The mythmaking against Gill, however, is indispensable to terrorist justification - when the murder of random innocents is the essence of your strategy, it is necessary to vilify the adversary who brought you to your knees, to distract from your own demonic acts. While the campaign against Gill builds on falsehood, there are publicly established acts of mass murder executed by the Khalistanis. Indeed, these real butchers were responsible for some of the most appalling slaughters of innocents. Among the most egregious of these were the train massacres in which 74 persons were murdered in cold blood in January 1991, another 76 in June the same year and 52 that December; the slaughter of 38 bus passengers in July 1987; the killing of 35 at a festival gathering in March 1988; and of 33 killed in indiscriminate firing in a crowded market in 1990, among numberless other acts of carnage. About 65 per cent of all civilians killed by the Khalistanis were Sikhs, the community the terrorists claimed to be fighting for.
Worse, from a Khalistani perspective, Gill exposed their cowardice before the world. The 'kharkus', who had sworn to fight to the last man, came out, their hands raised in the air, at the end of Operation Black Thunder, even as the world media watched. Gill led the media into the cavernous 'tehkhanas' of Akal Takht, where corpses of women - raped and tortured for months, and brutally executed - were discovered. The recovery of mutilated corpses in sewers around the Golden Temple had become routine in the prelude to Operation Black Thunder (as before Bluestar earlier). On all this butchery and defilement of the Golden Temple, the vociferous advocates of 'Khalistan' maintain silence.
These atrocities against innocents by the Khalistanis were a conscious choice, and an equally conscious rejection of the Sikh way of war, of the idea of 'sant-sipahi', of the ideal of the Gurus and their companions who embraced torture and death, rather than accept any act that would bring the faith to dishonour, or bring suffering upon innocents.
Gill also exposed the widespread indignities the Khalistanis inflicted on the general population: the routine rape of women in homes where the terrorists sought forcible shelter; the intimidation and murder that facilitated their extortion; and the accumulation of wealth, the networks of organised criminal enterprises that the terrorist leadership developed.
Gill didn't just defeat the Khalistani terror in Punjab; he restored the pride and honour of the Sikhs.