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It was early morning on January 1, 1988, when terrorists had struck at Cheema Batth, a village in Amritsar district. In the farmhouse where gun shots had rung out the night before. Through the half-open door nine blood-splattered bodies on the floor were seen. Not a soul was left to mourn as the whole family, including a four month old child, was killed by a terrorist gang on the suspicion that they were police informers.

The massacres were as common as marriages during the 80s with more than 25000 lives lost including that of a prime minister. Two decades later, Cheema Batth is still haunting us. Statistics don’t do justice to the firestorm that swept Punjab in the name of the pro-secessionist Khalistan movement. What began as a non-violent political protest for greater autonomy in the mid-’70s, spiralled into a cycle of violence, fuelled by political chicanery, Sikh fundamentalism spearheaded by the preacher turned-militant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, and the insidious support of militant groups from a hostile neighbour.

It found resonance in a section of their Diaspora, while the pro-Khalistan agitation got only a ripple of support amidst the Sikhs in the country. The army action at the Golden Temple, code named as Operation Bluestar, codenamed was the watershed in 1984, and the anti-Sikh riots following Indira Gandhi’s assassination, defining events that stoked a debilitating phase of terrorism, driven more by a paroxysm of revenge than separatist ideological underpinnings.

Much earlier before it was expected, public sentiment by the early ‘90s, turned against pro- Khalistan terrorists who ruled the state with a gun. When Punjab in mid 1992 had its first elected government after five years of President’s rule, terrorists were neutralized in a no-holds-barred police offensive. By 1993, terrorism was vanquished.

It the operation Blue star had not happened; there would have been no bloodshed in the state. This premeditated movement was in actual thrust on the so called terrorists as explained one of the former terrorists. They were used by Pakistan to keep the pot boiling. The militant movement was hijacked by criminals.  The violence-weary Sikh community wanted hardliners to take the democratic route and fight for their grievances but the radicals failed to do that.