Dr. S.S. Dharam

It has been the repeated experience of the Sikhs during the last thirty eight years of independence of India that Hinduism and Brahminism is a “jealous creed” which cannot coexist with other religious minorities. It either seeks to absorb them into Hinduism or to reduce them to serfdom and nonentities.

It is this peculiar character of Hinduism which negates and nullifies the meaning and import of secularism and democracy and turns every issue into the matter of Hindu and non Hindu confrontation. The Sikhs might protest and agitate but the tentacles of the Hindu majority will never relax their grip over them. The Sikh people have now realized that they will never receive justice and will never be treated as equals in Hindu India.

With democratic conventions in rags and with total denial of civil liberties and fundamental rights to the Sikhs, the soldiers and the officers of the Hindu Army,. BSF and CRPF have been on a killing and looting spree throughout Punjab. Thousands of Sikh men, women and children have been butchered and burnt in Punjab and rest of India. Thousands have been killed in fake police encounters; Tens of thousands have been rounded up and are being tortured in Army concentration camps in order to take out false confessions under duress; houses of Sikhs in villages and towns have been looted and stripped of all that was valuable. The security forces have converted Punjab into a virtual iron curtain concentration camp, and merciless hunting and killing of Sikh youth to the point of liquidation of the next Sikh generation is continuing.

The State is in the tight grip of the Indian Army which has unleashed a reign of terror. The army is working like the Big Brother in Punjab, keeping a watch on all Sikhs with the threat of a midnight knock on their doors in order to search, arrest, torture and kills. Flashes of the world as visualized by George Orwell in his book, 1984, have actualized in the case of Punjab. The state is under a tight iron curtain and every Sikh living in it is a suspect in the eyes of the security forces. It is particularly so in the case of devout Amritdhari Sikhs whose only fault is that they true to their faith and wear the five religious symbols ordered by Guru Gobind Singh Ji. The Army continues to rule Punjab. The Hindu Indian soliders continue to humiliate, torture and kill Sikhs. The Sikh people continue to be ground under the weight of it all. Neither the alienation, anguish and agony suffered by the Sikh people in Punjab are going to fade away from their psyche nor are the Sikhs going to forgive those who have tortured and killed thousands of their near and dear ones.

The rule of law has been eclipsed and norms of civilized governance have been thrown to the winds. The Sikhs are not even in a position to approach courts of law. Even the petitioners face innumerable obstacles, fears and threats while collecting facts to be placed before the Supreme Court. Sikhs are being deprived of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the constitution. They are denied the freedom of worship, freedom of. Assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom of movement within the country. Their holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, is still infested with the CBI,IB and RAW agents.

When the Hindu nation’s morality has been hijacked for long, when justice has been denied for a period covering the life span of a full generation, and when there are no hopes of an honorable solution to the problems of the people of a race and religion which has been betrayed, a call to fundamentalism is righteous and would move the people. With the destruction of the Holiest of Holy shrine of the Sikhs during Operation Bluestar in June 84, and with the declaration of war against the Sikhs in order to exterminate them, the Sikhs now have no other choice but to accept the challenge and create their own Independent Homeland (Khalistan).

There would be no negotiations with Indian Government who have perpetuated death, destruction and persecution in Punjab. With the bloodshed of thousands of Sikhs the plot of the drama in Punjab has thickened. Spread all over the world, the Sikhs today feel a deep sense of anguish and agony as a result of the bloody drama that is being played by the Hindu India against the Sikhs. The Sikhs today stand at the cross roads of history where ignorance, carelessness and unpreparedness may prove fatal in being run over by the speeding vehicle of Hinduism.

In view of the repeated mayhem and genocide of Sikhs as also violations of civil rights and civil liberties of the Sikh people as a whole during the last one and a half year and particularly after June ’84, the question of disturbances in Punjab is no more a matter of internal affairs of India. It is a large question of human rights and civil liberties of the Sikh people whose genocide by the Hindu India is under way.

If the world’s largest democracy, India, is allowed to slaughter a tiny religious minority of Sikhs comprising 2% of its population, without international protest, then the worlds, democratic and religious freedom stands in danger. The Sikh people hope that to keep up the dignity of man, human freedom and civil liberties the UNO as well as the powerful democracies of USA, UK, Canada, West Germany, Norway, France, Israel, Australia, and other freedom loving nations will raise their collective voice to safeguard the human rights and civil liberties of the Sikh community of 14 million people in Punjab and elsewhere in the country and support the Sikh nation in their only option for their survival i.e., Creation of Khalistan.

Before ending the present paper I wish to impress upon those gullible Sikhs who in spite of so much evidence against it still believe that an agreement can be worked out like the recent RajivLongowal pact which could be a workable and ultimate solution for the settlement of the Sikh problem in India. The history of Hinduism is a monumental evidence of the nature of their communal psyche; Hindu communal psyche is cowardly docile, slyly sheepish and sycophantic when they are enslaved; it is bitterly aggressive and cruel when they are the rulers. We know that Buddhism which had its origin in India was run over by the heavy vehicle of Hinduism. When they were the rulers Buddhists were reduced to almost negligible numbers in India by a process of suppression, extermination and assimilation started by Shri Shankaracharya. When they were slaves under the Mughal rule they lived a life of dishonor and cowardice and even accepted conversion to Islam to save their mundane life. And since the time they have become the rulers of India after partition they have treacherously betrayed the promises given to the Sikhs before partition that the Sikhs will be given an honorable autonomous status within India so they they can also feel the glow of the freedom.

The Hindus of the Punjab, who, with ready aid of the Government of India leaders, even when their understanding was not qualified to keep pace with the wishes of their heart, adopted every conceivable posture and shrank from no stratagem to keep Sikhs permanently under their political heel, first, by refusing to form a Punjabi speaking state in which the Sikhs might acquire political effectiveness, and second, by falsely declaring that Punjabi was not their mother tongue. When in 1950, the present Constitution Act of India was enacted, the accredited representatives of the Sikhs the Shiromani Akali Daldeclared vehemently and unambiguously in the Constituent Assembly that, “the Sikhs do not accept this Constitution: the Sikhs reject this Constitution Act.” Our spokesmen declined to append their signatures to the Constitution Act as a token of this clear and irrevocable rejection.

In 1954 when Master Tara Singh reminded Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru of the solemn undertaking previously given to the Sikhs on behalf of the majority community, he cool replied, “the circumstances have now changed.” When in 1966 after battling for almost eighteen years for a special status for Sikhs in Punjab, a bill for reorganization of a truncated Punjab without its capital city was passed by the Indian parliament, the working committee of the Shiromani Akali Dal passed a resolution on July 20th, 1966, which reads: “Akali Dal after having carefully viewed the findings, the reports and judgments of judicial and quasijudicial Tribunals and Forums that have dealt with matters and cases involving important Sikh interests, comes to the conclusion, that the entire judicial machinery and the judicial process of the independent India, under influences of certain section of political Hindus, is prejudiced and has been perverted against the Sikh People in India in relation to their just and legal rights.”

“Sikhs resolve and proclaim their determination to resist through all legitimate means, all such attempts to devalue and liquidate the Sikh people in a free India, and consequently, demand that ……. +. New Punjab should be granted an autonomous constitutional status on the analogy of the status of Jammu and Kashmir as was envisaged in the Constitution Act of India in the year 1950.”

Keeping in view the above brief story of the betrayal of the Sikhs and the present reign of terror in Punjab working under the draconian laws like Terrorist Affected Area (special court) Act, under which a person or a group of persons can be sentenced to death without either giving the name of the accused or the witness in the judgment, it would be living in the fool’s paradise if Sikhs hope that immoral, bitter and aggressive

Hindu communal Psyche will ever release the tentacles of the Hindu majority and relax their grip over them. It is clear beyond doubt that their ultimate aim is the extermination of the Sikhs through suppression, oppression and genocide. To give an example of suppression of Sikhs, one just has to note that whereas in Punjab the Sikhs form 62% of the population, their employment ratio to Hindus in Punjab University is 13:87 (Out of 1065 posts 937 are held by Hindus and only 128 posts are held by the Sikhs).

Another example of slow oppression of Sikhs in India is their gradual reduction in intake in the Army; while at the time of the partition in 1947, the Sikhs intake in the Army was above 30% presently it has been reduced to a mere 2%. A similar destructive attitude is manifested in distribution of river water and electricity, installation of major industries, provision of higher and technical education facilities and investment of only 1% out of the national budget for development projects in Punjab. Curiously the aim is to gradually weaken the Sikhs in all aspects and eventually either to assimilate them into Hinduism or to destroy them.

If Sikhs accept to remain in the present state of subjugation under Hindu rule, then with the present rate of genocide of Sikhs, the Sikh youth will be exterminated in a matter of four to five years.

 

Even if the Government accepts the Anandpur Sahib resolution in principle, the past history of the treacherous Hindu psyche shows that they will never fulfill their promises and will certainly betray the Sikhs. During the period of lull following any such agreement, the Hindu Government will continue to oppress and exterminate Sikhs as is being done presently in Punjab after RajivLongowal pact.

Therefore, the only option left for the Sikhs is to create their own sovereign and independent state of Khalistan. If Sikhs have to survive nothing short of Khalistan will do.

Article extracted from this publication >>  October 11, 1985