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nineteen eighty four |
| ....his face bruised and his arms and legs dotted with burns,he said he had been hung upside down and beaten.” | ||
ARMY ACTION IN THE PUNJAB
News of the attack on the Harminder Sahib spread quickly despite the curfew. Thousands of people in the surrounding villages gathered to march to Amritsar to defend the Harminder Sahib. At Golwand village in Jhubal District a crowd of several thousands gathered with make-shift weapons under the leadership of Baba Bidhi Chand and began to march the 25 km to Amritsar.
Helicopter patrols spotted them and strafed them with bullets without warning. Within minutes hundreds were dead and wounded. Crowds gathered at the villages including Ajnala, Rajash Sunsi,Dhandhesali, Fatehpur, Rajpurtan and Batala (Gurdaspur). A large crowd gathered at Chowk Mehta,HQ of the Damdami Taksal, where the army killed 76 Sikhs and arrested 285. All across the region, wireless sets carried the message from army chiefs to soldiers to shoot on sight anyone on the streets.
The army continued its task of moving through the villages in the countryside and flushing out alleged ‘terrorists ’. The young Sikh men in the villages were lined up in rows; some were stripped and publicly flogged and accused of being terrorists or withholding information about terrorists. Some were taken away and sent to interrogation centres, never to be seen again.
In the Sunday Times of 22/7/84 Mary Anne Weaver reported:
“Thousands of people have disappeared from the Punjab since the
siege of the Sikh ’s Harminder Sahib here seven weeks ago.The Indian
army have been engaged in a massive flushing out operation,aimed at Sikh
extremists. In some villages men between 15 and 35 have been bound, blindfolded
and taken away. Their fate is unknown.
The worsening relations between Indira Gandhi ’s government and the Punjab ’s 9.4 million Sikhs could be observed recently in the tiny village of Kaimbwala.One evening during prayers 300 troops entered the small-whitewashed temple, blindfolded the 30 worshippers and pushed them into the street.
According to the priest, Sant Pritpal Singh, the villagers were given electric shocks and interrogated about the whereabouts of Sikh militants. Guirnam Singh,a 37 year old landowner,was held in an army camp for 13 days.Last week, his face bruised and his arms and legs dotted with burns, he said he had been hung upside down and beaten.”
The army violated many other Sikh Temples in the Punjab on the pretext that they contained arms and terrorists. These violations were in breach of section 295 -298 of the Indian Penal Code which protects religious shrines from such abuse.On the night of the 6th of June 1984 soldiers who had been surrounding the Dukh Niwaran Sahib Temple in Patiala began firing.The shooting lasted about half an hour.Twenty people were killed and seven others wounded.
News- week on 2/7/84 carried the following report:
‘ “Nobody ever explained to us why they had attacked,or why
they had not given us a chance to come out first.”Ajaib Singh manager
of the Temple told me,“Not a single shot was fired from here.”
’
The army set up camps in Punjab at which Sikhs were detained. One camp was at Jullander Shauni behind the military hospital. Another was set up in Hoshiarpur District near Shan Choracy and yet another in Ropar District at the village of Kotla. There are reports of the torture of Sikh women detained at the camps in the Jullander.
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“Tell them of us when you go
home we gave our today for their
tomorrow.”
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