Courage is alien to the Brahmin character and it is altogether unknown to the Kashmiri Brahmins. History of Brahminisn, in brief, is the history of falsifying truth. Indian Ambassador to the United States, Mr. P.K. Kaul is a Kashmiri Brahmin. His incensed letter to U.S. Congressman, Hon. Norman D. Shumway, is an eloquent endorsement of the above generalization. He complained that the 15 U.S. Congressmen who expressed concern at the plight of the Sikhs in India were victims of “an active campaign of disinformation”.
Interestingly, Mr. Kaul has only repeated what Sikhs have all along been saying. Undeniably, the campaign of disinformation has been in operation ever since Sikh struggle in Punjab began to surface on the international scene. It is important that the authors of disinformation should be identified and truth brought out. How can it be done? Elementary, Mr. Watson. Just open Punjab to foreign journalists and to the representatives of Human Rights Organizations and International Amnesty. Let them stayin Punjab and freely meet a cross-section of the people at their own. Let them spend time with the freedom fighters rather than taking a few captive journalists on a guided tour of the State and exposing them only to a handful of well-rehearsed government agents and touts.
Mr. Kaul’s anxiety (feined) at the “campaign of disinformation and his vision (perverted) that looks upon “terrorism” as the primary issue in Punjab surely call for immediate clarifications. The Sikh struggle for freedom which he insists on branding as “terrorism”, is hardly four years old, whereas the curse of injustice, discrimination, persecution and slavery has been relentlessly haunting Sikhs for the last forty years. They have been struggling peacefully and scrupulously treading the nonviolent path shown by Guru Arjun Dev Ji and Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji. But to destroy their moral superiority and to cloud the legitimacy of their cause, violence was injected by the Indian government. “In the name of curbing ‘terrorism’, unabashed State terrorism has been unleashed on the Sikhs branding them as criminals….. sadistic torture and cold blooded shooting of young men in false encounters, are common occurrences….” records a former judge of the Supreme Court in the book “Oppression In Punjab: Report to the Nation”.
What Mr. Kaul calls a “tiny fraction of the political spectrum in Punjab”, unfortunately for him, the same “fraction’ has come to represent the collective voice of the Sikhs today. If he considers this claim as unfounded and contrary to the reality, the best way to arrive at truth is to hold a referendum on the issue. To his chagrin, Mr. Kaul will discover that only a “tiny unprincipled fraction of the political spectrum” among Sikhs still subscribes to the fast dying notion of Indian unity and integrity. Khalistan is no more a vague concept or a pressure slogan employed to elicit favorable terms of settlement. It is an ardent desire of an overwhelming Sikh majority in Punjab and a logical political solution to the Sikh problem.
Mr. Kaul says that “there is no more question of Punjab separating from India than of any state in the U.S. separating from the U.S. He, however, conveniently forgets that no U.S. State is under army occupation, no U.S. State is closed to the foreign journalists, in no U.S. State a religious minority is being victimized and butchered purely because it professes a faith different from its rulers and in no U:S. State young men of a particular religious community are being systematically eliminated through fake encounters. No, Mr. Kaul, there can be no comparison between Punjab and a U.S. state and it is time you suspend your campaign of disinformation. It has already begun to recoil and it is going to recoil with still greater intensity. The world knows full well that Mr. Kaul represents a government, the head of which lies and lies shamelessly and repeatedly in the highest forum of the country called Parliament. How can a lesser mortal like Kaul speak the truth?
Article extracted from this publication >> August 28, 1987
