Durbar (26 page)

It is one of the great tragedies of Kashmir’s tragic history that this kind of foolish argument was considered credible not just by Rajiv but even by his mother, who should have known better. Mrs Gandhi had campaigned energetically in Kashmir, wearing Kashmiri clothes and speaking her best Urdu, convinced that she would win at least 15 seats from the Valley for her party in the legislature. She sent all her Muslim MPs from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to campaign on behalf of the party without noticing that outside the towns the ordinary Kashmiri understood very little Urdu at the time. When the results gave Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference a full majority, she convinced herself that he had led a secret, secessionist campaign, and tried to bring his government down almost before it could take office. Rajiv and his friends, apolitical novices that they were, went along with this new and dangerous political game and a new Kashmir problem was created. A problem that had nothing to do with the historical one.

I
t may seem like an odd thing to say, with the perspective of history, but Kashmir was so peaceful in 1983 that it was easy to ignore the bad seeds being sown by Mrs Gandhi’s policies. There were tourists in the houseboats and hotels of Srinagar, music in the air, nightclubs that stayed open all night, trekkers in the mountains and anglers in the government rest houses along Kashmir’s rivers, where in the summer you can catch the best trout in the world.

Farooq as the new chief minister contributed to the atmosphere of fun and frolic by behaving like a chief minister without a care in the world. He developed a passion for motorcycles and took to racing about on them, often with Bollywood actresses riding pillion so that he became the delight of news photographers. On summer evenings he could be seen everywhere. At Kashmiri wazwan feasts on boats that glittered with fairy lights on the Dal Lake, at weddings and dinner parties, concerts and intimate social events in the chief minister’s official residence. He continued to live in his own house on Gupkar Road but used the official residence for concerts by young singers who sometimes came from as far away as Delhi to sing romantic Hindi film songs and Urdu ghazals.

It was Punjab that was India’s biggest political problem. Bhindranwale’s ragtag band of angry young Sikhs had created so much violence and terror that by the end of 1983 I can remember meeting senior police officers who admitted they were losing the fight because in the villages ordinary Sikhs were too frightened to speak out against the violent young men who lived among them. Those who did dare to raise their voices against the violence ended up dead.

Months went by and still Mrs Gandhi continued to do nothing to stop Bhindranwale from conducting his ugly war against the Indian state from the sacrosanct cocoon of the Golden Temple. Years later, Arun Nehru, Mrs Gandhi’s cousin, and one of her close aides at the time, said it was because she was so deeply religious that she was afraid of attacking the Golden Temple. ‘She had prayers said in all the temples,’ he told me, ‘and said that she didn’t want to attack the Golden Temple because she didn’t want to send soldiers into the house of god.’ This is probably true. It was well known that Mrs Gandhi was deeply religious. She wore around her neck at all times a string of sacred rudraksha beads, believed to have been given to her by a woman guru she was a devotee of, called Anandamayi Ma. And, until Rajiv and Sonia began to put their foot down one of the most frequent visitors to the prime minister’s house used to be an ascetic called Dhirendra Brahmachari, a most irregular sort of yoga teacher who ended up owning one of India’s first private aeroplanes and a gun factory in Jammu. Mrs Gandhi’s belief in Hindu rituals was encouraged by Dhirendra Brahmachari and her visits to temples and other places of worship when she travelled around India were never hidden from the general public.

Bhindranwale ranted daily against that ‘Brahmin woman who rules Delhi’ and against Hindus in general. His speeches poisoned the air of Punjab and the number of executions that were carried out at his behest were so many that we stopped counting. One of the victims was Lala Jagat Narain’s eldest son who had taken over the newspaper group after him. Many were innocent Hindus killed at random. But mostly he targeted policemen, many of whom were Sikhs. The Punjab government seemed hopelessly unable to control the violence and the state slid into a state of ominous lawlessness.

By the summer of 1984 things got so bad that not a single policeman or government official dared set foot inside the Golden Temple. Anyone suspected of being a police informant was brutally killed and his body thrown into the drains of the temple in small pieces. Bhindranwale seemed to realize that the Government of India would have to act against him at some point, so overnight he moved from his pilgrims’ lodge into the Akal Takht in the inner perimeter of the Golden Temple.

As a Sikh he understood well the political significance of the Akal Takht and its unique position among the sacred monuments of the Sikhs.
It was then a beautiful sixteenth-century building, with painted frescoes on its ceilings, and golden domes, and was built by the sixth of the Sikh gurus as a symbol of political resistance to the Mughal emperor. The Sikhs remained in permanent conflict with the Mughal emperors and at the root of this conflict was the imperial mission to impose Islam on those communities who had refused to become Muslim. ‘Akal Takht’ literally means ‘Throne of the Timeless One’ and when the sixth guru built this throne for God he built it deliberately a foot higher than the Mughal emperor’s throne in Delhi to make it clear that God was mightier than the mightiest emperors. The Akal Takht is directly opposite the Golden Temple, divided from it by its white marble forecourt and the sacred pool that surrounds the temple.

The Akal Takht was so revered as a symbol of resistance that nobody, not even the sixth guru himself, ever used it as a residence. So when Bhindranwale decided to make it his new home there were mutterings among more traditional Sikhs about how very irregular this was. But everyone was too scared to say anything. Everyone except my brother-in-law’s mother, Nirlep Kaur, and she chose to do this one sunny afternoon when I happened to be in the Golden Temple on a routine visit. I think it must have been just weeks before Operation Blue Star because I remember there was palpable tension in the air when I heard the sound of gunfire. When I asked one of the priests what had happened he said, ‘Oh, it’s just that Nirlep Kaur was here and she made a speech saying that people who hang their underwear in the Akal Takht are bound to meet a sticky end. Bhindranwale’s men got angry and started firing in the air.’ They would not have dared to attack Nirlep Kaur because one of her ancestors is part of Punjabi folklore for having freed the Golden Temple from the clutches of a Muslim governor named Massa Ranghar, who had at some turned it into a den of vice.

From my childhood I remembered Nirlep as a legendary beauty and a politician who, in the early seventies, had fought an election against her rich and powerful father-in-law, and won. She was estranged from her husband when she made this controversial entry into political life, and this made her victory the subject of much gossip among Delhi’s prominent Sikh families. She was no longer a member of Parliament but continued to take a keen interest in Sikh politics and totally disapproved of Bhindranwale. My earliest memories of her are of someone who broke rules with impunity and who
was completely fearless about consequences. That afternoon she arrived at the Golden Temple, made her little speech and strolled calmly back to her yellow Mercedes, undeterred by the gunshots. I met her as she was getting into her car. She chatted to me about this and that, and then drove off with a smile and a wave to the small crowd that had gathered. As a passionate Sikh, she saw through Bhindranwale’s limited understanding of the religion and as a politician she could see the harm his violent politics was causing.

Some weeks later, in Delhi, I got home from a dinner party really late to find Sandeep Shankar, my trusty companion on Punjabi adventures, waiting in a white Ambassador outside my flat. The party had exhausted me because dinner had not been served till after midnight. The ambassador of Qatar, whose dinner party it was, had got it into his head to treat his guests to an Arabian night. There were tents everywhere, even inside the drawing room of his fine colonial bungalow near the Claridges Hotel. Deer and peacocks frolicked in the lawns and in one white garden tent mattresses had been laid out on the grass to create the atmosphere of an Indian concert. A qawwal from Hyderabad sang dolefully and not very well but the ambassador was pleased and cheered him tediously on with endless ‘Wah, wahs’, which inspired him to continue singing. So at 2 a.m. the last person I wanted to find at my doorstep was Sandeep.

‘Not another rumour that they’re going to attack the Golden Temple,’ I groaned.

‘Yes. This time they say it’s based on definite information. The army is going in early tomorrow morning. We have to leave immediately.’

‘I’ll go up and change and get my toothbrush.’

‘Just get your toothbrush. You’re wearing a salwar-kameez and you have a dupatta so there’s no need to change. You can buy something in Amritsar if you need to.’

We left for Amritsar with me dressed in a shiny black salwar-kurta, a dupatta that glittered with silver and gold embroidery and a pair of dangling earrings, which I instantly removed and put in my evening handbag. A hot breeze blew in through the open windows of our Ambassador and I was so exhausted that I fell asleep before we got to Haryana. When I woke it was nearly light and we were already in Punjab, somewhere beyond Patiala. Sandeep was still asleep but stirred when I
asked the driver if he wanted to stop for tea. He said he would like to so we stopped at the next dhaba.

A long line of trucks stood outside it and Sikh drivers in grimy white vests and lungis lay asleep on the string beds that served as seating during meals and became beds at night. While we were drinking our tea two truck drivers woke and joined us. They were tall, heavily bearded Sikhs with big bellies. I asked if they had heard anything about an attack on the Golden Temple. They looked nervously at each other and the taller, fatter one, who had taken off his turban and had his thick, oily hair coiled on his head in a loose roll, asked who I was.

‘We’re reporters from Delhi.’

‘So something is happening,’ he said looking worried. ‘We are trying to get to Amritsar, our families are there and we have also heard rumours of an attack.’

‘When did the rumours start?’

‘We heard yesterday as we drove through Delhi. Some taxi drivers told us they had seen trucks carrying soldiers moving towards Punjab.’

‘It’s possible that it was normal troop movement to the border.’

‘They said they didn’t think it was routine stuff. But who can say? There have been rumours for such a long time. Anyway we should all get going because if something is happening they will close Amritsar down. There will be curfew and nobody will be able to get in.’

‘Is it a good idea for the army to go into the Durbar Sahib?’ I asked, using the Sikh name for the Golden Temple. It was a question that they seemed to have thought about and the taller man answered without hesitation.

‘No. They can kill the Sant and nobody would care, but if there’s an attack on the temple most Sikhs will see it as an attack on the Sikh faith and there will be a bad reaction. But they say that Mrs Gandhi is being advised by people who don’t know the mentality of the Sikhs.’

‘What will happen if the army is sent into the temple?’

‘There will be violence,’ he said, sipping his tea noisily, ‘terrible violence. They say she is surrounded by Madrasis who do not understand the way Sikhs think.’

The truck drivers finished their tea and drove off hurriedly, and we followed. There was no curfew in the towns we passed and no military movement on the highway. By the time we reached Amritsar, the sun was high in the sky and everything seemed peaceful. Nobody stopped
us from entering the city and we soon realized that this was yet another false alarm.

We ate breakfast at the Amritsar International Hotel and saw no barricades and no soldiers, even though the hotel was in the same bazaar as the temple. After breakfast we set off on foot through the bazaar and stopped for tea at a teashop we always visited when we wanted to know what was going on inside the temple. The teashop was popular with Bhindranwale’s followers. The owner was a Sikh so they spoke freely in front of him.

The teashop had a roof of corrugated iron sheets held up by narrow pillars of unpainted brick. There were five or six wooden tables and a few rickety chairs. There were no walls, so the owner could see everything that went on in the bazaar and everyone who went in or out of the temple. He was a source of information for journalists and the police. It was he who identified the killers of the first Sikh woman Bhindranwale’s men killed because she was suspected of being a police informant. This was the only time they broke the fundamental Sikh tenet that women and children cannot be killed, no matter what.

‘Sat sri akal,’ I said.

‘Sat sri akal,’ the teashop owner replied, continuing to pour milk from one tin jug into another. We sat down at one of the rickety tables. There was nobody else in the teashop.

‘Have you heard anything about an attack?’ I did not look at him when I asked the question. He did not look at me when he answered.

‘There have been some soldiers in civilian clothes hanging around.’

‘Inside the temple?’