India: 1984 Operation in Sri Harmandir Sahib

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi]

I hear clearly what my noble friend says. I had the privilege of being the first Minister in this Government to visit Sri Harmandir Sahib and also Jallianwala Bagh, where the tragedy of 1919 is still of significance, certainly for someone like me with origins in those lands. Those visits were incredibly poignant and emotional moments.

However, I take us back to the subject of discussion here. The reason for what the Prime Minister said and did in relation to Jallianwala Bagh was, of course, that there was a terrible, tragic massacre in which the United Kingdom was completely involved. We are talking now about a situation which involved Indian forces. The question that I had to address at the Dispatch Box was the nature of the UK’s involvement. I hope that, through the Statement and the documentation that has been published, I have made clear the UK’s involvement. Apologies go with responsibility but in this particular case the responsibility does not lie with the British Government. I completely understand the sentiment in the British Sikh community, and indeed in the wider community, but I do not feel that, so far as the United Kingdom is concerned, this is the kind of case that could be compared to Jallianwala Bagh.

On the noble Lord’s wider point about engagement with the British Sikh community, I enjoy a good relationship with that community as a Minister both in the Foreign Office and in the Department for Communities and Local Government. We meet regularly, both through Sikh communities coming to the department and through visits. Only a few months ago I was at the Nishkam Centre in Birmingham. We place huge value on our relationship with the Sikh community. We also note the huge contribution that Sikh communities make in the economic and professional fields and also in volunteering, something that I hold very dear and is so apparent when visiting places like the Nishkam Centre and other temples.

The Minister with responsibility for India, my right honourable friend Hugo Swire, is meeting the Sikh community as we speak, I think. The noble Lord, Lord Singh, is probably not in his seat because he is at that meeting. I was hoping that this Statement would be taken at 5 pm so that I could also be present at that meeting, as I intended. However, I will certainly follow it up with a further meeting with the community.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

Indeed, my Lords, my noble friend Lord Singh has asked me to express his regrets to the Minister and to the House that he cannot be in his place, given that he has followed this issue with assiduousness and determination over a very long period, but he is at the meeting to which the Minister has just alluded.

The Minister will have seen the statement made by Bhai Amrik Singh, the chairman of the Sikh Federation, that he was “hugely disappointed” with the inquiry’s “narrow terms” and that his meeting with the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood had failed to assuage his concerns. Given that the Minister has done so much to build good relationships with the Sikh community, will she assure the House that she is willing to meet Mr Singh to discuss whether there are outstanding issues that could still be examined? Will she also comment briefly on the remarks she made about Britain’s commercial interests when she repeated the Foreign Secretary’s Statement earlier and said they had played no part at all in any of these events? Would she be willing to publish a list of any arms deals that were made during the period prior to and immediately after these events in 1984?

[Baroness Warsi]

The noble Lord makes an important point. I think Amrik Singh is part of the delegation of individual organisations and individuals who are meeting with Minister Swire, but if that is not the case and he is not part of that meeting, I will certainly see whether appropriate contact could be made. As I said, I will be making contact myself with members of the Sikh community in the coming weeks and months. There is a wide range of opinion. I had the opportunity to discuss the matter at some length with the noble Lord, Lord Singh, and my honourable friend Paul Uppal, who is the only Member of Parliament of Sikh origin in the House of Commons. Quite a breadth of opinion has come back from the Sikh community about how far the British Government are expected to go to satisfy certain elements of that community. I completely take on board how raw this issue is—and how raw Operation Blue Star is—and to what extent certain elements of the community wish there to be a truth and reconciliation process. However, going back to what I said at the beginning, that is a separate issue to the one that we are dealing with, which is what the UK’s involvement was.

I assure the noble Lord that the advice that was given was not linked in any way to commercial interests or to a particular defence contract or negotiation. That is certainly what the documentation shows. I am not sure how much further it would take the matter to start publishing any discussions that were happening in relation to any sort of commercial activity with the state over whatever period of time. I know from my own dealings with countries that we are engaged with through UKTI that these matters can sometimes take months and sometimes years. How far would that net have to be cast? I would like to be assured, and to reassure the House, on whether there was, in this particular case, a commercial connection to the decision. I can assure noble Lords that there was not.