Kinlore
c. 1984–1995

The Punjab Insurgency

Armed Sikh groups fight for an independent Khalistan while security forces wage a brutal counter-insurgency; thousands of civilians, militants and police die before the violence ends in the mid-1990s.

  • Dead Silence: The Legacy of Human Rights Abuses in Punjab — Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights (1994)
  • Protecting the Killers: A Policy of Impunity in Punjab, India — Human Rights Watch and Ensaaf (2007)
  • The Sikhs of the Punjab (The New Cambridge History of India, revised edition) — J. S. Grewal, Cambridge University Press (1998)
  • The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies — Pashaura Singh and Louis E. Fenech (eds.), Oxford University Press (2014)
  • The Sikh Diaspora: The Search for Statehood — Darshan Singh Tatla, UCL Press (1999)

Debated by historians wartraumapolitics

After 1984, a number of armed groups, among them the Khalistan Commando Force and Babbar Khalsa, took up the cause of an independent Sikh state, Khalistan. A “Sarbat Khalsa” gathering in 1986 declared it. Militants killed policemen, politicians, journalists, Hindus and Sikhs they considered traitors; some groups slid into extortion and crime.

  • The Sikhs of the Punjab (The New Cambridge History of India, revised edition) — J. S. Grewal, Cambridge University Press (1998)
  • The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies — Pashaura Singh and Louis E. Fenech (eds.), Oxford University Press (2014)
In June 1985, a bomb planted by Canada-based Sikh militants destroyed Air India Flight 182 off Ireland, killing all 329 people on board, most of them Canadians, the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history.
  • The Sikh Diaspora: The Search for Statehood — Darshan Singh Tatla, UCL Press (1999)
  • The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies — Pashaura Singh and Louis E. Fenech (eds.), Oxford University Press (2014)

The state’s response was ferocious. Human Rights Watch and others documented torture, staged “encounter” killings and disappearances. In 1995 the activist Jaswant Singh Khalra exposed the secret cremation of thousands of bodies in Amritsar district; he was then abducted and killed by police.

By 1993 the insurgency had largely been crushed, and the 1995 assassination of Chief Minister Beant Singh was its last major act. Estimates of the total dead vary widely; commonly cited figures run to around 20,000 or more.

How it's seen
Many Sikhs

A dark decade in which the state treated young Sikh men as enemies: thousands were killed in staged "encounters", tortured or secretly cremated. Some see the militants as freedom fighters provoked by 1984; many others remember them with fear too, since militants also killed Sikhs.

  • Protecting the Killers: A Policy of Impunity in Punjab, India — Human Rights Watch and Ensaaf (2007)
  • Dead Silence: The Legacy of Human Rights Abuses in Punjab — Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights (1994)
  • The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies — Pashaura Singh and Louis E. Fenech (eds.), Oxford University Press (2014)

Indian government view

A terrorist campaign, backed in part from Pakistan, that killed thousands of innocent people, including Hindus massacred on buses and in villages, and which the security forces defeated to restore peace and democracy in Punjab.

  • The Sikhs of the Punjab (The New Cambridge History of India, revised edition) — J. S. Grewal, Cambridge University Press (1998)
  • The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies — Pashaura Singh and Louis E. Fenech (eds.), Oxford University Press (2014)

Human rights groups and historians

Both sides committed grave abuses. Militant groups killed civilians, while police, under director general K. P. S. Gill, used extrajudicial killings and disappearances on a large scale; few officers were ever prosecuted.

  • Dead Silence: The Legacy of Human Rights Abuses in Punjab — Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights (1994)
  • Protecting the Killers: A Policy of Impunity in Punjab, India — Human Rights Watch and Ensaaf (2007)
  • The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies — Pashaura Singh and Louis E. Fenech (eds.), Oxford University Press (2014)

Why it matters today

Sikhism

A generation of young Sikh men in rural Punjab was killed, imprisoned or "disappeared", and many families still do not know what happened to their sons. The era left grief, a culture of police impunity, and memories of militant killings of Hindus and of Sikhs who disagreed with them. Many Sikh families emigrated in these years. Most Sikhs in Punjab today want to leave the violence behind, while pressing for truth about the disappeared.