The spin artists that edit the main newspapers have by now decided that a massacre of Sikhs did not even happen in June 1984! The brave Indian army with tanks and all went into Golden Temple Complex to “flush out terrorists”, the said “terrorists” – the number of these militants has never been put, even by the Indian government sources, at more than 200, usually it is just 150 or so –did not come out peacefully, so there was a fire fight and the army won. Plain and simple!
The brave Sikh (the newspapers don’t fail each year to emphasize in full the Sikh background of a major-general and a lieutenant- general who were involved in the execution and planning of this attack) generals are each year in June clapped on the back by these editors for having been so very very patriotic, and for having put up in general such a jolly good show. If one goes back to the time shortly after the actual event Rajiv conceded about 750 army personnel had died in this army action referred always in the press as “Operation Blue Star” only.
Not mentioned in these official recaps is that these brave army men completely lost their head after this pyrrhic military “victory” and massacred about 5000 pilgrims who were sheltered in the serias only. These locations are nowhere in the crossfire of the fighting between the combatants: the militants and the army. No more than a handful of deaths of unarmed non-combatants could possibly be inadvertent and due to such crossfire. In fact there is every evidence that the massacre of the civilians in June 1984 was premeditated by the Indian state. The army entered the complex when it was chock-full of pilgrims because it was Guru Arjun Dev’s martyrdom day. And this scenario was repeated at 30 to 40 other gurudwaras throughout Punjab. Not even the government has ever claimed that more than 4-5 militants, armed with antiquated .303 guns, were found in all these other 30-40 gurdwaras combined.
Even the brave fighters in the Akal Takht were ill-equipped compared to the Army’s weaponry, however they were led by a brilliant ex-Indian army Maj. Gen., Shabeg Singh, and it is mainly because of him that they withstood the might of the Indian tanks etc. for so long, however this website is not to discuss military tactics and all, our concern is about the death of unarmed people, the deliberate murders of such people, including many women and children, that happened almost entirely after the fighting between the combatants was totally over.
Yet there were huge civilian casualties—Sikhs who lost their loved ones know this despite all lies by the state—in many of these other gurdwaras also.
The Punjab was cut off to all journalists and was under complete curfew for many days. But the one single journalist, a certain Brahma Chellaney, who managed to reach the Golden Temple complex after the military action was over had reported that truck after truck of the municipal committee was carting away the bodies, often with their hands still tied behind their backs, …
The current issue of The Sikh Review, June 2013, gives you the picture in the words of some people who were actually there in the complex then, it is written on the basis of oral interviews etc of these people and entitled, “Operation Blue Star: The Untold Story” by A. Rao, A. Ghose et al. Untold that is in the mainstream press only when another anniversary of Ghallugara Divas rolls around. Sikhs have taken care to remember the details from the very beginning …
This blog is focussed however on the massacre of November 1984 in Delhi in full view of everyone and even the foreign diplomats of all the embassies there. So there is tons of evidence, even photographic, showing how Congress party high-ups were very much on the scene of the bloody action, killing innocent after innocent to extract vengeance for the murder of Indira Gandhi – the person who had ordered the butchery in Amritsar in June 1984 – at the hands of two Sikhs. Similar murders of thousands of other Sikhs were also carried out to console the bereaved Rajiv in many other states run by the Congress party. But returning to Delhi it is quite possible that, besides all this evidence – that you can find elsewhere on this website and other similar sites – there were diplomatic cables – perhaps Wikileaks (?) will one day come out with these too, already it has laid bare via such leaks some things quite “embarassing” to the Indian government about the various murderous police officers in the the killing fields of the Punjab of the 1990 … — from say the ambassador of the US in Delhi to Washington D.C. laying bare the nuts-and-bolts even of how these murders of thousands on the streets of Delhi were very much planned in some high meetings of ministers shortly after Indira’s murder. There are references to such meetings, this planning, in the articles by Ivan Fera and others that appeared in the Illustrated Weekly of India in the weeks following November 1984 and that can be found on this website. To our knowledge this magazine was the only one, amongst all the main newspapers and magazines of India, that had the guts to immediately call these killings of November 1984 what they were: state-ordered killings of thousands of innocent Sikhs to avenge the murder by two of a murderous prime minister.