The Hindu is not my favourite newspaper. Nonetheless, I do sometimes read it. And invariably come away annoyed. This article , The Road Home From Khalistan, showed up in a Google News Alert for 'Khalistan.' It talks about what has become of three Khalistanis in the years since 'the end of the war for Khalistan.'. That is, the taming of the the Khalistan terrorists. This article annoyed me greatly and I'd like your ideas and opinions on this, er, assessment of the situation. Excepts from the story are below, a short bit about each of these tamed 'terrorists.' Please go to the link above and read the whole **[rather biased] article.
Fifteen years ago, Navtej Singh was one of *the Khalistan
Commando Force’s leading operatives. From 1981 to 1993, the war he fought in
claimed the lives of 21,043 people — 11,594 civilians, 8,003 terrorists, and
1,746 security force personnel. Now, dozens of men like Singh, fortunate enough
to survive the carnage, are attempting to put their forgotten war
behind them, and rebuild their lives. (Italics mine)
Singh joined the KCF as a teenager. His brother had joined the
Khalistan movement soon after Operation Bluestar, in 1984; many of his closest
friends were members of terror groups. “I used to be detained for questioning
whenever anything happened,” he recalls, “and the police would often torture me.
I finally decided to fight.” Read on...
The Truck Driver
On the day Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated, Manjinder Singh Issi was celebrating the sale of his family
harvest with six friends — and five bottles of liquor. He had no idea of the
gathering storm that would, within months, transfigure his life.
Back in
1984, Issi was a student at the Government College in Malerkotla. His family,
which owned a 10-hectare farm near the south Punjab town of Dhuri, supported the
centre-right Shiromani Akali Dal leaders ranged against Jarnail Singh
Bhindranwale’s neoconservative movement. On one occasion, Issi marched to the
Golden Temple in support of the former Chief Minister, Surjit Singh Barnala.
In college, though, he met the man who changed his life: ‘Professor’
Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar, a top *Khalistan
Liberation Front operative ...Read on...
And the third
Soon after Gyan Singh Leel emerged from his 17
years in prison, three of them on death row, he sat with a small group of
friends in Ludhiana, listening to a virtuoso sitar performance. “The one thing I
have ever really wanted to do,” he said, crying quietly, “is learn to play the
sitar.”
Leel was one of a group of young men who, on August 21, 1985, pumped
bullets into the body of the centrist SAD leader, Harcharan Singh Longowal. The
architect of a peace deal with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Longowal was seen by
most in Punjab as the last hope of a peaceful resolution of the conflict — and
by his neoconservative detractors as a traitor. Leel’s bullet, it is believed,
hit Longowal on the chest...Read on...
*If anyone has better links than Wikipedia for these two organisations, I would love to link them. Just let me know. Also if anyone has good links to these gentlemen, I would be most grateful if you would share them with us.
**For those of you that don't know, I use [--] as a devise to avoid the use of expletives. To get the meaning, just substitute the enclosed words with something really filthy.
If you are interested in the establishment of the Republic of Khalistan as a political reality, please read this letter.
