Before memory fades

On June 4, 1984, Rachpal Singh, the secretary of militant leader Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, was seeking shelter in the Golden Temple with his wife Pritam and their 18-day-old son, during Operation Bluestar. 

Two days later, just past midnight, a bullet hit their baby before hitting Pritam on the chest. As Rachpal bent over his wife and son, a bullet hit him on the head. Pritam lay in a pool of blood, beside her dead husband and son. 

It is stories of women like Pritam that are at the centre of author Sanam Sutirath Wazir’s latest book, The Kaurs of 1984—The Untold, Unheard Stories of Sikh Women, which captures the horrors of the Operation Bluestar, the subsequent death of then PM Indira Gandhi, and the riots that her death ensued.

In painstaking details, Wazir captures the destruction at the Golden Temple. “Over 350 bullets riddled the dome of the Golden Temple. One bullet pierced the cushion on which the Guru Granth Sahib was placed, pushing through as many as 82 pages of the book. Most of the items in the toshakhana (a storehouse for valuables) were destroyed… all the handwritten hukamnamas (orders), penned by different Sikh gurus across the ages, were lost as well.” 

Equally visual is the chronicling of the human rights violation by the Army and the security agencies. Following Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh guards, mobs in Delhi, mainly orchestrated by the Congress party, laid siege to the Sikh community. 

Here’s an instance: At Block 32 in Trilokpuri, East Delhi, local leader Rampal Saroj, accompanied by a group of men, asked Darshan Kaur where her husband Ram Singh was. She said he had gone out with his brother. 

The men did not believe her. They broke down the main door and barged into the house. Ram Singh was hiding in the kitchen. “They dragged him out by his hair,” writes Wazir.