Operation Blue Star and 1984

Outlook has lots of interesting articles on 1984 and operation Blue Star.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, a writer born in the Bihar town of Motihari published a dystopian novel predicting the victory of totalitarianism in the West. This envisaged an all-powerful state that would take over all aspects of a citizen’s life, regulating what he (or she) could—and could not—think, eat, speak, etc. The book’s title simply inverted the last two numbers of the year in which it was written.

When 1984 finally did arrive, it was not an especially bad year for the countries that George Orwell had in mind. The economy of his own homeland, England, was on the mend, while victory in the Falklands War had given rise to a renewed sense of national pride. As for the two superpowers, the United States was not, in 1984, involved in a major war, this a rather exceptional occurrence in its conflict-ridden history. Meanwhile, with the death of the ogre Leonid Brezhnev, the USSR had finally begun to allow its citizens to breathe. The stage was being set for the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev and his policies of perestroika and glasnost. Thus, contrary to Orwell’s forecast, in 1984, the Western democracies were as robust as ever, while the totalitarian Soviet Union was for the first time acquiring a democratic veneer.

In the country of Orwell’s birth, however, the year made famous by the title of his novel was anything but placid or even-paced. Marked by instability and conflict, by assassination and mass murder, it was in 1984 that the Republic of India came closest to being, as it were, a non-functioning anarchy.

In the early months of 1984, there was disquiet in the Kashmir Valley and in Nagaland. These were old trouble spots; far more worrying was the growth of separatist sentiments in the Punjab. The Sikhs had long been considered to be an integral part of the Indian nation. They played a key role in the agrarian economy and in the armed forces. They were well represented in the professions, and in sports—there were more Sikh Olympians than from all other communities combined.


That a section of Sikhs would want to carve out a separate state was a surprise. That they would do so with Pak help was a shock.


That a section of the Sikhs would now want to carve out a future distinct from that of India was a surprise. That they would seek to do so with the help of Pakistan was a shock. For the Sikhs had been the main victims of Partition; following which they were thrown out of the canal colonies they had built, and kept away from their sacred shrines, which were now (with one striking exception) on the wrong side of the border. Indeed, in 1946 and 1947, the Punjabi Muslim and the Punjabi Sikh had been at each other’s throats. Three-and-a-half decades later, they had become unlikely allies, as the wily ruler of Pakistan, Zia-ul-Haq, began aiding the Khalistani militants with money, arms, and not least, safe havens. (A waggish friend of mine joked that once Zia saw the putative map of Khalistan the support would stop—for this included a corridor to Karachi, as the new nation would not be secure without access to the sea.)

The rise of Sikh separatism was the product of several factors—among them the cynicism of the Congress, which had initially propped up the extremists as a counterweight to their old rivals, the Akalis; the pusillanimity of the Akalis themselves, who allowed their flock to be captured by bigots; and the messianic leadership of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who thought that with God on their side the Khalistanis would certainly vanquish the Indian state.