Stolen Years

In 1984, Simranjit Singh Mann resigned from the Indian Police Service in protest of Operation Blue Star, the Indian Army operation ordered by Indira Gandhi, then prime minister, that cleared the Golden Temple complex of Sikh militants. Mann was subsequently charged, among other things, with conspiracy to assassinate Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. A passionate Sikh whose radical beliefs were honed by his family, Mann went underground and was apprehended while trying to flee the country. He spent five years in prison, after which all charges were dropped. Three decades after Blue Star, his daughter Pavit Kaur looks back on the years her father spent in prison. In this disarmingly honest and emotionally charged account, Pavit Kaur documents her father’s hellish journey through the Indian prison system. This is also a personal story and the story of a family during one of the most fraught times in India’s history.