ISI support cell under Gen. Akhtar Abdur Rahman

Who: Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) under Gen. Akhtar Abdur Rahman (Director General from April 1979 to 29 March 1987), who opened a cell within the ISI to support the Sikhs' "freedom struggle against India" (Husain Haqqani, cited in Wikipedia). Hamid Gul was Director General from 29 March 1987 to 27 May 1989, and Wikipedia says he actively backed the Kharku groups.

What: ISI support for Kharku groups, which Indian accounts say was later folded with Kashmir into the "K-2" plan (The Tribune, 2023, which names no source). Hamid Gul is credited with calling a destabilised Punjab an extra division at no cost. Pakistan has said it did not support the Sikhs' movement (Dawn, 2015), and Kiessling often draws on Indian accounts. The sources describe:

• Training camps for young Sikhs in Karachi and Lahore, with ISI Field Intelligence Units on the border (Hein Kiessling, 2016).
• Weapons: a new ISI cell passed weapons and ammunition to Bhindranwale's followers from the early 1980s, and AK-47s reached the groups from May 1987 (Kiessling).
• Financial support: Sikhs in Canada, the UK and the US arranged for cadres to travel to Pakistan, where they received financial and military help (Christine Fair, 2005).
• Lahore sanctuary: as Indian forces pressed the groups from 1990, some leaders fled to Pakistan, Kiessling writes, and the ISI hosted Wadhawa Singh Babbar of the BKI and Paramjit Singh Panjwar of the KCF, among others. Panjwar moved to Pakistan in the early 1990s and was shot dead in Lahore in May 2023 (ThePrint). ThePrint reported in 2022 that Wadhawa Singh leads the BKI from Lahore.

Where: ISI headquarters Islamabad; Lahore and Karachi (camps, later sanctuary); Pakistan-Indian border (weapons transfer); Punjab (operational targets).

Why it mattered: Kiessling dates the ISI's "Khalistan adventure" to the early 1980s and says its scale showed at Operation Blue Star in June 1984. The Indian general Afsir Karim (1991, cited in Wikipedia) wrote instead that it took an event of Blue Star's magnitude to give rise to an organised armed struggle. Either way, this support is separate from the false documents that, Wikipedia reports from the Mitrokhin Archive, a KGB agent gave Indira Gandhi.

Two strands:

• The Dharam Yudh Morcha was an Akali campaign for the Anandpur Sahib Resolution (Wikipedia). Karim writes that there was "nothing to suggest that the initial break between Sikhs and the national mainstream was engineered by outside agencies" (cited in Wikipedia).
• Armed groups spread after 1984: Fair writes that Operation Bluestar and the massacres of Sikhs that followed fostered a wider-spread armed struggle, to which the ISI's help was added.