It is 11 pm in the history of the Sikh community. And the clock is ticking away relentlessly. Soon it will be too late to salvage their fortunes. The Panth is truly in danger, not as a result of an assault from outside, or of a conspiracy against it, but of the suicidal activities of those who speak in its name and the failure of the sane elements in it to assert themselves. Only the Sikhs can still avert a disaster. The rest of us can help a little. We cannot persuade or compel the Akalis to abandon the road to hell.
This is not to suggest that the Hindus are not in some way responsible for the tragedy that is being enacted in Punjab. They are. Since they are principally in control of the machinery of the state in the country as a whole, they are mainly to blame for its steady deterioration to a point where it finds itself bereft of the necessary moral authority and, indeed, of the physical capacity. Punjab was converted into a smugglers’ paradise long before the Akalis launched what has turned out to be a war of attrition. And if they did so in the conviction that the government, both in the state and at the Centre, would soon sue for peace, they were not much to blame. Their only mistake was not to take fully into consideration Mrs. Gandhi’s capacity to dig in her toes even when her battalions are a shambles as they are in Punjab.
A great deal has been and can be written on the manner in which we have almost wilfully decimated the Indian state in recent years and in the process robbed ourselves of the capacity to cope with desperadoes such as Sant Bhindranwale and his armed men. Corruption is a hydra-headed monster which feasts on the state and it is remarkably fertile. It produces scores of progenies, smuggling on a truly frightening scale being only one of them. But all this has long been a commonplace. In the present context it will be necessary to dispose of a couple of bogeys which have vitiated thinking.
Some of the Hindus themselves have propagated the myth that events in Punjab would not have taken the turn they have if at the time of the census in 1951 the Punjabi Hindus had not disowned Punjabi as being their mother-tongue and opted for Hindi. This is a form of masochism for which the Hindus are well known. It ignores the background against which the Punjabi Hindus took the decision they did.
Victims Of Partition
The Punjabi Hindus were among the principal victims of partition. It had demonstrated that their adherence to the Punjabi language and culture could not protect them against the fury of communalism, at that time Muslim communalism. By championing the demand for a separate Sikh state on the basis of religion the Akalis had put them on notice that they (the Akalis) too intended to follow in the footsteps of the Muslim League. The Punjabi Hindus had never accepted the Gurmukhi script. For them to have done so in the wake of independence would have been tantamount to voting against the Indian Union. They had not much to gain and a great deal to lose by adopting such a course of action. For the Akalis would never have owned them as their own.
We have given the go by to history in India. This is especially true of many commentators. So assured are they of their wisdom that it does not even occur to them that it might be necessary for them to go into the historical background. So in their utter confidence born out of ignorance and buttressed by self-alienation, they have invented and spread the myth that in 1951 the Punjabi Hindus acted without provocation or justification as if driven by some virulent form of malevolence. The slightest acquaintance with history would have shown it to them that this was not the case. If in 1951 the Hindus in Punjab proclaimed their adherence to the larger north Indian Hindu society by proclaiming the Hindi language with Devanagari script as their mother-tongue, it was in response to the Akali efforts over more than half a century earlier to give the Sikhs a separate religious, cultural and political identity.
The second myth that needs to be laid to rest relates to Mrs. Gandhi. Whatever her faults and weaknesses, she is an utterly patriotic Indian. It is just inconceivable that she would avoid settling the Akali demands in order deliberately to polarise the situation in Punjab so that she could win over the Hindu vote in the whole of north India and beyond. This kind of calumny speaks more for those who indulge in it than for her. As she often sees things, India’s and her own interests converge. She does think herself as the chief instrument of the nation’s destiny. But this is true of many other leaders, certainly including Jawaharlal Nehru, Winston Churchill and De Gaulle. This trait, common to so many great leaders and perhaps essential for them, cannot expose her to the charge of treachery which a deliberate decision to aggravate Hindu-Sikh tensions must attract.
Demands Inflated
The politics of democracy and nation-building rests on tolerance – tolerance even of unreason, unreasonableness and aggressiveness. This tolerance in turn rests on the capacity to place oneself in the opponent’s shoes, view things from his perspective, blame oneself for one’s sins of omission and commission, real or imaginary, and go out of one’s way to accommodate him. But this psychology can be sustained only on the strength of the assumption borne out by experience that those you seek to accommodate are willing to be accommodated even if in a modified system. The assumption turned out to be misplaced in the case of the Muslim League and it looks as if it is misplaced in the case of the Akalis. Tolerance can be overdone and chest-beating and self-denigration are no part of tolerance. They lead to appeasement which is a very different proposition.
To be fair to the official Akali leaders, it is possible that when they launched the agitation, they did not anticipate that Mrs. Gandhi would not allow herself to be pushed and that Sant Bhindranwale and his armed band would make it difficult for them to accept a reasonable compromise. But that was their mistake for which they cannot blame anyone else. They compounded it when they let slip many opportunities Mrs. Gandhi offered them to get out of the trap in which they had put themselves. That was before Sant Bhindranwale had tightened the grip on them. In any case, once the poisonous fruit of their actions had appeared on the table in the form of Hindu-Sikh clashes in Patiala last summer, they should have realised that they had no choice but to withdraw the agitation if they wanted to avoid a disaster for the Sikh community and the country.
They had the experience of the Muslim community to learn from. It is not possible to say whether they concurred with the views some of their extremist supporters took. These bigots argued that if the Muslims could get away with an independent homeland and an honourable place in the Indian Union, there was no good reason why they too could not do the same. But they acted as if they did. They added new demands to the existing ones, including the one for a separate Sikh personal law, of course an obscurantist one, and for an amendment to the Constitution removing the mention of the Sikhs in Article 25.
Identity Issue Worn-out
The last is a truly extraordinary demand. It ignores the fact that the reference to the Sikhs was included in Article 25 in order specifically to meet their insistence that the concessions granted to the scheduled castes among the Hindus should be extended to depressed sections of the Sikhs. The demand was illegitimate in that it ignored the fact that once a Harijan got converted to Sikhism or Islam or Christianity, he no longer suffered from the disabilities he suffered earlier on account of the shameful Hindu practice of untouchability. Indeed, the demand compromised the Sikh faith, as Sardar Patel pointed out. But the Congress leadership agreed to concede it so that the Sikhs did not nurse a grievance. In order to be able to do so, it had to provide that reference to Hindus in Article 25 would be construed us a reference to Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists as well. Clearly there was no design to deny the Sikhs their religious identity in the name of which the Akalis are now clamouring that the article be amended.
The identity issue is worn-out. No Hindu, not even the most sentimental one, can any longer care whether or not the Sikhs should regard themselves as Hindus. It is the business of the Sikhs. If the Akalis wish to ignore history and invent a new one to give themselves a separate identity and other Sikhs wish to go along, no Hindu is going to shed a tear over it.
The problems are different. The Akalis cannot force another partition on the country whatever they do, whatever assistance they receive from sources hostile to India and whatever the cost to the nation of resistance to them. There is no British power in the country which can divide it once again and the Indian state is not so weak as to crumble in the face of their onslaughts on it. The support of the Sikh community cannot win them power in Punjab. The majority of the Sikhs in the state is small – a bare two per cent if that – and they do not command a majority in a majority of the constituencies in view of their heavy concentration in certain districts. So the more self-conscious they become of their separate identity and the more aggressively they behave, the more condemned they will be to remaining in the wilderness.
Meanwhile as Punjab burns, the alienation of the Hindus from the Sikhs in the rest of the country will gather momentum. The process has already gone dangerously far. The recent riots in Haryana are an indication. The Akalis will be ignoring the long-term consequences at the cost of the community. That is why the first sentence in this article. It is 11 p.m. in the history of the Sikh community. It must reverse the clock. It is still possible to do so. But time is running out. The community must demand that the agitation be called off.
The Sikhs must heed the warning before it strikes midnight. The Muslims in the sub-continent allowed themselves to be seduced by Mr. Jinnah with consequences that are there for anyone to see. The Sikhs must not expose themselves to a similar fate. History has a way of repeating itself, not necessarily as a farce. The repetition can be equally tragic.
The Times of India, 7 March 1984