It is not the first time that you have seen a beleaguered minority community go into a mood of complete denial. It happened with the Sikhs in the mid-eighties. There was widespread non-acceptance of the idea that the Bhindranwale phase, and the subsequent phase of terror, was indigenous, local, and mostly voluntary. For a long time, it was all blamed on Indira Gandhi’s and Zail Singh’s machinations. Bhindranwale was widely believed to be their creation. Initially, as his gunmen targeted policemen and leaders of the Nirankari sect, the dominant view within the Sikh community was that somehow this was part of a diabolical operation run by Indira Gandhi to embarrass the Akalis and give the Sikhs a bad name. Immediately thereafter, as hit squads began to pull Hindus out of buses and massacre them, or in one case shoot everybody inside a barber shop, most ordinary Sikhs you met told you, with genuine conviction, that there was no way a real Sikh could have done this. With Sikhs and Hindus, joined like fingers and nails, how is such a thing possible.

It was much later, around 1992-93 as armed terror bands began to hold sway over the countryside that the sad reality, inevitably, came to be accepted. Those running the terror campaign were “our own” and were doing a great disservice to the “qaum” and Punjab. From then on, it took just a few months for terror to wind up. I can never forget conversations with a large number of militants who had surrendered as their campaign ended and were kept on the Punjab Armed Police campus in Jalandhar. Many of them, still in their early 20s, answered to the ranks of “Lt-Gen” and “Maj-Gen”. The story of one 21-year-old “Maj-Gen” was typical: “Until now people used to welcome us to their villages, even gave us food and shelter; now they began throwing us out, reporting us to the police.”

... contd.