SIKH VIRSA ARTICLE ( June 2020)

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He had briefly considered
a plan to starve out the
defenders but junked it
fearing an uprising in the
countryside.
Bluestar bloodbath:
Shortly after 10.30 p.m. on
June 5, 1984, 20 men in
black dungarees stealthily
entered the Golden
Temple. They wore nightvision
goggles, M-1 steel
helmets, bulletproof
vests and carried a mix of
MP-5 submachine guns and AK-
47 assault rifles. The men of sg's
56th Commando Company were
then the only force in India
trained for room intervention,
the specialised art of fighting in
confined spaces. Each commando
was a sharpshooter,
diver and parachutist and could
do 40-km speed marches. Some
of them wore gas masks and carried
stubby gas guns meant to
launch CX gas canisters, a more
potent tear gas. Three months
before this night, the commandos
had stayed around the
temple and rehearsed for Operation
Sundown. Some of them still
sported the beards they had
grown for their undercover work
as volunteers in the Golden
Temple's langar. When the plan
was called off, they returned to
their base in Sarsawa. They had
flown into Amritsar the previous
day at the request of Lt-Gen
Sundarji.
The three battalions that Lt-
Gen Brar's 9th Infantry Division
sent into the Golden Temple that
night were trained to fight a conventional
combat on the plains
of Punjab and in the deserts of
Rajasthan. They would overwhelm
the enemy by sheer force
of numbers. The commandos,
who spearheaded the assault,
made use of stealth, speed and
surprise to achieve results. Soon
after arriving, one of the sg officers
had briefed Lt-Gen Ranjit
Singh Dayal, Sundarji's chief of
staff, on a plan to capture the
Akal Takht by blowing off its rear
wall. General Dayal, a paratrooper
who had captured the
Haji Pir pass in an unconventional
operation in the 1965 war,
immediately overruled it. "There
must be no damage to the Akal
Takht," he said. The commandos
were to capture the sacred building
by using gas to flush out the
militants, he said.
The Army had clearly underestimated
the defences. As soon
as they entered the temple, a
sniper shot the unit's radio operator
clean through his helmet.
The rest took cover in the long
gallery of pillars that led to the
Akal Takht. Light machine guns
and carbines crackled from behind
impregnable walls of the
temple, their multiple gun flashes
blinding the commandos' nightvision
devices, forcing them to
take them off. The commandos
and infantry soldiers cautiously
advanced, sheltering behind
rows of pillars. Those who tried
to advance towards the Akal
Takht were cut down on the
marble parikrama. An armoured
personnel carrier bringing in
troops was immobilised by a
rocket-propelled grenade.
"Shabeg knew the Army's Achilles
heel," says an SG colonel.
"He knew we couldn't fight in
built-up areas."
Post-midnight, remnants of
the sg unit and the Army's 1 Para
huddled near a fountain at the
base of the Akal Takht. The area
between the Akal Takht and the
Darshani Deori that led to the
Golden Temple had turned into
a killing zone, covered by
Shabeg's light machine guns.
Attempts by the para-commandos
to storm the defences were
repeatedly beaten back. They
lost at least 17 men, their black
dungaree-clad bodies lying
prone on white marble. Commandos
who tried to fire the CX gas
canisters discovered that the
Akal Takht's windows had been
bricked up. The only openings
were horizontal slots out of
which machine guns poured
deadly fire. The commandos
neutralised two of the machine
gun nests by dropping grenades
into them but the Akal
Takht was impregnable. Then,
around 7.30 a.m. on June 5, three
Vickers-Vijayanta tanks were
deployed. They fired 105 mm
shells and knocked down the
walls of the Akal Takht. Commandos
and infantrymen then
moved in to mop up the defenders,
tossing gas and lobbing grenades
inside the building.
The temple premises resembled
a medieval battlefield,
one sg trooper recalls. Bloodied
and blackened bodies lay scattered
around the white temple
parikrama. In the basement of the
blackened, still-smoking ruin of
the Akal Takht, the commandos
found the body of Shabeg. The
Army recovered 51 light machine
guns, 31 of which had been concentrated
around the Akal
Takht. "Normally, an army unit
(of around 800 soldiers) would
deploy this quantum of firepower
to cover an area of about
eight km," Lt-Gen Brar recounted
in his book Operation Blue Star:
The True Story. Shabeg, he believed,
wanted to hold out
until daylight in the hope
that there would be a
popular uprising among
the people when they get
to know of the army action.
The former war hero
had extracted a bloody
price on an army he felt
had wronged him.
'Oh my God,' she
said: Around 6 a.m. on
June 6, 1984, the phone
rang in R.K. Dhawan's
Golf Links home. Minister of
State for Defence K.P. Singh Deo
wanted Dhawan to convey an
urgent message to Mrs Gandhi.
The operation was a success, he
said, but there were heavy casualties-both
armymen and civilians.
Mrs Gandhi's first reaction
was anguish. "Oh my God,? she
told Dhawan. "They told me
there would be no casualties."
It took the Army two more
days to clear Bhindranwale's
men from the temple's labyrinthine
corridors. The commanding
officer of the sg contingent,
a lieutenant-colonel, was seriously
wounded by a sniper as
he escorted President Zail Singh
around the temple on June 8.
Operation Bluestar inflamed
Sikh sentiments and triggered a
mutiny in certain Indian Army
units. It also led to the death of
Mrs Gandhi: Her two Sikh bodyguards
gunned her down on
October 31 that year. The communal
holocaust in which over
8,000 Sikhs were murdered by
mobs around the country-including
3,000 in Delhi-fanned
another decade of insurgency in
Punjab. In the aftermath of Mrs
Gandhi's assassination, sg commandos,
several of whom had
seen action at the Golden
Temple, were rushed to 7 Race
Course Road to guard Rajiv
Gandhi and his family round-theclock
for a year. They had plenty
of time to wonder if history
would have turned out differently
had they been given the
chance to carry out Operation
Sundown. (The End)
Sikh Virsa, Calgary 46. June, 2020