Surya magazine

Surya, published as Surya India, was an Indian magazine. It matters to this history for one cover story that appeared soon after Operation Blue Star, in its September 1984 issue.

The report: titled "Dead Men Tell No Tales", it was by the reporter Rajeev K. Bajaj. The editor said it rested on information from "patriotic officers of RAW". According to the South Asia Forum for Human Rights report Reduced to Ashes, it cited "highly placed and highly disillusioned sources" in the Research and Analysis Wing. It claimed that most of the arms inside the Golden Temple complex had been smuggled in under the supervision of a special agency, controlled directly by the director of the Prime Minister's secretariat. This is what later writers call the Third Agency.

Gurmukh Singh, summarising the report in a column in Asia Samachar, says it described the agency as a super-intelligence body loyal to Indira Gandhi. He says it named R.N. Kao as its think tank and said its members came from RAW and other agencies. He also says it claimed the agency supplied weapons to the Golden Temple, had 47 railway stations blown up and incited violence in Punjab.

The Batala claim: Reduced to Ashes records that the story said the Punjab police had stopped two truckloads of weapons and ammunition at Batala one week before the Army action. It said an officer of the third agency in charge of Amritsar then persuaded the Director General of Police to release them and send them on to the Golden Temple.

How firm it is: both accounts present these as the magazine's claims from unnamed sources. We found no source that verifies them. Wikipedia's article on Operation Blue Star reports the Surya story, and Gurtej Singh's separate account of being offered a truckload of weapons for a kar seva truck, as claims and not as established facts.

The same report also cites Surya India pieces from November 1984, "Politics of Bloody Revenge" and "Psychology of Revenge", on the killings of Sikhs after Blue Star.