It is not clear what the controversy kicked up by the statutory declassification of a Whitehall document revealing a British Special Forces (SF) — Special Air Service — role in the prosecution of Op Blue Star is all about. True an NRI member of the House of Lords, Indarjit Singh, and a Labour MP Tom Watson, have asked prime minister David Cameron to inquire into this SAS role, but that may be more for domestic political reasons of winning Sikh votes in the next general elections in South Asian enclaves in London, Birmingham, and elsewhere than because they want the SAS role investigated and publicly fleshed out.

Lt Gen (ret) Kuldip Singh Brar, the GOC, 9 Div, who conducted the military operation against the Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale-led terrorists in the Golden Temple Complex in Amritsar is clear that there was “no question…we never saw anyone from UK coming in here and telling us how to plan the operation.” He was speaking to a TV news channel. But Brar couldn’t possibly have known of an SAS officer being deputed by Brit PM Margaret Thatcher at the express request of her Indian counterpart, Indira Gandhi, to advise the latter on the best course to follow.

The context for the SAS call-in was that the Vice Chief of the Army Staff and the person slated to become the next army chief, Lt Gen S.K. Sinha, had strongly advised the PM against any army action to forcefully vacate the Har Mandir Sahib of the provocative Khalistani presence. He was rewarded for his counsel, which turned out to be right, by being passed over for promotion and the spineless General Arun Vaidya installed as COAS instead. The more important political context, it must be recalled, was that the menace of the Khalistan Movement was sedulously nursed and fostered by Indira Gandhi to neutralize the growingly unpliable (as she saw it) Chief Minister Zail Singh in Punjab (whom she weaned away from the state with the offer of the President’s post). But by the time she realized the danger posed to the country, Bhindranwale and his cohort of converts to the Khalistan cause had grown into the proverbial uncontrollable Frankensteinian monster whom she had to physically eliminate and destroy.

With Sinha and the army brass wary about involving the Service in any such adventure, Indira looked to London — much as her father Jawaharlal Nehru had done after independence and right up to the Fifties when in a tight corner (such as accepting Mountbatten’s advice to take the Kashmir issue to the UN and about the best ways to spend the accumulated sterling balance in equipping the Indian military). In Thatcher, she discovered another “Iron Lady” and kindred soul who had successfully mounted a war to keep the Falklands Islands in the southern Atlantic as British territory. The Brit PM, in turn, would have instructed the SAS to go to New Delhi and suggest a plan of action to Indira.

The SAS is an SF that distinguished itself in World War II and in subsequent bush wars of the Cold War era by pulling off forceful interventions. Naturally, the designated SAS officer would have advised a commando military operation to flush out the militants from the Amritsar Temple, entirely innocent of the socio-cultural factors and its ramifications on not just the Indian society and state but also the Indian Army which, at that time, had Sikhs constituting as much as 10 percent of the fighting forces. The SAS couldn’t have been expected to be aware of these sensitivities that Sinha obviously was.

But Indira wanted a show of strength and she got it in terms of appropriate advice from the SAS and of two dissimilar commanders — one a flashy showoff Lt Gen K. Sundarji as the Western Army Commander, and the soft-touch, the new COAS Gen Vaidya, asked to plan and implement the operation. Brar, as may be seen, was nowhere in the picture and wasn’t in the loop of the carryings-on in Delhi or as regards the Indira-Thatcher-SAS connection.

Then came the most classical colonial ploy the British had time and again used during the Raj to quell insurgencies and local strife in the subcontinent by essentially distancing themselves from the action and shoving the responsibility for containing such eruptions on to the natives, to Indians of the specific community that had to be actioned against, who were asked to lead the charge. Thus, for instance, the police operation to finish off the Muslim militancy in the Punjab of the 1930s — the so-called “Khaksar rebellion” was headed by an Indian Muslim ICS officer, Badruddin Tyabji, leading a force of exclusively Muslim members of the Punjab Police. When it came to Op Blue Star, a similar template was followed. Sikh officers were at a premium and so carefully chosen (perhaps, with the help of RAW). In any event, Brar was brought in as the Divisional cmdr and head of the actual operation, the chief of staff of the Western Army was Lt Gen Ranjit Singh Dayal, and commanders of four of the six units — 10 Guards, 1 Para, 26 Madras, 9 Kumaon, 12 Bihar, and 9 Garhwal — tasked with the assault, were Sikh officers.

The question arises: Was there a less inflammatory option? What did the VCOAS Sinha actually have in mind? One of the things talked about at the time was cutting off food and water to the Complex and waiting out the militants until they surrendered. Certainly this has the merit of a peacable solution. Except, a call from Bhindranwale apprising the Sikh community of this development would have eventuated in large masses of Sikhs from the countryside congregating at the Temple, all determined to protect their holiest of holies with their lives, and thus defeated any attempt at compelling the militants to surrender.

A more surreptitious operation of infiltrating armed commandos to execute Bhindranwale and takeout the top Khalistan echelon was possibly mooted but given up, considering that among this cohort was Maj Gen (ret) Shahbeg Singh, hero of the Bangladesh War who had fashioned the Muktibahini into a top class guerilla force. He had espied Brar inconspicuously recceing the Complex and insured against any such move by posting eagle-eyed acolytes at the entrance to the Harmandir Sahib.

That brings us to Ground Zero and the extraordinarily cynical politics Indira Gandhi practiced which was the locus genesis. It brought her own end and the country to a dangerous pass with an entirely avoidable military and civil catastrophe.