Tavleen Singh’s first meeting with Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in 1983 didn’t go very well. She found him in a room at the Guru Nanak Niwas in Amritsar, surrounded by armed followers, and watched him casually order a hit on a policeman mid-conversation. 

When she asked if he had taken funding from the Congress party, his mood turned instantly even though at the time she didn’t know that the money hadn’t reached him. Bhindranwale wanted to know who had told her, and after she had left, her photographer had overheard him asking his followers who she really was.

That access defined her reporting through the crisis. 

She spoke to General Shabeg Singh, the 1971 Bangladesh war hero who went on to fortify the Golden Temple for Bhindranwale, before Operation Blue Star. She was summoned by Bhindranwale himself at a rooftop gathering days before the assault, singled out in front of his armed men in what she describes as “putting a target on your back”. And despite martial law being in force, she reached Amritsar three days after Blue Star to report on the horrors of what took place at the premises of the Golden Temple. 

She then travelled through Punjab’s villages during the decade of violence that followed, documenting the torture, disappearances, and killings on both sides, and highlighting the fate of families of militants, policemen, and ordinary Sikhs and Hindus caught in between. She traced how Delhi’s own missteps fed a cycle of grievance and revenge that neither side could control.

Tavleen Singh even recalls trying to warn Rajiv Gandhi – then his mother Indira Gandhi’s closest advisor – about what was unfolding in Punjab, before things took a dark turn. “I was almost acting like their intelligence agent. I would come there and tell Rajiv... and how would he respond? ‘I’ve been saying to Mummy we must do something,’ and then that would be it.”

On this episode of Back in Time, Newslaundry revisits Tavleen Singh’s reporting from inside the crisis and the questions history still hasn’t resolved: Who created the Punjab crisis? Was Blue Star avoidable? Was the infamous KPS Gill the saviour of Punjab or someone who just fed into the violence? And what does a democracy become when it fights terror with terror?

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