POLITICS.CO.UK: The truth behind the Amritsar massacre

The truth behind the Amritsar massacre

By Dabinderjit Singh

Code-named Operation Bluestar began on June 1st 1984. Up to 150,000 Indian army troops were sent to the northern Indian state of Punjab, the Sikh homeland, equipped with helicopter gunships and tanks.

Over 125 other Sikh shrines were simultaneously attacked. On the false pretext of apprehending ‘a handful of militants’ lodged inside the Golden Temple, the Indian army unleashed a terror unprecedented in post-independence India. It took the use of Vijayanta tanks to win the fight for the army. These let loose a barrage of highly explosive shells, which destroyed the Akal Takht, the temporal seat of the Sikhs.

The Shiromani (Temple) Committee secretary Bhan Singh was in the temple complex at the time of Operation Bluestar. He witnessed soldiers, commanded by a major, lining up young Sikhs along the hostel’s corridor to be shot. When Bhan Singh protested, the major flew into a rage, tore away his turban and ordered him to either flee the scene or join the ‘array of martyrs’. Bhan Singh turned back and fled, jumping over the bodies of the dead and injured. Hundreds of young Sikhs, innocent pilgrims from the villages, were killed in this manner. http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2014/01/16/the-truth-behind-the-amritsar-massacre

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