Mistakes of Blue Star Operation, costs the life of our Sikhs and Indiraji.

Mistakes of Blue Star Operation, costs the life of our Sikhs and Indiraji.

On the morning of June 5, 1984, hours before the army entered the Golden Temple complex. Indian and foreign journalists rounded up by the police in Amritsar and expelled from Punjab to prevent reporting on Operation Bluestar. The whole state had been put under curfew. In the villages, even the domestic animals seemed to be observing this curfew. The only trains moving were carrying troops.


General Krishnaswami Sundarji, who was commanding the operation, said, “I was told to flush out the extremists from the Golden Temple with no damage, if possible, to the Harmandir Sahib (site of the sanctum sanctorum) or the Akal Takht (by then Bhindranwale’s fortress). I was told to use the bare minimum of force required for achieving this object and that I was to minimise casualties to both sides.” As it was, squash-head shells fired by tanks reduced the Akal Takht to little more than rubble and the white paper said 493 people were killed. Eyewitnesses believe the figure to have been higher. No one will ever know what the exact figure was because neither the police nor the army made any attempt to identify the dead before they were hurriedly cremated. So what went wrong?


The Sikhs struck with vengeance a few days later, on Oct. 31, 1984. Gandhi was leaving her private compound at Safdarjang Road in New Delhi to meet British actor Peter Ustinov to film a television documentary when the shots rang out. Two of her uniformed security guards standing at attention along the path had suddenly broken ranks to shoot at Gandhi. From point blank range Beant Singh, twenty-one fired three shots from a.38-caliber revolver. As Gandhi slumped to the ground the other uniformed guard, Satwant Singh, pumped thirty rounds from a Sten automatic weapon into her. The two Sikhs surrendered to police and were led to the guardhouse. Beant Singh, who was a favorite of Gandhi during the five months he had been assigned to the detail, attempted to seize a gun from one of the other guards and was shot dead.


Operation Bluestar in Punjab was certainly a mistake, which the then political party in power took under political compulsions, and this should never happen again. Due to mistakes, we have lost our beloved Sikh people and Indraji.