Overview

June 5, 1984. 10 PM. India's Army marches into its holiest Sikh shrine. The Harmandir Sahib - the Golden Temple - has stood for four hundred years as the most sacred site in the Sikh faith. On the night of June 5, 1984, the Indian government sent tanks and paratroopers inside its walls. What happened over the next sixteen hours changed India forever. Sacred Fire is the first full narrative account of Operation Bluestar told from ground level - by an officer who was inside the complex on that night, who watched two soldiers from his unit die on the marble parikrama, and who has spent forty years trying to understand what he was part of. This is not a book about whether the operation was right or wrong. It is a book about what it was. About the political cynicism that manufactured the crisis. About the intelligence failures that made the assault bloodier than it needed to be. About the civilians - the pilgrims trapped inside during a religious anniversary - whose deaths have never been officially counted. About the soldiers who followed orders into a sacred space and carried the weight of it for the rest of their lives. Drawing on declassified documents, the British SAS connection, survivor testimony, and forty years of witness interviews, Sacred Fire is the complete account of India's most contested military operation - told with the honesty that only time, and the presence of a witness, can produce. For readers of India's Most Fearless, The Siege, and Midnight's Furies. For anyone who wants to understand what India did in 1984 - and why it still matters.

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