Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines

by Amandeep Sandhu

But the consequence was also an exclusive Sikh religion bereft of the inclusiveness that had marked the religion’s beginning when Guru Nanak emerged from meditation and pronounced: Na Koi Hindu, Na Musalmaan (There is no Hindu or Muslim). Guru Nanak’s message was that all of us are one as human beings.

If all Sikhs were to follow the Granth Sahib and live by its tenets, we would actuate a wider sphere of influence than by prioritising symbols alone.

I don’t think there is a better vehicle than a Bullet to travel in Panjab. When on it, one feels like there is a horse under one’s legs, the sound of the motor pumps up your blood flow and the ease with which it negotiates kutcha roads, fields, mounds and sandy banks is unparalleled.

Panjab is a mental health time bomb, ticking away furiously.

Clearly, the Jinnah trajectory had evolved into the creation of Pakistan. The Ambedkar trajectory slowly led to caste consciousness which now informs public debate and politics in India. The Master Tara Singh trajectory—the matter of Panjab and Sikhs—remained unfulfilled.

Per Amnesty International, during the Emergency, Indira Gandhi jailed about 140,000 people. Out of these, per historians, 40,000 were Sikhs from the Akali Dal.44 Going by sheer numbers, the greatest resistance to the Emergency was from Panjab which otherwise is 2 per cent of India’s population.

JP hailed the Akalis as ‘the last bastion of democracy’.

the curtains were drawn on the demand for a federal India and the Anandpur Sahib Resolution came to be seen as a secessionist document.

The protests underlined how bland symbolism had replaced the core issue: the promotion of the city as a religious and tourist destination in the manner of many European cities.

The battle of the Darbar Sahib during Operation Blue Star was thus an engagement between the nation state and the fighters of a religion whose very ethos lay in standing up for justice and honour the way they interpreted it.

Religious belief is a part of citizen rights and when the Sikh community witnessed the hoary institution of their belief, the supreme seat of justice, the Akal Takht, blown off, they felt a bewilderment and betrayal which has lasted three and a half decades.

the Indian Army either wilfully or through neglect, killed many pilgrims. Knowing this, it remains difficult for the Sikh community to repose its faith in India’s democracy.

In many homes, shops and public spaces I visited, Bhindranwale occupies a place of pride and reverence. In many homes from where a son has migrated abroad, I see drawing rooms with three pictures on the wall: Bhagat Singh, Bhindranwale and the migrant son. A Panjab sinking into depression through the shenanigans of Centre and state politicians and its own religious bodies feels these are the three heroes who could have, and now can, save it from economic distress.

I do not know how to reconcile the fact that the very Green Revolution that had fed the nation had led to grave harm to its base in Panjab.

Panjab presents the nation an opportunity to display it can make amends. It presents an opportunity to overcome the breach in faith and rebuild it.

We know how synthetic drugs have ruined the physical and mental health of people. Similarly, these study guides have destroyed the education system and the intelligence of our society.

This identity formation, part of organising the religion, has been on since the 1870s, as discussed earlier in the chapter Rosh, led to communities like Sindhis and sects like Udasis who believe in Guru Nanak alone being ousted from the religion. It also led to sects like Nirmalas and Namdharis who believe in all the Gurus from Guru Nanak to Guru Gobind but also believe in a living Guru being ousted from the Sikh religion.

Parkash Singh Badal finally managed to push out Tohra and gained control of the SGPC. This was the corporate takeover of the organised religion.

The 2016 Bill is clear indication that the corporate Sikh religion needs to keep its voter base small so that it can be manipulated.

But most of all the verdict reduced the vast ocean of Sikh thought and philosophy to the presence or absence of hair on one’s body.

The fact is the SGPC today is the Mahant of yore and unless the community rises to create a Singh Sabha 2.0, the control of the Akalis on the SGPC is going to leech the community.

In 2015, the SGPC pardoned Gurmeet Ram Rahim for the 2007 blasphemy through a Rs 100 crore deal brokered allegedly at actor Akshay Kumar’s home in Mumbai. That is when Sukhbir Badal had, without consulting the SGPC President Avtar Singh Makkar, got the Akal Takht Jathedar Gurbachan Singh to issue the pardon.

As of now, the Badals, through the Akalis, through the SGPC, control this causeway. This is their corporate control of the religion.

The probable war soon became a middle class video game.

All the twenty-one Sikh non-commissioned officers and soldiers of other ranks who laid down their lives were posthumously awarded the Indian Order of Merit, the highest gallantry award of that time which an Indian soldier could receive. The battle has frequently been compared to the Battle of Thermopylae, where a small Greek force faced a large Persian army under Xerxes I in 480 BC.

The point really is the empire: whether of the Mughals, Ahmed Shah Durrani, Ranjit Singh or the British, and its sense of the self. Or even now the way the nation state is constructed by creating enemies. Panjab, and its people—Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims—have been fodder, some glorious, some not-so-glorious, through the ages. What we celebrate depends on which tide of history we choose to stand upon. The real pathos is, after the dynasts, after the empires, after the colonialism, in spite of democracy, Panjab is still at a crossroads with no clear path ahead, as it has been many times earlier in its history.

Indeed, it was Delhi and Islamabad that stood between making the two Panjabs one again—one language, one culture, one people, and perhaps someday, again one land of five rivers.

Our tragedy is we remain individual profit-centred and do not think about society.’ ‘Is it because we have seen too many social systems collapse? We do not trust them any longer?’ The bureaucrat paused, and said, ‘Yes, that is perhaps correct. Since no one has benefitted from the system except by bypassing it, violating it, everyone wants to make igloos out of profits and hide in them. Yet, when the entire society goes down, even these igloos will crumble.’

In Panjab, both the militants and the police remained trapped in a quagmire, and the state which was supposed to create processes did not play its role. The model of police injustice continued to perpetuate itself. Manipur asks the same question, as do Bastar and Kashmir. These days the questions are being asked about Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh. The model everywhere is Panjab.

Khalra’s list of 2,097 people disappearing led to the formation of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Panjab which analysed 900 cases and produced a report called Reduced to Ashes, co-authored by Ram Narayan Kumar, Amrik Singh, Ashok Agarwal and Jaskaran Kaur.

Jaskaran Kaur who was co-author of the CCDP report is now co-director of Ensaaf, a US-based human rights group. Till date Ensaaf has mapped 5,234 victims of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings in Panjab from 1981 to 2008. These include 4,393 fake encounters and 841 forced disappearances. Ensaaf’s rigourous and very well-catalogued website provides details of victim demographics, incident information, and the identity of the perpetrators.

England-based lawyer Satnam Singh Bains and his team have toiled hard to bring out their study: Panjab—Identifying the Unidentified.

The group has also made a film Panjab Disappeared—Disappeared, Denied, But Not Forgotten

The Khalistan movement has been crushed, but the stories grow, and continue to evoke mixed responses from the people. If the state believed that the stories would fade away with time, then it is not happening. A generation has passed, the ones who directly suffered the atrocities are passing away or will pass away, but families remember their grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles and aunts. Those abroad raise their voices because they are in relatively safer conditions, in societies where the freedom of speech and protest is intact. The popular discourse that the Indian state creates—on the basis of these demands—is that those people are pro-Khalistan. Yet, the Indian state has never looked critically at itself.

Nations are imagined communities and there is no point in living in a nation in which one does not feel that he or she belongs or where they feel their dignity, self-respect, sense of justice, and resources for a better life are not met.

Panjab was the laboratory where social and economic experiments failed, but were still implemented across India.

Kapurthala to see the grand Moorish Mosque built on the lines of the Grand Koutoubia Mosque of Marrakesh in Morocco by Maharaja Jagatjit Singh and later in the day at Goindwal, considered the axis of the Sikh religion.

Today, the contrast between Amritsar and Goindwal is all too apparent. In Amritsar, Sukhbir Badal has created a ‘Heritage Street’ at the entrance to the Durbar Sahib. The architects have used red stone from Rajasthan and made uniform the shop signs of all the stores there except for McDonald’s and Subway which obviously are bigger corporate entities than the SGPC.

Panjab is an extensive exercise in how to keep one’s faith alive.

the only pillars that stood in the ruin of Panjab were its resistance to power and hegemony. That was, that is, and that will always be Panjab. The dropping of the veil of self-doubt gave me the courage to write this book and place it in the landmine of narratives that we know as Panjab.

experiencing Panjab now was to experience India’s future.

the real question such a turnaround begets is if it admits that Panjab can now trade with the world through Pakistan.

An indigenous leadership acceptable to all levels of Panjabi society. Someone Panjab can trust to push its issues towards closure.

To construct a narrative, Panjab would need a push to bring in a structure where Panjabis not only in Panjab, but also those living in other parts of India, across the border with Pakistan, and in the diverse diaspora, could participate together in re-building Panjab.