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Jasveer Singh
March 20, 2024
The Chittisinghpura massacre saw 35 Sikhs in the Kashmiri village of Chittisinghpura rounded up and fired upon at a local Gurdwara on the eve of U.S. President Bill Clinton’s historic state visit to India in the spring of 2000.
To this day, it is officially unknown who was behind the carnage, the first time Kashmiri Sikhs had been targeted in such a manner in the region.
Indian authorities would go on to claim, as they still do, that the Pakistan-based Muslim militant groups Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Hizbul Mujahideen carried out the attack – a claim that Pakistan and militant groups continue to deny. India used the incident to also urge America to take a more suspicious and hawkish geopolitical approach to Pakistan.
But from the outset, allegations of Indian army and government involvement have persisted, whether directly or through mercenaries, which a retired Indian army officer would later also confirm.
“The army was using the surrendered militants that time to fight, to sacrifice these surrendered militants instead of themselves…these surrendered militants hatched a plot, and the army soldiers helped them [with the Chittisinghpura massacre]. The army was guilty, not the commanders, but till the Captain level,” Lt Gen KS Gill exposed in an interview.
“The full report was prepared. We said the army was involved. We asked for a judge of the Supreme Court to look at it. Nothing happened…[The BJP’s] Advani was the Home Minister. We gave the first report to him… Clinton (who was on a visit to India) kicked up a row, saying that ‘due to me a lot of lives have been lost. I want to know exactly what happened,’” Gill went on to share.
The village of Chittisinghpura sits in the middle of a rugged and rocky landscape. With deep sloping mountain roads to one side and apple orchards and rice fields to the other, it is where 200 families, almost all Sikh, have been living for generations.
On March 20, 2000, the residents had been celebrating Hola Mohalla in their homes and in the two village Gurdwaras. That evening, when most had retired to their houses, they found that the electricity was out. It was dark, there were no phones, and their homes were spread out from one another.
Around two dozen men, seen wearing the Indian Army’s regulation-issued uniform, stood at opposite sides of the village as they began to round up residents. As is the case in much of Jammu and Kashmir, the most militarized territory on earth, military presence was nothing unusual. Witnesses shared that the men looked “more like people from Southern India.”
The uniformed men gathered 36 Sikh men in total and lined them up in front of a wall of the local Gurdwara, where they fired at them with machine guns at point-blank range.
Clinton stated in the foreword to the former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s 2006 book The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs, six years after the incident, that “Hindu militants” were actually behind the massacre of Sikhs blamed on Muslim insurgents in 2000.
“During my visit to India in 2000, some Hindu militants decided to vent their outrage by murdering 38 Sikhs in cold blood. If I hadn’t made the trip, the victims would probably still be alive,” he wrote.
“If I hadn’t made the trip because I feared what religious extremists might do, I couldn’t have done my job as president of the United States. The nature of America is such that many people define themselves—or a part of themselves—in relation to it, for or against,” Clinton added.
After complaints from India, the passage was later edited out of future copies. However, Clinton personally never retracted or clarified the claim and never restated India’s unproven allegation that it was Pakistan that carried out the massacre through Islamist militant groups.
“In fact, in the hours immediately after the massacre in March 2000 when Clinton was on his way to New Delhi from Bangladesh, the US condemned the killings but refused to accept the Indian government’s contention that it was the handiwork of Pakistan-based jihadi groups,” a TNN report read at the time.
One survivor, saved from the gunfire by the shield of a toppling body, lived to tell the tale, saying he heard chants of “Jai Mata Di” and “Jai Hind,” an Indian nationalist slogan, as the killers marched off. In total, 35 Sikh men were murdered by the attackers that night.
“[Nanak Singh] remembers that some of the gunmen had faces painted in the raucous fashion of Holi, a Hindu holiday being celebrated that day. As the killers marched off, a few called out the parting words ‘Jai mata di,’ a Hindi phrase of praise for a Hindu goddess,” Barry Bearak reported for the New York Times in a lengthy article exploring the contradictions and mystery around the massacre and Indian official accounts.
By claiming that the attack was carried out by militant groups based in Pakistan, the LeT and Hizbul Mujahideen, India pushed the image of a rogue Pakistan which believed in driving non-Muslims out of Kashmir. It not only helped pit communities against each other in the region but potentially forced America to double-think its close ties to Pakistan.
Both militant groups denied they were behind the incident and instead blamed India.
“The brutal mass murder [was a] pre-planned act of Indian intelligence to defame the Kashmiri freedom struggle,” Syed Salahuddin, head of Hizbul Mujahideen, stated at the time. “The Mujahideen have nothing against the Sikh community, which sympathizes with our struggle. We assure them that there never was and there will never be any danger to Sikhs from Kashmiri freedom fighters,” he added.
On March 25, 2000, India claimed that an alleged collaborator, a milkman named Mohammad Yaqoob Wagay, had been apprehended who, in turn, disclosed to authorities, after an “interrogation,” the hideout of five alleged militants that were involved with the massacre. The latter would all be killed in a shootout, as per government accounts, that left their bodies completely charred from mortar fire.
The problem with the Indian narrative, however, was that the “collaborator” would eventually be found to be innocent and was not involved in the massacre. Also, the five “militants” were actually local Muslim youths picked up at random by Indian forces and killed in fake encounters.
The Indian version of events unraveled and was exposed as a lie.
“In any case, the story was drifting elsewhere. By then, many of the authorities — in the government, in the intelligence services, in the police — had quietly abandoned the merchandising of their once airtight case. In a revised analysis, Wagay, the milkman, was now thought to be innocent,” Bearak reported from the ground.
Local protests against the Indian government over the encounters were met with bullets, as the Indian army opened fire on the demonstrators on April 9, 2000, killing eight Kashmiris in the process.
An Indian government source told Bearak that “after Chittisinghpora, there was tremendous pressure to catch the militants. Name, fame, money, career: those were the reasons to fake an encounter. They couldn’t catch the militants, so they picked up locals. Unfortunately, locals have families that ask questions. It didn’t work.”
And unfortunately for the Sikh community, questions remain unanswered about what really happened in Chittisinghpura, including India’s hand in the massacre.
Jasveer Singh hails from Southall, UK, and is the Senior Press Officer of The Sikh Press Association, a position he has held since 2015. In this role, Jasveer works across all sectors of media supporting Sikh organisations and individuals on Panthic endeavours. Jasveer previously worked as a freelance journalist which included stints with Sky News, Super Fight League, and more. You can find Jasveer on Twitter at @Jazzthejourno.