Dharam Yudh Morcha Bhindranwale had risen to prominence in the Sikh political circle with his policy of getting the
Anandpur Sahib Resolution passed. The Government was of the view that passing of the resolution would have allowed Punjab to be autonomous. As high-handed police methods normally used on common criminals were used on protesters during the
Dharam Yudh Morcha, creating state repression affecting a very large segment of Punjab's population, retaliatory violence came from a section of the Sikh population, widening the scope of the conflict by the use of violence of the state on its own people, creating fresh motives for Sikh youth to turn to insurgency. The concept of Khalistan was still vague even while the concept was fortified under the influence of former Sikh army officials alienated by government actions who now advised Bhindranwale, Major General Shabeg Singh and retired Major General and Brigadier Mohinder Singh, and at that point the concept was still not directly connected with the movement he headed. In other parts of Punjab, a "state of chaos and repressive police methods" combined to create "a mood of overwhelming anger and resentment in the Sikh masses against the authorities", making Bhindranwale even more popular, and demands of independence gain currency, even amongst moderates and Sikh intellectuals. Extrajudicial killings by the police of orthodox Sikh youth occurred in rural areas in Punjab during the summer and winter of 1982 and early 1983, provoking reprisals. Over 190 Sikhs had been killed in the first 19 months of the protest movement.
Operation Blue Star Operation Blue Star was an Indian military operation carried out between 1 and 8 June 1984. It was ordered by
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to banish
Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his armed followers from the buildings of the
Harmandir Sahib complex in
Amritsar,
Punjab. In July 1983, the Sikh political party
Akali Dal's President
Harcharan Singh Longowal had invited Bhindranwale to take up residence in
Golden Temple Complex. In the violent events leading up to the Operation Blue Star, the militants had killed 165 Nirankaris, Hindus and Nirankaris, even 39 Sikhs opposed to Bhindranwale were killed. The total number of deaths was 410 in violent incidents and riots while 1,180 people were injured. Counterintelligence reports of the Indian agencies had reported that three prominent figures in the operation,
Shabeg Singh, Balbir Singh and
Amrik Singh had made at least six trips each to Pakistan between the years 1981 and 1983. According to figures compiled by the South Asia Terrorism Portal, over 550 civilians were killed during the fighting in and around the
Golden Temple complex and within
Amritsar city, many of them caught in the crossfire between security forces and armed militants. A directory released by the radical Sikh organisation
Dal Khalsa (organization) lists 229 armed Sikh militants killed during
Operation Blue Star. Former Amritsar district commissioner
Ramesh Inder Singh, in his eyewitness account, wrote that 717 bodies were recovered from within the Golden Temple complex between 3 and 9 June 1984. Of these, 501 were civilians and 216 were armed militants, based on records prepared by the civil administration and police before
Autopsy examinations. Singh also records that 11 additional people were killed on 1 June 1984 during clashes between the
Central Reserve Police Force and armed extremists in Golden temple complex . High civilian casualties were attributed by the state to militants using
pilgrims trapped inside the temple as
human shields. According to Indian army generals, it was "doubtful" that Bhindranwale had any assurance of help or promise of asylum from Pakistan, as he made no attempt to escape with any associates, in addition to traditions of martyrdom.
Assassination of Indira Gandhi and anti-Sikh riots Operation Bluestar was criticized by many Sikhs bodies who interpreted the military action as an assault on Sikh religion. Four months after the operation, on 31 October 1984, Indira Gandhi was
assassinated in vengeance by her two Sikh bodyguards,
Satwant Singh and
Beant Singh. over Gandhi's death led to the killings of more than 3,000 Sikhs in the ensuing
1984 anti-Sikh riots. The most-affected regions were the Sikh neighbourhoods of
Delhi. Human rights organisations and newspapers across India believed that the massacre was organised. The collusion of political officials in the violence and judicial failure to penalise the perpetrators alienated Sikhs and increased support for the Khalistan movement.
Militancy Since the November 1984 pogrom, the Sikhs considered themselves a besieged community. The majority of Sikhs in Punjab would come to support the insurgents as harsh police measures, harassment of innocent Sikh families, and fake encounters from the state had progressively increased support, and provided fresh motives for angry youth to join the insurgents, who were extolled by the community as martyrs as they were killed by police. Police activity discriminatory towards Sikhs increased alienation greatly, triggering indiscriminate militant incidents. However, the insurgent groups were also highly vulnerable to infiltration by security forces, providing possible motive as to frequent assassination of those suspected of being informants. A section of Sikhs turned to militancy in Punjab; some Sikh militant groups outside Punjab aimed to create an independent state called
Khalistan through acts of violence directed at members of the Indian government, army or forces. Others demanded an autonomous state within India, based on the
Anandpur Sahib Resolution. Rajiv Gandhi congratulated a "large number" of Sikhs in a speech in 1985 for condemning the actions of the militants "for the first time." An anthropological study by Puri et al. had posited fun, excitement and expressions of masculinity, as explanations for the young men to join militants and other religious nationalist groups. Puri et al. stated that undereducated and illiterate young men, and with few job prospects had joined pro-Khalistan militant groups with "fun" as one of the primary reasons, asserting that the pursuit of Khalistan was the motivation for only 5% of "militants". However, retired Indian Army general
Afsir Karim had described "myths" that had become part of the conventional wisdom of the establishment, including that of "Sikhs have no cause to be dissatisfied or disgruntled" or "have no grievances", or that "terrorism and violence is the work of a handful of misguided youth and criminals and can be curbed by strong measures taken by the state law and order apparatus", stating that the terrorism was a preliminary stage of insurgency in Punjab, that it was well organized, and that the militants were highly motivated and that crime was not their motive. Army leaders during the earlier operation had noted that "it was now evident that this was no rabble army, but a determined insurgent army fired up with religious fervour." as well as by entryists like
Naxalites who "took advantage of the situation for their own ends." On the same day, in another location, a group of militants killed two officials during an attack on a train. Trains were attacked and people were shot after being pulled from buses. The Congress(I)-led Central Government dismissed its own Punjab's government, declaring a state of emergency, and imposed the President's Rule in the state. Indira Gandhi's son and political successor,
Rajiv Gandhi,
tried unsuccessfully to bring peace to Punjab. By the beginning of 1990, the Sikh militancy had begun to kill proportionately more Sikhs than Hindus. In the period of 1981–1989, 5,521 people, including 451 police personnel had been killed by terrorists. In the period 1990–1991, 6,000 people, including 973 police officers, paramilitary, home guards and special police personnel had been murdered. Militant organizations such as Babbar Khalsa began issuing edicts in an attempt to restore ideological justification for the millitancy which had now acquired significant criminalization in its praxis. Schools were ordered to mandate religious uniforms and ban skirts for girls, other demands included the promotion of the Punjabi language, a proscription on alcohol, cigarettes, meat and certain wedding conduct. Militants set fire to various bank branches to enforce their promotion of Punjabi, journalists and newspaper deliverymen were gunned down to coerce the media into portraying the militants in a more favorable light and to append honorific titles before certain militants' names.
Alleged Pakistan involvement According to Indian general Afsir Karim, there was "nothing to suggest that the initial break between Sikhs and the national mainstream was engineered by outside agencies." The first impetus occurred shortly after Independence in 1951 when Punjabi Hindus, under the influence of local Hindu radical groups, abandoned Punjabi to call Hindi their mother tongue in falsified censuses to prevent the formation of the
Punjabi Suba, which brought out other differences between the two communities in the open. Despite this, it required an event of the magnitude of Operation Blue Star to give rise to militancy in an organized form. The pre-operation period generated enough heat to draw Pakistan interest, but it was Operation Blue Star which gave the final push to angry Sikh youth to cross the border and accept Pakistani assistance and support. Even then their anger was "not particularly against the Hindu population but against the humiliation of Blue Star compounded by the anti-Sikh riots of 1984." In 1964, Pakistani state-owned
radio station began airing separatist propaganda targeted for Sikhs in Punjab, which continued during the
Indo-Pakistani War of 1965. Pakistan had been promoting the Sikh secessionist movement since the 1970s. The Pakistani prime minister
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had politically supported the idea of Khalistan wherever possible. Under
Zia ul Haq, this support became even more prominent. The motive for supporting Khalistan was the revenge for India's role in
splitting of Pakistan in 1971 and to discredit India's global status by splitting a Sikh state to vindicate
Jinnah's
Two-nation theory. Zia associated this with the Pakistani military doctrine to "
Bleed India with a Thousand Cuts". Former Director General of ISI
Hamid Gul had once stated that "Keeping Punjab destabilized is equivalent to the Pakistan Army having an extra division at no cost to the taxpayers." Since the early 1980s, for the fulfillment of these motives, the spy agency Inter-Service-Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan became involved with the Khalistan movement.
Training and infrastructure Pakistan had been involved in training, guiding, and arming Sikh militants. According to KPS Gill, militants had been mainly using crude bombs but since 1990s more modern explosives supplied by Pakistan had become widespread in usage among them. The number of casualties also increased with more explosives usage by the militants. By 1993, the Punjab insurgency had petered out, with the last major incident being the
assassination of Chief Minister Beant Singh occurring in 1995. According to data published on the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), 11,694 civilians were killed by Sikh militant groups during the Punjab insurgency, of whom 7,139 were Sikhs.
Kanwar Pal Singh Gill, writing on SATP, stated that approximately 61 percent of the victims of terrorist violence during the insurgency were Sikhs, while around 4,500 Hindu civilians were killed during the period within
Punjab, India. == Timeline ==