The 6th of June 2025 marks the 41st anniversary of the assault by central armed troops on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, an act that was officially called Operation Bluestar.
It is essential to learn the truth about what really took place and why it took place. It is essential because we continue to be confronted with the menace of state terrorism and communal violence, including attacks on places of worship under various pretexts.
The attack on the Golden Temple took place at a time when thousands of people had gathered there to mark the occasion of the martyrdom of Guru Arjun Dev. For six whole days, the armed forces kept firing at the Complex. Tanks and armoured vehicles were used to bombard the sacred Akal Takht. The armed forces entered the temple complex allegedly to liberate it from terrorists. Hundreds of innocent men, women and children lost their lives in that operation.
It was an act of state terrorism. The state, whose core duty is supposed to include protecting people’s lives and their right to any form of religious worship, sent its army to attack a place of worship, killing a large number people assembled there.
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi claimed that her government had “no choice” because it had allegedly received secret information that terrorists gathered inside the Golden Temple were planning to organise the massacre of Hindus all over the country. This official justification has by now been exposed as a blatant lie. No proof has been offered in the past 40 years about any such conspiracy.
Evidence has by now been found which show that units of the Indian Army had been training for this operation several months prior to June 1984. There is also evidence that the Government of India had requested and received assistance from the government in Britain at an early stage of planning the attack on the Golden Temple.
Senior officials in charge of the Punjab Police have admitted that special “counter-terrorism” units were used to periodically organize killings of Hindus in buses and market places and blame it on “Sikh terrorists”. Using such acts to inflame passions, the ruling circles carried out massive propaganda to brand the struggles in Punjab as being driven by “Sikh fundamentalism”.
It was a time when there was widespread discontent within the country. Workers, peasants and other working people were fighting for their rights. The people of Punjab, Assam and other regions were demanding their national rights within the Indian Union. The capitalist monopoly houses, who head the Indian ruling class, wanted to consolidate their control over state power. They wanted to suppress all resistance to their global empire building aims. Creating the spectre of “Sikh terrorism” to justify widespread state terrorism became the preferred method to achieve this aim.
An important lesson to be drawn from the experience of the past 41 years is that communalism and state terrorism serve to maintain the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, headed by the monopoly houses. They serve to keep the people divided and diverted from their real enemies, and provide a justification for using brute force to suppress all dissent.
We must reject the notion that the Indian State is secular while some religious fundamentalists are the problem. In the 1980s, some within the communist movement conciliated with the official propaganda that “Sikh fundamentalism” is the problem. That weakened the struggle to build political unity against state terrorism. Today, the official propaganda presents “Islamic fundamentalism” as the main problem. It will be a serious mistake to combat this propaganda with the notion that “Hindu fundamentalism” is the problem. The struggle against communalism and the growing attacks on people’s rights today must be directed against the state and the dictate of the monopoly capitalists.
We communists must lead the working class to fight in defence of the right to conscience, as an inviolable right that belongs to every human being. We must oppose every act of the State which violates anyone’s right to conscience. We must wage the struggle with the perspective of replacing the existing bourgeois state with a workers’ and peasants’ state, which will guarantee the democratic rights, national rights and human rights of all, including the right to conscience.