Floods a reminder of 1988, when Maj Gen was killed

CHANDIGARH: Whenever Punjab is deluged, its people remember the tragic September of 1988, when the lakes of Pong and Bhakhra Nangal dams had come close to bursting and the militants had killed a Major General, who had prevented this apocalypse.

Just three days of rain in 1988 had forced open the floodgates of Pong and Bhakhra Nangal dams to save their reservoirs, but it led to the state’s worst ever-flood that killed 600 people, marooned 2,500 villages, and ravaged the Kharif crop. And as if that was not enough, Major General B N Kumar, who was then heading the Bhakhra Beas Management Board (BBMB) that ran the hydroelectricty plants built over major north Indian rivers, was murdered.

Two allegations turned a natural disaster into a controversy. First, that the floodgates had opened without adequate warning, and second, that those had opened too fast. Punjab’s former assistant engineer irrigation department Sukhdarshan Natt, in whose presence at the Pong dam’s floodgates were opened, said: “Punjab’s rainy season is from July 1 to September 30, with September being the lean month, when the authorities prefer to fill the reservoirs to capacity in the first two months. So, by the middle of September 1988, these lakes were filled. However, a sudden, 3-4 days of downpour in the catchments during last week spiked the water level.”

Remembering that scene, Natt said: “The floodgates were never opened so wide, neither before nor after 1988. About 3 lakh cusecs of water from Pong was released into the Beas and about 4 lakh cusecs from Bhakhra Nangal into the Satluj. The fury of Satluj forced us to open all 52 gates of the Harike barrage to save it from collapsing. The water released into the Satluj was almost double the river’s capacity of 2 lakh cusecs.” So, the tragedy was part man-made and part act of God.

Weather experts suggest that the BBMB had expected the rivers’ catchments to receive less than 120 millimetres of rainfall that September, but from September 23 to 26, it had poured more than 640 mm in each area. In 1998, with militancy also at its peak in Punjab, the sudden opening of floodgates was taken as BBMB plot against the state, and because major general Kumar defended the decision, citing weather charts that predicted a dry September, terrorists killed him 40 days later in Sector 35, on November 7.

This May, 35 years later, the Major General’s name appeared in the news once again when his assassination’s mastermind was killed in the heart of Lahore, Pakistan. Paramjeet Singh Panjwar, was chief of the Khalistan Commando Force that that executed several terror attacks in 1988,