G.B. Singh
The Setting ‘During the time of the Gulf war, I came across two Punjabi speaking Hindu physicians who were in the middle of their residency in the field of psychiatry. During our chat they both boasted of their one particular departmental project involved with the psychoanalysis of Saddam Hussain, the dictator of Iraq. With that kind of background training, Lasked them if they could also devote their talents in the psychoanalysis of Hindu leaders of India, The world is in dire need of that precious information, I informed them. Our conversation ended abruptly. I sensed the two psychiatry residents fell on an uncongenial spirit to my goals of better understanding the Hindu leaders. Sikhs, especially the ones touched by myriad Hinduism can present a baffling challenge to any meaningful ideological and psychological analysis, Take for example on my visit to New Delhi last year, a Sikh officer, colonel in the Indian Amny, stated to me, “I am only concerned with performing my duty well, I am never worried of the results.” Oblivious as it may seem, this officer had been treading on dangerous Bhagavad-Gita directed thought process. When I reminded the officer that his statement violated the very roots of Sikh ideology, the colonel hurriedly moved away without any comments, KP.S. Gill, being a Sikh and the Director-general of Police in Punjabis an elusive figure. He has been involved in some of the most ruthless murders of innocent Sikhs for many years. In an open letter dated March 21.1994 to Gill under the heading “HITLER IS YOUR SOULMATE KHALISTAN
Dr.G.S. Aulakh President, Council of Khalistan reiterated the crimes committed by Gill against the Sikhs camouflaging in various forms of extortion, censorship, vote rigging, fascism, state sponsored terrorism, murder, rape, and torture. By all accounts available, this letter had no intended effect on Gill, nor will anything else. What has surprised me and others the most about Gillis that he hasn’t shown even the slightest remorse in his public postures. How could that be possible? How can we account for that behavior? The answers are hard to come by. If you search through the articles published by the Indian journalists, Gill is repeatedly portrayed as “Super Cop” destroying terrorism, Saving the mother India from a possible disintegration and so on. India Today (January 15, 1994) advertised a beautiful color portrait of Gill with boldface caption, which read: “I LET MY IMAGE RIDE. IT SERVES ITS PURPOSE.” Perhaps, Gillis showing a narcissistic personality, a personality peculiar among those who are raised Hindu. How did K.P.S. Gill the Sikh become narcissistic? To answer that, will require a close study of Gill.
Both the Indian media and Indian intellectuals besides their propaganda have failed, perhaps consciously, to provide us with any meaningful data on Gill. However recently, I stumbled upon two well written books with few details on Gill that caught my attention: (1) India Commits Suicide by G.S. Dhillon; Singh & Singh Publishers, Chandigarh: 1992. On page 375, Dhillon cited that Governor Ray (presently India’s ambassador to U.S.) had “brought swashbuckling K.P.S. Gill in place of Ribeiro, who was made the Advisor to the Governor….. The logic of Gill was that the police were dealing with people who did not believe in any laws and so unless the police too was lawless it could not really fight them.” The statement is alarming. Moreover, what source and where Gill had learned it from? Surprisingly, the answer is simple: Mahabharata. 1 shall dwell on this a bit later.
(2) On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia by Steve Coll; Random house, Inc., New York: 1994, The author had a face to face dialogue with Gill. During this conversation Gill absorbed at least seven full bottles of Royal Velvet Scotch Deluxe Malt Whisky. I reproduce in its entirety what Steve Coll wrote about Gill.
“Our conversation turned to the problem of revolution and terrorism. Democracy, Gill made clear, ‘was no solution. “The situation is evolving too fast for the human rights activists to keep pace with it,” he said. ‘Ultimately terrorism will die a natural death. It may take little. It may take a longer time. But there is no ideology behind it. The problem with the Sikhs today is that it is a progressive community saddled with a backward-looking political leadership… Their killings are so pointless. They don’t even send a message. The creation of terror by itself, [don’t think that was advocated by any of the ideologues. The classical theory is much different from what is being worked out here.”
Well, then, I asked, what should be done?
“Has any democracy answered that question in the face of a problem like this?” he replied, “Against State power, you can’t use violence. It just doesn’t work. What a Political solution boils down to today is elections. But elections are no solution… Look, in Punjab there has always been this grudging admiration of the outlaw. Even when I was a child, if a dacoit {bandit} was killed by the police, a thousand people would come to see the body of the dacoit, which would be displayed. And we would hear exaggerated details of the dacoit’s physical prowess. Today it is that same thing, the militant is fighting. He is battling the police. It’s a grudging admiration. The police have never been popular in Punjab. I remember as children the idea was, when we traveled to a village, we had to reach it before sunset. It’s the same thing today. And the so-called ‘fake encounters death squad killings) were a part of Punjab administration in those days, too. Some district commissioners were remembered popularly for wiping out dacoitarics through fake encounters…. The general who fought Napoleon in Russia, his motto was “Time and patience.” All you need is time and patience.”
His speech was milky now, cloudy and fluid, and he began to talk about religion, what stands between a man and the Creator, I came back to democracy. If you organize yourself around that idea, then don’t you have to have faith in it in a situation like the one in the Punjab? Won’t the violence Gill advocates indeed, practices unapologetically finally undermine democratic society?
“Elections are a very minor episode,”’ Gill said, “They don’t matter at all. Only you people are sold on elections. The problem is human nature, Terrorism is an inevitable product of human expression. I don’t know how much time I’ve spent reading “Walt Whitman a lot of time. Now with all this there’s so little time to read and recollect. I sometimes think I could tum and live with the animals. Not one of them is dissatisfied. Walt Whitman, he was not a poet. He was a saint, ‘I Hear America Singing.”
Now Gill began to recite stanzas of Whitman. He began to recite Ezra Pound.
Tasked again about terrorism and counterterrorism in Punjab, the uses of state power that he endorsed. Gill stood dramatically and walked to his bookshelf. He returned with a copy of Any Old Iron, a 1989 novel by Anthony Burgess that concerns the recovery of King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, and how there no longer seem to be any human causes worthy of the sword’s might, Gill thumbed through the pages and then handed me the open book, his finger on a particular paragraph.
“Read this,” he pronounced in a deep voice.
The passage concerned the narrator’s recollected impressions ‘of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, It read.
I saw fists and howling mouths and then Weizmann’s own acetone at work, and I was visited by a philosophical speculation rather mature for a boy of nine: that religious and political causes were only pretexts for smashing things and people; it was the smashing that mattered, Human beings were balls of energy, masses of fleshly acetone, and the energy could best be fired to a destructive end, creation being so difficult and requiring brains and imagination. But since man is a creature of mind as well as nerve and muscle, some spurious cause has to justify destruction. Destruction, best expressed in this age in which I write as terrorism, is truly there for its ‘own sake, but the presence of religious or secular patriotism converts the destructive into the speciously creative.
I wondered afterward whether it becomes easier or more difficult to do what Gill docs round up the angry young men, supervise the interrogations and torture and killings, take the war to the enemy—if you think like this. Gill seemed to find solace in it, or else in his whisky. To me, this sort of nihilism was more chilling even than the purposeful, visible state murders in the Sri Lankan jungles. There the death squads operated in a twisted, brutal climate of political morality. Gill’s vision was darker. It existed outside of conventional political morality because it rejected politics—rejected, even, human nature.
Soon Gill wanted to go to sleep, He poured a last whisky and recited more poetry. Then he shook my hand and said good night. Tomorrow, he reminded me, was another day of counterrevolution.
Article extracted from this publication >> October 7, 1994
