Govt must stop Khalistan movement from raising its ugly head, says Brar

Govt must stop Khalistan movement from raising its ugly head, says Brar

GenSpeak: There has to be a limit to liberal policies, otherwise radicalism will gain ground

The government is doing nothing to stop people from celebrating militants as martyrs, says Lt Gen (retd) KS Brar, who was recently attacked in London. In an interview to Dilnaz Boga, the officer, who had led the Operation Bluestar, says India must take steps to stop the Khalistan movement from gaining momentum. Excerpts of the interview Charges against two persons who attacked you have been downgraded. Why has that been done? They’ve arrested 13 suspects and nine of them are out on bail. Charges against two people have been downgraded from ‘attempt to murder’ to ‘intent to cause grievous bodily harm’. To prove the murder charge, you require a lot of witnesses. That could be one of the reasons. The second reason is that the knife didn’t pierce my arteries. If the knife had gone right down to the arteries, attempt to murder case would hold. I was told that this process will be speedy. Your attackers were in their early 30s. During Operation Bluestar, they must’ve been four years old Yes, they don’t know anything about the operation. They have been told about it. A lot of doctored footages of the operation have been circulated around Europe and Canada. The youth have been indoctrinated and told that the operation was an attack on the Sikhs, on the holy Darbar Sahib and how revenge needs to be taken. This rips up your sentiments, your emotions. It is an ideology of the hardcore passed on to the innocent youth. If you go to the gurdwaras abroad in places like the UK and Canada, you will find ‘Khalisatan zindabad’ boards there. The British government can’t do anything about it because of its liberal policies, nor can the American government. But look at the damage it is doing to the youth. India’s policies are just as liberal because now a memorial is going to be erected for the martyrs of the operation without any opposition from the state That’s true, we are not doing anything about it. There has to be some limit to these liberal policies. I’m very sad. It makes everyone in uniform feel terrible, whether you are retired or whether you are serving. You have that anger, that my chief of army staff, a brave, highly decorated officer (Gen AS Vaidya) was carrying out the task in the line of duty has been murdered when he has retired and gone home. And now the assassins are being honoured. They’re being called martyrs. Are they martyrs for murdering someone? Firstly, they were criminals who belong to a militant group. A martyr is someone who has done something for a cause. What is the cause? To kill an innocent general. This is disgraceful. Why has the government not taken a strong stand, especially with talks of the Khalistan movement gaining momentum? I don’t know, they must have their reasons. They have their own political problems in Delhi. Maybe they’ve been cowed down by the Akali threat that “we will do what we want”. The government should assert itself and say this is a matter of national security and we should stop this because it will create mayhem like the violence that we saw in the 1980s. We don’t want a repetition of that. After all these years, we would like the wounds to be healed and not reopened. This will have an overall effect on the Indian security. People across the border in Pakistan are also supporting the radicals. Abroad, they are collecting money from the rich Sikhs and sending it to Punjab as well as to the ISI. The ISI has a cell in Pakistan which trains Babbar Khalsa and other militant groups. The money is slowly being pumped into India to regroup those who want to join this movement. Slowly and steadily, the whole thing is snowballing into the situation we witnessed in the 1980s. So we must nip it in the bud.