Golden Temple massacre: Senior MP demands inquiry into Thatcher’s role

Parliamentary committee chairman calls for probe into UK complicity with Indian army atrocity at Amritsar in 1984.

13 January 2025
A landscape shot of Amritsar India Sri Harmandir Sahib (golden Temple) with two men sat in the foreground.

The Golden Temple in Amritsar. (Photo: Helene Rogers / Alamy)

A senior Labour MP has called on the government to hold an “independent inquiry” into British complicity in a massacre of Sikh pilgrims by Indian troops 40 years ago.

Tan Dhesi, who chairs parliament’s influential defence select committee, said Labour should honour a pledge it made while in opposition to fully investigate the affair.

Hundreds of Sikhs were killed at their religion’s holiest site in June 1984 when Indian forces stormed the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar to evict a separatist leader.

Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s then Conservative prime minister, had secretly sent an SAS officer to Amritsar months before the massacre to advise India’s army on conducting the operation.

Thatcher’s involvement only came to light 30 years later when I found papers at the National Archives outlining the mission.

Dhesi, who represents Slough, told parliament last week: “The British Sikh community duly launched a campaign for an independent inquiry to establish the extent of that involvement. 

“While previous Conservative governments have tried to brush the issue under the carpet, Sikhs expected the new Labour government to establish that promised independent inquiry. When will that be initiated?”

Lucy Powell MP, leader of the House of Commons, responded: “We need to get to the bottom of what happened, and I will ensure that the ministers responsible are in touch with him to discuss the matter further.”

‘Whitewash’

The episode was first investigated in 2014 when the then prime minister David Cameron asked cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood to hold a “review” of my findings.

Heywood claimed his team considered 23,000 documents in just over a fortnight and concluded that the SAS advice had “limited impact in practice”.

He said Thatcher was not motivated by potential arms and helicopter sales to India worth billions of pounds.

Sikh groups denounced the Heywood review as a “whitewash” but a formal request for a public inquiry was refused by Conservative ministers.

Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Labour manifestos promised to hold an inquiry into the affair and Keir Starmer made a similar commitment after he took charge of the party.

Starmer’s deputy, Angela Rayner, said on the 40th anniversary of the massacre this June: “Labour stands with the Sikh community in calling for an inquiry into the historic role Britain played. A Labour government will work to determine the best way to find out the truth.”

However the pledge was missing from Labour’s 2024 manifesto and the Sikh Federation said on Friday that foreign secretary David Lammy has not responded to five letters it sent him about the matter since he took office in July.

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Conflicts of interest

Labour’s lack of action comes despite mounting evidence that the original Heywood review was marred by bias and omissions, as I found by taking the Conservative government to court twice over the affair.

In my first case, information tribunal judge Murray Shanks rejected the Cabinet Office’s claim that greater transparency could damage diplomatic ties with India. 

Despite allowing Sir Philip Barton, who now runs the Foreign Office, to testify in secret court, Shanks found “no evidence of any adverse reaction from the Indian government” after the SAS role was exposed and said India’s response to the Heywood review was “anodyne”.

Shanks also acknowledged “the limitations of the Heywood review…in particular the speed with which it was carried out and the limited time period of the files that were looked at.”

In my second case, the Foreign Office was ordered by a judge to admit that “one or more officials who worked on UK/India diplomatic relations in 1984 helped locate and identify papers” for the Heywood review.

An even more serious conflict of interest later emerged when I found that Heywood had given Hugh Powell – the son of Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser Charles Powell – a leading role in conducting the review.

Unanswered questions

An independent inquiry could allow an impartial team to evaluate the papers Heywood saw and potentially reach different conclusions about the SAS’ impact or the influence of trade deals.

Sikh groups have said any inquiry should have a broader scope than Heywood’s probe – which only looked up to June 1984 – in order to examine Britain’s support for India after the massacre.

The government has never explained a document I found from July 1984, which suggested further SAS assistance for India was already being considered. Civil servants did not provide this document to the Heywood review, either by accident or design. 

Britain’s intelligence agencies were off limits to Heywood’s review, meaning he did not look at a claim by a former Indian intelligence official that MI5 officers conducted reconnaissance of the Golden Temple by posing as tourists.

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Many of these unanswered questions can only be resolved if ministers give a public inquiry sufficient powers to probe Britain’s secret state.

While Dhesi’s defence committee can initiate its own inquiries into a wide range of military matters, it does not have the authority to investigate UK special forces – nor does any other parliamentary committee.

The SAS is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, and the government said the original files that sparked the scandal were released to the National Archives by “mistake”.

Paddy Ashdown, the late Liberal Democrat leader and Special Boat Service veteran, told me: “There ought to be much more transparency over historical operations. Our special forces are being ludicrously overprotected on records that are, never mind 30 years old, but 70 years old.”

Part of the resistance to holding a public inquiry in 2014 was due to the mystique surrounding the SAS. However the regiment’s reputation has suffered repeated blows over the last decade.

An inquiry is underway into murders allegedly committed by the SAS in Afghanistan, with covert operations in Syria and Libya also being probed for war crimes, plus a drug dealing case against soldiers in Hereford.

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