Britain's cooperation with India is not unusual and neither is Operation Bluestar unprecedented. What is needed is a lessons learnt exercise to ensure there is no repeat of the politics that led to such a situation so as to put a closure to the unfortunate incident and to move on.
Dinesh Kumar
RECENT revelations that an officer of the Special Air Services (SAS), a British Special Force, reconnoitred the Golden Temple Complex in February 1984 and gave advice to the Indian government on the latter's request on how to flush out the armed militia led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale from inside the premises of the holy shrine has evoked considerable dismay and outrage among sections of the Sikh community both in India and overseas, especially among those residing in the United Kingdom. 'How could have the British Government rendered advice to the Indian government to attack the holiest shrine of the Sikhs? is their angry question.
Notwithstanding, the fact remains that at the operational level it appears that whatever was the rendered advice, it was either not passed on to the Army or, even in case it was, it was not followed by the formation commanders during Operation Bluestar which had taken place less than four months after the visit of the SAS officer. The content of that advice is yet to be publicly revealed. As Lieutenant General Kuldip Singh Brar, who as General Officer Commanding of 9 Division in the rank of Major General had led Operation Bluestar, has repeatedly stated, the Army action was planned over barely five days (June 1 to 5) prior to Operation Bluestar and executed over a single night (June 5/6).
Saudi-French military action in Mecca
The short answer is that it is not unusual for countries to seek advice from each other. Neither was Operation Bluestar unprecedented. For, just four-and-a-half-years earlier, the world witnessed a similar operation inside the holiest shrine of the Muslims, the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The operation that lasted two weeks witnessed the active involvement of the French Special Forces, essentially Christian and non-Muslim and therefore 'infidel'.
The incident dates to 20th November 1979, the first day of the year 1400 according to the Islamic calendar, when Juhayman al-Utaybi along with 400 to 500 followers seized Islam's holiest shrine and proclaimed Mohammed Abdullah-al-Qahtani as the Mahdi or messiah. The gunmen smuggled their weapons into the mosque in coffins, declared the Saudi family illegitimate and held hostage hundreds of worshippers who were on a pilgrimage.
As was faced by the Indian Army in the Golden Temple complex, the Saudi Army had little intelligence of the number of gunmen or hostages taken, faced heavy casualties during a frontal assault, found themselves at the receiving end of ambushes and sniper fire and ended up using heavy weaponry including tanks while making no headway with announcements for surrender over the public address system. The gunmen eventually took refuge in the basement and finally the Saudi Arabian government turned to the Groupe d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale, the Special Forces unit of the French armed forces, which ended up commanding the Saudi forces but did not actually participate in the attack since non-Muslims are not allowed inside the holy city. The 14 day operation, which ended on 4th December 1979, resulted in the death of 255 persons including 127 Saudi soldiers and injuries to 560 including 451 soldiers. The unofficial figures are much higher. The one major difference, however, was that the Saudi's got the ulema to issue a fatwa permitting the use of deadly force to re-take the Grand Mosque from the terrorists. But even this fatwa came after three long days of persuasion. Unlike Bhindranwale who was killed in the Army operation, Juhayaman and 67 of his followers were captured, secretly tried, convicted and then publicly beheaded in different cities of Saudi Arabia.
When the ISI cooperated with RAW
The revelation of British assistance to India has also evoked similar surprise among a section of non-Sikh politicians in the country. 'How could have the Indian government compromised on their sovereignty and sought advice from the very country that until only 27 years earlier had colonised and ravaged India for over 200 years?' is their indignant question.
The fact is that truth is stranger than fiction and history is replete with examples of intelligence agencies, on occasions, cooperating with even their adversaries. The game of realpolitik, as any practitioner or theorist of statecraft ranging from Kautilya and Sun Tzu to Machiavelli will explain, is altogether different and, most will argue, is necessary.
Still a controversy
Operation Bluestar remains the subject of considerable controversy and continues to evoke strong negative emotion among large sections of the Sikh community. It is still perceived as an attack on the holy shrine rather than on a band of armed militia that had fortified the premises of the Golden Temple complex and buildings in the periphery after smuggling in weapons and explosives and from where they ran a virtual parallel government and spread terror across the state.
Incredible as it may sound, one such example of cooperation between two adversaries was between India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), the very agency which has executed some major terror attacks in India. Interestingly, this phase of cooperation occurred at the height of terrorist violence in Punjab which was being fuelled by the ISI. All this occurred during the tenure of the much hated President Zia-ul-Haq, a former Pakistani Army chief who as an India baiter aggressively pursued the building of the Islamic (nuclear) bomb, pandered to Islamist radicals and under who the syllabus of Pakistani history school books were further Islamised and made stridently more anti-India and anti-non Muslim.
The cooperation was facilitated by Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan who was a personal friend of Rajiv Gandhi when the latter was Prime Minister. Prince Hasan's wife is of Pakistani origin and he also personally knew General Zia-ul-Haq when as a middle-rung officer he had been earlier posted in Amman as a commanding officer of a Pakistani unit based in the Jordanian capital. Ironically, several years earlier during the 1971 India-Pakistan war, Amman had sided with Pakistan and provided them Jordanian Air Force fighter aircraft.
Prince Hassan had then separately contacted Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and President Zia-ul-Haq and suggested that the chiefs of the RAW and the ISI meet to discuss Pakistan's support to terrorists in Punjab along with other issues. The first meeting between the then RAW chief, AK Verma, and the then ISI chief, Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, was held in Amman with Prince Hassan personally present during the initial moments before leaving the venue of the meeting in order to allow the two Intelligence chiefs to continue their discussion. This was followed by a second meeting between the two in Geneva.
The two countries came close to resolving the Siachen issue as a result of these meetings and the ISI secretly handed over four Sikh soldiers who had earlier crossed over to Pakistan after deserting the Indian Army while posted in Jammu and Kashmir. Dialogue and cooperation between the RAW and the ISI had continued even after Benazir Bhutto came into power in elections held soon after General Zia-ul-Haq's death in August 1988 but came to a halt after Nawaz Sharif succeeded Benazir Bhutto as Prime Minister in the early 1990s. It was during Benazir Bhutto's tenure that the ISI's support to terrorists in Punjab had begun to decline although it correspondingly intensified in Jammu and Kashmir.
There is also the interesting example of the Mossad, Israel's external intelligence agency, training a contingent each of the Indian special forces, the Sri Lankan special forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) at the same time and at the same place in Israel during the 1980s long before New Delhi established diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv as is brought out by former Mossad agent Viktor Ostrovsky in his book By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer. Then again, there is the incident of Indo-US intelligence cooperation during the height of the Cold War when in the late 1960s the two sides cooperated to install a US-supplied plutonium powered transceiver in the Himalayas to detect and report data on future Chinese nuclear tests following Beijing's first nuclear test in October 1964.
Key issues need to be addressed
The decision to order Army troops into the Golden Temple and the hastiness with which the operation was planned raises a question on the quality of governance and decision making. There is first and foremost a need for a serious debate on why and how the political executive and its advisors at that time allowed such a situation to build up in the first place that subsequently necessitated them to order a military action.
Secondly, although the Army can say it was following orders given by the government, the question remains on whether it made sense for the Army to plan and execute a close quarter battle (CQB) operation of such intensity and sensitivity on such a short notice and with abysmally minimal intelligence in one of the country's holiest shrine.
Thirty years on, Operation Bluestar remains the subject of considerable controversy and continues to evoke strong negative emotion among large sections of the Sikh community. It has since cost the country the life of a Prime Minister that in turn led to Congress party-inspired brutal killings of Sikhs in Delhi and other parts of the country and revived terrorism in Punjab that lasted a decade and which cost several thousand lives. For, the operation is still perceived as an attack on the holy shrine rather than on a band of armed militia that had fortified the premises of the Golden Temple complex and buildings in the periphery after smuggling in weapons and explosives and from where they ran a virtual parallel government and spread terror across the state.
Among defence analysts, there remains the question of whether the Army could have executed Operation Bluestar in a better way so as to have inflicted minimal damage and casualties inside the complex. The debate is endless but what is disconcerting is that the Army never conducted a post-Operation Bluestar lessons learnt exercise. One other critical question remains, which in fact did arise at a later date in May 1993 with respect to the holy Charar-e-Sharief sufi shrine in the Kashmir valley with disastrous consequences: What would the Army have done if some of Bhindranwale's armed militia had taken armed positions inside the sanctum sanctorum, the Harminder Sahib? Unlike with the Akal Takht, the temporal seat, on which the Army fired about 20 tank shells to neutralise the heavily fortified positions, the Army would have been constrained to launch an assault on the sanctum sanctorum had the latter been similarly fortified. A retreat would not only have resulted in a loss of face to the Army but would still not have served the purpose of vacating the shrine premises of the armed militia.
There is need for both the Congress and the Akalis to introspect on the politics they played in the 1980s that had culminated in an Army action aimed at vacating Bhindranwale and his gunmen from the holy shrine. Similarly, the Army should also have carried out a lessons learnt exercise following Operation Bluestar (and the Charar-e-Sharief episode) on how they could have handled the operation better. This would be necessary in order to once and for all put a closure to Operation Bluestar. For how long can a country, society and a community hold on to the past?
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