Operation Wood Rose

Who: The Indian Army, under Indira Gandhi's government, and the Sikh villagers and young men of Punjab's countryside. According to Wikipedia's account, Major General Jagdish Singh Jamwal was assigned to seal the border with Pakistan and Lieutenant General Ranjit Singh Dyal to oversee the apprehension of those wanted inside Punjab.

What: After Operation Blue Star (June 1 to 6, 1984), the Army carried out follow-up sweeps across Punjab under the code name Woodrose. The Tribune says Operation Metal was the name for the action against Bhindranwale's inner circle, and Woodrose the name for the Punjab sweeps.

Inderjit Singh Jaijee, a human rights activist, writes in Politics of Genocide (p. 109) that the Army imposed a total curfew, lifted after 30 days in some parts of Punjab and after more than three months in others. Citing the journalist Mary Ann Weaver, he says that in villages along the border all men between 15 and 60 were picked up. The Indian Express of October 15, 1984 reported that more than 8,000 people were missing from their homes or detained. The Punjabi papers gave higher figures. Jaijee adds that the government never investigated the number missing and rejected all requests to do so.

The order that targeted initiated Sikhs is on paper. An army circular of July 1984 ("Baat Cheet", serial no. 153) is pictured by the 1984 Sikh Archive and is quoted in Mark Tully and Satish Jacob's Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi's Last Battle (1985, p. 204). It describes Amritdhari Sikhs as "dangerous people" pledged to commit murders and asks that any knowledge of them be reported to the authorities. The Archive says initiated, baptised Sikhs were particular targets of Woodrose.

Where: Punjab's villages, above all in the border districts.

Why it mattered: Blue Star is remembered as an attack on Sri Harmandir Sahib. Woodrose carried the same campaign into the villages, where, in the border districts, Jaijee says able-bodied Sikh men aged 15 to 60 were detained. Jaijee puts the civilian death toll of June and July 1984 at between 18,000 and 20,000, counting Blue Star and the "missing" of Woodrose together. That is his estimate, not an official count.

Wikipedia cites the writer Srikanta Ghosh (1992), who called the operation "a disaster" that deepened rural Sikh solidarity with the insurgents. Jaijee likewise writes that the Army became very unpopular after Blue Star and Woodrose.