We are serializing a letter written by the great Sikh intellectual Puran Singh to Sir John Simon (of the famous commission) in 1928. The conclusions of that great mind for what would happen to India have been coming painfully home to many so called Indians particularly the minorities. This letter of advice, which was also ignored, will be given to our readers in 4 weekly installments.
English commanders, one after the other has spoken in glowing terms of the outstanding bravery, chivalry and the upright character of the Sikh soldier. The present Commander in Chief in India once remarked that he would trust his wife and daughter for their safety to a Sikh soldier. And it is in the Punjab that the Missals of the Sikhs were formed. A Sikh chief would throw his saddle in a village or a town and thenceforth it will be his private estate. The Punjabi Hindu could not oppose the Sikh saddle, Under Maharaja Ranjit Singh; the Punjab was never a Muslim province but a Sikh province. The Muslim ministers of the Maharaja remained faithful to the last, while the Hindu and the Brahmin ministers proved traitors. It may be remembered Maharaja Ranjit Singh the Sardar of the Sikh Misals, was invited by the Muslim choudhries of Lahore to come and be their King. Hari Singh Nalwa struck terror in the den of the lion. The Frontier Pathans still say to their crying children, “Harya Ragla” Hush Harya has come!” How can the Nehru committee to day extinguish such a community by a stroke of the pen? Is this their Hindu fairness? Sindh must be separated because that is the Muslim demand and the Sikh is but a Hindu ignores him. The Hindu if he were a man should have stood up for the Sikh and proposed the separation of the Central Punjab as the Sikh Province. It is all nonviolent civil anarchy giving all advantages to a powerful and well combined community who shows the mailed fist. Let me say openly if the Sikh Jats get into their heads that they can have a province to rule, they will die to a man and create many Kohats. The Sikh knows how to Sight for his rights but why should such activities at all be inspired by the Nehru report?
Let us take the population basis and the adult suffrage on which the whole of the theoretical reasonableness of the Nehru Report is being preached, broadcast.
In this country, where one powerful Zamindar of Bengal has thousands of his galley slaves to sweat for him for a Starving pittance where even in the most virile Punjab, the secret of Agriculture prosperity in the most prosperous irrigated colonies is the perpetual indebtedness of the tiller who gets but the barest subsistence and works more for keeping his flesh and blood together than to earn a wage that may make life worth its joys, and is under the thumb of the moneylender, what an absolutely hypothetical value is attached in this Report to the voter as if he were an old Athenian peasant or a Roman citizen!
With the old Roman citizen, as even with the Greek peasant, the political sense was, so to say, the sixth sense. An illiterate voter would go and ask a literate citizen to write down for him the name of his chosen candidate. He behaved as a citizen. Even then, we know how to oratory of the Antoine’s and others swayed the political minded mob, and exactly similar is the case in England and other Western countries now.
For ages, the masses of this country have been terror stricken not only by the foreign invaders, but by the habitual and slow daily tyranny of the little Nero’s of India, the Indian kings and Zamindars and the Bankers and have been driven like the bleating sheep that are led to the slaughter house. It is simply sickening to find such a uniformed population made as the basis of an adult vote. And when practical modern administrators of experience laugh at the school boy like proposals of the Nehru Committee the ill organized noise of the Congress Camp, utters a hooting shriek. However able these Hindu lawyers of India may be to make the purely academic debates hot and saucy in the Assembly chamber, they cut a sorry figure in practical administration. The Japanese statesman has the same poor opinion about the quality of this highly intricate Hindu intellect.
It is an open secret how an audacious A.D.C and some of the Secretaries made the late Lord Sinha uncomfortable. I dare say a Sikh Sardar or a Moslem Zamindar of the Punjab would have known better how to sit in that chair.
What is then the significance of the Nehru Report when it is vitiated by the fundamental mistake of determining power to vote by mere populations and mere adult suffrage in this country where it is impossible to get an independent voter?
Mahatma Gandhi has failed to give a remedy. Pandit Moti Lal Nehru has not asked you to leave the country, as he should have done, to violent anarchy, but wishes you to Set in that form of consumption which would naturally eat up the weaker communities. It would be the same thing if you agree with Nehru’s draft or make yourself a similar one with a few modifications; both will be useless unless you red vision India into four or five Harmony Presidencies will all communal power well-nigh equally balanced. If the wise acres tell you that this red vision is impossible, then no Democracy can be made to work equitably in India. Better put back the hands of the clock and bring in one efficient, impartial, stern but benevolent dictatorship.
Article extracted from this publication >> August 17, 1990
