Sikh struggle for national liberation is the result of a progressively developing consciousness since 1947, from the unceasing experience of injustice and denial of our socioeconomic, linguistic and religious rights. We are determined to pursue the struggle for freedom to its logical conclusion writes Wadhawa Singh Babbar.
Even as we, a representative organization of the Sikh struggle for freedom in Indian Punjab, take to pen and paper to introduce our cause and our plight under Hindu tyranny to you, we cannot fail to be a conscious of that irony of history which is underlying our situation today. Our ancestors, even as they processed different religions, belonged 1o a common value system, which was cemented by the bonds of a common language, culture and a shared historical background. Those elements of the past still weld our souls, in spite of the cataclysmic history by which we have been divided for two years short of five decades. It is from the consciousness or this past that we approach you for understanding, fraternal sympathy for our cause of freedom and, to say the Ieast, moral support.
You are a leader of the Muslim people in that part of land where our ancestors had once, as sons of the soil, shared rich experiences of life: their agonies and ecstasies, anxieties and expectations of their common struggle for freedom from the British colonial yoke, and had concertedly striven for dignity of life under self-rule. Although the Hindu nationalist media and several agencies of the Indian state have relentlessly denigrated our struggle as a militant movement, you must certainly know that for over four decades and a half we Sikhs have been engaged in an intense struggle for socio economic and political justice, and preservation of our cultural and religious identity as a people against the Hindu tyrannical establishment in India.
Of course, for all these decades, the Sikh society has been politically fragmented. To some extent this was inevitable, given the circumstances in which they had to first find the moorings of life following the baleful legacy of 1947. The Sikh society might have altogether succumbed to the physical and spiritual afflictions of this period had not the vision of life revolving around their religious values sustained them internally. The Sikh struggle against the Indian state is motivated by a vision of society which has become unattainable, our experience under the tyranny of Hindu India over the last 45 years has demonstrated, within the frame. work of the Indian constitution. It is from this experience that we have resolved, with consciousness of the hardships we have to suffer and the sacrifices we have to make in the process, to secede from the institutional structure of Hindu India as the sine qua non of our civilization destiny. We are conscious that the Sikh leaders at the waning of the British colonial epoch had been unable to visualize the evil days which the freedom of India heralded for their community. The Hindu leaders of the congress had fooled them by making spacious promises because without their co-agency Punjab, the granary and shield arm of India, would have federated with Pakistan with its borders meeting the outskirts of Delhi.
As Sikhs we have always learned that we must either attain our just objectives through relentless but righteous struggle, or perish in the process. We initiated the armed struggle in Punjab in 1982 under the conviction that the Sikhs of East Punjab would remain wedded to slavery and the misery of Hindu India until they dissolve its evil in sacrifice, light and blood. However contrary to the Indian propaganda, Babbar Khalsa is neither a terrorist organization, not does it’s an action indiscriminate killings. All our militant actions, as even the Hindu Indian press often admits, have centered on concrete moral and political issues pertinent to the Sikh national liberation struggle. From sacrifices we do not shirk, and as you might be aware, thousands of us have already laid down our lives consciously to sustain the struggle. Babbar Khalsa International, since its formation in 1982, has maintained that as an insignificant minority of less than two per cent of India’s population, the Sikhs of East Punjab can never attain their aspirations of freedom by adhering exclusively to electoral methods to express their will. You might recount that marshalled on one side of the controversy on the elections in early 1992 were those Sikh groups who, in spite of their grievances, viewed the geo-political entity of India as an individual whole. Pitted against them were those radical groups, led by our organization, which attained that an irrevocable separation from India’s institutional framework and its ideology are preconditions for the fulfillment of the Sikhs” civilization aspirations. By refusing to take part in the elections to Indian parliament and the State legislative assembly within in the framework of a constitution which, under its articles 99 and 188, requires the elected to take “an oath of true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India as by law established,” the radical Sikh groups relayed the message that they are now beyond the last barrier of thralldom to the Indian dominion. The boycott of the elections, by the radical Sikh groups, represented a clarity of approach in their political philosophy, which has remained largely unrecognized: It emphasized the point that their claim to the right to self-determination is not actuated by the desire to take part in the process of political power as an end in itself. their abstention from the Indian. electoral process, although they were in a position to win in the hosting, made it unambiguously clear that they considered the political system of the Indian State as being unworthy of participation, and that they were determined to carry on their just struggle. Obviously, the Congress party could not have captured the state government with a comfortable majority if the Sikhs had not boycotted the elections. This consequence of their decision, the radical Sikh groups had been foreseen. But they maintained that the boycott was the only effective way of showing that. the Sikhs of Punjab have lost all faith in the Indian constitutional framework. Parliamentary elections at the end of 1989 had not only proven that the radical Sikh groups, who stand for national liberation, would easily trounce their moderate rivals in any electoral contest, but also that they would fail to attain their objectives through parliamentary methods. This point has been democratically established, and yet the Indian propaganda machinery continues to denigrate the Sikh struggle for freedom as a militant movement. Acquiescence by the Western countries in the blind policy of repression of Sikhs in Punjab, since their overwhelming boycott of the elections, proves that democratic aspirations, no matter in which form they are conveyed, count for nothing with their government. What hope we have then to seek our right to self-determination through methods of peaceful persuasion or by force? We can blame history for having intrigued against us: We are an insignificant minority of less than two per cent in India’s population; therefore we cannot ever hope to make an effective assertion of our rights democratically.
Article extracted from this publication >> April 7, 1995
