Britain’s National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has called on Prime Minister David Cameron to establish a full public enquiry into the 1984 Amritsar massacre, following revelations in recently released official documents about British assistance in planning the Indian military’s assault on the Golden Temple in which thousands were killed.
In a statement Wednesday the NUJ said delegates at its conference last week unanimously accepted a motion calling for a British public inquiry that would cover “all the documents and events relating to India, covering the whole of 1984.”
“Information about India’s relations with Britain have been kept secret and they have not been revealed to parliament or the public for 30 years. Not all of the information and documents have been released,” the statement said.
The conference motion noted the British Cabinet Secretary’s internal inquiry, tabled in the House of Commons on 4 February 2014, stating that Margaret Thatcher’s government agreed the UK would provide military assistance in the form of SAS advice in planning the assault by Indian forces on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, which resulted in the death of thousands of people.
The motion had been tabled by Parvinder Singh, NUJ book branch and author of 1984 Sikhs’ Kristallnacht, whose family in Delhi narrowly survived the 1984 genocide, the NUJ said.
While speaking about the catastrophe at the NUJ conference, Singh said the Cabinet Secretary’s recent internal inquiry had been “too narrow in scope and timeframe - many questions remain unanswered, despite PM Cameron’s statement that his government would be transparent on the issue.”
In the subsequent anti-Sikh pogroms of November 1984, the Conservative government “chose to maintain close relations with India in order not to jeopardise billions of pounds of commercial contracts, despite evidence that leading members of India’s ruling Congress Party were instrumental in the massacres,” Singh added.
The conference also commended the work of journalist Phil Miller, who discovered the initial documents at the National Archives in Kew.