Memory and Vengeance: Indian General Stabbed in London

An old man was set upon by four men on London on Sunday and stabbed in the neck. Police are treating it as attempted murder.

But the circumstances suggest this was no random street crime. The 78-year-old victim was a retired general in the Indian army, Kuldeep Singh Brar. And he’s not just any general.

Brar had a key role in leading operations against a Sikh revolt in north India in the 1980s.

Brar says the men who set upon him were Sikhs and that he was stabbed with a kirpan, a ceremonial dagger that every Sikh man is supposed to carry.

The Sikhs had taken up arms to fight for independence from India for the predominantly Sikh state of Punjab and surrounding districts.

In 1984, Sikh rebels seized the holiest site in the Sikh religion, the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Brar oversaw the operation to clear them out, an operation that cost over 1,000 lives.

The Golden Temple of Amritsar. (Photo: Wiki Commons)

For me, the attempted killing of General Brar has eerie parallels with an earlier episode of violence in Punjab and England.

In 1919, British-led troops opened fire on a pro-independence demonstration, also in Amritsar, in a public area known as the Jalianwalla Bagh. It was a brutal act, and perhaps 1,000 people died. It’s a scene immortalized in the movie, Gandhi. Michael O’Dwyer was the British Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab. Twenty years later, a Sikh man, Udham Singh Kamboj, traveled to Britain, and tracked down O’Dwyer to a public meeting in London where the 75-year-old O’Dwyer was a guest speaker. Udham Singh shot him dead.

Sir Michael O'Dwyer (Photo: Wiki Commons)

Singh was tried and hanged a few months later. He was reviled as a terrorist in England, but became a martyred hero to India’s independence movement.

(The whole affair came to my attention as a young man living in the west London borough of Hounslow in the 1980s. Hounslow is and was home to one of Britain’s largest population of south Asian origin. It’s also full of streets named after old British war heroes like Wellington and Nelson. During a re-modelling, the Borough Council decided to re-name one of those streets after Udham Singh, but had to retreat in the face of protests from the town’s old inhabitants.)

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