In June 1984 the Indian Army entered the Golden Temple complex at Amritsar in Operation Blue Star, to remove Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and armed followers who had fortified the Akal Takht. The operation used tanks and artillery. The Akal Takht was heavily damaged. The Sikh Reference Library, holding manuscripts and records, burned or was removed; what happened to it has never been fully accounted for.
It was conducted between 1 and 8 June, over the martyrdom anniversary of Guru Arjan Dev Ji, when the complex was full of pilgrims. Official figures gave 493 civilians and 83 soldiers killed. Other estimates are several times higher. Simultaneous operations were conducted at around forty other gurdwaras.
On 31 October 1984 Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards. In the first days of November organised mobs killed Sikhs in Delhi, Kanpur, Bokaro and elsewhere. The official count for Delhi is just under three thousand. Voters' lists were used to identify houses. Convictions have been very few and very late.
The decade that followed in Punjab, of militancy and of counter-insurgency, killed something in the region of twenty thousand people. Both armed groups and the state killed civilians. Human rights bodies have documented mass cremations of unidentified bodies in Amritsar district.
None of these events has had a full public accounting. That absence, more than any single fact about them, is what shapes how they are discussed in Punjab now.
This page states what is on the record and marks what is contested. It is not a settled history and nobody should present it as one.
Operation Woodrose ran through the summer of 1984 across the Punjab countryside, with detentions under the emergency legislation of that period. It is the part of the year least covered in any account and the numbers held are not agreed.
A succession of commissions and committees examined the November killings between 1985 and the 2010s. Each was constituted on different terms, several were rejected by the complainants, and the prosecutions that reached conviction did so more than thirty years afterward.
Every element of this is contested: the casualty figures, the necessity of the operation, the organisation of the killings and the responsibility for them. This page states the sequence and does not adjudicate it, and no account that claims to settle it should be trusted quickly.