A STATEMENT ON THE BACKGROUND AND THE OBJECTIVES OF THE SIKH STRUGGLE AND CASE STUDIES OF STATE TERRORISM IN PUNJAB

INTRODUCTION

Punjab Studies Circle as a forum aims to promote rational communication and understanding of the issues underlying the Sikh struggle and its travails.

This document the first release by the forum aims to communicate in two parts the political content of the vision which motivates the Sikh struggle as well as the means of repression employed by the Indian State against it.

The vision of society which the Sikhs perceive to be unattainable within the all-pervasive injustice and degradation of India is ironically enough an extension of the ideals which had inspired the secular unity of the Indian peoples during the period of anti-imperialist struggle culminating in the birth of the Indian nation in 1947 and towards which its institutions and their helmsmen have since become impervious. Indian nationalism today is locked in an implacable conflict with the Sikh political aspirations because the latter emanate from the craving for that very freedom and justice which the institutionalism of the former had vowed to grant but betrayed as it developed into the instrument of self-serving elite. The argument of inviolability of national sovereignty is for them a means to call up legitimacy to their policy of repression which in transgressing the basic principles of governance even as enunciated in the Indian Constitution contradicts the principle of sovereignty derived from people’s consent They however forget that repression as a means to enforce loyalty exceeding a critical limit boomerangs on those who use it depriving them of their right to rule in the mind of their subjects. Repression of such kind takes away the liberty of the people to accord their inner consent to the authority which inflicts it. They cease in their freedom to obey.

The policy which the Indian State has adopted to crush the Sikh movement is on one hand one of indiscriminately violent repression of common Sikhs and on the other hand the corrupting of Sikh leaders through a subtle combination of threat and the lure of office. True Sikh political leaders are as corruptible as others of their ilk in the rest of India. But Sikhs in general reject those who compromise and are quick to react if they realise betrayal of their interests. Repression and persecution too have not been unknown to them in the five hundred years of their history. They were able to withstand repression throughout. It does not seem likely that the Indian State would break their spirit either. A large number of Sikhs men and women both young and not so young are willing to sacrifice their lives for a cause which in practical terms might appear implausible but which has the same apodictic appeal to them as the belief in a kingdom of god is seen to have to the religious Sikhs have a tradition of martyrdom. They learn to view corporeal discipline and death for dignity as a religious exercise which emancipates the soul from the brutalities to which the body succumbs. Every Sikh martyred by the Indian State further un-encumbers the longing in the living to live and die for the same cause. They would ultimately wrest from the Indian State should it not in reason concede their identity as a nation following a sense of historical destiny

What we present in two parts of this document is not fundamentally more than what every socially conscious Sikh in Punjab is poignantly aware of however little the instruments of the Indian State including the national press may care to take note of them. The least we expect this document to achieve is to expose the large sections of oppressed people reeling under the hegemony of the Indian State with as many reasons to be disenchanted with it as Sikhs themselves to facts about their struggle which might enable them to stop acquiescing in the inhuman atrocities inflicted on them by the macebearers of the Indian State. What we hope for ideally is to stir them to make common cause with the Sikh struggle to transform the political order which has become repugnant to their evolution into a meaningful future.

Narinder Singh Ravinder Singh Shergill Ram Narayan Kumar Inderjit Singh Jaijee Baljit Kaur Gill Sukhjit Kaur Gill Jaspal Singh Dhillon Sukhjinder Singh Bajwa

(PUNJAB STUDIES CIRCLE December 1990)

PSC is headquartered in Chandigarh and is run by volunteers whose primary aim is to present the background to the ongoing Sikh Struggle.

(Over the next few months WSN will serialise the report)

Article extracted from this publication >> March 29, 1991