, and the two bodies are cremated there. So two sacred places come into being: the place where the boys were bricked up, and the place where they were cremated. And the anniversary of the martyrdom is marked by a ritual procession from one place to the other.