On 6 November 2016, the British Prime Minister Theresa May flew into India for a three-day visit aimed at strengthening ties between the United Kingdom and India in the areas of trade, investment, defence and security. The significance of May’s visit is underscored by the fact that this is her first bilateral trip outside Europe since taking office in July. Speaking about her decisionat the inauguration of an India-UK Tech summit, May said, “I chose India...because of the special partnership between our countries.” However, an aspect of the historically “special partnership” that the British Prime Minister referred to has now come under scrutiny. May’s first visit to India is eclipsed by the shadow of the British government’s alleged involvement, under the aegis of the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in Operation Bluestar—an ill-conceived military operation that was conducted at Amritstar’s Golden Temple Complex in June 1984, resulting in the deaths of over 700 people, of whom at least 350 were civilians.
In Britain, the Labour Party, the opposition in the UK, called on May just before she left for Indiaand asked her to “come clean” about the country’s role in the widely criticised military operation. This is not the first time that this issue has caused a furore. In January 2014, Phil Miller, an independent journalist, discovered declassified documents, which indicated that authorities from the British government had responded “favourably” to a request from India, soliciting their help in Operation Bluestar. Subsequently, David Cameron, who was Britain’s prime minister when Miller made the discovery, asked the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, to conduct an inquiry. Heywood was looking into the allegation that in 1984, Thatcher’s government had sent an officer from the Special Air Service, or SAS—a special forces unit of the British army—to advise the Indian government on its attempts to remove militants from the Golden Temple. According to a statement made by Cameronin February 2014, the investigation—which was initiated as a result of the requests made by many Sikh organisations, and the Labour party’s deputy leader Tom Watson’s decision to raise the issue in the parliament—provided “absolutely no evidence of the UK government involvement in the operation itself.”
William Hague, the foreign secretary of the Cameron government, also told the parliament that “one of the questions raised is whether there could have been British Military involvement in subsequent operation Black Thunder I and II—the paramilitary raids that were conducted on Khalistani separatists at the Golden Temple in 1986 and 1988, respectively.” According to Hague, “From everything that the Cabinet Secretary has seen having examined hundreds of files—200 files—the answer to that is no”.
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