The gravest peril that besets Sikhs today lies just a step farther. It is the peril posed by the policy of the majority Hindu government of Delhi today to tackle the Sikh question by strewing slow death in their path.
First, the balancing influence of Islam has been banished from the lives of Sikhs in the Punjab. The whole exposure now is to Hinduism, which is all around them. This is an unprecedented ecological change for Sikhism.
Offers of Indian government positions, rewards, patronization, honors, and the Hinduization of Sikhs, socially and culturally, have been handy tools to win over a number of Sikhs whose tendentious service to the Hindu Raj now continually corrupts and confuses Sikhs and their politics. Thus we are left in the position of having not only to fight Hindus but also Sikhs.
At the same time the Hindu government has taken care that no Sikh is left in any important command position in the Indian Army, Navy or the Air Force. Most of the old time, and some British trained, Sikh generals have now been retired, some prematurely. And no new ones are in line to get important command positions in the Indian Armed forces. Sikhs, in 1982, are merely 1½% in the Indian armed forces whereas formerly they were 12%.
The Delhi government’s subversive process is hitting Sikhs hard. It is doubly ruinous to Sikhs. On the one hand it entices away Sikh leadership material. On the other, when these Sikhs are thus tempted away to greener political pastures and thus publicly forsake Sikh nation’s ideal and resolve for sovereignty, they shatter the credibility of Sikh leaders in the estimation of Sikh masses who thus begin to doubt and question leadership and beliefs. The process of demoralization of the Sikh under the Hindu Raj is thus complete.
This lethal process of desensitization of the Sikh political consciousness has to be resisted, and must stop. More than others, the press, the rich, the intellectuals, politicians, theologians, professionals, authors, Sikhs in positions of advantage – must resist and fight this noxious process of the majority community and government that will destroy Sikhs if not checked in time.
“Hindus who form 80 percent of the population will in due
course make Hinduism the state religion of India. The only
chance of survival of the Sikhs as a separate community is
to create a state in which they form a compact group.””1
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- Khushwant Singh, A History of the Sikhs, Princeton, 1966, Vol. 2 p. 305
