Amritsar, July 4: The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) on Sunday organised an event to commemorate the police action in the Golden Temple here on this day in 1955. The then government in Punjab had sent police to the Golden Temple in 1955 during a Punjabi Suba Morcha, a movement started for a Punjabi speaking state. The action came after the then Amritsar Deputy Commissioner banned the slogan ‘Punjabi Suba’ in view of the law-and-order situation.
On the morning of July 4, 1955, the then Deputy Inspector General of Police Ashwani Kumar led the police and entered the Golden Temple premises with shoes on. He stopped the ‘langar’ and also took away utensils and other articles used for making food for the devotees. Police had also lobbed teargas shells in the periphery of Golden Temple and more than 200 people were detained.
“This was the first attack on the central Sikh shrine, Sri Darbar Sahib, after Independence. Sikhs sacrificed… their lives for the independence of the country. “But the deployment of police in the central shrine of the Sikhs only after eight years of independence was a manifestation of anti-Sikh mentality of the then Congress government,” SGPC chief Bibi Jagir Kaur said on Sunday. The then chief minister Bhim Sen Sachar tried to “suppress” the legitimate demands of the Sikhs, but the community, as always, emerged victorious from the challenge, Kaur said.
The SGPC chief said that an anthology would be compiled after thorough research on the police action on Darbar Sahib on July 4, 1955, and photographs related to it would also be included. “Efforts will be made to preserve memories by searching for the eyewitnesses of that time,” Kaur said and appealed to the people to make their children aware of this history.
At Sunday’s event, the teargas shells which were fired by the police inside the Darbar Sahib complex in 1955 were displayed.
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