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It was a blistering April afternoon
in 1984. A white Ambassador
car drove into the driveway
of a modest Lutyens Delhi
bungalow, 1 Safdarjung Road,
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's
residence. A tall bespectacled
man got out. He was known only
as DGS or director general security,
a key official in the Research
and Analysis Wing (RAW) who
controlled a small air force and
two covert paramilitary units, the
Special Frontier Force and the
Special Services Bureau. Three
years earlier, DGS had raised
another unit, called the Special
Group or sg, for clandestine
counter-terrorist missions in
Punjab and Assam. For the past
two months, SG personnel, all
drawn from the Army, had been
training in secret at a base near
Delhi for a critical mission.
Memories of Operation
Bluestar: DGS was ushered into
the living room where a pensive
Mrs Gandhi sat with a salt-andpepper-haired
gentleman wearing
thick black glasses-
Rameshwar Nath Kao, 66, the reclusive
spymaster who had built
the external intelligence agency,
RAW, in 1968 and used it to train
Mukti Bahini guerrillas during
the Bangladesh war in 1971. He
had returned to government as
Mrs Gandhi's senior aide in 1981
and was now her de facto national
security adviser. More important,
he was a key adviser on
the Punjab problem. For over
two years now, India's most
prosperous state had been engulfed
by communal violence. A
radical group of Sikhs led by a
fiery religious preacher Jarnail
Singh Bhindranwale, 37, had
declared war against the state.
His motley group of armed supporters
had, by 1984, murdered
over 100 civilians and security
personnel. The radical militant
leader had then been ensconced
near the Golden Temple since
1981 with his heavily armed followers,
shielded by his proximity
to Sikhism's holiest shrine.
Operation Bluestar: Night of
The untold story before
Operation Bluestar
blood DGS briefed Mrs Gandhi
on a surgical mission that fell
short of a military strike to evict
the rebels. Operation Sundown,
he explained, was a 'snatch and
grab' job: Heliborne commandos
would enter the Guru Nanak
Niwas guesthouse near the
Golden Temple and abduct the
militant leader. The operation
was so named because it was
timed for past midnight when
Bhindranwale and his guards
would least expect it.
SG operatives had earlier infiltrated
the Golden Temple, disguised
as pilgrims and journalists,
to study its layout. Then,
for several weeks, over 200 SG
commandos had rehearsed the
operation on a wood and Hessian
cloth mock-up of the twostoreyed
resthouse at their base
in Sarsawa in Uttar Pradesh.
Commandos would rope down
from two Mi-4 transport helicopters
onto the guest house and
make a beeline for Bhindranwale.
Once they captured him, he
would be spirited away by a
ground assault team which
would drive in. There was a possibility
of a firefight with the militant
leader's bodyguards and
civilians who could rush in to
protect him.
Mrs Gandhi's listened to the
details impassively. She had just
one question. "How many casualties?"
Twenty per cent of the
commando force and both helicopters,
dgs replied. Mrs Gandhi
grimaced. She wanted to know
how many civilians would die.
The RAW official did not have
an answer. No one did. That was
it. Mrs Gandhi said no and Operation
Sundown died before the
first helicopter could take off.
Just two months later, Mrs
Gandhi ordered the Army to
flush militants out of the temple.
Eighty-three armymen and 492
civilians died in Operation
Bluestar, the single bloodiest
confrontation in independent
India's history of civil strife.
Machine guns, light artillery,
rockets and, eventually, battle
tanks were used to overwhelm
Bhindranwale and his mini army
and the Akal Takht, the highest
seat of temporal authority of the
Sikhs, was reduced to a smoking
ruin. In the maelstrom of
Bluestar, Sundown and its extensive
preparations got buried in
RAW's secret archives.
Three decades later, Operation
Sundown resurfaced in an
unexpected location-London.
On January 13, the United Kingdom
was shocked by declassified
letters dating to February
1984 that revealed that Margaret
Thatcher's government had
helped India on "a plan to remove
Sikh extremists from the
Golden Temple". This plan, according
to a top-secret letter
from the principal private secre-
Sikh Virsa, Calgary 44. June, 2020