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Khalistan Is A Lost Cause, Mishandling Notwithstanding

Dr. N. C. Asthana, IPS (Retd)

Some developments of the past few months in Punjab have given a reason to
Cassandra’s in the security establishment and the media to predict a return of
the era of militancy in Punjab due to Khalistan supporters. The recent attack on
the Ajnala police station by the armed followers of Amritpal Singh was quite
disturbing. Subsequently, the police told the court that there was no evidence
against his associate Toofan Singh who was arrested earlier on abduction
charges. In May 2022, a RPG (rocket propelled grenade) was fired at the
Intelligence HQ at Mohali. In December 2022, another RPG was fired at the
Sarhali police station.

Mistakes of the Past That Must Not Be Repeated

At this juncture, a brief review of the Khalistani militancy in Punjab in the

1980s would be in order that had consumed 21,469 lives in a little over a decade
of strife. From April 1978 when Bhindranwale’s gang attacked the Nirankari
Convention until he was killed in Operation Blue Star (June 1984), he had
unleashed a reign of terror mixed with religious hatred. Fact remains that
despite his virulence, he was propped up by the ‘secular’ Congress (I) in the
SGPC elections of 1979. He also canvassed for Congress (I) candidates in the
General Elections of 1980 and once even shared a dais with Indira Gandhi. His
gangs went on to kill Baba Gurbachan Singh and then Lala Jagat Narain. Yet no
action was taken against him.

All that was done was a flurry of deceptive moves for the show of it, outwardly
to arrest him, but in reality countered by a series of manoeuvres to help him
escape the consequences of his crimes. Eventually, however, he made himself
safe inside the heavily fortified Gurudwara Gurdarshan Parkash at Chowk
Mehta. The Gurudwara was surrounded by the police, but no attempt was made
to arrest him. Instead, senior officials supposedly went in to ‘negotiate a
surrender’, and Bhindranwale announced that he would ‘offer himself for arrest
after addressing a ‘religious congregation’. His terms were meekly accepted. At
the appointed hour, he came out only to harangue a large mob of his followers
armed with spears, swords and firearms. Having aroused the rabble to a pitch,
he officially ‘surrendered’ to the police. However, as he was taken away, the
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mob opened fire on the police—in the fire fight that ensued, 11 persons were
killed.

It is very much doubtful whether Bhindranwale could, by himself, have become

what he became, had firm action been taken against him in the beginning itself
when he was far from becoming an icon. The nation was to pay heavily for such
despicable acts of political expedience.

Even after his so-called arrest, he was kept in the government circuit house and
not in a jail, and for 25 days, violence exploded all over Punjab. These incidents
included the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane to Lahore. Soon,
Bhindranwale was a free man again, after the then Home Minister, without the
benefit of any inquiry or judicial process, announced to Parliament that
Bhindranwale was not involved in the murder of Lala Jagat Narain.
Bhindranwale then appeared invincible. With truckloads of men armed with
sophisticated automatic weapons, he moved around with impunity across
Punjab and even Delhi.

Between 1981 and 1983, terror was let loose. Finally, fearing an attempt by the
government to arrest him, Bhindranwale moved into the Akal Takht, and began
fortifications. Between January 1, 1984, and June 3, 1984, the terrorists killed
298 persons—obviously on his command. Eventually, on June 3, 1984
Operation Blue Star was launched.

Following the 1985 elections, the government appointed the Bains Committee,
which released, en masse, over 2000 extremists at that time under detention.
The impact on terrorist violence was very much clear. Those who were released
simply resumed their activities, and others saw in this act a restoration of the
immunity they had enjoyed in the pre-Blue Star phase. In March 1988, 40 high
profile prisoners were released in a ‘goodwill gesture’ as part of a compromise
with the terrorists. They simply walked into the Golden Temple, where Jasbir
Singh Rode was installed as the Jathedar of the Akal Takht. The terrorists again
began to build up internal defences within the Temple around the parikarma.
Once again 288 people (including 25 policemen) were killed in March and
another 259 (including 25 policemen) in April before Operation Black Thunder
was launched in May 1988. This was followed later by Operation Rakshak-I.

Eventually, the elections of February 1992 confused the terrorists—their big

mistake was to give a call for boycott of elections. The voter turn-out was low,
no doubt; but it installed an elected government with a comfortable majority in
the state. It made the terrorists lose any moral authority or any pretensions to
having influence over the people. There was a time when police stations used to
lock themselves up from inside for the night—they got out of that miserable
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situation and in a way, redeemed themselves through Operation Night

Dominance.

The Ultimate Folly of Bhindranwale That Doomed Him

The guerrilla or the insurgent, if he knows his business, must never attempt to
hold territory or defend a position for the simple reason that holed inside that
position, however strong that be, his resources and ammunition are necessarily
limited. On the other hand, those who are outside and if they know something of
logistics, can have practically unlimited resources. Precisely for this reason,
military history stands witness, if the armies laying siege to a fort knew their job
and managed to secure their supply lines from the rear, they had merely to be
patient. They could literally starve the garrison inside the fort both in terms of
food and water, and ammunition. The fall of the fort was a foregone conclusion.
In India, even formidable forts like Golconda, which was actually a fort system
with its own agricultural fields inside, eventually fell before a competent
general like Aurangzeb after a siege lasting nearly eight months!

What was true of regular armies defending a fort is all the more true for non-
state actors like terrorists, insurgents or guerrillas. If they, by any chance, decide
to hold ground or defend a position, they write their epitaph. The LTTE was
formidable as a terrorist organization with technically some of the most brilliant
terrorist attacks to their credit in the history of terrorism. However, when they
decided to hold territory and even administer it, they were utterly destroyed.
The reason is simple. Then they were obliged to fight on the terms of the
enemy. As long as they were attacking the government targets sporadically,
they had the government on its toes, because they were fighting on their terms.
The moment they held some territory in some grandiose dream of having
‘liberated’ it, they were forced to fight on the terms of the government. Then
they had to contend with the superior firepower, artillery and air force of the
government for which they had no answer. Nothing could have been more
foolish for a guerrilla force with inferior weaponry to dig up trenches and wait
for the mighty assault of the enemy infantry and artillery. There was no way
they could ever win that war. The superior firepower of the government rolled
them up very cheaply and almost made the Sri Lankans forget how the LTTE
had bled them all those years with their hit-and-run terrorist strikes. Fighting
pitched battles was as terrible a folly as could be imagined. Maulana Abdul
Rashid Ghazi committed the same mistake in the Lal Masjid, Islamabad (2007).

Back home in India, terrorism in Punjab (in the sense of sporadic terrorist
attacks) could have gone on for some more time had Bhindranwale not
committed the blunder of taking up shelter in the Golden Temple. His own fate
was sealed that very day even if the operation cost us the security forces some
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losses. By hiding there and mistakenly thinking that a religious place was
inviolable, he presented a tangible target to the Indian security forces with
vastly superior firepower and was utterly destroyed. Slugging it out with limited
ammunition was the cardinal mistake which Bhindranwale had committed in his
medieval mind-set. The security forces took losses, but when push came to
shove, howitzers and tanks were thrown in and each one of the terrorists was
killed.

Why Khalistan Is Even Theoretically An Unviable Idea?

The Khalistan supporters, in the first place, could never understand as it how
could a land-locked country survive for a day except for the mercy of Pakistan
in providing corridors to port—thereby securing a permanent grip on their
throats.

Second, Khalistan was never a popular movement in the first place and derived
little support from the Sikh masses—in stark contrast to the early years of
militancy in Kashmir when the state seemed to be in the grip of a “climate of
collapse” with even state government employees striking work in their support.
It therefore really did not have the intrinsic strength that an insurgency
demands. That it could survive for so long was only due to inept handling.

Third, while it made sense for the ISI to fish in the proverbial troubled waters
and harass India with comparatively very little investment in arming and
sheltering the Khalistan supporters, it was doomed to remain limited to that. The
Khalistan supporters never realized that even if Khalistan were to get carved out
someday, there is no way the people of that land can come to terms with the
Pakistanis with whom they had such a bitter experience not so long ago during
the Partition. The Kashmiri terrorists could perhaps make peace with Pakistan
on the ground of the commonality of religion; the Khalistan supporters could
not. Even if the ISI could accept them for tactical gains against India; the people
of Pakistan could never reconcile with them. In late November 2019, Khadim
Hussain Rizvi, founder of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, had delivered
objectionable sermon against Sikh Gurus and Kartarpur Corridor. Then in late
December 2020, he again spewed hatred against Maharaj Ranjit Singh,
following which, the extremists vandalised the statue of the Maharaja at the
Lahore Fort. In January 2023, far from appointing a Sikh to the PMU (Project
Management Unit) that looks after the management of Gurdwara Darbar Sahib,
Kartarpur Sahib in deference to Sikh sentiments, the Pak government appointed
Muhammad Abu Bakar Aftab Qureshi, Deputy Director General, ISI as the
CEO of PMU—an affront in fact!
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Fourth, the fact is that unlike the Kashmiris, the Sikhs are widely dispersed
throughout India and have economic interests greatly spread across the country.
They are not an isolated people like the Kashmiris. This meant that some
Khalistani Sikhs could not have continued to commit acts of terrorism in Punjab
indefinitely in the sense of targeting the Hindus and hope that there would be no
reaction on the Sikhs elsewhere in the country. The November 1984 anti-Sikh
riots, however despicable they might have been, drove a point home in a most
brutal manner—that some people could not commit atrocities on the minorities
in the state and get away with that—people of their religion may have to suffer
repercussions elsewhere in the country wherever they happened to be in
minority.

Fifth, they still do not understand that pure unadulterated terrorist strikes,
simply for the sake of terrorism, do not make much sense and cannot go far.
There has to be something political or something emotive attached to it to
enable it to draw some supporters. That support could not be had even in the
1980s when the going was good for them courtesy shady governance; now they
have no chance.

Sixth, they do not seem to understand that while it is natural for jobless,
frustrated or drug-addict youth victims an old sub-culture of machismo to be
drawn to a militant movement, and puff up their chests wielding illegal arms or
sport stickers of gun-wielding terrorists on the rear windows of their cars, it
does not translate into popular support from the public. The average family man
knows it very well where his life lies. That is why, even as memorials for
Bhindranwale could be erected, they would remain just memorials—they are
not likely to ‘fire up’ Khalistani sentiments in the hearts of the people on any
significant scale.

Still, There Is No Scope for Complacence

The foregoing analysis should not be misconstrued to mean that the essential
unviability of the idea of Khalistan gives the nation a license to mishandle it as
we had done in the 1980s. The people of the country had to go through a lot of
physical and emotional suffering. Thousands of lives were lost—some at the
hands of the terrorists; some at the hands of the security forces; and some at the
hands of the rioters. Why let things deteriorate to a state where they would
happen again?

We must not grow complacent because many disturbing questions remain to be

answered. The militancy in the 1980s was basically bullets and IEDs (the
infamous transistor bombs, if you recall). The introduction of the RPG requires
deep investigation.
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The tail of the RPG fired at Sarhali can be clearly seen in the photo given by
The Tribune. Earlier, the same thing was found in Mohali too. I have identified
it as the tail of the new disposable tube RPG-18. The older RPG-7, which is
synonymous with the Taliban, was fired quite often in Kashmir in the 1990s—
including at famous targets like the Gupkar Road residence of the Abdullahs
and the Hyderpora residence of the in-laws of Ghulam Nabi Azad. However, it
is a very long thing and difficult to conceal. The RPG-18 is not as powerful
(warhead being only 1.2 kg as compared to 2 kg of RPG-7) but is much more
compact and hence concealable. The warhead that self-destructs after a flight of
6 seconds is actually wasted on a target like a room or a building—it was never
designed for that purpose. What the police need to realize that if they fire it on
bulletproof or armoured cars, it will make the lives of many VIPs miserable
because armour penetration is the purpose for which it is designed.

It does not really help to arrest the kids who might have been hired to fire the
RPGs. The fundamental question is how the RPG came into India. The Punjab
border has extensive coverage by the BSF without any gaps—electrified
fencing, optical, thermal, LORROS and what not. The gravity of the situation
should not downplayed for whatever reason.

Prognosis for Punjab from the Security Perspective

I can only pity the utter ignorance of the Khalistan supporters. Why don’t they
understand that now the country does not have a weak-kneed government or a
government that had been hobnobbing with the terrorists for years for political
expedience?

If Modi ji could lance a wound called Article 370 of the Constitution that had
been festering since the past 69 years by just one stroke of pen, what chance a
ragtag band of desperadoes have? They must not forget that when Modi ji had
to do away with Article 370, the nation could afford to pump in as many as
38,000 additional troops of the paramilitary forces in a matter of just a few days.
Who could ever imagine that sort of deployment at lightning speed? This is a
reflection of not just the steel resolve of the government but also the tremendous
resources, which the nation commands now. The nation and its paramilitary
forces are infinitely stronger than what they used to be in the 1980s.

Second, the Khalistan supporters must remember that if they commit violent
crimes, the union government will eventually hand over the operations to the
paramilitary forces like the CRPF and BSF. They had crushed militancy when,
back in the 1980s—the period I trained with them—they had just two SLRs
(self-loading rifles) per section of 10 soldiers and the remainder had old
British .303 rifles. Now they have infinitely better weaponry and resources—X-
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95 rifles, Minimi machine guns, UBGLs (under-barrel grenade launchers),

AGS-17 automatic grenade launchers, CGRL (Carl Gustav Recoilless Rifle—
mistakenly called rocket launcher by many—there is no rocket in it), Mine
Protected Vehicles and indigenously produced bulletproof light/medium
vehicles, and what not. They would crush any whiff of insurgency.

Khalistan supporters must remember, if the security forces kill terrorists this
time, they would kill a lot more and more ruthlessly. There is still time to
behave!

I do not think that anybody should be foolish enough to try taking shelter of a
religious place again. There is absolutely no reason to even suspect that the
Modi government would allow things to reach that stage—they would be
crushed much before that. The government would not let things reach a stage
where another Operation Blue Star becomes necessary.

In this article, I do not consider it necessary to conjecture about the people in

India or abroad who have propped up Amritpal Singh, or who was behind Deep
Siddhu. What matters is what people like them can do on the ground. The nation
state of India knows that the real ‘damage potential’ of the likes of Satwant
Singh Pannu of the Sikhs for Justice, USA or Hardeep Singh Nijjar, Canada
who had played a key role in organising the Khalistan referendum in Brampton
city of Canada is very limited. They had tried their hand during the farmers’
agitation and had miserably failed.

They must understand that a modern nation state and society do present myriad
undefended targets that can be attacked by terrorists. However, running an
insurgency is materially different from terrorist strikes. They should not be
misled about their strength on the basis of a couple of incidents of browbeating
the police or, for that matter, even some terrorist attacks in future. Bereft of an
insurrectional focus, terrorism would be just another law and order problem and
will be crushed ruthlessly by the might of the nation state.