Sikhs Storm 2 Trains, Kill 110 in Punjab

Two heavily armed hit squads of Sikh militants stormed two passenger trains in strife-torn Punjab state Saturday, raking them with indiscriminate machine-gun fire and killing at least 110 people in the bloodiest single attack of their decade-long campaign for a separate Sikh homeland.

The coordinated assaults on the trains, which were forcibly stopped and raided on two separate railway lines 15 miles apart, were the most brazen and deadly attempts yet by the insurgents to force cancellations of state elections this week, which are scheduled to give Punjab its first democratically chosen government in four years.

The militants, who already have assassinated more than 20 candidates in a deadly campaign to compel cancellation of next Saturday’s balloting, worked with lethal efficiency in the two railway attacks, according to police officials in the state capital of Chandigarh.

The trains were stopped within 10 minutes of each other when militants on board pulled the emergency chains several miles outside the industrial city of Ludhiana, a hotbed of Sikh extremism and the site of earlier killings.

Small terrorist units, all wearing the black and orange turbans that are trademarks of the Sikh militants, then casually stepped up to civilians aboard the trains’ well-marked passenger cars and raked them with gunfire. Police said that at least 75 passengers were mowed down on the first train about three miles west of Ludhiana and that at least 35 were killed on the second train 10 miles to the south of the city, located about 200 miles north of New Delhi.

Friday night, the central government in New Delhi had declared Punjab to be a “disturbed area,” deploying the Indian army throughout the state and giving it broad powers to search, seize and arrest people on mere suspicion of wrongdoing.

“We are determined to thwart any attempts to scuttle the present elections,” Tejendra Khanna, the state’s most senior bureaucrat, said just 24 hours before the massacres. “We shall hold these at all costs and have an elected setup. This is a very sacred rite and has to be protected with all the might.”

Subodh Kant Sahay, India’s deputy interior minister who was the target of an assassination attempt 10 days ago because of his bid to win Ludhiana’s seat in elections for the national Parliament, called the attacks “a desperate action,” and he urged voters not to be swayed by the terrorists’ latest tactics.

Several national political parties have called on election officials in New Delhi to postpone or cancel the Punjab elections because of the bloodshed there, which has left nearly 2,000 dead this year and claimed as many as 50,000 lives since Sikh extremists launched their campaign for a separate homeland called Khalistan, or Land of the Pure, in early 1982.

But the government of India’s caretaker Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar, who negotiated the state elections in meetings with Sikh leaders several months ago as a means of neutralizing the militants, has refused to stop the balloting, vowing instead to saturate the state with tens of thousands of security personnel.

Most of the security forces have been assigned to seven other violence-prone states where final voting--except for Punjab--took place Saturday in India’s staggered and once-delayed national elections. National balloting began May 20, but two subsequent election dates were put off for several weeks after the assassination of Congress-I Party leader Rajiv Gandhi during a campaign rally in southern India on May 21.

The national elections, which already had left more than 250 dead nationwide before Saturday night, have been the deadliest in India’s 44 years of independence, and officials deliberately staggered polling dates to permit security forces to be deployed in the largest numbers possible in each of India’s 22 states as voting took place.

Voting in Punjab, where the largest and most militant of nearly a dozen Sikh extremist factions vowed to use murder and violence to enforce a call to boycott the election, was set for June 22--seven days after the rest of the country completed voting--to let all of the nation’s paramilitary security forces take up positions there.