Mr. G. S. Tohra (M.P.) president of the powerful Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, in Amritsar was extremely critical of the deliberate massive publicity given by the Government to the Khalistan demand voiced by a few individuals. These ‘disinformation’ techniques are clearly intended to discredit the entire Sikh community across the country by amplifying and exploiting the Khalistan demand of the few. Sikhs have always been most patriotic and have always stood for a United India. Today we would have been living in a united peaceful Punjab if the Punjabi-speaking Hindus had not disowned their own Punjabi language. It was a misrepresentation of colossal magnitude in Indian History on the part of over ten million Hindus who lied in the Census and disowned their Punjabi language with open encouragement and support from their Arya Samaj and Jan Singh leaders at a time when there was not even a single Hindi newspaper in the combined state.
“Most of these millions of misguided souls were so totally ignorant of Hindi that evens their one sentence of historic lie “we are Hindi speaking” was uttered in the Punjabi language. It was this platform of falsehood which became the foundation of Haryana und the basic cause of the division of our united Punjab.”
The hatred for the Punjabi language continues in Haryana where Punjabi has been denied the status of second language, even though thirty per cent of Haryana’s population is still Punjabi-speaking and Punjab is their neighboring state. On the other hand Punjab is the only non-Hindi state, where Hindi has been accorded favored treatment. It is a compulsory subject up to matriculation and every employee of the state government must acquire this standard before being confirmed. Punjab was the first state to use Hindi for correspondence with the Hindi-speaking States.
The Hindu opposition to the naming of Guru Gobind Singh Marg reflects their anti-Sikh prejudice and clearly implies that Guru Gobind Singh was not Hindu, Their opposition to the Sikh demand for the Golden Temple Express and the holy-city status for Amritsar were only few of the many incidents designed to alienate Sikhs from the Hindu Society. Mr Tohra then cited some examples of broken promises from Mr Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi and explained how the Sikh race has been sinned against in Free India, notwithstanding its stupendous sacrifices and sufferings, first for its freedom and then for its defence and development.
Mr Tohra was particularly critical of mischievous interpretation of Gurdwara Act. He emphasised that the proposed Act will be applied only to the historic Gurdwaras and it will not cover the holy Shrines managed by the Sindhis, Udasis, Nirmalas, Nihangs etc. He strongly criticized the Government for banning the Sikh soldiers from carrying the swords, while Gurkhas in army continue to carry Khukri on their person. Mr Tohra appealed to the Hindus and Sikhs of Punjab to maintain unity and cordiality in the face of the Congress Government. He claimed that by limiting the Sikh recruitment to 2% the Government has brought communal politics in the armed forces and has confirmed its discrimination against the patriotic Sikhs. publishers note, Mr O. P. Tyagi (MP) says, “This book is Magnum Opus of Maharishi Dayanand Saraswati, founder of Arya Samaj. This book is regarded as the Bible of Arya Samaj and is as immortal as the truth is. We are particularly tempted to call it a ‘Cult’ because we hate to see it identified with our ancient (and yet modern) highly philosophical and tolerant religion of Hinduism. We were really amazed to hear that over half of the Punjab and Haryana Hindus are followers of this fanatic cult. How members of this kind of hateful sect can co-exist with other religions is indeed hard to understand. After studying their slander on Guru Nanak and his humble teachings, we became inclined to look at the causes of Hindu-Sikh conflict in a different perspective; Arya Samaj support for the Nirankaris and the object of their similar other anti-Sikh activities became self-explanatory. We wondered how many Arya Samajists in the garb of Hinduism have helped influence Hindu national opinion through some of their own controlled media and also perhaps affect the Government’s judgment and its decisions through the positions they may occupy in the ruling party and the senior posts they hold in the Civil Service. The anti-Sikh mentality of former Home Minister Gulzarilal Nanda, and former Prime Minister Charan Singh are perhaps due to their origin in Arya Samaj and also responsible for influencing the usually impartial attitude of the Congress towards minorities.
