India, the so called champion of nonviolence, is currently ruled by forces that represent gangsterism, terrorism and genocide on a scale unheard of in history. Delhi rulers have mastered the age old Brahmin technique of operating through intrigue, hypocrisy and deceit. They have been trying every conceivable strategy to strangle Sikh aspirations and to perpetuate a system of ostensibly legalized plunder of Punjab resources. The latest in the series involves manipulating communist confrontation with the Sikhs. Evidently, Rajiv Gandhi has succeeded through the good offices of the Soviet Union in making the Communists of India his accomplices in the sinister plan of exterminating the Sikh youth. He had been using Barnala for this very purpose. But after dismantling his government for the dubious objective of deceiving Haryana voters, he was feeling handicapped in continuing his offensive against the Sikhs. Punjab being under Delhi’s direct rule, he would not like the world to look upon him as the communally motivated revengeful maniac obsessed with a compulsive urge to kill Sikhs. He, therefore, needs to camouflage his operations and communists have readily agreed to oblige him.
Armed with guns, rifles and revolvers communist workers are rampaging through Punjab villages targeting the Sikh freedom fighters even though there is a total ban on the carrying of arms by the civilians. Exception seems to have been made in the case of the communists. Mr. Harkishan Singh Surjeet, the Politbureau member of the Communist Party (Marxists) is demanding more arms for his party workers to combat the Sikh freedom fighters. Surprisingly, Mr. Surjeet hopes to succeed with old fashioned guns and revolvers where police and paramilitary troops have failed with sophisticated weapons and other elaborate paraphernalia of the fighting forces.
Rajiv Gandhi has created a cadre of communist mercenaries who profess to be Sikhs by the sheer accident of their birth but have no respect for the Sikh scriptures. They care two hoots for the Sikh holy shrines and have no faith either in God or in religion. They kill Sikhs belonging to one faction and then put the blame on the other faction of the freedom fighters in order to generate internacine bloodshed. They kill innocent women, children and priests to discredit the Sikh movement. The Sikh youths have seen through their game and have started retaliating with a kind of chastising aggressiveness that they deserve.
But in the process it is the Sikhs that get killed at both ends. It is a situation that eminently satisfies Rajiv as he has been able to successfully substitute Barnala with Harkishan Singh Surjeet. This deal serves him even better. Through communists he intends to create the illusion of a “popular” reaction to Sikh freedom fighters, whereas every objective analyst of the Punjab problem has acknowledged that the freedom fighters enjoy full support of Sikh masses. The truth of the situation comes out vividly from the way Punjab landscape is extravagantly dotted with army camps and the manner in which police ruler the State not through laws but through bullets. There is not a semblance of legal machinery or democracy in Punjab. It is a pure and simple Gestapo Raj with Sikhs reduced to a worse fate than the Jews in the Nazi concentration camps.
On the one hand, Rajiv Gandhi acts as the Chief spokesman of the Tamil “terrorists” and bullies Sri Lankan government into bowing to their wishes. But on the other hand he publically declares his resolve to crush the Sikh freedom fighters who had originally started their peaceful struggle for a settlement for less than what Tamil “terrorists” are seeking through the barrel of the gun. India’s duplicity is being exposed with each passing day and the time is not far when it will be thrown overboard stock, barrel and gun.
Article extracted from this publication >> August 7, 1987
