Jaitley wants Centre to come clean

Responding to an HT report on declassified UK papers saying British elite force special air service (SAS) advised India on Operation Bluestar, senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley said it was about time that the government of India decided “to tell us the truth as to what the real facts were”.

This would enable the people of India to conclude whether Operation Bluestar was a strategic miscalculation, he said in a Facebook post.

The UK documents suggest then prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s administration dispatched Britain’s SAS officials to help Indira Gandhi in the storming of the Golden Temple.

Jaitley said those in the government of India have recorded these incidents differently. “I was among those present at the release of PC Alexander’s memoirs a few years ago. He was the principal secretary to the prime minister in MayJune 1984 and perhaps one of the best witnesses to what was going on. A chapter in his book on the Operation Bluestar gives an impression that it is only when the dialogue between Alexander and Sant Longowal failed that General Vaidya was called towards the end of May 1984 and asked to get ready for a military operation.”

The BJP leader said a new set of documents now published in Britain throw a different light on the subject.

“Contrary to what we have been told that it was the collapse of the dialogue in May 1984 that led to Operation Bluestar, the government of India was in dialogue with the British government on the plan to remove the dissident Sikhs from the holy Golden Temple.”