Dean! Singh’s canonization & Punjab’s illusory peace Dr. Asok Mitra It is not time for some blunt speaking? The past two months have witnessed a torrent of hypocritical ate siege. The gentleman who lost his life in that ghastly incident in Chandigarh on August 31 has emerges, exclusively on account of the manner of his death, as a paragon of all via uses, the savior of Punjab, the restorer of peace in that state after it had been seemingly irretrievably unquiet for a dozen years, a martyr to the cause of the nation’s integrity. a relentless fighter for secularism. The ex-post accolades are all children. The point at issue though is not how hackneyed they sound but the falsehoods they pack. Scant Singh was not; repeat not, a noble, heroic character of any specks. He did not bring back peace in Punjab. He out terrorized the terrorists. Flanked by an amoral hand-picked director general of police, he rode roughshod over the mica law in the state. Young people were cut down in the hundreds in the name of restoration of order and tranquility. During his tenure as chief minister in town and country, for months on end, the. citizenry would list in dread of the midnight knock, offspring of middle aged parents would be dragged away by his police and paramilitary outfits, never to be heard anymore.
The militants of Punjab were no question often ruthless beyond mea-sure, their acts and activities bordered on the barbaric. But Bean ( Singh’s official peace-restorers weir no less cruel, or not less brutal and devoid of normal human sensitivities true, for the past few months, a state° f relative quiet ensued in Punjab illusion, how. ever. is not the reality Ignore. for a moment, the garbage of propaganda in the media. and reach out to ordinary families populating this truncated land of the five rivers. An alto-genies different version of truth will emerge. Mothers and sisters and wives of young men – either whisked away never to return or killed in cold blood – have dried their eyes. But they are not yet reconciled to the meticulously executed liquidation under official auspices, of their near and dear ones. They have, of course, as much reason to nurture hatred toward the indiums, and the government gendannene who have been a perfect match for each other. None expected gentlemanliness though from the militants. The latter indeed bragged of the lawless route they had undertaken.
The government, on the other hand, was expected to con form to the norms of the civil and criminal procedure codes to the hilt. It was, after all, battling to revive the regime of law and order. Should the personnel of such a government turn out to be the worst Perpetrators of illegality and behave in a manner indistinguishable from that of rampaging outlaws? Or-dinary men and women reach their own judgment – and they did. Even without Beam Singh’s assassination, the aura of fright and uncertainty would have continued to per-vade Punjab. It does. There is a deep undercurrent of resentment against the kind of peace the felled chief minister and his director general of police ushered in I have aside the preemies whether the evil that men do tends or does not tend to live after them. or whether the so-called good they do during span of life is or is not interred with their bones. Not with-standing the sickening ambience of establishment conformity, it should be possible to set the record straight- Brant Singh became thief minister by virtue of an election which was a comprehensive fraud, with barely 15 per cent of Punjab’s voters anticipating in it. Once installed as chief minister. Brant Singh proved in no time mat he was incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong. The nation’s highest judiciary had pulled him up en quite a number of occasions because of his administrations blatant wrong doings. He did not bother to conceal his contempt for such judicial interdicts. His Mice-men were castigated by the Supreme Court for their often outrageous behavior that bordered on gross criminality. Bunt Singh and his director general of police remained in contrite. As a riposte to the Supreme Courts observations, he even announced to the world that each time his police-men would be committed for trial. they would be defended at the government’s expense. The assassinated chief minister held in equal contempt the country’s Constitution. He authored a unique version of political geography which shaded tilt into an ominous political theory. As far as the Punjab police were concerned, interstate borders, he held. were non-existent Police on the payroll of the Punjab administration had the inalienable right to travel a 1000 or 1500 miles, to West Bengal or Tamil Nadu to Calashnikov-off persons whose faces they did not approve of without so much as the leave of the government of the state where the spectacle was to be enacted. The compulsions of restoring peace in Punjab was, apparently, a priority of an absolute order the standing in-junctions of a moth-eaten Constitution must not stand in the way of the assertion of that priority.
Such men arc dangerous. They do not advance the cause of national integration. Their contribution is precisely in the reverse direction. In that sense they are no less enemies or the state than the militants. No that some of the teen being shed on account of Brant Singh’s gory elimination arc not genuine. This man actually did succeed in restoring a temporary kind of eerie tranquility in Punjab. The fact that even an illusion of peace was there, advanced the class interest of certain sections and helped assorted political luminaries to trumpet the claim that they have been able to bring back peace in Punjab while others had failed.
From all indications.. arrangements are on the anvil to transform the RDXed chief minister into a national hero. The next thing one would know is either a statue., of him will be installed on Parliament premises, or his pot-trait ceremonially hung in its central hall. At such a rarefied moment. it will be considered vastly improper to remind the powers- that be of inconvenient facts. Such as, the great reluctance this gentleman. Beam Singh, exhibited to apprehend despite repeated Judicial orders – his favorite grandson charged with the kidnap-ping and molestation of a French girl, Or how after the young man had finally been arrested for form’s sake he was offered gala hospitality in the poshest luxury bungalow in the state government’s possession. The powers that be would perhaps, remain unfazed. Yes. Beam Singh was no respecter of the niceties of law. But then compare like with like was Bhagat Singh ever either? canonization could not have proceeded at any faster pace.
Meanwhile, other consequences have followed in the wake of the assassination India, the world’s largest democracy, now presents a fantastic prostrate to the outside world, The country’s leaders, the supposed representatives of the people, move about in double, triple or quadruple layers of protection, afraid to mingle with the people. Because leaders must have their security. the rights of ordinary men and women, rights granted as much by the nation’s Constitution as by the United Nation’s Human Rights Charter for instance, those of free movement and free Teeth – are to be rudely brushed aside. At the same time, the citizenry arc being sought to be aroused, through orchestrated propaganda, to a fever of patriotic forestry. Enough of the non-sense of human rights, enough of the nonsense of a people-to-people en-devour for rapprochement with Pakistan. Suspend your wishy-washy preaching of the message of love and understanding, Punjab must be made secure for the nation as Kashmir too must be, and the Northeast too must be. Resources – which could have been devoted either to eradicate illiteracy and malnutrition or to advance the welfare of women and children or expand irrigation facilities – will now be further diverted to boost the army and the paramilitary and the police budget, and not a squeak of protest is to be permitted to be uttered around the country against such absurdities. The assassination of !leant Singh will, in other words, cheer up the species who equate democracy to holding on to what one has, never mind the morality or mortality of holding on. There is however one snag. Unfortunate y for the authorities. they have liberalized and glob Hired the system so that just as the Kalashnikovs and the RDX explosive can no longer be kept out – the specifics of the democratic human rights-norms this nation is ordered to con-form to cannot al so be prevented from filtering out to the rest of the world. That could spell even deeper trouble for a government which has voluntarily strayed away from the path of self-reliant, independent growth. [T.S.R.11-951].
Article extracted from this publication >> December 8, 1995
