THE SIKH CASE

The Congress Party’s government in Punjab had taken office in early 1992, without an electoral contest against the will of the majority. As you must know, the main Sikh political groups had called for the boycott of 1992 elections. With this call, they wanted to determine democratically whether or not the people of Punjab endorse their agenda of irrevocably breaking with India’s Hindu authoritarian system of polity, which in its forty five years of existence has repudiated every single one of their basic beliefs, their fundamental rights, their socio-economic endeavors and even their religious, cultural and linguistic identity. An overwhelming majority of Punjab’s Sikhs abstained from voting in the elections, even as the government arrested all the Sikh leaders who had endorsed the boycott call and three hundred thousand soldiers did rounds of Punjab’s 12,000 villages to ensure that the “terrorists” did not interfere against the people’s right to franchise. The Sikh boycott of elections, like their vote for Simranjit Singh Mann’s candidates in November 1989, conclusively established that the majority of them endorse the agenda of irrevocably breaking with Indian constitutional system However, the Congress Party’s government in Punjab claims that it represents the democratic mandate to eliminate the “anti.-national” elements. The Indian State and its ideological representatives continue to denigrate the Sikh struggle for radical structural reform in Punjab’s polity as a terrorist movement. The Western countries, although they untiringly proclaim themselves as paragons of democracy and freedom for all people of the world, continue to acquiesce to India’s blind policy of repression of Sikhs in Punjab.

What are we Sikhs to do then? As Sikhs we have always learnt that we must either attain our just objectives through relentless but righteous struggle, or perish in the process. 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. But the forces of the Indian establishment are merciless and, in shameless contradiction to their profession of non-violence, the Hindu public opinion would rather condone the total annihilation of various nationalities fighting for freedom rather than let them loose from their tyrannical hold. This is absolutely evident from the conduct of the Indian forces in Kashmir, Punjab, northeastern states, and from the enthusiastic commendation of State atrocities against the people of these regions by the large majority of Hindus in India, with the western governments gleefully looking on.

We Sikhs are aware that struggles for freedom from the Hindu totalitarianism of Indian Union government by ethnic and religious minorities and their highhanded repression are not unique to Punjab, either at present or earlier, starting from the armed insurrection for an independent Nagaland in the northeast, which had plagued Jawaharlal Nehru’s first two decades of Premiership.

India knows about these struggles in all the peripheral states of India and their brutal repression by Indian security forces from the beginning of its political independence. But we appeal to you to learn about the uniqueness of the on-going Sikh struggle in Punjab. In 1947, the Sikhs had paid a heavy price for joining India, losing not only the canal colonies but also their important religious shrines in the Western part of the province. They had joined India on the basis of the promises of Indian leaders that the Indian constitution would be truly federal and secular. As the events were to subsequently prove, the Sikh leaders had been naive in believing that the Hindu leaders of India had meant to keep these promises.

The Indian constitution as finally adopted by the Constituent Assembly in November 1949 was diametrically in contradiction not only with the principles of the Cabinet Mission Plan, under whose terms the Constituent Assembly had been organized, but also with the spirit of the Objective Resolution moved by Jawahar Lal Nehru in the Assembly on 13 December 1946. This resolution had declared that “the said territories, (Provinces and the States) shall possess and retain the status of autonomous units, together with residuary powers,” Six months after the resolution a joint meeting of the Union and the provincial Committees which were headed  by Jawahar Lal Nehru and Sardar Patel respectively decided that the Assembly was free to give such additional powers to the Centre as it may consider desirable. By the time the Constitution had been finalized by the drafting Committee it was clear from the Union and the Provincial lists of subjects in the seventh Schedule that the Centre in contradiction with the original scheme of the Constitution had become more powerful over the provinces. Every single important suggestion made by the Sikh members of the Advisory Committee which had been appointed to evolve the statutory provisions for the protection of fundamental rights of citizens and special safeguards for the minorities was completely ignored in the writing of the Constitution. The Sub Committee was dominated by Hindu hawks like Govind Ballabh Pant and K.M. Munshi who had their own perception of the problem. Pant believed that the minorities had been used so far by British imperialism for creating strife, distrust and cleavages between the different sections of the Indian nation. K.M. Munshi, a member of the Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee, opposed the Sikh profession of inseparability of religion and politics. The Article VI of his Draft on Fundamental Rights while guaranteeing “freedom of conscience and the right to profess and practise religion in a manner compatible with public order, morality and health”, emphasised that “the economic, financial and political activities associated with religious worship shall not be deemed to be included in the right to profess or practise religion.” All the important suggestions of Hamam Singh, a member of the Sub­ Committee, were refused. To mention only two of his suggestions that were balked at :

1) Religious minorities in the country shall have the right to establish autonomous institutions for the preservation and development of their culture and to maintain special organizations with powers to levy taxes for maintenance and welfare of such institutions.

2) The Constitution shall provide that in the passing of any Bill motion resolution affecting exclusively a single community members of other communities shall not have a right to vote. Only one suggestion of Harnam Singh was accepted to become a sub-clause of Article 25 of the Constitution the “wearing and carrying of Kirpans shall be deemed to be included in the practices of the Sikh religion.” a clause which, we remember, came into focus when Mr. Mann and other elected members of the last Lok Sabha tried to enter Indian Parliament to take oath of their membership with their kirpans, and were refused entry. The two points made by Ujjal Singh a member of the Minorities Sub Committee, were also refused. They were : (1) The principle of equality of opportunity in government services should not restrict the government from making rules to give special considerations to minorities; and (2) Their places of worship should not be acquired by the State. When responding to an official questionnaire circulated to the members of Sub-Committee, Ujjal Singh and Harnam Singh prepared a joint memorandum demanding reservation of six per cent of seats for the Sikhs in the Central Services and twenty five per cent in the Provincial Services in Punjab and the status of official language to Punjabi in the State, it was given a short shrift.

Presenting the final report of the Advisory Committee on Fundamental Rights and Minorities in May 1949, Chairman Sardar Patel referred to the Sikhs in the following words, “The Sikhs are suffering from the fault of the Sikh community and nobody else. They are suffering from a complex which is called fear complex… so the House will realize and I don’t propose to conceal anything from the House, that religion is only a cloak, a cover for political purposes”. This constitution and its makers were not acceptable to the Sikh members of the Assembly. Hukum Singh and Bhupinder Singh the representatives of the original Akali Dal, while refusing to append their signatures to the draft of the constitution were forced to proclaim, “The Sikhs don’t accept this constitution. The Sikhs reject this Constitution Act.

This declaration of rejection was not actuated by the temporary provocation of feelings but by the fact that the principles which had been agreed upon to form the basis of the Indian Constitution had been systematically and thoroughly undermined in the course of its drafting. They rejected the Indian constitution which completely severed the association of the Indian history with the process of devolution of Central Power as it was initiated by the British reforms in the wake of the Montague – Chelmsford report of 1917. The Indian Constitution not only lacked in the safeguards promised to the Sikhs by Gandhi and Nehru, but also contained selectively discriminatory provisions against the Sikhs. For example, the word Sikh occurs in two different meanings in the Constitution. Referred to as a religious community they are under Article 25, shown to be members of the Hindu religious family along with Jains and Buddhists. The Hindu Code Bill describes Sikhs as a sect within Hinduism.. In the original scheme of the Constituent Assembly the office of a Governor was not vested with indiscriminate powers to interfere in the working of a responsible provincial government. In fact he was not even to be a nominee of the Central government. The memorandum on the Principles of the Provincial Constitution prepared by the Constitutional Advisor to the Assembly in May 1947, had provided that the Governor would be elected by the Provincial Legislature. The provincial Constitution committee had gone a step further in considering direct election of the Governor by the people of the Province or at least through some system of indirect election. A Sub-Committee appointed to consider the issue, consisting of G.G. Kher, K.N. Katju and P Subbaravan had recommended that the Governor should be elected by an electoral college formed in Assembly constituencies on that scale of one elector for every 10,000 voters. The recommendation had been incorporated in the Committee’s Report. But suddenly the leaders decided to transfer all powers from the provinces to the Centre to supervise and direct their functioning. One Brajeshwar Prasad was asked to move the amendment proposing that the Governor should be appointed by the President by warrant under his hand and seal’. This Brajeshwar Prasad used to candidly state that the proposal was contrary to the accepted principles of provincial autonomy federalism and democracy and that these niceties of the Western democracies were not applicable to the conditions in India. Brajeshwar Prasad’s amendment was adopted. This is how the institution of Governor came to have the present form. As a matter of fact the State governments even in the normal times under the Constitution can not function except as puppets of the Central government. They have no independent powers in any area of governance. The Union has usurped the residuary powers of legislation over the States under Articles 246 and 254 of the Constitution. Governors have the power to withhold assent to a Bill passed by the State Legislatures and to render the same to the President who can deny his assent without assigning any reason under Articles 200 and 210. Even the reservation of certain subjects to provincial jurisdiction is no more then a sham as the case of industry under entry 24 in the States List illustrates. Right from the beginning, through the Industrial Policy Resolution of 1948, the Centre assumed monopoly over key industries like arms and ammunition, atomic energy, railway transport, iron and steel, coal, ship building, telephones telegraphs. Through a revision in the Industrial Policy Resolution in 1956 the Union acquired control over many other key industries including oil, electricity, machine tools, fertilizers, drugs etc. The Constitution confers the power on Parliament by entry 52 of the Union List to take over any industry in the States List by issuing a proclamation that it is necessary for the purpose of defence or just in “public interest”. Exercising these powers, Parliament enacted the Industries (Development and Regulation) Act, 1951, transferring 37 items of industry to the control of the Centre. This meant that the Centre alone could grant licenses, regulate production and distribution etc. The Act has been amended ten times since then and today 171 items divided into 38 different categories of industries are reserved for the control of the Union.

But when it comes to taxes the Centre takes all remunerative and elastic taxes. The taxes which had little potential for growth are left to the Provinces. In fact provincial taxes began to shrink. For example land revenue for all States in 1951-52 was about 49 crores (1 crore = 10 million), 21.3 per cent of their total tax revenue. But in 1984-85 land revenue of the states at Rs. 318.41 crores was only 2.6 per cent of their total revenue base. Likewise, the income tax raised by the Union but compulsorily shared with the States was in 1951-52 at Rs. 145.99 crores, amounting to 28. 5 per cent of the total tax revenue of the Union government; it shrunk to just 8.2 per cent at Rs. 1927.66 crores in the year 1984-85. The total tax revenue of the Union in 1984-85 was 23,470. 59 crores and that of all States together Rs. 12, 342.81 crores. On the other hand Union excise duties, which are retained completely by the Centre, have gone up from Rs. 85.78 crores in 1951-52, i.e. 16.7 per cent of its total tax base of 515.65 crores, to Rs. 11.84 or 47.5 per cent ofit in 1984-85. So we see that the States which have the responsibilities for rural development, education, public health, welfare of minorities and the suppressed classes are left with very narrow-based and inelastic tax-resource. The union skimmes off the cream. Of the combined aggregate resources during the period during the period 1951-85, the Union government raised 71.5 per cent and the States  only 28.5 per cent of the tax resources. These resources which the Centre skimms off from the States are spent mostly on defence, interest payment and discharging other non-productive liabilities. During 1980-85 the Union spent 64 per cent ofits total revenue resources and 47 per cent of its capital resources on these heads of expenditure.

Thus, it should be clear that the Indian constitution and its working over the last four and half decades are in total contradiction with the professed goals of India’s freedom struggle and the promises of the Congress leaders that had inspired the Sikhs to throw in their lot with India in 1947. Defence became the paramount objective for these leaders who, professing their unswerving and absolute commitment to non-violence under Gandhiji, had used the issue of non-violent opposition to the Second World War to launch the Quit India movement. Rajendra Prasad, the president of the Constituent Assembly, who had come into politics by joining the movement launched by Gandhi to redeem the bonded conditions of indigo plantation workers of Bihar, now expressed himself against the abolishment of Zarnindari-revenue farming. Gandhi himself, known to the world as the harbinger of appropriate technology, became the father of a nation which had the first nine items of the Union List in its Constitution dealing with Naval, Military and Air Force, Arms and Explosives, Atomic Energy, Defence Industries and Preventive detention. The man who used to equate Swaraj to decentralization of power acquiesced to the partition of India so that its mutilated bulk might survive as a single unit through the coercive force of a strong Centre. These are the so called “merits” of the Indian Constitution which the Sikh representatives in the Constituent Assembly had rejected. It has nodoubt taken the Sikhs as a people 45 years to realize what it means to be yoked to India under this constitution. It was their naivity that they for so long believed in the possibility of reforming the Indian State through constitutional and democratic methods. The makers of the Indian Constitution too did not need the approval of the Sikhs any longer. Sardar Patel while making the aforementioned comments on the Sikhs chose not to make one single reference to the plight of the Sikhs who in hundreds of thousands had been massacred, raped, robbed and uprooted in those parts of Punjab which had been awarded to become Pakistan. The Congress leaders had earlier made specious promises to the Sikhs because without their coagency Punjab, the granary and the shield arm of India, and which provided at that time India’s only road link with Jammu and Kashmir would have federated with Pakistan extending its borders to the outskirts of Delhi. Now that they had their India and a centralized system to rule it, they decided to put down the Sikhs who with their combination of religion and life, and the principle they follow to fight injustice as a religious obligation, had never been liked by the Congress leaders including Gandhi. Now they decided to deny to them even their language and their religious identity.

The States Reorganization Commission, appointed by the Prime Minister in December 1953, while recommending reorganization of States for the rest of India on the basis of linguistic homogeneity, however, rejected the demand for the formation of a separate Punjabi speaking State. Hindus of Punjab were called upon by their leaders to disown their mother tongue, Punjabi, and to register their language to be Hindi. When the government made a small concession to the Sikh leaders by introducing the so-called Regional Formula which granted the status of official language to Punjabi at the district level, the Hindu elements of Punjab who wanted Hindi alone to be recognized as the official language of the state started a violent agitation against it. Even when Punjabi Suba was constituted following the special circumstances of War with Pakistan in 1965, large tracts of Punjabi speaking areas were given away to Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. Chandigarh which was to become the capital of Punjab for its loss of Lahore, was retained as the Union Territory and the joint capital of Haryana and Punjab. And although Indira Gandhi had announced the award of transfer of Chandigarh to Punjab in January, 1970, which was again taken up in the Rajiv -Longowal Accord of July 1985 as if it were a big concession to Punjab, Chandigarh twenty five years after the award remains a Union Territory. Under the sections 78 and 80 of Punjab Reorganization Act. 1966 the Central government acquired the power to control and dispense river waters of Punjab as well as hydel power generated from Punjab’s river waters. These powers acquired by the Centre are not only contrary to the riparian laws but are also violative of the Indian Constitution and the Statute on river waters which states categorically that the Centre has no authority to allocate waters from the rivers of a State which flow only within its own territories to non-riparian States, or to assume their management. Article 246 (3) enjoined with the Entry 17 of the List II in the Constitution confers on the State legislatures the power to legislate in respect of their “waters”. Neither the River Boards Act of 1956 nor the interstate Water Dispute Act, 1956 empowers the Union government to interfere with water disputes unless the dispute concerned interstate rivers. But contrary to the statute and its own Constitution the indian government took away from Punjab its natural rights over its river-water resources. With its cultivable area of 10.5 million acres, its water requirement for agriculture which has become dependent on intensive irrigation, is 50 to 60 Million Acre Feet of water. The total availability of water from the Sutlej, Beas and Ravi rivers is only 37 Million Acre Feet which is 23 Million Acre Feet, short of its actual requirement. To make up for the deficiency, they have had to depend on tubewell irrigation whose costs are prohibitive, specially if pump sets are run on diesel instead of electricity. The most dangerous aspect of this dependence on sub-soil water is that the source is getting fast depleted, threatening the advent of semi-arid conditions in Punjab, and spelling doom to the predominant population of Sikh farmers.

The Hindu Indian State is also responsible for conspiring to erode and ultimately eliminate the Sikh religious identity. From the very beginning it followed the policy of encouraging those sects and groups such as Nirankaris, Radha Swamis, Namdharis etc which under the guise of being Sikhs have been trying to dilute the Sikh beliefs, and corrupt their commitment to their holy book, and the “word”, their only and the true Guru. These sects were encouraged to set up false gurudom, which is fundamentally disallowed in Sikhism, and tried to exploit the human weakness for personalized relationship to God’s laisonmen. This trend of corruption of Sikhism being encouraged by Hindu establishment came into clash with the true Sikh faith and erupted virulently through the incident of April 13, 1978. Nirankaris were instigated to organize their jamboree with the conscious objective to clash with the Sikhs who opposed  their heretical practices and their derogatory comments on the Sikh Gurus. When the Sikhs went to oppose them, the Nirankaris led by one of their followers Deputy Commissioner of Gurdaspur, Mr. Niranjan Singh, opened fire killing thirteen of the protestors . They hoped to overawe the Sikhs with the help of the Central government which had helped them to hold their blasphemous gathering in Amritsar on the birth day of the Khalsa. The government instead of punishing the killers, supported them openly. They were allowed to repeat their jamborees at Kanpur and Delhi and government tacitly allowed them to meet the Sikh protest with the force of arms. The trial of the killers of Amritsar incident was manipulated, the legal jurisdiction was flouted in transferring the case to a court outside the State, in Kamal. The killers were acquitted, predictably. The State government refused to appeal against the acquittal in the High Court. Sikhs then came to the conclusion that they ought not to expect justice in Hindu India. They cannot have freedom of religion in this State, and that their identity and survival were themselves at stake. It is from this premise that the present phase of the Sikh struggle commenced. That this premise is not the product of a paranoid sensitivity would be evident to all students of Indian history. Buddhism which had its origin in India and was until 9th century the predominant religion in the whole of Asia has almost totally disappeared from India, Buddha himself having been coopted in the Hindu pantheon . Another example of elimination of ethnics and minorities can be cited from Soviet Union which until recently had been Hindu India’s strongest ally. The census of 1926 in the Soviet Union, with its extremely heterogeneous ethnic structure, listed 178 ethnic groups, and the census of 1959, 101 ethnic groups. The census of 1970 listed ony 91 nationalities of more then ten thousand people each. (SJ.BROOK “Ethnographic process in the USSR-Soviet Ethnography 4(1971:23). The Soviet establishment explained the disappearance of some 80 ethnic entities to be the result of ethnic consolidation, a cliche which has its parallel in Hindu India’s slogan of National Integration. Even then the Sikh struggle which started from August 1982 was based on a charter of demands which could have been resolved within the framework of the Indian Union. But in June 1984 Mrs. Indira Gandhi ordered army action in Punjab, particularly against the Golden Temple. The assault against the Golden Temple was launched on 5 June 1984, the martyrdom day of Guru Arjun. The gory details of the army action in Punjab are too well known to need repetition here. The assassination of Mrs. Gandhi was a riposte to the army assault on the Golden Temple of Amritsar, the Sikh Vatican. And then followed the anti-Sikh mayhem, not spontaneous but systematically orchestrated, claiming 3000 innocent Sikh lives. The Hindu judiciary refused to inquire into these episodes, and the Hindu press only reproached the Sikhs. Police officials in Punjab whose anti-terrorist campaigns received imprimatur as cover stories were being quoted: “For one innocent person killed by militants, the police would kill ten of them”. No one asked who would be these ten! For the first time the institutions of the State as well as those who called themselves independent were being cavalier in upholding an extra-judicial approach to tackle a discontented people. Then in March, 1988 the Indian Parliament went out to the extent of constitutionally suspending their right to life, selectively, through 59th Amendment of the Constitution. The selective denial of right to life to the Sikhs was enacted into a constitutional principle although there were already many black laws in force which gave extraordinary powers to the State to meet the challenge of Sikh militancy. The National Security Act, amended by the Act No. 24 of 1984 and No. 60 of 1984 enabled the government to detain any person suspected of involvement in activities

prejudicial to the defence and security of India for a maximum of two years without trial and extension of the period of detention by another term of two years. The Terrorists Affected Areas (Special Courts) Act of August 1984 makes it mandatory for the Special Courts, established to try persons involved in making imputations or assertions prejudicial to national integration or in waging war against the State, to conduct the trials in camera. Those who are tried by the special courts under the Act are presumed to be guilty until they can prove the contrary. The Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act provides for death sentence for terrorist crimes involving murder. It also gives powers to superintendents of police to use confessions made by suspected terrorists in the course of their interrogation as evidence against them. Yet the government was able to contrive the opinion that these measures were not draconian enough and that it was necessary to absolutely deny the right to life of the people of Punjab. The reports on the state of civil rights in Punjab brought out by organizations like Amnesty International, Asia Watch, and Punjab Human Rights Organization make it plain that the sovereignty of the Indian State in Punjab is not limited by the rule of law. The Indian State in Punjab today, as a model of anti­ democratic power, is without a shadow of legitimacy. Pursuing the policy of repression with impunity, not caring even for a pretence to legality, the sovereignty of the Indian State for the Sikhs has become the antithesis of democratic consent.

We do not want to dwell on the all too well known reports of custodial tortures and killings of thusands of innocent Sikhs in Punjab. But what we wish to state here is our conclusion that the brutality of the Indian security agencies like that of their Hindu political masters is irredeemable. The reports on their brutalities and inhumanity are as old as these establishments themselves, and there is no reforming them. The following are some examples : On September 9, 1854 the Governor in Council of Fort St. George appointed a Commission “for the investigation of alleged cases of torture at Madras”. The report was released on April 16, 1855 after the commission had examined 529 oral and 1440 written complaints. The Commission found that the practice of torture for collecting revenue, for obtaining confessions every now and then, extorting money was prevalent in the Madras province.”The methods of torture were described by the Commission in its report: “Among the principle tortures in vogue … we find the following : Twisting a rope tightly around the entire arm or leg so as to impede circulation : lifting up by moustache : suspending by arms while tied behind the back : placing scratching insects, such as the carpenter beetle on the naval, scrotum and other sensitive parts: dipping in wells and rivers till the party is half suffocated : squeezing the testicles :beating with sticks : prevention of sleep : nipping the flesh with pincers: putting pepper or red chillies in the eyes or introducing them into the private parts of men or women :these cruelties occasionally continued until death sooner or later ensues.” (Torture Commission Report. Para 67) Those who are familiar with the current methodology of third degree practised in every police station, innumerable interrogation centres and many private houses and canal guest houses converted into illegal detention centres know that many new innovations have been added to the methods of torture discovered by the Torture Commission of 1854. The Second Police Commission was appointed in July 1902. By then the Police Act of 1861, Indian Penal Code of 1860 and the Indian Evidence Act passed in 1872 had been in operation for decades.The Indian Evidence Act passed in 1872 made confessions to the police officers inadmissible in evidence by their sections 25, 26 and 27. Further the Indian Penal Code made torture a punishable offence. Its sections 330and 331, which remain part of the code, read : Section 330: “Whoever voluntarily causes hurt for the purpose of extorting from the sufferer or any person interested in the sufferer, any confession or any information which may lead to the detection of an offence or misconduct, …. shall be punishable with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to seven years, and shall also be liable to fine”. Section 331: “Whoever voluntarily causes grievous hurt for the purpose of extorting from the sufferer, or from any person interested in the sufferer, any confession or any information which may lead to the detection of an offence…. shall be punishable with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years,and shall also be liable to fine”. Yet the Indian Police Commission of 1902-3, also known as the Fraser Commission since the President was Andrew H. L. Fraser, then Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces, found that the police force continued to follow the third degree. Its report said: “What wonder is it that the people are said to dread the police, and to do all they can to avoid any connection with a police investigation? Deliberate association with criminals in their gains, deliberately false charges against innocent persons on the ground of private spite or village faction, deliberate torture of suspected persons and other most flagrant abuses occur…” (Report of the Indian Police Commission 1902-3, paras 24-25). After Indian independence nine State Police Commissions were appointed. The Punjab Police Commission of 1961-62 which was headed by a former Chief Justice of India, Mehr Chand Mahajan had in his report some comments to make on the CIA of Punjab : “The Commission is of the opinion that most of the investigating officers have no training in the use of scientific methods of investigation, and the only method of investigation known to them is that of third degree. Third degree methods are used by them in one form or the other to extract confession or else such statements as make the use of section 27 of the Indian Evidence Act possible. The Central Investigation Agency, a special branch of this organization charged with the duty of investigation of heinous crimes has acquired notoriety in the public for third degree methods and is styled the “butcher – khana” (Butcher’s working place). Instances of people dying as a result of torture by the police are not wanting and this is a big blot on the organization.”(Report of the Punjab Commission , pp 64-65) The third All India Police Commission , also called the National Police Commission. appointed in November 1977 discussed the use of third degree methods used by police officials in its Fourth Report released in June 1980, and regretted that several police officers, “under pressure of work and driven by a desire to achieve quick results” use force on witnesses, suspects and accused. But if the conduct of the Indian security forces has not improved for the last hundred and fifty years, inspite of commissions and indictments, legislative reforms, it is futile to expect any improvement in their sense of respect for human rights for the future either. It is actually futile to blame the security agencies alone which constitute only one limb of the society. It is not feasible that they would remain completely capricious and cruel while the other institutions and their leaders operate with the sense of fairness and justice . The police can only be what the public will allow it to become, and this has little to do with pious professions in the Constitution and laws. Hindu mind remains perfectly at home with contradictions of profession and practice, rooted in the structure of delusion to which it is attached. The grosser, the darker their actual practice in the world of dust and tears, the more immaculate their utopian pronouncements become. The alienation between the Hindu thought and the Hindu reality is itself of frightening proportions. They might writhe in a abysm of misery, but would spawn fantasies of emancipation and past glory in the autonomous sphere of thought . Their thought itself, anemiated by its dissocation from life, feeds like a ghoul on thier ideas and exhausts them even before they can touch the plane of actualization. This fundamental evil of Hindu society is its ingrained craving to debase others. First and foremost comes the sacerdotal order of internal oppression, epitomized in the hierarchy of caste. Under the caste system, it is the prerogative, nay the moral function of the high castes to injure and humiliate the low born, who in turn must accept debasement as their inescapable spiritual condition that only death can dissolve.The caste system of Hindus ordains humanity to live in implacable bonds of oppression and servility. More than two thirds of their population – the Shudras and the untouchables, do not stand to gain anything from the political and social changes, which concern only upper castes.This is the key factor which remains unchanged that was responsible for the apathy of their people and it explains the humiliation which the Hindu India has suffered from foreign aggressors down the ages. What stakes can the majority of their people, suffering without reward and without hope, have in defending a State which stands at the apex of a system of oppression? Caste is merely the main index of their system of spiritual and secular oppression which stifles the creative potential of the people and binds them to the torture wheel of self hate , self injury, and external prostration. The depth of cruelty inherent in the totality of human interactions under this system, is truly immeasurable.The irony is that a pitiless society like theirs, which inficts so much violence on itself, should parade before the world as a paragon of non­ violence and co-existence. More than a hoax, India’s pretence of being a non-violent society is a cynical exercise in deception which deserves to be denounced and universally condemned. This desolate State of Hindu India is as pathetic as it is outrageous. It is pathetic because of the spectacle of human suffering. It is outrageous because it entails such a prodigious waste of human potential. We have realized that the cure for this India, the embodiment of violence and degradation, is not in the Constitutional and legislative fig-leaves under which its dominant classes seek to hide the shame of their oppression. Untouchability, for instance is an offence under law. But every year hundreds of Harijans are burnt alive in collective pyres for daring to challenge caste oppression. Bonded labour, likewise, has been abolished by their constitution. But according to the Bonded Liberation Front, an organization working for the emancipation of this wretched lot, at least five million people are still held in slavery under that system. Sati was abolished way back in 1824. However, not only do we hear of isolated incidents of Sati, but we witness right under our eyes, in Hindu metropolises, the steady rise of those gruesome “dowry deaths”, which usually involve the burning alive of young wives by their husbands and mothers-in-law for their failing to bring with them sufficient dowry. In the year 1929, the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, popularly known as Sharada Act was passed. But even today we come across any number of baby-brides and baby-bridegrooms -unexceptionable toddlers­ put through the rituals of marriage by their criminal parents. Most of the aboriginal tribes – the Santhals, Gonds, Mundas, Oraons, Bhils etc – have been brought to the verge of extinction. They are driven out of their natural abodes in forests, which are declared reserved for industrial monoculture or converted into game sanctuaries. We could go on cataloguing the manifestations of Hindu India’s unremitting violence against the underprivileged, minorities, the outcastes, – the lower limbs of the social body as their scriptures describe them. Most of the people tortured or killed in State custody apart from the Sikhs and the Muslims of Punjab and Kashmir, most of the women kidnapped, raped or killed in the countryside by the Hindu landlords or their henchmen, most of the prostitutes, prisoners and beggars in their cities, all the human flotsam edged out of the fringes of society by the machinations of the privileged, are all examples of Hindu India’s relentless war against its own people.

The roots of this violence in the Hindu India against those born meek and defenceless run very deep indeed. To strike at its contemporary manifestations without tracing their sources in the tradition would be like snipping the boughs and branches of a tree whose deep roots are left untouched and will soon send forth new sap up the trunk. Cosmetic reforms of that sort are worse than being ineffective; they exert their own corrupting logic, by breeding hypocrisy and spreading anaesthesia. Their implementers and their beneficiaries, caught in the vortex of delusion, are slowly transformed into spokesmen of the status quo. No genuine reparation of their society is possible without their oppressed first dismantling those pipelines of primeval corruption which circulate ever fresh poison into their contemporary perversions. Those who profess commitment to the cause of the depressed castes, the so-called backwards, will have to reject lock, stock and barrel, all scriptural traditions which enjoin barbaric punishment against Shudras even for the most trifling transgressions, such as trying to acquire Sanscritic knowledge and thereby trespassing on high-caste preserves. Like wise, those who champion -sex equality must need repudiate the scriptural and conventional beliefs which sanction atrocities against womankind. Even the later vedic period was familiar with the notion that only sons, not daughters, are competent to secure heaven for the ancestors, Though it is difficult to say exactly when, the Pumsavana ritual seems to have originated very early in the Brahmanic tradition, the ceremony, still in vogue among many high caste Hindus is based on the absurd notion that all embryos are orginally male and turn female only if the foetus gets corrupted by malignant spirits. A hymn in the Atharvaveda pleads “O, Pinga, defend the child in the womb, let not the evil one turn the male into a female”. By the time the Dharma Shastras were compiled. Hindu society seems to have already reached its spiritual nadir. The Brahmins legislated with a mind which had become perverted by the sloth and senility of their exclusively liturgical profession and the Kshatriyas enforced these laws with a cruelty which can arise only from the loss of true martial traditions. In the priest-plagued country, life became cheap. While their myriad gods revelled in absolute glory, human beings were deprived of all rights and stripped of all dignity. You need only to read Manu to realize that Hindu religion in that age had already become the pure negation of man by man. The Dharma Shastras characterized women as personifications of falsehood, caprice and lust; to be kept under strict control and whose only hope of salvation lay in the unquestioning service of their husbands – be they drunkards, gamblers or debauchees. Many Puranas praise the institution of Sati. So do the Smritis. The spread oflarge temples in the period from the 5th to the 12th century was accompanied by the rise of temple prostitution. The famous Khajuraho temples in Central India and the Konark temple on the eastern coast of Orissa, the major tourist attractions of Hindu India today, bear witness in stone to the perversion of this age. The Somnath temple which Mohammed ofGhazni levelled to the ground in the year 1026, boasted of its five hundred devadasis in the service  of clergy and pilgrims. The destruction of these temples which harboured such evils was perhaps the most commendable achievement of the Muslims. We have said enough. Our doors for dialogue would remain forever open to these oppressed people of India whose upliftment was one of the main concerns of the Sikh Gurus. It is for them to decide whether they would like to join us in a war of liberation or remain prostrate before the oppression of the Hindu elite, with a belief in their “Karma”.  So far as the Sikhs go, we have our vision of society with the concepts of prayer, hard work and sharing at its hub which has been motivating us towards that goal from our inception. Ours is a social religion whose institutions exist to provide not only solace against worldly want, misery and injustice but also to fight against them. We have attained the realization that our vision of society is unattainable within the framework of Hindu India, its Constitution and its psychology. When after the Parliamentary elections towards the end of 1989, which saw Panthic forces emerge victorious, Mr. Simranjit Singh Mann and other elected members of Parliament went to take oath of membership with our mandatory religious symbol of kirpan guaranteed by the Article 25 of the Constitution, the Sikhs were still willing to sit in the Indian Parliament and its Legislature, and try to persuade the Hindu ruling class to let the Sikhs be on their own. But we were not even allowed to enter the Parliament although Simaranjit Singh Mann himself created a record in his constituency by showing the largest number of votes secured by a candidate in India. He had polled 5, 27, 707 out of a total of 5,91, 883 votes. When the governement had announced elections to the State Assembly in June 91, Sikhs were still, although full of hesitation, willing to take part but then the Congress party boycotted the elections and ultimately the polls were cancelled at the behest of Mr. T.N. Seshan, Chief Election Commissioner and Mr. Narasimha Rao, Prime Minister of India and the Indian Union lost another chance to resolve the issues of the Sikh struggle through a parliamentary process.

It was in this historical background that the Sikh political parties had boycotted the elections of 1992. To hold the elections, against the Sikh call to boycott them, the Union government had deployed six Corps of the Indian army with artillery, tanks and other means to murder the Sikh populace. One Corp has three divisions, one division has twenty thousand armed men. It means over three hundred thousand armed combatants. And there were over one hundred thousand men of para-military forces, fifty thousand policemen, and twenty five thousand Special Police Officers. Hence the so called security cover consisted of more than 500 thousand men. Such a massive military presence, ostensibly for the elections, was surely an anti-thesis of democracy. Students of Indian history know that the Indian National Congress had boycotted the elections to the provincial and the Central legislatures, held in November 1920 to protest against the enactment of the Rowlatt Acts which permitted detention without trial and trial without jury to repress political activities. Surely it must be granted the Sikhs of Punjab had far more serious grievances compared to what the Indian National Congress had against the British in 1920s. The Indian National Congress had also decided to boycott the elections, although it ultimately recoiled from the decision. held under the Government of India Act. 1935 to protest against the power granted to the Governor General to override the Central Legislature as well as the powers conferred on the Governors in the Provinces to rule directly during emergencies. Surely it must be granted that the programme of the Sikhs to exercise their right to self-determination had a far more sound ground to boycott 1992 elections than the discontent against the excessive powers of the governors which had inspired the Congress to contemplate the same step in 1935.

The Sikh boycott of elections, like their vote for Simranjit Singh Mann’s candidates in November 1989, had conclusively established that the majority of the people in Punjab endorse this perspective of the radical Sikh groups. Indeed, the Sikhs believe that a radical devolution of political power, as envisaged in the Anandpur Resolution, would eventually help the Hindu heartland as much as the pockets of ethnic and religious minorities in India’s peripheral provinces. They also maintain that the vast majority of Indian people remain backward and poverty ridden five·.decades after independence, because their leaders adopted a constitution radically departing from the fundamentals of India’s democratic evolution over the last century, with provincial autonomy and constitutional safeguards for the minorities being the guiding principle. However, the last two decades of India’s politics have disillusioned the Sikhs regarding their possibility to carry the Hindu majority oflndia along with their struggle for provincial autonomy.

Although an insignificant minority of 2 per cent of India’s population, the Sikhs are striving to attain this vision of Confederal India, through democratic means. While they thus engage in this struggle, the international community, committed to fundamental human rights, has the duty to ensure that.the Indian security forces do not inflict on them atrocities of the kind which the enclosed documentation reveals.

Thank You,

-::S    ·

.Jaswant Singh Khalra

General Secretary, Human Rights Wing, Shiromani Akali Dal

Sri Amritsar.