Opinion - Leader Page Articles   

The road home from Khalistan

“Honey,” his friends call him, without a hint of irony in their voices.

“It’s a fantastic business,” says the tall, muscled young beekeeper, his skin tanned as leather from hard work under the blazing Punjab summer sun, “you should think about investing in it.”

Fifteen years ago, Navtej Singh was one of the Khalistan Commando Force’s leading operatives. From 1981 to 1993, the war he fought in claimed the lives of 21,043 people — 11,594 civilians, 8,003 terrorists, and 1,746 security force personnel. Now, dozens of men like Singh, fortunate enough to survive the carnage, are attempting to put their forgotten war behind them, and rebuild their lives.

Singh joined the KCF as a teenager. His brother had joined the Khalistan movement soon after Operation Bluestar, in 1984; many of his closest friends were members of terror groups. “I used to be detained for questioning whenever anything happened,” he recalls, “and the police would often torture me. I finally decided to fight.”

Fearing for his life, Singh fled to Pakistan in 1992. “We stayed in a safe-house in Lahore,” he recalls, “but Inter-Services Intelligence feared some of us might be Research and Analysis Wing agents. The atmosphere was rife with suspicion, and on one occasion there was a shootout among various Khalistan groups. The next day, it was reported in the newspapers as dacoity.”

As the Khalistan movement began to disintegrate, Singh returned to India. He attempted, unsuccessfully, to secure asylum in the United States. In 1999, Singh was arrested on charges of conspiring to kill the former Vice-President, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat. He was eventually acquitted of the charge, but sentenced to five years in prison for possessing illegal firearms. “The weapon was planted,” he insists, “and the charges were ridiculous. But no one would defend me, until a courageous local lawyer took up my case.”

Since his release, Singh has spent his time fighting off the 17 criminal cases filed against him one by one — and rebuilding his life from the ruins of the Khalistan years. “I had to sell off a good part of my land to pay my legal fees,” he recalls, “and have sold samosas for a living. My wife and I ran a roadside restaurant, and she worked as a teacher for Rs.1,700 a month. Hard work has got us where we are today.”

“I do not regret what I did,” Singh says, “for I fought for a principle. We were young and angry, and willing to die for a just cause.” “Today,” he goes on, talking of his political work for the small SAD faction led by Simranjit Singh Mann, “I hope to achieve the same things — but by persuading people through ideas, not guns.”

“Strange, isn’t it,” Singh concludes: “the Khalistan movement, when I joined it, was just as it is now, a few men talking in a room.”

On the day Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated, Manjinder Singh Issi was celebrating the sale of his family harvest with six friends — and five bottles of liquor. He had no idea of the gathering storm that would, within months, transfigure his life.

Back in 1984, Issi was a student at the Government College in Malerkotla. His family, which owned a 10-hectare farm near the south Punjab town of Dhuri, supported the centre-right Shiromani Akali Dal leaders ranged against Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale’s neoconservative movement. On one occasion, Issi marched to the Golden Temple in support of the former Chief Minister, Surjit Singh Barnala.

In college, though, he met the man who changed his life: ‘Professor’ Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar, a top Khalistan Liberation Front operative who has been sentenced to death for his role in a 1993 bombing, intended to assassinate Congress leader Maninderjit Singh Bitta.

Issi’s new politics earned him disapproval from his family — and reprisal from the police. He was first arrested in 1985 on charges of associating with terrorists, and detained again soon after his release. “My family suffered terribly,” Issi recalls, “for no fault of theirs. Our home was ransacked and they were forcibly evicted by the police.”

Soon after his second term in prison, Issi joined a terror cell led by one of Bhullar’s friends, Jagroop Singh Kalakh. By 1990, his name figured regularly on the Punjab Police’s intelligence records, as a key confidante of KLF commander Gurjant Singh Buddhsinghwala. While Issi refuses to discuss the criminal cases still pending against him, the Punjab Police claim he was involved in almost two dozen terror strikes, including the 1990 assassination of the State’s former Finance Minister, Balwant Singh, an attempt to assassinate the former Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandak Committee president, Gurcharan Singh Tohra, and a February 1991 bombing directed at the then Director-General of Police D.S. Mangat.

One case Issi is willing to discuss, though, is his October 1991 kidnapping of Romanian diplomat Liviu Radu: a case in which the prosecution collapsed after the victim failed to give evidence. KLF leaders in Pakistan, he says, ordered the kidnapping to secure the release of Harjinder Singh Jinda and Sukhjinder Singh Sukha, who were later hanged for assassinating the former Chief of the Army Staff, General A.S. Vaidya. “I was against the operation from the outset,” he insists, “because I knew Radu was too unimportant for India to concede our demands.” He was proved right.

With funds from the KLF, Issi relocated to Jabalpur, in Madhya Pradesh, where he set up a transport business. For the next eight years, he shipped mangoes from Dehradun to Mumbai, and lemons from Madhya Pradesh to Maharashtra. In March 1999, the Punjab Police finally caught up with him.

Weeks after he came out of jail in 2002, Issi was elected Sarpanch of his village: no one had the courage, or inclination, to stand against him. Earlier this month, he was appointed a senior functionary of Simranjit Singh Mann’s SAD-Amritsar faction. Much of his time, however, goes into running the truck business he founded and managing the family farm.

“Hum josh mein ladey, na ki hosh mein,” he says: “we fought in anger, not in our senses.”

“Back in 1991,” Issi recalls, “we had a real chance for peace. Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar had authorised secret negotiations with the Khalistan movement, and I think we could have arrived at a negotiated settlement. All of us — the Panthic Committee head Dr. Sohan Singh, who came from Pakistan, Dr. Pritam Singh Sekhon, Dr. Hari Singh, Paramjit Singh Panjwar, and Daljit Singh Bittu — met in Ludhiana to discuss the issue. Soon after, though, someone among us ordered the bombing of Union Home Minister Subodh Kant Sahay’s car, and the dialogue process fell apart.”

“Now, through my political work, perhaps we can achieve at least some of what we were willing to die for.”

Soon after Gyan Singh Leel emerged from his 17 years in prison, three of them on death row, he sat with a small group of friends in Ludhiana, listening to a virtuoso sitar performance. “The one thing I have ever really wanted to do,” he said, crying quietly, “is learn to play the sitar.”

Leel was one of a group of young men who, on August 21, 1985, pumped bullets into the body of the centrist SAD leader, Harcharan Singh Longowal. The architect of a peace deal with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Longowal was seen by most in Punjab as the last hope of a peaceful resolution of the conflict — and by his neoconservative detractors as a traitor. Leel’s bullet, it is believed, hit Longowal on the chest.

Leel spent 13 years in jail under trial, for seven of which he was never once presented before a judge. He was then sentenced to death, a punishment the Supreme Court commuted to life in 2001. When Leel finally emerged from prison that year, he had spent a total of 17 years in jail; he was just 19 when he was arrested.

“Perhaps I was the lucky one,” he says, counting off the names of the others who fired on Longowal that day. “Jarnail Singh Halwara: he is dead. So is Charanjit Singh Talwandi. Palwinder Singh: dead. Mahesh Inder Singh Gehal — now him, I think he got asylum somewhere in the west.”

Could the cause that destroyed so many lives revive again? As the continuing arrests of terror operatives and recoveries of arms and explosives demonstrate, the Khalistan movement may be comatose — but it is far from dead. Since 1995, police records show, over 100 civilians have lost their lives in attacks by Khalistan terror groups. Just in June, the Punjab Police arrested two alleged Bhindranwale Tiger Force of Khalistan operatives, Swaranjeet Singh and Gurcharan Singh Kala, on charges of planning to assassinate Piara Singh Bhaniarawala, a Dalit preacher conservative Sikhs consider to be a heretic.

Still, there’s little sign that the Khalistan movement enjoys any real mass support. Even the SAD-Amritsar, which is studious in avoiding calls to violence, was decimated in the last Punjab Assembly elections. “Young people don’t care about our cause these days,” he says. “They’re too busy getting stoned, or plotting their way to America or Australia. And, who knows, perhaps it’s better that way.”

“I [have] done enough work to last several lifetimes,” Leel ends, “so nowadays, main mauj karta hun: I enjoy life.”

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

Stories in this Section

Destructive path
Republicans close ranks
The road home from Khalistan
How Flanders deals with its waste
Corrections and clarifications
Heir manifest
Bandh is no answer
Youth power
Darfur crisis: a view from the inside
India’s ‘rising profile’ in East Asia

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