LONDON – The Foreign Office has pulled dozens of files from the National Archive amid fears that they contain details of British military assistance in India’s crushing of Sikh dissent in the 1980s, UK newspaper The Times reported.
Whitehall papers released to the archive this summer were recalled abruptly last month, days after the Sikh Federation wrote to Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, saying that they had uncovered “delicate information” concerning “UK military assistance to India”.
A researcher working for the federation at the Kew archives found a note referring to the possibility of an SAS involvement after “an Indian request for military assistance in the setting up of a National Guard for internal security duties”.
The note, marked confidential, was written on July 3, 1984, a month after a notorious Indian army assault on Sikh militants at the Golden Temple in Amritsar in which thousands of people were killed.
The letter was written by a civil servant in the Foreign Office’s South Asia department and copied to Ministry of Defence officials and the high commissioner in Delhi.
Sikh community leaders claim that the memo points to a British role in the crackdown on Sikhs throughout the 1980s.
The assault on Sikhism’s most holy place was followed by further repression, which remains a contentious issue for Sikhs around the world. The period of sectarian conflict saw the assassination of the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, by two Sikh bodyguards.
The revival of concerns over British involvement threatens to be a diplomatic headache for Theresa May as she prepares to visit India next week.
Files removed include papers about a meeting between Mrs Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher, British defence sales to India and Sikh demonstrations in Britain.
The discovery of the note referring to the SAS raises questions about the integrity of a 2014 Whitehall review by Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, which said that British assistance to India at the time was limited to a visit by a military adviser in February 1984.
Sir Jeremy’s review concluded that Britain’s military advice to India was “a one-off” that was “not sustained”. It also found that a Ministry of Defence file on military assistance to India over the Golden Temple operation had been destroyed in November 2009.
Lord Hague of Richmond, when he was foreign secretary, told the Commons that the review had examined 23,000 documents from December 1983 to June 1984 and “found no evidence . . . that any other form of UK military assistance was given to the Indian authorities”.
A spokesman for the Sikh Federation said the new discovery in the National Archive undermined that statement and the Heywood review and the Foreign Office’s decision to remove files from the archive bore the hallmarks of a “cover-up”.
A government spokesman defended the Heywood review and said that the files would be returned “in full” to the archive.
