When P. Chidambaram recently admitted that “Operation Blue Star was the wrong way, and Indira Gandhi paid with her life for that mistake,” he reopened a wound India has never healed. His statement, coming after forty-one years of silence from Congress’s top brass, has stirred the party’s conscience — but not enough.
His remarks:
Chidambaram deserves credit for breaking ranks, but his attempt to lessen the blame on Indira Gandhi is wrong. He should go further — to say with courage and clarity that the Congress Party must apologise for both the 1984 carnage inside the Golden Temple and the genocide that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination. For forty-one years, Congress has avoided this reckoning. It has never apologised for the 1984 riots, offering only selective regret and political evasions.
Operation Blue Star was not a national security imperative; it was a political operation executed through the Army. Excessive force was unleashed inside one of the holiest shrines of the Sikh faith. To call it a joint decision of the Army and intelligence agencies, as some do, distorts the truth. The decision was political — the Army merely implemented it.
The groundwork for this disaster was laid much earlier. Factional rivalries within Punjab Congress, especially between Giani Zail Singh and Darbara Singh, crippled governance and inflamed communal tensions. The Sanjay Gandhi’s coterie treated Punjab as a laboratory for political manipulation.
As former civil servant R.I. Singh recounts in Turmoil in Punjab: Before and After Blue Star, Delhi ignored clear warnings from the field. Intelligence veteran G.B.S. Sidhu, in The Khalistan Conspiracy, exposes how manipulation, intrigue, and neglect allowed extremism to spiral out of control. And Mark Tully’s Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle** provides a harrowing narrative of how politics surrendered to force — and faith was trampled in the crossfire.
As K.B.S. Sidhu recently argued in The KBS Chronicle, Blue Star cannot simply be discussed as a “mistake.” It was a catastrophe of governance that deserves not reinterpretation but investigation. He went a step further — demanding that the State itself register an FIR on Operation Blue Star, to formally establish accountability for the chain of decisions that led to it. Such a step, he rightly notes, is “the least a constitutional democracy owes to its own citizens.”
Indira Gandhi Paid the Price — But Accountability Died with Her
Indira Gandhi paid with her life, assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in October 1984. But thousands of innocents had already paid before her — in Amritsar, and later across Delhi and other cities in the anti-Sikh massacres that followed. These were not spontaneous riots but orchestrated pogroms, and the Congress leadership has still not atoned.
The party’s pattern of “regret without apology” is morally hollow. Regret is political expedience; apology is moral courage. Until Congress finds the strength to apologise unambiguously, its contrition will sound like calculation.
Is former Member of Punjab Public Service Commission
A farmer and keen observer of current affairs
BJP’s Selective Silence
But moral responsibility does not stop with Congress. The BJP government, in power for over a decade, has chosen silence over transparency. It has refused to declassify the Operation Blue Star files, which could finally tell the full story.
What prevents the government from releasing these records? Why are the facts of 1984 still hidden from the nation? Truth strengthens democracy; secrecy corrodes it. Declassifying these files would expose not only Congress’s political culpability but also the roles of many Punjab leaders, including from the Akali Dal, who share fragments of responsibility.
As K.B.S. Sidhu observed, “if even after four decades the State fears to open its own files, it confesses guilt by silence.” He is right — secrecy is not patriotism; it is protectionism for the powerful.
A National Wound Still Unhealed
For the Sikh community, June 1984 remains an open wound, not a distant event. The pain endures because both truth and accountability remain buried. The massacre inside the Golden Temple and the pogroms that followed are chapters of the same tragedy — written by political arrogance and moral cowardice.
Chidambaram’s statement is an opening, but it must become an awakening. If he truly believes Blue Star was a “mistake,” he should have the courage to say it was a crime against faith and humanity, and that Congress owes an unconditional apology to Sikhs and to India.
Truth Before Reconciliation
India cannot reconcile with its past while truth lies sealed and justice is denied.
The Congress must apologise.
The BJP must declassify.
Only then can the nation begin to heal from its most painful domestic trauma. Until that happens, “regret” will remain the coward’s substitute for repentance — and silence, the accomplice of guilt.