Douglas Alexander – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Douglas Alexander on 2014-04-03.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, whether the Cabinet Secretary was tasked with assessing whether there were gounds for a further inquiry into the events surrounding the storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

Mr William Hague

The Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood’s investigation looked at why the UK provided advice to the Indian authorities, the nature of the UK assistance and the impact of that assistance in Operation Blue Star at the Golden Temple. As I told Parliament in my statement to the House on 4 February 2014, Official Report, columns 139-142, the report and the documents we published clearly show the limited nature of UK advice on Operation Blue Star, and that there were no grounds for a further inquiry.