Twenty-five years after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, Amritsar, the city where it all began, erases its scars to look ahead, writes Anand Sankar
On the face of it, Amritsar is like any other pilgrimage city in India — noisy, colourful and crowded by day, but refusing to sleep even at night. Towards the end of October, that pace increases as the annual holy days of the Sikh calendar are around the corner. But the end of October carries an added undercurrent in the city of the Golden Temple.
Blue Star, the codename of the operation to flush out armed Sikh extremists from the Golden Temple in June 1984, had its aftershock in Delhi on October 31, 1984, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her Sikh bodyguards. The assassination set off a bloody pogrom in Delhi, as mobs went on the rampage for three days, brutally killing almost 3,000 Sikhs, during what was their holy month. Twenty-five years after those fateful days, you do not register the momentousness of the occasion on Amritsar’s chaotic streets, where it is business as usual. Only in the local newspapers a few column inches have been devoted to the bandhs called by holders of extreme views in Punjab’s politics to mark those days.
Reporters are the eyes and ears of any city, and a seasoned hand tells me that while there are echoes of those distant events in 1984, the problems are different now that Amritsar faces some existential challenges. “The city is dying,” he says. I see few signs of that, though away from the bedlam of the walled city, the scenery does tend to slow down a bit. It is apparent nowhere more than at the hotel I am staying in.
Hotel Ritz sounds fancy and is a sprawling property on Mall Road, supposedly Amritsar’s most sought-after address. The hotel, which began operations in the early 1960s, was till recent years also its most expensive. A popular hangout during the tense years of 1983 and 1984, it was booked to capacity by journalists from around the world who converged here. (It also made it easy for the army to round them up and bus them out of Punjab before the storming of the Golden Temple began.) Today, the Ritz looks jaded, its yesteryears wearing heavily on it as the Amritsaris and their Canadian kin have moved on to better things. Religion aside, the only local behemoth appears to be a paper mill, and it seems the family that owns it makes up most of the city’s A-list.
The development that seems to have set the city abuzz is its first five-star hotel, which the Amritsaris say is a bigger achievement than even the international airport, because “the airport was merely extending an existing air force base”. The Ista, owned by the same group that operates Rishikesh’s Ananda spa, has taken advantage of a scheme by the Punjab government to attract investors. The scheme allows the co-location of a shopping mall and a hospitality venture on a single large plot of land. Thus, the 24-storey Ista sits plum next to the monstrous AlphaOne shopping mall on the main highway leading into Amritsar from Jalandhar. The mall is being developed by another Amritsar family, but one which keeps a low profile. The hotel, though, is happy to enjoy the first-mover advantage in the city.
“Isn’t most of the work in India getting land and clearances?” asks Ashwin Handa, the general manager of Ista Amritsar.
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Demand for high-end hospitality in Amritsar is still a couple of years away, but Ista is ready for the Punjabi who flashes his card and asks for “the most expensive room” in the city. The rooms have views looking towards the Golden Temple, and of course there is the Ananda spa to go with it. But the hotel will soon have competition from the Radisson at the international airport, and the Taj Group, which is said to have settled on a location for a property here.
Lack of visible high-end or high-tech development does not mean that Amritsar has been bypassed by almost two decades of the Indian economy’s march forward. It has the most important visible signs of the boom — woefully inadequate public infrastructure (read transport, electricity, sewage, water supply, solid waste management...) — and a thriving real estate market. “People want to move out of the chaos of the inner city. They want houses where they can park their big cars,” says Krishan Kumar Kukku, a property developer standing on his 100-acre patch a few kilometres outside Amritsar.
He says he has so far developed over 25,000 plots for sale and this latest development will add a few hundred more to that. Properties such as those developed by Kukku are exclusive gated communities and he says he is ready for the day when the government eases restrictions on development in Amritsar. According to him, Amritsar has been hamstrung because of its proximity to the Pakistan border which makes the government unwilling to commit to high-value business here.
Gurinder Singh Johal turns out to be the proud Amritsari who, when I tell him I have had an incomplete feel of the city, offers to show me around Amritsar. It helps that he is a professional tour guide. “Most people who come to the city see the Golden Temple and the Attari-Wagah border. Indian tourists, especially, are not keen to explore the city. People say Lahore has history, but so does Amritsar. You can say they are twins,” he argues passionately.
I hop on to his bike for a heritage tour of Amritsar. After a cup of tea at Giani’s stall on Bhandari bridge, an arterial junction in Amritsar, Johal says he will take me to the home of the person after whom the bridge is named. Of course, the original Mr and Mrs Bhandari are no more, but the bridge apart, I learn that Mrs Bhandari’s Guest House is one of the city’s enduring institutions. It was set up when Mr Bhandari passed away and
Mrs Bhandari converted it into an inn to support her family. Today, the couple’s daughter Ratan Bhandari takes care of the guest house — which is located adjoining a wonderfully maintained bungalow at 10, Cantonment. The family, the house and the guest house have seen everything from
Partition to Blue Star and after. “In the 60 days it takes for us to renovate a bathroom, you get a new hotel in Amritsar,” laughs the present Mrs Bhandari. She has further cause for amusement when she learns that I am visiting the city in search of something to write about on the 25th anniversary of the consequences of the storming of the Golden Temple. “Anniversaries come every year,” she says. “Today business is difficult, and it was difficult in 1984, but we managed.”
Along with Johal, I roam the streets of Amritsar’s walled city. We trudge up narrow stairwells of old crumbling temples and visit empty akharas. Johal says the old city’s architecture is being ravaged because the government has ceased to pay any attention to its conservation. Even the mosques abandoned by Muslims fleeing to Pakistan in 1947 have not been spared. They now house Sikh families. We sample the local cuisine — sooji ka halwa, Amritsari kulchas, pedas and kulfis. As we walk past a goldsmith’s shop, I’m told that the large number of goldsmiths in the walled city have led to prospectors panning the open drains for the tiniest particles of gold dust. The tour ends at the Golden Temple’s main gate, opposite which is a giant poster of
Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the architect of the Sikh uprising in 1984. The shops around it sell Bhindranwale T-shirts for Rs 200 each.
Curiosity takes me to the office of the Dal Khalsa, one of the organisations spearheading the “Sikh cause” today. The Dal has called for a Punjab bandh on November 3. Mohkam Singh, also an activist of the Damdami Taksal (a pro-Sikh nation outfit, which was led by Bhindranwale till his death), notices that I am wearing a T-shirt with an image of Che Guevara. “Sikh youth wear the image of their hero,” he admonishes me. “His image must be everywhere,” including computer mousepads,” he points out. Singh and his fellow activists address Bhindranwale as “Sant”. Kanwar Pal Singh Bittu of the Dal Khalsa is mellower while reacting to the events 25 years ago. “On the surface, people have moved on,” he tells me, “but the scar left by the events will not be forgotten.” Nor is the Khalistan dream dead. A Sikh state will one day be established, they claim, with “Amritsar as the centre of its polity”. Administering the state, though, is another matter — for that, “Haryana has to be out of Chandigarh”.
Though it’s a theory often quoted, it has a resonance when Ashwin Handa of Ista states it. A Sikh who grew up outside Punjab but is now living and working in Amritsar, he says that ever since the Afghan invasions, the resilience of the Sikhs has stood the test of time. So it remains today, when they remain unfazed by, for instance, even a huge loss in a business venture. “They rise right back,” affirms Handa. In that light, it is hardly surprising that a few green shoots of growth suggest an Amritsar that might be laying the foundations for something both sturdy and permanent.