Did Rajiv Gandhi play a role in Operation Bluestar?

The roles of the Indian Army and former prime minister Indira Gandhi have always remained under a cloud whenever the bloody truth of Operation Bluestar in 1984 is revisited. The question is: how much thought went into the decision of freeing the Golden Temple from the armed men under Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was taken? Was there no one to foresee the serious consequences it could have led to? Probably there was but the saner voices were marginalised. In his piece The Shattered Dome in The Caravan magazine , author Hartosh Singh Bal wrote howthe bloodshed could have been avoided and an amicable solution may have been arrived upon only if time and talk were given a chance. Indira Gandhi’s trusted aide RK Dhawan had told Bal that the Gandhi was never in favour of using force.[caption id=“attachment_1553519” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. AFP[/caption] “Indira Gandhi was opposed to the Army action till the last minute,” Dhawan repeated. ‘It was convincing by the army chief and this trio that eventually changed her mind." Dhawan made it amply clear that the trio included Arun Singh, Arun Nehru and Indira Gandhi’s eldest son Rajiv Gandhi. The “corporate managerial talents” of Rajiv’s team, as the intelligence officer MK Dhar put it, were new to Indian politics, and marked by their immaturity. In his book Open Secrets, Dhar writes that in one meeting to discuss security for the Asiad, “Rajiv even spoke in favour of using ‘terrorising tools to destroy the terrorists.’" From the words of the aide of the former prime minister it is perhaps pellucid that Rajiv Gandhi meddled with affairs that he should have perhaps left well alone. Ironically, Rajiv even publicly defended Bhindranwale as a religious leader till April 1984… so long as he fitted the Congress bill. But once it became clear that Bhindranwale no longer served the purpose of the Congress party politically the decision to neutralise him was, probably, taken in a hurried and shoddy manner. Rajiv toed the party line and publicly shielded Bhindranwale for so long that, as late as 29 April 1984, he told reporters in Chandigarh that Bhindranwale “was a religious leader and has not shown any political affiliations so far.” By this time, violence in the state had escalated dramatically: in the first half of 1984, before Operation Bluestar, nearly three hundred people were killed.— Bal’s piece said. The assessment of the ground situation was without doubt inaccurate – both from the political and military aspect. “As long as Mrs Gandhi was there, Arun Nehru was in the thick of what was happening between Rajiv Gandhi and Arun Singh, and he was himself part of it,” Dhawan continued. “At that time, to my knowledge, the trio was functioning together. Arun Singh — from the beginning, two to three months before Bluestar — was insisting on the army action. At that time Arun Nehru, Arun Singh and Rajiv Gandhi were all one, sharing all the things.” Dhawan said the trio felt that as a result of a successful army operation against Bhindranwale, “they would be able to win the elections hands down. That was weighing in their minds as the elections were shortly due." The fighting prowess of Bhindranwale was also severely underestimated. Sadly, the military, in this case Lt Gen Sundarji, made an incorrect assessment of the army’s capability to fight in an urban scenario. Hundreds of life were snuffed out between 3–8 June 1984 including that of former prime minister Indira Gandhi. Notwithstanding his status as recorded in government books, Bhindranwale is a craze today in Punjab. As put by Bal, “It isn’t just stickers. In the bazaars of the state, T-shirts and other Bhindranwale memorabilia have sold briskly for years.” The blood on the Harmandir Sahib and the Akal Takht may have been washed off but the scars remain and for that there are no answers. In its disastrous handling of Bhindranwale’s challenge, the Congress government of the day only ended up making him Punjab’s Che Guevara.