The goal of Sikh Sovereignty, which crystallized into a clear political objective after India launched its military aggression against the Golden Temple of Amritsar in June 1984, is not a result of an isolated even if drastic experience of religious sacrilege, as many assume. This point has been democratically established, and yet the Indian state continues to denigrate the Sikh struggle for freedom as a militant movement. Not only manipulation of the media, but infiltration and even stage managing militant out rages were part of gover1ment policy to sustain the anti-Sikh: hysteria. By giving maximum publicity to all crimes as terroristic committed by anti-social elements and government infiltrated militants, the government tries to inspire moral revulsion in people against Sikhs to repress their legitimate struggle.
Several articles which have appeared in the world press and purport to speak for the government of India, present so completely false and erroneous a picture of the genesis and the character of the Sikh struggle that the Sikh freedom fighters and their sympathizers feel overwhelmed by distress. We have been accused of mobilizing the people from our religious pulpits. For Sikhs the distinction between religion and society does not exist. Ours is a social religion. Our religious institutions exist to provide not only solace against worldly want, misery and injustice but also to fight against them. By provoking communal reactions against us in other sections of the people, the central government of India and its protagonists built up a popular mandate for their policy of repression.
Some examples, “Khalistan: Fact or Fiction” by Mr. Ikram Ullah Khan in “The Nation, Lahore, “Madness under a turban” by Amit Roy in ‘Sunday Telegraph, London and “Sikhs at crossroads” by Kuldip Nayyar.
Ikram Ullah Khan is the spokes man for the government of Pakistan and Kuldip Nayyar belongs so that fast vanishing breed of Hindu Indians who speak for the minorities when the majority opinion clamors for their highhanded suppression. It is with this recognition that we must take up Khan, Nayyar and Roy’s point for discussion, not to launch a rhetorical counter attack
Ikram Ullah Khan in its write-up traces the genesis of the conflict to the violent campaign of the militants groups in the wake of the Blue Star in the course of which government functionaries, civilian and military installations, railway stations, buses and even ordinary citizens became the targets of slicks of Sikh militants.” The author goes on to explain that “East Punjab is not a disputed territory like Kashmir.”
Our freedom movement did not begin, as Khan has tried to convey in his article, from a violent campaign after the operation “Blue Star.” It has been waged for over 46 years on almost every issue which pertains to our cultural identity, our religion, the language, the inalienable rights of our people in the economic and the political spheres, through peaceful and democratic methods. Hindu India tried to ride roughshod over our democratic mobilization by calling our demands parochial.
Khan ought to know, in spite of the I arguments in his write up, that Sikhs too are struggling for their right to self determination, although India and Pakistan had not promised it to them as they had to Kashmiris. The modern theory of human rights insists on a set of prerogatives, including the right to self-determination, which all the peoples of the world are entitled to in their urge of positive self-assertion. The Sovereignty of state is also an important principle of civilization rightly suggesting itself to be inviolable so long as it is exercised indivisibly with the common will of the people.
Amit Roy in his article “Madness under a Turban” says that Sikhs make more noise about “largely imaginary injustices, than is justified by their number.” It follows that the right of the people to make noise is an appendage of their numerical supervisory. The Hindus, because they are the majority in India, have the right to bring down the Babri Mosque into a heap of rubble; to blow up the Akal Takhat with battle tanks, to exterminate the Kashmiris to the last so that they may remain the master race over India’s ethnic and religious minorities. According to Amit Roy, a minority of Sikhs in Punjab has been pursuing the campaign for Khalistan. He overlooks the democratic mandate the Sikh people gave successively in two general elections. In November, 1989, the candidates under Simranjit Singh Mann, with their manifesto of national liberation, I captured 10 out of 13 parliamentary scats from Punjab. Again in early 1992, when the radical Sikh groups called for boycott of elections to establish the popular disenchantment with the Indian Constitutional system the Sikh electorate showed empathy by collectively abstaining from voting.
Roy appears to be completely mistaken about the nature of the Sikh struggle. The phase of the Sikh struggle to which Sant Bhindrawale attached himself in August 1982, and which the Government of India tried to crush by mobilizing its Army in June 1984. was democratic in every sense of the word and was carried out with the active participation of thousands of common Sikhs.
In his “Sikhs at crossroads” published on 22 Feb., Kuldip Nayyar says: “Ultimately, the Sikhs will have to assert themselves. It is they who count, not the leaders who are trying to speak on their behalf.” True! The Sikh people must decide what they want to come to terms with the Indian government within its constitutional framework or to carry on their struggle to create an alternative structure of polity within which they may be able to forge their destiny without the tyrannical hold of Hindu India. However there is one question for Mr. Nayyar to answer sincerely: Do the Sikh people and their democratic will count for the Indian state and the vast majority of its Hindu masses? The evidence shows that they do not count.
Mr Nayyar would perhaps more easily recall that, on 26 Jan. 1986, the large gathering of Sikhs at the Akal Takhat widely cheered the suggestion from the organizers that the assassins of Indira Gandhi would take place the martyrs of Khalistan if India should execute them. In conclusion, I must point out the crucial error of premise that underlies Nayyar exhortations to the Sikhs. That they are faced with dilemma of choice on crossroads of history. The dilemma was already resolved 12 years ago when they embarked on the course of bitter struggle to break with the constitutional system of India, incompatible with their vision of society. The relevant question for them now, in my opinion, is how they should carry on their struggle to realize their resolve in reality.
We expect from the leaders of the world media to correctly understand our cause in spite of the attempts of persons like Ikram Ullah Khan, Kuldip Nayyar, Amit Roy to denigrate it as a militant movement. We hope that in future, media leaders would keep these facts in view when projecting the travails of Assamese, Kashmiris and Sikh people in their life and death struggle for liberation from India.
Article extracted from this publication >> April 28, 1995
