Shrine To A Separatist

The state has been in denial about a Bhindranwale memorial that was a decade in the making

- Asit Jolly

Thirty-six long years after he was killed during Operation Bluestar—the military exercise to flush out Sikh extremists from Amritsar’s Golden Temple in June 1984— Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the man who had then challenged the writ of the Indian State, has a gur udwara dedicated to his memory.

Christened ‘Gurudwara Sant Khalsa’, the new shrine, which opened on February 14, has been built on the site of what used to be Bhindranwale’s ancestral home in the twin villages of Rode-Landé in Moga district’s Baghapurana subdivision.

Arguably unbeknownst to, but more likely deliberately ignored by, both the previous Shiromani Akali Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party government and the incumbent Congress dispensation, construction of the shrine went on for more than a decade. Harnam Singh Dhuma, the incumbent head of the Damdami Taksal, a Sikh seminary once headed by Bhindranwale, says the work started in September 2007.