More than just a film: Don’t let ‘Satluj’ rewrite the history of Punjab’s terror years

Let me begin by saying that this article criticising Satluj will not change the fact that the release on Zee5 OTT and then the tactical withdrawal will make the movie even more appealing and serve the purpose of the makers in narrative building. But truth must be told with conviction and boldly, and must not look for popular validation. If the people who fought the violent Khalistan 1.0 movement had not stood up despite the fear of bullets, Bharat would have suffered a mortal blow. The fight for Punjab was a fight for Bharat.

If Indira Gandhi had not decided to correct the wrong she had committed by raising a character like Bhindranwale, she would have lived longer. Manish Tewari’s father would not have died from Khalistani bullets, Beant Singh would not have been blown to death, and KPS Gill could have lived a happy retired life. RSS would not have lost scores of its swayamsevaks to terrorist bullets.

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Eighteen hundred policemen would not have lost their lives, nor would their families have been destroyed. When the nation demands sacrifice, patriots come forward expecting no rewards, nor name or fame. Thousands of Hindus lost their lives just because they were Hindus before KPS Gill took up the challenge and breathed new life into the Punjab Police. Thousands of Sikhs would not have died because they refused to call a wrong right.

It was a period when judges avoided terrorist cases and let terrorists be released despite overwhelming evidence, fearing for their lives. No human rights ‘activists’ were visible until KPS Gill brought the curtains down on terrorism.

As soon as the terrorists were silenced, the human rights industry crawled out of the woodwork to target the very police force that had saved them. The man who saved Punjab, KPS Gill, wrote to the Prime Minister: “What is to be said about judges who failed to consider overwhelming evidence of the most heinous crimes? Even in cases as fully documented as Operation Black Thunder, where the entire action was carried out in full view of the media, not a single conviction was pronounced?”

Jaswant Singh Khalra was a foot soldier of the Khalistanis and Bhindranwale, as many of his photographs and pronouncements on video clearly establish. He too morphed into a human rights activist during this period.

Such was the atmosphere that the brave SSP A.S. Sandhu committed suicide because he preferred to die rather than be humiliated for doing his duty as mandated by the state. KPS Gill wrote in an essay, available on the SATP portal: “Few today understand the significance of what happened in Tarn Taran. Had we lost control over the district, Punjab’s secession would have become an inevitability. Had we lost Punjab, Kashmir would certainly have followed. And once this process of fission began, every linguistic, ethnic and cultural group would have raised the standard of revolt. Pakistan would have been celebrating this 50th year of its independence through the realisation of its dream of a balkanised India. We are not far from the edge of the abyss.”

It is nobody’s case that there were no police excesses. But when you are facing the dismemberment of the nation by unscrupulous terrorists who kill innocents, target police families, rape women, extort money, accumulate arms, and have no morality or religious ethics, what is a government supposed to do? What was the state supposed to do when people were pulled out of buses, lined up for being Hindus, and killed in cold blood? What is the state supposed to do when Bhindranwale openly challenges the government that he will kill 5,000 Hindus in a single day? Can we equate the state’s counter-violence with terrorist violence that made the state take a firm stance after looking on helplessly for years? My simple question to political leaders, including today’s Congress, is: what would they do today if an insurgent group started killing people again as the Khalistanis did during the Khalistan 1.0 days?

I was a witness to the rise and decimation of the separatist violent movement, as I used to visit Punjab every two to three months and stay there for 10-15 days during that period, travelling across nearly all of Punjab, including the worst-affected areas. I have my ancestral village home, where I used to stay at night hoping that there would be no terrorist knock on the door, ride buses where some Hindus had been shot two days earlier, and travel on trains where all the Hindus aboard had been gunned down three days before. I have done deep research for my book Conflict Resolution: The RSS Way, in which Punjab features as one of the three conflict zones, the other two being Jammu & Kashmir and the North-East Region.

I quote from my book, Conflict Resolution: The RSS Way: “In their dispatch from Punjab, Inderjit Badhwar and Prabhu Chawla in India Today described the grim situation that cements the observations made by KPS Gill in his essay. They note, ‘On the surface, life in the state appears to move normally—if the markets, offices and daytime traffic are any indication. But the number of terrorist killings—between 500 and 700 under the current political regime—point to a starkly different reality. […] The violence, once restricted to the border areas of Amritsar and Gurdaspur, has now erupted in Hoshiarpur, Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Faridkot.

What started out as a violent political agitation has now assumed the trappings of an insurgency that could rip to shreds the delicate weave that sustains the country’s democracy and integrity. […] In towns across Punjab, radical Sikh intellectuals — retired government officials, lawyers and former police officers — meet with members of the banned All India Sikh Students Federation (AISSF) to discuss extremist strategy.

Sikh Army personnel who come on leave to Punjab complain to family members about discrimination against them by senior Hindu officers. […] Decent, gentle, but now embittered by the calumny and deceit that have reduced him to this situation, Barnala (the then Chief Minister) is candid in admitting that terrorists are now able to choose the place, time, method and victim at their calling.’”

People must remember all this when they discuss a film like Satluj — the film that was first titled Gallughara, then Punjab 95, and finally released without a censor certificate as Satluj. Gallughara is a very sacred and painful word for Sikhs that carries the burden of history.

Chhota Gallughara occurred in May 1746, when around 7,000-11,000 Sikhs were massacred by the Mughal Governor Yahiya Khan. Vadda (or Big) Gallughara occurred on February 5, 1762, when Ahmad Shah Abdali slaughtered 25,000-40,000 Sikhs in a surprise attack at Kup Rohira in Malerkotla. Thus, the narrative of the terrorist period in Punjab was sought to be turned upside down as a massacre of Sikhs by their enemies.

When you discuss a film like Satluj, it is important to rise above elitist club talk about freedom of expression and cinematic liberty and remember this history. People ask: there was Maachis. Yes, Maachis played apologist for terrorists. But it was entirely fictional and people kept quiet, though it is regrettable that the government played along with this fake narrative, just as it played along with the sob stories of Kashmiri jihadis being victims of Army excesses in Mission Kashmir and Haider. We also had an apologia called Shikara.

This movie is different, as it is acknowledged to be based on the true-life story of Khalra. The problem is that when a movie validates sainthood for Bhindranwale and almost celebrates the cold-blooded murders of Beant Singh and Indira Gandhi at a time when Punjab is on the brink of Khalistan 2.0, now fought more in people’s minds through subtle narratives created by the hard groundwork of Pakistan-inspired and funded Khalistanis, Satluj does not remain a simple story of human rights.

It becomes a tool of propaganda for the separatists in an atmosphere made much more vicious by social media messaging and the fine-tuning of Sikh history and scriptures compared with the 1980s. If it had even a glimpse of the unjust killings and victimisation of Hindus, Sikhs and security forces, I would accept that it is an objective account. You cannot pull out one part of the horrible period in Punjab at the cost of diluting the real history.

The immortal policeman KPS Gill wrote a letter to the Prime Minister when his police officers were being victimised for what they had done under extremely difficult circumstances. He quoted the revolutionary Ramprasad Bismil:

“Hum bhi bach sakte the ghar pe rah kar,

Hum ko bhi Maa Baap ne pala tha dukh seh kar.”

He wrote, “The state’s mechanism for investigation disproportionately focuses against the police while Khalistani cadre walk free […] It appears almost as if the state is discriminating between terrorists and policemen in favour of the former.”

In his essay on the Punjab insurgency, sharing his pain over the victimisation of his policemen, he wrote: “Let this nation beware of the hour when no man will risk his life to protect another or to defend the nation.”

Josh Malihabadi once wrote:

“Buzdilon ke ishq mein, shaida mujhe kyon kar diya,

Is naamard desh mein paida mujhe kyon kar diya.”

Let us not fall into the trap of freedom of opinion when the future of the nation is at stake.

(The writer is a well-known author and political commentator. He has written several books on RSS, including RSS 360, Sangh & Swaraj, RSS: Evolution from an Organisation to a Movement, Conflict Resolution: The RSS Way, and has done a PhD on RSS. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)