There are no fringe benefits

Longowal was assassinated within just about a month of signing a peace accord with Rajiv Gandhi. Badal is still around. You bet he still gets nightmares on that phase in his political career. Certainly, most of us, who witnessed and chronicled it as journalists, still do.

Many of the memories are mere reporter’s stories. But many add up to a story with a scary message: it is tempting for mainstream politicians to let an extreme fringe grow, to say and do things they never would, in the hope that this would bring votes and more. It is also often inevitable that the fringe then drives them out of the mainstream, shifting the centre of gravity in their politics and marginalising those moderates who so cynically looked the other way. There are so many examples of that in our political history. The 15-year terror phase in Punjab is by far the starkest.

MY own reporting encounter with that period began in the summer of 1984, when the first major killings had taken place. There were killings of some policemen on the terrorists’ hit lists. The Punjab Police already cowered in fear after A.S. Atwal, the DIG who dared to take militancy on, was shot on the steps of the Golden Temple.

The first incidents of pulling Hindus out of passenger buses had already taken place and Punjab was pretty much a terror zone in a way no other part of the country had ever been. But Badal and Longowal, the two moderates on whom the nation — and their fellow Punjabis — had such hopes, were silent if not acquiescing. Each terrorist strike was condemned, but with a qualification; ‘‘this is awful but only if the Centre/Mrs Gandhi were to address the real concerns of the Sikhs…’’ Or, this is terrible and there should be a thorough impartial inquiry to find out who is actually responsible.

Each one of the separatist, militant statements emanating from Bhindranwale and his supporters was dismissed as media hype. ‘‘Why do you take him so seriously? Why is the media building up Bhindranwale,’’ they would ask us. This, mind you, was much before live television news entered our lives.

Once, in the third week of May, 1984, reclining on a frilly gao takiya (an oblong pillow) on a satin mattress Longowal chided some of us, Indian and foreign journalists: ‘‘This problem,’’ he said, pointed backwards over his shoulder with his right thumb pointed generally at the Akal Takht, the supreme seat of Sikh spiritual and temporal power (where Bhindranwale now lived with his most loyal troopers), ‘‘is entirely a creation of you press people.’’ Who, he said, would even have known ‘that man’ indicated by his thumb and half-clenched fist, if ‘you press people’ had not been going to him all the time for juicy statements that made headlines that sold our papers faster than fresh-fried jalebis. ‘‘Who are they,’’ he said, ‘‘except munde te goonde (sundry boys and hoodlums). But if you treated them as such, who would pay your salaries?’’

JUST two weeks later, Indira Gandhi’s commandos, the Brigade of Guards and Vijayanta tanks were laying siege around the temple complex to clean up the ‘little problem’ with ‘mundas and goondas’. Longowal was looking desperately for somebody to rescue him before Bhindranwale’s boys dragged him into the Akal Takht as well to witness their last stand, and probably die as most of them did.

He was grateful to be taken away in time by the army and to be ‘imprisoned’ in the safety of a government guest house in faraway Udaipur. I would guess he did not tell his rescuers the minor problem on the terrace behind his back was not merely a creation of the media.

Just about a year later, while India was still recovering from the trauma of Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the massacre of Sikhs, I found a Longowal that thought very differently in detention in Udaipur. I had been taken to his guest house unofficially, as a well-wisher since he was not allowed to meet the press and he was to only answer questions for publication in writing.

But he was a pious man, only drawn into religious politics and if he had one serious regret it was that he did not move in time to prevent ‘so many catastrophes, one after another’. ‘‘So many of my friends and colleagues have died, all good people. Now the corpses of so many thousands of Sikhs hang between Delhi and Punjab. Who will take us back to old days of bhaichara (brotherhood)? How will somebody do it? We thought this was just one more voice in politics. If only we knew what this would lead to…’’ he said. A few weeks after that first conciliatory interview from a Sikh leader after Operation Bluestar, he signed the peace agreement with Rajiv Gandhi, obviously hoping he would be that ‘someone’ to restore the old bhaichara to his people, Sikhs and Hindus. Next month, he was assassinated in a religious congregation. The mundas and the goondas were still around, and getting their quarry.

THE subcontinent has routinely produced extremely talented rabble-rousers who specialise in articulating a minority’s grievances, real and imaginary, turning them into a huge persecution complex. Some use it towards very narrow and limited political ends, as Subhas Ghising did with his Gorkha movement in Darjeeling.

Some acquire demi-god status within their own communities and are finally satisfied with the oversized presence it gives them in the larger political playground. This was the case with Altaf Husain, the (now exiled) founder of Pakistan’s Mohajir Quami Mahaz.

Bhindranwale belonged to the most radical category. He wanted to create a new, theocratic, sovereign nation, change history. But partly because nobody questioned him, he also believed so many of his own myths.

On the day the army was laying siege around the temple complex he was telling his armed followers in front of so many of us newsmen: ‘‘Bibi (the lady, for Mrs Gandhi) will be sending Russian commandos to fight us. Because the Sikhs in her army won’t fight and the topiwallas (the Hindus), cannot fight.’’ If you looked at his eyes then — what a pity I can’t show you a video clip to prove my point — you knew he wasn’t lying or bragging. He actually believed it.

He thought he had redefined the politics of his state and faith, he was destined to change history and that his moment had now come. Then, he mocked those Sikh leaders, who he said won’t be there to fight ‘the Russian commandos’ tomorrow but will be living happily in the safety of the bibi’s jails. ‘‘Once this is over,’’ he said, ‘‘we will deal with the traitors and the cowards.’’

Even this was not something said merely for effect. He believed every word of this. ‘‘If I am merely a terrorist and my support is merely a fringe of my society, why don’t you ask any of its leaders (said mockingly) to call me that. Let them disown me. Let one of them say I don’t speak for the Sikhs, or even that I don’t speak for them,’’ he had said to me in April 1984, two months before he died facing the Vijayanta, mountain Howitzers and the might of at least five cutting-edge battalions of Indian infantry besides the special forces.

I MAY not have any video tapes but I still keep some record of that period. There is a box that I have always called the Collected Works of Bhindranwale. It contains the 21 ‘official’ cassettes of his speeches sold at the Golden Temple those days. You can play some of these at random and hear many of the lines quoted above, over and over again.

The second is a solitary tape, which I shoved into a small tape-recorder on the night of Operation Bluestar and kept on the terrace of the Ritz Hotel to record the sounds, the explosions and the bursts of automatics. I also have other memories, in particular two that still give me nightmares. The first is a truck laden with the corpses of Bhindranwale’s supporters pulled out of the temple complex the day the main operation ended.

The bodies have begun to smell, a hard-boiled DSP of local police cried like a baby in fright. The second is an army ambulance truck moving at a crawling pace through one of the bazar-streets leading out of the temple. It has bunks of stretchers on both sides — each one carrying an army jawan’s body. One face is particularly young, maybe 20. It’s serene, peaceful and still has beads of perspiration. Enough time hasn’t passed since his death for those to dry.

Surely, anybody who witnessed that phase has his own different memories and nightmares. But like all stories, even horror stories, even this one had to have a moral at the end of it all. It is likely that while memories and nightmares might differ, the moral we draw from this story will be the same. That it never pays to let extreme fringes grow in your politics as a temporary, tactical measure. That if you do that, never dismiss this as a mere fringe, the mundas and the goondas because the language of extremism and intolerance, the quick results that unconventional politics often achieves tend to dazzle the masses and, therein lies the danger of the centre of gravity shifting away from the mainstream.

And that, finally, this one was merely a case of an extremist leading a small minority against the might of the entire Indian state and extracted such a toll. What can happen if somebody were to, some day, attempt to lead the dominant majority against a minority. These lessons must be remembered if today’s moderates, respected, mainstream politicians were not be reduced to the irrelevance of the Badals and the Longowals of the eighties.

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