Government should tell the truth on Operation Bluestar: Jaitley

Asking the government to tell the truth on Operation Bluestar, BJP leader Arun Jaitley Tuesday said British documents claiming they were onsulted lends credence to the fact that the then Indian government did not believe in tackling the problem in the initial stages.

"If British government was being consulted in February 1984, it only lends credence to the fact that government of India neither believed in nipping the problem at the initial stage nor in exploring alternative methods of evacuating the extremists from the Golden Temple," Jaitley said in an article on his Facebook page.

Operation Bluestar was an Indian military operation ordered by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in order to remove Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his armed followers from the Sikhs' holiest shrine - the Golden Temple in Amritsar city.

Over 1,000 people were killed after troops entered the shrine.

Jaitley alleged that the then Indian government "wanted to invade the sacred precincts of the Golden Temple no matter even if it hurt the national interest and certainly the interests of the Sikhs".

"We are now having some of the British documents becoming public. In the next few months, more documents between the period February to June 1984 would become public on account of the expiry of the limitation of 30 years. It is about time that the government decided to tell us the truth as to what the real facts were," said the Bharatiya Janata Party leader.

He claimed instead of preventing extremist hardliners from collecting in large numbers with arms and ammunition inside the Golden Temple, the government decided to look the other way.

"It had hoped that moderate Sikh politicians would become irrelevant. It probably had planned that on the eve of the 1984 elections, a police-military confrontation with the extremists would take place and the 1984 elections would be won by the Congress on the patriotic slogan of saving Punjab and saving India from terror," he said.