How Khalistan Movement Scarred Punjab's Very Soul -- Wassan Singh Lives To Tell Horror Tales

The small, single-storey house stands alone, as if wary of the habitation around the nearby village of Zaffarwal. Dwarfed by its large, walled compound, it has just three rooms, and a stairw ay outside leading to the terrace, where nights are spent sleeping under the stars, old style. Nights바카라�. We are in Gurdaspur district, a couple of hours off Amr­itsar, in a swathe of rural Punjab that spent a decade-and-a-half as if in a long night. The dark tone of the 바카라�80s resurfaces here the moment there is any intelligence input on terrorism: it is to this house that police posses come swooping down.

One such visit was around the last week of October. Some 100 cops, with one senior police officer, drove in. A stifling panic struck all, including octogenarian Kulwant Kaur. Her son, Wassan Singh Zaffarwal, was not home. The police wanted to wait. Relief came only when he returned, and the posse left after meeting him.

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A curious inversion here: once a name that struck fear across Punjab, Wassan Singh now lives in fear. The dreaded chief of the Khalistan Commando Force during the late 바카라�80s and early 바카라�90s is trying to lead a normal life: his prison sentence ended around a dec­ade ago. He has sought redemption through politics, but is hobbled by the fact that he바카라�s often jai­­led or under house arrest. His latest struggle: trying in vain to get a passport to visit Australia to see his 3-year-old grandson, whose photo adorns the bed shelf.

In a white kurta pyjama, with an orange turban wrapped Guru or Sufi style, Wassan Singh is calm in tone. Remorse tinges his words, but he바카라�s not hesitant to speak about the past if he trusts you. 바카라�After I declared war against police and anti-Sikhism forces, my family was the first victim. My father and brothers, even the youngest one who was 14, were tortured. I can바카라�t tell you the horrors they went through. My mother would sit for days in different police stations, hoping for news that they are alive.바카라� He had travelled to Pakistan and Switzerland before being arrested in 2001 for at least half-a-dozen cases of killing and kidnapping across Punjab. In Dasuya, Amritsar, Batala바카라�.

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Born to a poor farmer in Zaffarwal village, Wassan, a school dropout, started as a class IV employee in Dhariwal Mills. A baptised Sikh who used to participate in Gurbani recitation, he joined Damdami Taksal and became a follower of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. He pronounced the 바카라�creation바카라� of Khalistan from the Akal Takht on April 29, 1986바카라�and moved to Paki­stan, coordinating the activities of KCF (Zaffarwal) from there. He mostly stayed there바카라�occasionally sneaking into India바카라�before moving to Europe. 바카라�I wanted to surrender, but was arrested before,바카라� he quips.

Night Sets In

Even people like Zaffarwal now describe the period of insurgency, from the late 바카라�70s to around 1993, as 바카라�the dark days바카라�. A time when religio-political differences peaked into a bloody war where only victimhood was secular: both Hindu and Sikhs suffered. For those who survived, life limped on. Streets emptied at night: people stopped stepping out in the dark. Also, it was an era of social diktats! The fiats from terrorists were not limited to Sikhs. One such was a dress code for women and girls: no skirts or jeans, only a salwar suit with dupatta. Every school, private or government, was forced to introduce this new uniform. Even missionary schools toed the line.

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Another was language, an old canker in the soul of Punjab, at least since the 1961 census. A lot of ethno-national movements are propelled by linguistic identity: here it had the additional force of being identified with religion. All government departments were directed to have nameplates and vehicle number plates in Punjabi. The promotion of Punjabi was made so important that Patiala AIR station director M.L. Manchanda was kidnapped and killed on May 27, 1992 by the Babbar Khalsa for apparently not being pliant enough, after the government바카라�s negotiations for his release broke down. They were demanding that electronic media broadcast only in the local language, not Hindi.

Senior journalist Prabhjot Singh, who worked with The Tribune, says, 바카라�My editor called...militants had threatened to send one severed arm of Manchanda to the Tribune office and another to the Punjabi news­paper Ajit. Can you stop it, he asked me.바카라� Prabhjot did not know what to do bey­ond the regulation follow-up, using his reportorial network. He rushed with a photographer to Patiala and from there to Ambala, following pol­ice leads. But too late. 바카라�Manchanda바카라�s body was found near Rajpura, with his arms intact but his head over 200 km away in Ambala. The police took his head in a 15 kg tin box used for ghee. We followed the police, although they tried to avoid us.바카라� Finally, the head was stitched up at Rajpura mortuary and the body handed over to the family after an autopsy.

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A post-mortem of the whole state seemed nigh, such was the stultifying air. 바카라�The media crawled, we didn바카라�t have legs to stand upon. There was so much fear,바카라� says Prabhjot, who too was beaten up once at a Patiala temple. 바카라�I almost got killed.바카라� Many others did not live to tell the tale.

That Seventies Feeling

A brief genesis of the Punjab problem. For a province torn asunder by Par­­tition, a hint of community estr­­angement was perhaps natural. It started peaking in the mid-1970s: the Anandpur Sahib resolution of 1973 became an inflection point as Akali politics started hewing to a more radical line. But the genie could not be put back in the bottle after Bhindranwale, a minor religious figure propped up by former PM Indira Gandhi as a counterweight, turned rebellious. Bhi­­ndranwale now supported the radical panthic politics of the Akali Dal and its new 바카라�manifesto바카라�: the 바카라�73 Resolution demanding more autonomy for Punjab.

The historical trauma of Partition had combined with a sense of discrimination, of being a minority, to amplify Sikh disaffection. The community was disappointed with the Congress-run Centre바카라�s res­ponse to the Resolution. The anger now coalesced anew, given focus by the strident charisma of Bhindranwale, who made the Golden Temple the headquarters of his planned armed rebellion.

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With the temple a bristling armoury, with militants manning fortified defences, on June 6, 1984 the army was ordered to throng the Golden Temple. The resulting bloodshed and desecration of the holiest Sikh shrine has still not been fully accounted for바카라�in quantified terms or the deep sense of woundedness. The levels of alarm really peaked in New Delhi after reports of desertions from the army (by June 12 itself, an estimated 500-600 deserted their units) started filtering in. In all, around 2,800 Sikh personnel, officers and others were involved in collective insubordination and desertion. (Out of them, 450 were discharged or dismissed and put in civil jails.)

Cataclysm begat cataclysm. Indira Gandhi was assa­ssinated by two Sikh bodyguards four months later. Within a day, Delhi started living its worst moments, with a massacre of the Sikhs in thousands.

The long, bloody militant aftermath lasted another decade: killings, bombings, all encased in a renewed call for Khalistan. Victims were strewn across Pun­jab바카라�s fields. The full force of the security backlash was felt after IPS officer K.P.S. Gill took charge of ending terrorism. Thousands were arrested as suspected militants or informers and jailed for months or years, without judicial trial or record. Many were eliminated; often last rites were conducted without families being informed.

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Amrish Kumar (name changed) from Ludhiana says human rights violations were routine. 바카라�I rem­em­ber night curfews, with the last bus from all cities, especially in winters, leaving by 6 or 7 pm바카라�. I got a bank job, but my mother refused to let me take it because it would have meant travelling 60-70 km daily one side.바카라� He remembers a militant-police encounter next door in the late 바카라�80s. The cops had taken up position on their roof. 바카라�It was so scary.바카라�

A former DG of Punjab Police offers a defence. 바카라�It was a political movement that turned communal. Mil­itants were killing everyone. You would find highly literate people joining the terrorist ranks. It wasn바카라�t a situation that could be handled with negotiations,바카라� he says. 바카라�The stories of torture are many on our side too. How police families were killed, women raped, which many a times we didn바카라�t report.바카라� Ours, theirs바카라�Punjab had split into two.

Says Manjit Singh Dala, a Gurdaspur realtor and the son of a big farming family: 바카라�That era changed cropping patterns in Punjab. Not just militants, even the government and police issued verbal orders to people. Stopping sugarcane cultivation was one such.바카라� For sugarcane fields were deemed a safe haven for fleeing extremists; in several cases, entire fields laden with cane were burnt, with policemen ringing it all around. Most farmers started cultivating rice.

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Zaffarwal offers an interesting analysis. 바카라�These atr­o­cities was one main reason for youth joining us radicals. Only 10 per cent of Sikhs who joined the Khalistan movement did so out of ideological influence; for 90 per cent it was the atrocities that impelled them. When young boys used to come to Kothi (an undisclosed location across the border), they were fuming. Each had his own story to tell.바카라� He accuses the media of being biased. 바카라�They never tried to put forward the real story. Ideological hardliners could be accused, but the war against atrocities had to be written about too.바카라� That바카라�s one reason why Bhindranwale is considered a saint and still has a following across the world, he adds, as an afterthought.

During those volatile times, the Indian Army had its own lessons to learn. There was a media blackout and there were no mobiles or messaging apps; even then news about the Harmandir Sahib being attacked by the army reached the all-Sikh regiments (like 9 Sikh). An armed rebellion broke out, but was contained bef­ore anyone could reach Amritsar. That was when the army realised it was better to have mixed regiments; the idea of pure community-based regiments started withering away, although a handful survive. A former defence personnel who was part of the battalion that entered the Golden Temple also claims that the scenario inside was not entirely in line with what people would connect with piety and holiness. 바카라�The sight inside was horrendous. A sacred place like that바카라�it would have left anyone angry.바카라� Sikhs in the army too slowly realised this, he adds.

Three decades later, Mehta village, headquarters of the Damdami Taksal and Bhindranwale바카라�s original base, has a deserted look. On internet sites, Facebook, YouTube or any social media, however, one can still find Sikh youth across the world, especially from the US, UK, Canada and Italy, being staunch Bhindranwale followers. In Punjab too, though not many adhere to his ideology, he바카라�s still an icon of sorts, a symbol far removed from the actual, messy history. His iconic image바카라�poster-blue turban, woollen shawl, a belt of bullets slung around, an arrow in hand, standing on the premises of Golden Temple with the Harmandir Sahib forming the backdrop, can be found everywhere. Cars with his poster and T-shirts with his messages abound on college campuses. A disembodied reminder of the past.

Bhindranwale Zinda Hai

Says Balkar Singh, a Ludhiana resident who had a narrow escape during a bomb blast in the 바카라�90s, 바카라�Hindus might consider Bhindranwale a terrorist, but for Sikhs he is not. We believe a conspiracy theory works behind terrorism and that happened with Bhindranwale too. You have radicals in all religions. But when you try to suppress people, they would rebel.바카라� Most militants, he adds, were religious men, not experts in politics.

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He remembers the day of the blast in Chandigarh. 바카라�I was going with my dad to the market바카라�within a few seconds on the road, we heard a huge explosion. There was blood all around. A scooter bomb....바카라� He remembers gurdwaras in villages talking about abjuring meat and alcohol. And not having more than five people at weddings. 바카라�It was suffocating바카라�I can바카라�t dream of going back,바카라� he says. An essential amb­­­ivalence haunts him, even though for him Bhindranwale was a 바카라�political victim바카라�.

Says Jobanpreet Singh, a student of Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, 바카라�Every Sikh has respect for Bhindranwale somewhere.바카라� This boy, in his 20s and dressed in Sikh attire바카라�adhering to all the 5 바카라�K바카라�s, kesh, kangah, kada, kachha and kripan바카라�is pursuing an MPhil on Religion and Conflicts and the contribution of Damdami Taksal, and for his research stays at their Mehta headquarters. He believes Bhindranwale바카라�s mission is incomplete and one day it would be successful. 바카라�Bhindranwale had instilled a feeling of freedom among youth, which is still burning after so many years. He taught us what real Sikhism is.바카라� Would the wizened scholar or the Sikh commoner be able to offer an unequivocal response to that? Perhaps not even Zaffarwal can.

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By Jyotika Sood in Amritsar and Gurdaspur