Punjab minister: India’s legal system “erases” Sikh identity

Punjab’s Minister for Human Rights and Minority Affairs, Ramesh Singh Arora, stated that Operation Blue Star became the starting point of the Khalistan movement.

He made these remarks at the international conference “Racism and Violence Against Sikhs and Other National Minorities in India: Realities on the Ground,” held in Baku, domestic media reported.

Arora said the deeply rooted violence directed at Sikhs stems from a combination of political opportunism, state-driven repression and a systematic denial of Sikh identity and national aspirations.

“To understand this, it is enough to look at Article 25(b) of the Constitution of India. That is, in India’s constitutional and legal field, the identity of Sikhs is effectively erased,” he noted.

He pointed to the 1984 Operation Blue Star as a clear example, during which the Indian army stormed the Sikhs’ most sacred site, the Golden Temple. “This event inflicted deep wounds on the collective consciousness of Sikhs and simultaneously became the beginning of the Khalistan movement, meaning the idea of complete freedom and sovereignty. From this moment, the struggle ceased to be a demand for greater autonomy for the state of Punjab and turned into a struggle for full independence,” Arora said.

He added that the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on 31 October 1984 was used as a pretext for the subsequent violence. Following the killing, he recounted, genocide unfolded in Delhi and other cities: armed groups that had received voter lists from politicians attacked Sikh households, burned men alive, killed children and raped women. “It was an attempt on a nationwide scale to complete the process of genocide, initiated by the Indian state itself,” he said.

Arora stressed that more than forty years later, those responsible have still not been held accountable. “To this day, real legal justice has not been provided for the victims of the 1984 genocide. From this perspective, the ‘truth’ that India presents to the world raises serious doubts,” he stated.

He added that India refers to this period as “riots”, a term that he argued is fundamentally misleading. According to him, “riots” imply clashes between two comparable sides, which does not fit the circumstances: the entire machinery of a powerful state was involved. Voter lists were handed to violent groups, the police either stood by or directly participated, and the army and security forces were not deployed to restore order.

By Tamilla Hasanova