Other States - Rajasthan   

“Shifting to Pune cost Gen. Vaidya his life”

JAIPUR: General Arun Kumar Vaidya, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army during the Operation Blue Star, could have perhaps saved his life if he had stayed back in the “intense security conscious ambience” of the national Capital instead of shifting to his hometown Pune after retirement. A susceptible though tension-free Pune, along with the scaling down of his personal security to just one head constable, cost Gen. Vaidya his life, says a new book authored by former CBI director, Rajendra Shekhar.

The General was gunned down on August 10, 1986, about two years after Operation Blue Star, by the Khalistan Commando Force (KCF) militants Harjinder Singh aka Jinda and Sukhdev Singh, aka Sukha, riding a black motorcycle. Gen.Vaidya was driving a Maruti 800 on a Pune road with his wife seated next to him and the security officer Baburao Kshirsagar sitting in the back when the militants fired three bullets from a close range.

“Despite meticulous preparations and awesome firepower at its command, the army action turned out to be somewhat of a messy affair,” this is how Mr.Shekhar, also a former director general of Rajasthan police, describes the Operation Blue Star in his book, “Defining Moments”. The book is to be released by the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha and former Union Minister Jaswant Singh here on Saturday.

The 263-page memoir, published by Rupa & Co has steered clear of revelations which could have been typical with retired top cop, but gives Gen.Vidya assassination enquiry as one “eminently representative of CBI’s investigative temper”. “It was one of the most dramatic and challenging cases ever investigated by the CBI,” Mr.Shekhar, who was with the agency for 14 years, says.

Unlike Gen.Vaidya, who was involved in the planning and execution of Operation Blue Star, the other two Generals involved -- Lt.Gen.Sunderji and Major General K.S.Brar -- had remained back in Delhi. “The militants had on target all the three Generals who had pioneered the mission. However, realizing that the security cordons around Sunderji and Brar were, more or less, impenetrable, the KCF outfit shifted their focus from Delhi to Pune and chose a comparatively softer target in Gen.Vaidya,” the book notes.

In Pune, after what the CBI sleuth explains as a “decent interval”, Gen.Vaidya’s security was scaled down to a head constable each on 12 hourly shifts.

“This amounted to nothing more than a token recognition of his susceptibility,” Mr.Shekhar observes.

Soon after the assassination, the CBI could establish the identity of both the assassins and also the vehicle used by them for the mission. In fact, Sukha was caught a month after the assassination riding the same motorcycle at Pimpri. In March 1987 the co-accused, Jinda landed in police custody after a bloody shoot out with Delhi police. The CBI filed the charge sheet in the court of the Special Judge, designated for CBI cases, on August 14, 1987.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Rajasthan Assembly session from Sept. 18
“Shifting to Pune cost Gen. Vaidya his life”

Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu