While interacting with members of the Indian diaspora at an event in the United States, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said that the fight in India is about whether a Sikh person would be allowed to wear a kada and go to a gurdwara or not. His comments have sparked a political slugfest in India, with BJP leaders saying that the Lok Sabha’s leader of opposition has defamed India on foreign land. And, sources said, insulting and endangering the Sikh community has been a legacy of the Congress and the Gandhi family.
They pointed out that in 1982, under Rahul Gandhi’s grandmother late prime minister Indira Gandhi’s administration, the police, fearful that Akali Sikh activists may try to disrupt the Asian Games, arrested more than 700 Sikhs.
GBS Sidhu, a former official of India’s external intelligence agency the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), in a podcast with ANI’s Smita Prakash, spoke about how people close to the political establishment sowed the seeds of the Khalistan movement and recruited separatist leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale for political gains. He also discussed how top politicians of the Congress nurtured the Khalistanis, which resulted in Operation Blue Star in 1984.
On June 1, 1984, after negotiations with the militants failed, Indira Gandhi ordered the Army to launch Operation Blue Star, attacking the Golden Temple and scores of other Sikh temples and sites across Punjab which included killing civilians and devotees. The civil administration of Punjab, under President’s Rule then, was not kept in the loop, nor was the President of India Giani Zail Singh, a proud Sikh and supreme commander of the Indian Army, the sources said.
They added that one of the first decisions taken after Operation Blue Star was that no Sikh officer should be deployed in close-proximity duties. “All Sikh officers posted at her residence were redeployed discreetly. There was absolutely nothing wrong with this decision. It is a rule of prudence followed by the security agencies of many countries that no officer belonging to a community, which is aggrieved against the government, should be deployed as bodyguards of the head of the government," a source said.
Indira Gandhi was assassinated on October 31, 1984, by her Sikh bodyguards as revenge for Operation Blue Star. From November 1 to 4, according to government data, angry mobs, many of them led by Congress leaders, brutally murdered around 3,350 Sikhs. On November 19, 1984, while giving a speech in front of thousands of people, then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had justified the violence, saying, “Jab bhi koi bada ped girta hai, toh dharti thodi hilti hai (When a big tree falls, the earth shakes)."
Many Congress leaders like Kamal Nath, Sajjan Kumar, and Jagdish Tytler were let off by the government, sources said.
According to them, Rajiv Gandhi believed that Zail Singh was one of the people mainly responsible for the Punjab problem. “His hate for a Sikh was so much that he also refused to call on Singh to brief him on his own foreign visits, a major breach of protocol. Also, the President was not taken into confidence during major decisions," said a source.
Orchestrated criticism of the President inside and outside Parliament was launched by Congress(I) MPs, the sources said. During the 1985 budget session, KK Tewary, the then minister of state for public enterprises, alleged that Khalistan sympathisers were staying at the Rashtrapati Bhawan. “Gandhi’s contempt for Zail Singh resulted in him deputing Vice President R Venkataraman instead of Singh for ceremonial visits overseas," a source said. “Ministers in Rajiv Gandhi’s government refrained from responding to official summons from Rashtrapati Bhawan. Congress-ruled states were instructed to play down or discourage Giani Zail Singh’s visits. His scheduled visits to Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra were not cleared because the state governments were stalling the visits by giving false pretence of not being able to give security clearance."
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