The report on the interrogations of 173 Sikh youth elsewhere in this issue cannot leave the smallest scope for doubt regarding Pakistan’s involvement in the secessionist-terrorist campaign in Punjab. The interrogations on which the report is based are too detailed to have been cooked up by an intelligence agency; an Indian agency engaged in such a fabrication would tend to exaggerate Pakistan’s involvement and not to represent it as the low-cost low-risk operation it is; above all, an Indian outfit anxious to establish the fact of Pakistan’s complicity would never bring it out that Islamabad suffered from indecision for a whole year. Our report does not specify when the indecision set in. It could, however, have set in after Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s assassination on October 31, 1984, since President Zia-ul-Haq and his colleagues believed that they could come to terms with the successor, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi. Incidentally the White House in Washington reached a similar conclusion then and could have put some pressure on President Zia. It would appear that Pakistan’s involvement in Punjab terrorism was low-level even earlier. That is presumably one reason why the white paper issued in the wake of “Operation Bluestar” had refrained from making a specific charge against Pakistan. The charge was in any case not easy to establish. Pakistani officials had then drawn attention to the fact that neither many sophisticated weapons nor substantial sums of money nor communication facilities had been seized by the Indian authorities from the Golden Temple. Now we know that Pakistan did not provide these because it was pursuing a different strategy. Islamabad, it would appear from the report, also monitors the support certain Sikh organisations abroad extend to the terrorists in Punjab. This support also seems to be at a rather low level.
The report confirms what we have believed – that the resentment caused among the Sikh community in Punjab by “Operation Bluestar”, however intense, was temporary, that the Sikh peasantry had not said goodbye to its proverbial commonsense and that apologist-commentators, many of them non-Sikh, blew out of all proportion the feeling of alienation among the Sikhs and created an atmosphere in which it became difficult for Mr. Rajiv Gandhi and his aides to take rational decisions. Surprisingly, even some intelligence men joined in so vitiating the atmosphere. They fed the press reports of thousands of Sikh youth having gone over to Pakistan. The number turns out to have been just around 700. The fact that so many surrendered to the police on being sent back speaks for itself – low motivation and low morale. It is absurd to speak of an insurrection or even the possibility of an insurrection in such a context. The hard core in this case means only hardened criminals who kill unarmed men. The killings are, of course, not senseless; Pakistan’s preference for ex-army-men would indicate that one purpose of the killings might well be to sow dissensions in the armed forces. Finally, our report leaves us ignorant of the chain of command among the terrorists. The interrogators should look for it, in the material at their disposal.