Punjab 1984: The Real Story, From a Broken Promise to Blue Star and the November Massacres

Sunday, 3 June 1984, began like every year’s shaheedi purab of Guru Arjan Dev, the Guru who built the Harmandir Sahib and was martyred in Lahore in 1606. Families came from the villages with children on their shoulders. Sevadars poured sweet water against the heat. Akali jathas marched in to court arrest, as they had for almost two years.

But soldiers were already in the lanes. That night a curfew came down over Punjab, the phones went dead and the trains stopped. Thousands of pilgrims were inside the complex, and they could not get out.

Facing the Harmandir Sahib stands the Akal Takht, raised by Guru Hargobind in 1606. Living in it was Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the 37-year-old head of the Damdami Taksal, with armed Sikh fighters behind sandbags. In probably his last interview, to Reuters, he did not sound like a man about to leave.

We may be killed. But a Sikh never weeps.Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, to Reuters, days before the assault

Three nights later, tanks were firing into the Akal Takht. Before the year was out, the Prime Minister who ordered it had been shot by her own Sikh bodyguards, and mobs had killed thousands of Sikhs in Delhi. How did a festival day come to this? The story starts 55 years earlier, with a promise.

Lahore, December 1929. On the banks of the Ravi, the Congress vowed to fight for complete independence, and assured the Sikhs and other minorities that it would accept no constitution that did not give them full satisfaction. In July 1946 Jawaharlal Nehru went further: he saw nothing wrong in an area in the north where the Sikhs could ‘experience the glow of freedom’.

Then Partition cut Punjab in two, and Lahore and Nankana Sahib went to Pakistan. When India wrote its Constitution, the safeguards the Sikh members had asked for were not in it; one line of Article 25 even counted Sikhs as Hindus for some laws on religious institutions. On 21 November 1949, Hukam Singh of the Akali Dal rose in the Constituent Assembly. Neither he nor Bhupinder Singh Mann signed.

My community cannot subscribe its assent to this historic document.Hukam Singh, Constituent Assembly, 21 November 1949

The majority’s view was that after Partition, equal rights for every citizen were safer than guarantees for any one community. Many Sikhs heard a promise broken. That feeling runs under everything that follows.

On 1 November 1966, after years of Akali agitation, Punjab became a Punjabi-speaking state, but a smaller one than asked for. Haryana and Himachal were carved out, Chandigarh became a union territory, and the Bhakra and Beas dams went to the Centre. In 1970 the Centre announced that Chandigarh would go to Punjab, tied to handing Fazilka to Haryana. It never happened.

In October 1973, at Anandpur Sahib, the Akali Dal set down what Punjab wanted. The Anandpur Sahib Resolution asked for a federal India in which the Centre kept defence, foreign affairs, currency, communications and railways, and the states ran the rest. It asked for Chandigarh, the Punjabi-speaking areas left out, control of the river headworks and a fair share of Punjab’s waters.

Indira Gandhi’s government called it secessionist. Akali leaders said Sikhs had no intention of leaving India. When she imposed the Emergency in 1975, the Akalis ran one of the biggest campaigns against it from the Akal Takht; historian J.S. Grewal puts the number arrested at nearly 40,000.

Baisakhi, 13 April 1978, Amritsar. A jatha of Akhand Kirtani Jatha and Damdami Taksal Sikhs marched on a convention of the Sant Nirankaris, a sect orthodox Sikhs regard as heretical. Shots were fired, and thirteen Sikhs and three Nirankaris died. In 1980 a Karnal court freed all 64 Nirankari accused on grounds of self-defence; that April their chief, Gurbachan Singh, was shot dead in Delhi.

The preacher who rose from that day was Jarnail Singh, born in 1947 at Rode and head of the Taksal from 1977. He preached against drink, drugs and trimmed beards in village Punjabi, and young men came in thousands.

He also had friends in high places. The journalist Kuldip Nayar wrote that Sanjay Gandhi wanted a ‘Sant’ to take on the Akali government, that Zail Singh blessed the founding of the Dal Khalsa in 1978 to needle the Akalis, and that Sanjay’s friend Kamal Nath recalled giving Bhindranwale money now and then.

We never thought he would turn into a terrorist.Kamal Nath, as quoted by Kuldip Nayar in Beyond the Lines

In September 1981, after the murder of Lala Jagat Narain, editor of the Hind Samachar papers, Bhindranwale offered himself for arrest; about a dozen people died in the violence around it. On 14 October, Home Minister Zail Singh told Parliament there was no evidence against him. He walked out bigger than ever.

On 8 April 1982, at Kapoori near Patiala, Indira Gandhi dug the first earth for the Sutlej–Yamuna Link canal, to carry Punjab’s water to Haryana. The Akalis began a morcha on the spot. That July, Bhindranwale moved into the Guru Nanak Niwas inside the Golden Temple complex.

On 4 August 1982 the Akali Dal under Harchand Singh Longowal launched the Dharam Yudh Morcha, with Bhindranwale merging his campaign into it, to win the Anandpur Sahib demands. Day after day, jathas walked out to court arrest; over two years the total is put at more than 200,000.

The state hit back. During the 1982 Asian Games, Haryana police under Bhajan Lal stopped and searched Sikhs heading to Delhi, Army officers among them: the Asiad humiliation. On 4 April 1983, police firing on a Rasta Roko protest killed about two dozen people in a day. Kuldip Nayar wrote that Indira Gandhi once accepted a settlement and changed her mind before it reached Parliament.

On 25 April 1983, A.S. Atwal, a Sikh Deputy Inspector General of Police, walked out of the Darbar Sahib after praying and was shot dead at the entrance. His body lay where it fell. The government called it proof that killers were sheltering in the shrine; Bhindranwale condemned the killing and blamed the government.

On 5 October 1983, gunmen stopped a bus near Dhilwan, picked out the Hindu passengers and shot six dead. Nobody claimed it. The next day Punjab was put under President’s Rule. Hindu families in parts of the state began to leave, and in May 1984 Jagat Narain’s son Romesh Chander was shot dead too. Historian Ramachandra Guha records Bhindranwale telling followers to hit back with whatever came to hand if Hindus came for them.

On 15 December 1983 he moved into the Akal Takht. Beside him was Major General Shabeg Singh, a 1971 war hero who had trained the Mukti Bahini and was dismissed a day before retirement on corruption charges he fought. The fighters sandbagged the turrets around the parikrama. The government said the shrine had become an armoury; his followers said they were preparing to defend it from an attack they could see coming.

Major General Kuldip Singh Brar, a Sikh officer, was given the job. The Army called it Operation Blue Star. Sikhs call it the Ghallughara, after the great massacres of the 1700s.

Soldiers coming onto the marble parikrama in the dark met heavy fire from the sandbagged buildings and made little headway through the night. Early on 6 June the tanks were cleared to fire; Brar later told The Tribune that about 20 rounds went into the Akal Takht. Bhindranwale, Shabeg Singh and Bhai Amrik Singh died, and so did many pilgrims who had come only to pray. In the same days troops went into about 40 other gurdwaras across Punjab.

Official figures: 83 soldiers and 492 civilians and fighters killed, among them 30 women and five children, and 1,592 detained. On 12 June 1984 the Associated Press quoted officials in Amritsar saying the toll could reach 2,000. Eyewitness accounts gathered by the rights group Ensaaf put it at 4,000 to 8,000, most of them pilgrims.

In 2017 an Amritsar court, ruling on 40 men held for years in Jodhpur jail, found no evidence that the Army had told civilians to leave before the assault, and none that those men had fired on troops. The Centre appealed, then agreed in 2018 to pay them compensation.

Then there is the Sikh Reference Library, with its hand-written birs and rare books. General Brar’s book says a shell aimed at the Akal Takht went astray; the SGPC and library staff say troops burned it after taking its treasures. In 2023 the SGPC said 1,500 manuscripts, including 512 birs, and 12,613 books were never returned. In March 2026, after a Rajya Sabha question, its chief secretary said he did not know how much the government still held.

Sunday, 10 June 1984, Ramgarh in Bihar. Hundreds of soldiers at the Sikh Regimental Centre broke into the armoury, shot dead their commandant, Brigadier R.S. Puri, and drove towards Punjab. They were rounded up within a day. The government later counted 2,606 deserters from that month.

The writer Khushwant Singh, a critic of Bhindranwale, returned his Padma Bhushan. Congress MP Amarinder Singh quit his party and the Lok Sabha. In the villages, Operation Woodrose picked up thousands of young men from June to September; rights groups say baptised Sikhs were singled out. Even K.P.S. Gill, the police chief who later crushed the armed movement, was scathing.

Woodrose suffered from all the classical defects of army intervention in civil strife.K.P.S. Gill, former Punjab police chief

On 30 October 1984, Indira Gandhi addressed a huge crowd in Bhubaneswar.

If I die today, every drop of my blood will invigorate the nation.Indira Gandhi, Bhubaneswar, 30 October 1984, as reported by Time

At about 9:20 the next morning she walked from 1 Safdarjung Road towards her office, where Peter Ustinov waited to film an interview. At the gate stood Sub-Inspector Beant Singh, in her security for nine years; after Blue Star she had personally revoked his transfer. He fired his revolver, and Constable Satwant Singh emptied a sub-machine gun into her.

Beant Singh was shot dead in custody within minutes. Satwant Singh and Kehar Singh were hanged in 1989. By evening, Rajiv Gandhi was Prime Minister.

By the morning of 1 November, mobs armed with iron rods and kerosene, and, witnesses said, lists of Sikh homes, were moving through Trilokpuri, Sultanpuri, Mangolpuri, Palam and dozens of other neighbourhoods. They hunted Sikh men and boys, set them alight, and burned homes and gurdwaras. In many places the police looked on, or helped.

Officially 2,733 Sikhs were killed in Delhi and about 3,350 across India; some independent estimates run from 8,000 to 17,000. The PUCL–PUDR report called it ‘the outcome of a well organised plan’ and named Congress leaders, among them Sajjan Kumar, H.K.L. Bhagat and Jagdish Tytler, and police officers. The Congress long said it was an unplanned outburst of grief.

On 19 November Rajiv Gandhi told a rally that when a mighty tree falls, ‘it is only natural that the earth around it shakes’.

On the evening of 1 November in Indore, about 150 men with knives and sticks came for Balbir Singh’s family. Their neighbour Vijay Jagirdar had already taken them in. He went out, pleaded, then tried to stop the mob. They beat him, and he died in hospital. The family lived; he was honoured with a posthumous gallantry award.

In south Delhi, a young lawyer named H.S. Phoolka and his wife were hidden by their Hindu landlord. In Yusuf Sarai, Hindu shopkeepers lay down before Sikh shops and told the mob to burn them first. In Trilokpuri’s Block 32, five Muslim households stood between the mob and their Sikh neighbours. These stories are gathered in Pav Singh’s book 1984: India’s Guilty Secret.

In November 1984 Phoolka walked into a relief camp and began filling in claim forms. He has been fighting the cases since. Ten commissions and committees followed. The Nanavati Commission, tabled in 2005, called it organized carnage, found the police passive and found local Congress leaders had incited or helped the mobs.

I bow my head in shame.Manmohan Singh, Rajya Sabha, 11 August 2005

Manmohan Singh apologised to the Sikhs and the nation, while saying Nanavati had nailed what he called the lie that top Congress leaders were involved. By 2014, Human Rights Watch counted about 30 convictions, and not one police officer.

On 17 December 2018 the Delhi High Court overturned Sajjan Kumar’s acquittal for killing five Sikhs in Palam Colony, jailed the former Congress MP for life and called November 1984 crimes against humanity. In 2025 a Delhi court gave him a second life term; in January 2026 another acquitted him in a separate case. He died in custody on 20 August 2026, aged 80, his appeal still before the Supreme Court.

Jagdish Tytler is on trial, accused of inciting the mob at Gurdwara Pul Bangash; murder charges were framed in 2024 and he denies them. Kamal Nath has never been charged. Witnesses told Nanavati he was in the crowd outside Gurdwara Rakab Ganj; he says he went to calm it, and the commission did not find he incited it. He denies any role.

On 24 July 1985, Rajiv Gandhi and Sant Longowal signed an accord: Chandigarh to Punjab on 26 January 1986, a tribunal for the waters, rehabilitation for Army deserters. Many Sikh fighters saw it as surrender. On 20 August 1985 gunmen shot Longowal dead near a gurdwara in Sherpur.

Chandigarh is still a union territory. In November 2025 a plan to bring it under Article 240 caused uproar across Punjab’s parties, and within a day the Home Ministry said no bill was coming that session.

In April 1986 a Panthic Committee declared Khalistan from the Golden Temple complex, and thousands of young Sikhs, called kharkus and honoured by many as shaheeds, took up arms. The armed groups killed too. In 1986 General Arun Vaidya, Army chief during Blue Star, was shot dead in Pune. In July 1987 gunmen killed 38 Hindu bus passengers near Lalru and 34 more near Fatehabad; police blamed the Khalistan Commando Force, whose leader denied it. In 1995 a Babbar Khalsa bomber killed Chief Minister Beant Singh.

The state answered under police chief K.P.S. Gill with torture, disappearances and encounters that courts later found were staged. One count, by Ajai Sahni’s Institute for Conflict Management, puts the dead from 1981 to 1995 at 21,532, including 11,696 civilians he says the armed groups mostly killed. Jaswant Singh Khalra said 25,000 young men died in staged encounters.

Khalra ran the Akali Dal’s human rights wing in Amritsar. In crematorium registers he found bodies brought in by police and burned as ‘unidentified’: 2,059 in three crematoriums alone. On 6 September 1995 police picked him up outside his home. He was killed in custody, and his body was never found.

The CBI later confirmed 2,097 illegal cremations in Amritsar district. Six policemen were convicted in 2005, and five convictions were upheld up to the Supreme Court. By July 2026, police and lawyers told The Tribune, nearly 135 policemen, mostly junior, had been jailed in such cases. Gill’s defenders call the campaign against the police a myth that hides the armed groups’ crimes.

In June 1984 Punjab’s newspapers were censored, and in 1985 police seized Oppression in Punjab, a Citizens for Democracy report, at the press and charged its authors with sedition. In 2014 Kaum De Heere, about Indira Gandhi’s killers, was stopped a day before release; the Delhi High Court cleared it in 2019. In 2022 Sidhu Moose Wala’s SYL, on Punjab’s waters and 1984, was blocked on YouTube in India after a government complaint.

Then Khalra’s story. The censor board told Honey Trehan’s film, with Diljit Dosanjh as Khalra, to make 21 cuts and change its title to Punjab ’95; later demands ran past 120. On 3 July 2026 it streamed uncut as Satluj, and was pulled in India within two days, with no reason given.

The more you try to stop this, the more people will talk about it.Diljit Dosanjh, on Instagram, July 2026 (translated)

Every 6 June, Sikhs gather at the Akal Takht for Ghallughara Diwas. In 2003, at a function under the Akal Takht, Jathedar Joginder Singh Vedanti honoured Bhindranwale’s son with a siropa and Bhindranwale was declared a shaheed; until then a section of his Taksal insisted he was alive.

After Blue Star the government had the Akal Takht repaired under Baba Santa Singh’s banner. Sikhs rejected it. On 26 January 1986 that building came down, and the Sikhs rebuilt the Akal Takht themselves through kar seva, finishing in 1995.

1984 is not one story. It is a promise made in Lahore and not kept in Delhi; a peaceful agitation that let guns into its holiest place; a government that answered with tanks on a Guru’s day; two bodyguards who chose revenge; and a capital that let mobs burn its Sikh neighbours while the police looked on.

Every side has blood on its hands, and every side has its heroes: pilgrims who never came home, soldiers sent into a nightmare, a man in Indore who died at his neighbours’ door, a lawyer still in court after four decades, a man who counted the cremations and paid with his life. The truth about 1984 has been fought for line by line. The least we owe that year is to tell all of it.