Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site decwrl.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!ucbvax!decwrl!bajwa@nacho.DEC (BAJ DTN 381-2851) From: bajwa@nacho.DEC (BAJ DTN 381-2851) Newsgroups: net.nlang.india Subject: Response by a Sikh Message-ID: <643@decwrl.UUCP> Date: Tue, 1-Oct-85 23:07:32 EDT Article-I.D.: decwrl.643 Posted: Tue Oct 1 23:07:32 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 3-Oct-85 06:06:47 EDT Sender: daemon@decwrl.UUCP Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation Lines: 439 A while back someone asked to hear from a Sikh on the happenings in Punjab and elsewhere concerning the Sikhs. Let me respond. ( By the time I finished, I realised that this message was outrageously long, therefore you may want to print it and read it off line. My apoligies for that; but then again the issue is of serious concern). The fundamental issues involved are things like justice, equality, rights, etc.; issues which are fundamental to a democratic system and without which all the nonsense about democracy is just that. India, it is claimed, is the largest democracy. Unfortunately only one of those is true. In my opinion, over the last decade or two, most fundamental institutions of democracy ( press, media, the judicial system, police, etc.) have been highly politicised. The "Sikh problem" is just a symptom of these problems and unless some of the fundamental issues are addressed I predict that there may be several more of these problems. As regards the "Sikh problem" in particular, I think that the factor that has contributed the most to making the situation deteriorate so much is the stranglehold of the Indian govt. on the media. Most Indians are really not aware of what has been really happening to the Sikhs. The govt has used it's control over the media to give a false picture of the happenings in the Punjab region. Until about two years ago, Sikhs were considered to be simple, loyal, hard-working, patriotic people. In the last two years, tens of thousands of them have been killed, their holiest shrine desecrated and destroyed and now they are the outcasts in India, and their loyalty id being seriously questioned. Yes, it is also true that Indira Gandhi was assasinated by two Sikhs ( as individuals and not as a conspiracy as publicly stated by several govt officials immidiately after the assasination ) and also that some non-Sikhs were killed in Punjab during the same time. But overall, the sequence does not make logical sense. It is almost that the victims are being pointed out as being the villians. Sikhs constitute one of the wealthiest communities -- that does not constitute an environment that would foster terrorism; they would stand to lose the most. Before the Golden Temple assault, there was perhaps a handfull of Sikhs talking of Khalistan, after the attack many in Punjab began to talk about it and then after the massacres in Delhi and other North Indian cities, most Sikhs talk about a Khalistan. Note that the talk about Khalistan is merely a reaction and in my opinion is borne out of a feeling of insecurity caused by diminished trust of the govt. I will list a few issues here which may not be known or well understood outside the Sikh community; -- Most linguistic states were automatically formed within a few years of independence. Punjab, as a punjabi-speaking state, was the last to be formed in the late sixties, and that too after much peacefull agitation by the Sikhs (Tara Singh, Fateh Singh etc.). This irked the Sikhs even more considering that more than 75% of those either killed or sent to Andaman during the independence struggle were Sikhs (a fact not well publicised in commonly prescribed history books in schools; yet another sour point from the Sikhs' perspective). -- At the time of partition there were about 40% Sikhs in the armed forces. Now there are about 15%. This was accomplished by a concious policy to limit their recruitment to 2% (their population ratio). (This was done despite the fact that there was an overall shortage of volunteers). What is wrong with such a "quota system" you might ask? Well, this was not a case of normal quota allocation; normal quota rules are used to promote, rather than limit, a minority's participation! For example, would it be acceptable to limit Brahmins to say 3% of govt jobs, because that might be their population representation? Of course not! I really believe that many of the young Sikhs who were followers of Bhindranwale and died fighting the Indian army in the Golden Temple, would have been soldiers in the Indian army, had this ceiling not been the policy. What a pity, when you consider that they would have fought just as fiercely defending India if they hadn't been denied recruitment. -- The Indian govt would have you believe that the assault on the Golden Temple was necessary and justified. The facts, however, do not back up the rhetoric. Consider the following; . No charges were filed and warrants issued against Bhindranwale and his men. There had been a media blitz against him with implications that he was involved in the killings in Punjab (which may or may not be true; but the proper process is very essential). . Bhindranwale was a smalltime religous leader before the govt (Sanjay Gandhi and Congress people in Punjab, in particular) built him up (with money, publicity, political backing etc.) in order to divide the Sikh votes and ensure Congress rule in Punjab. . Bhindranwale had been arrested on at least two occassions and released by orders from some 'highups' in the govt. . Bhindranwale went into the Golden Temple when he realised that the govt had decided that he was then expendible.( It may be interesting to note that Indira's father, Nehru, had also taken shelter in the same temple to avoid arrest during British rule). . The Indian army had been rehearsing an attack on the Golden Temple almost a year prior to the actual assault. This was being done at Chakratta (in UP) where a mockup model of the temple had been constructed. . It wasn't only the Golden Temple in Amritsar that was attacked by the army. All major Sikh temples in Punjab were simultaneously attacked. At some of these several hundred pilgrims were indiscrimately killed. . The particular day chosen for the attack was a Gurpurab (Sikh holy day) when tens of thousands of pilgrims visit the Golden Temple and other Sikh shrines. -- Mutinees by Sikh soldiers were an unfortunate but understandable happenings. Knowing the part that religon plays in the psychology of the Indian soldier, the mutinees should have been anticipated. Most of the soldiers involved are being punished and at least one Sikh battallion has been disbanded. What irks the Sikh community, however, is the inconsistancy with which these incidents are being handled as compared to others. In the past there have been wartime mutinees by large groups of non-Sikh soldiers, at which time those involved were let off with light reprimands. -- By now everyone is aware that the post-assasination riots in Delhi etc. were planned and directed by various leaders of the Congress party, with the active participation of the police in many instances. The investigation by the People's Union 0f Civil Liberties and the Citizens for Democracy is summed up in their report titled "Who Are the Guilty?". The govt, including Rajiv Gandhi, have stated that there was no need of an inquiry. The govt agreed to an investigation in April (after 5 months), but as of now nothing much has been done. Although I don't condone the rationale, most people believe that the assasinations of the two congress leaders (Lallit Maken and Arjun Dass) in Delhi were a result of their involvement in the massacres. Union ministers like HKL Bhagat have also been named in the civil liberties groups' report. The report by the way has been banned in India, but substansial copies are circulating there and abroad. -- The Indian Government's 5-year $270 million relief plan for the Bhopal victims is commendable. The unfortunate aspect of this, however, is the glaring inconsistency it shows when contrasted to the government's attitude towards the victims of the horrible anti-Sikh massacres. The differences become even more apparent when one considers that the Bhopal tragedy occured later than the anti-Sikh riots and that it was an industrial accident as compared to the massacres which were acts of contemplated criminal behaviour, perpetrated over several days. Furthermore, the government initially refused to even hold an inquiry into the anti-Sikh events despite several reports by civil liberties groups indicating that several Congress Party officials and the Police were involved. This was in contrast to a flurry of activity by the government in mobilizing legal assistance in trying to maximize compensation for the Bhopal victims. This is just one example, amongst many, of the anti-Sikh bias of the Indian government. It also casts serious doubts about its sincerity in solving the crisis involving the Sikh community. -- The same civil liberties group's have published the results of their investigations of the events in Punjab, clearly indicating the brute repression carried out by the police and the army. The report has been banned and its writer and publisher jailed. Some excerpts of what appeared on the news wires a few days ago: [Details are now available on the banning of a report on Punjab and arrest of a civil right activist. The police arrested on Sept. 11 two people, ND Pancholi, general secretary for Citizens for Democracy and Prakash Gupta, printer of the document "Report to the Nation - Oppression in Punjab." They along with other authors - Amiya Rao, Aurobindo Ghose, Tejinder Singh and Sunil Bhattacharjee- of the report were charged with sedition and inciting disaffection between Hindus and Sikhs. Two days later, Pancholi and Gupta were granted bail. The police had also seized over 2000 copies of the report. The report was released to the press by an eminent jurist VM Tarkunde on Sept. 8 and it reportedly created a furor in Congress headquarters. Congress(I) general secretary Srikant Varma immediately demanded the arrest of Tarkunde and the authors of the report. According to many, the arrests were politically motivated. The report is in there parts: first part describes what it calls the "inhuman barbarities the Sikhs in Punjab were subjected." It gives specific instances of alleged army atrocities holding it responsible for "harassing, torturing, and killing innocents on fake suspicion of being terrorists." The second part gives the nonofficial version of what happened before and during the Operation Bluestar. It said, "June 4 was the wrong date to enter the temple since on June 3, nearly 10,000 pilgrims were inside the temple for gurpurab and most of them were killed during the operation. "The last part details an account of several "existing black laws in Punjab." It declares "the situation is really desperate and it will be surprising if the brutal torture by the police does not encourage retalitation and fresh violence and create fresh terrorists." Opposition leaders condemned the arrests and banning of the report.] This report sheds a totally different light on the situation in Punjab than the one projected by the Indian govt through its controlled media. Perhaps it helps non-Sikh Indians understand why the Sikhs are so angry and it might explain why so many of them have turned into "extremists and terrorists". The history of the Sikhs is one of fighting against tyranny, opression and injustice. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. -- Most of us here in the US are aware of the haste with which the Indian govt. blamed the Sikhs for the Air India crash. Within a few hours of the crash the Civil Aviation minister was sure that it was an explosion that brought down the plane and that the Sikhs were responsible. Most Indian Newspapers carried bold headlines indicating that the "Khalistanis" were involved. Many months later with many experts working on the investigation, it is yet to be established that it was in fact an explosion that downed the aircraft, let alone that the Sikhs were responsible. The damage, however, had been done; people all over the world have the impression that Sikhs blew up the plane. -- Most people wonder why most of the Sikhs aren't rejoicing at the recent Rajiv-Longowal agreement. As usual most people go by their impressions (which are formed by what the media puts out) rather than actually reading the text of the agreement. Except for the transfer of Chandigarh (although what portion of the Union territory goes to Haryana is yet to be decided) by 26-Jan-86, most of the rest of the agreement is vague and to be decided by commissions to be appointed by the govt. For instance, one of the points calls for the center to send a circular to all state governments to provide protection for the minorities! More importantly, however, the Sikhs find it difficult, based on its past record, to trust the govt. Had te agreement been more concrete and assured that the Sikhs did not get short changed (by giving them an adequate say in the commission appointments, for example), I'm sure most Sikhs would have been satisfied and happy. I hope that some of the points made above will help in trying to understand why the Sikhs feel so alienated. I would like others to comment on these or add to them. It is always good to have a healthy dialogue amongst people with differing viewpoints. I am appending two articles written by friends. They represents more of the feelings within the Sikh community. [ THE PUNJAB PROBLEM - AN ANALYSIS "The political independence of the new Third World countries," according to the French sociologist Jean Duvignaud, "must be followed by social independence, which today does not exist." He continues on to say that " the elite group that won political freedom has become a petrified ruling class whose very existence broadens the gap between the city and the steppe." Though Duvignaud wrote this in the year 1968 in his study of the Tunisian village of Shebika, he could easily have been talking about a village in India. Does India have social independence today even thirty-seven years after gaining political independence? If by the concept of "social independence" we mean the ability to obtain for itself an individual or collective freedom and to find "spontaneously ... the social forms of its adaptation to change," the answer is no, it does not. India is colonized by its urban elite, who have stepped in where the British left off. The killing of thousands of Sikhs in the Indian state of Punjab last June seems a repetition of the massacre by the British of hundreds of Indians at Jallianwalla Bagh (Amritsar), which, curiously enough, lies only a few hundred yards from the Golden Temple. Mrs. Gandhi's action showed the same callous disregard for human life that was shown by the British, furthermore it reveals a disregard for religious sentiment by the invasion of the religious shrine of an industrious, thriving minority of India. The government in India has openly shown that it has become, to the Sikhs, a colonial power. Like the British, it governs the Punjab as though it were a colony, exploiting its labor and its resources while not putting anything back into it. It governs by means of a bureaucratic structure that was taken over intact from the British, except that now an urban elite, which Duvignaud so aptly called a "petrified ruling class," fills the slots that were the prerogative of the British. Indians have to, even today, call these Tax Collectors and District Administrators "Sahib" as they did their British masters. They must still treat them as an aristocracy that is far above them in rank. And it is not merely that anti-egalitarian, hierarchical aspect of this bureaucracy that is objectionable to the common people, it is also that this bureaucracy is riddled with corruption. Every cog in this bureaucratic machine takes, or demands bribes as their right and as a prerequisite of their position. From the District Administrator to the peon who guards the Administrator's door, to every official in the Tax service, the public works department, the police, the telephone service, graft and bribery is the normal way of living. No ordinary person can exist without giving bribes at some time or the other, whether it is to get the very essentials of life like cooking gas or train tickets, or to obtain electricity or water for the farms, or even the use of government-owned harvesters when the crops have ripened. Every person must compromise her or his integrity regularly in order to survive. Indians, consequently, have been rendered effete by this bureaucracy. They see no escape from a life of servitude to these rulers, and feel bound by a consciousness of their shameful complicity in this dishonesty. The Sikhs have decided that it is time this slavery ended. It is time to really be a democracy, to be active participants in their own future, to throw off the cumbersome, stifling colonialistic bureaucracy that hinders dynamism and change. This bureaucracy is, furthermore, governed by a central government that is urban and elite, and which hence has very little knowledge of rural India, or even of the immense differences that exist at a regional, or even village, level in the various parts of the country, imposing plans and projects from a distant, alien city, the rulers are turning villages into merely negative spaces -- spaces that are non-urban, non-dynamic, non-progressive. The central government encourages the villages to become parasites on it by allowing those changes that it brings itself. The bureaucracy effectively stifles any self-help or self-transformation. Consequently, the city becomes, to the villager, the only place where wealth or change is possible, ending up, unfortunately, in the pitiful slums that exist in every Indian city. The Punjab, however, is not a state which thrives on its cities. Its life lies in the farms and the farmers who inhabit the villages -- the same farmers that grow enough food to feed the rest of India. And the central government prevents improvements in the villages by its efforts to remain a powerful, urban elite. By electric power cuts of 12 hours or more a day, by siphoning off Punjab's waters, by imposing artificial wheat prices that allow a minimal profit to the farmer while allowing the merchant in the city to sell in the free market, by nationalizing banks and farming co-operatives as well as much of the farming industry, the center stifles the transformation of the Punjab. Even though, compared to the other poverty-ridden states of India, Punjab is considered to be well-to-do and its desire for autonomy supposed to be merely a desire to grab whatever cake there is while much of India starves, yet Punjab does not get back anything comparable to what it gives. New Delhi is, for Punjab, just as exploitative as London was during the British rule. Punjab is denied the capacity to improve or transform spontaneously into what it has the potential to be. The Punjab farmers do not feel that their labor is given just recompense. They do not feel that they are "fated" to remain poor or starving. Their relegion rejects such passivity. The Sikhs have always been called "progressive." They are not content to remain a petrified society. The Sikh relegion, which was essentially a movement of reformation created out of elements of Hinduism and Islam, has built a society and an ethic in Punjab that is very different from that of the Hindu majority in the rest of India. First, it stresses egalitarianism. Sikhism rejected the cast system, saying instead that all people were born equal. No person was fated to be a collector of refuse as a consequence of birth. It is out of this Hindu belief in the caste system that the present toleration of the hierarchy of urban elite and village poor, of Brahman rulers (to which caste Mrs. Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi belong by birth) and common people, exists. To the Sikhs such hierarchical divisions are intolerable. Sikhism, secondly, proposes that the right way to live is a life of work and family and service to the community. The life of meditation or reclusion is not requisite for salvation, anyone can be a priest, anyone can have access to holy writings. To the Sikhs, therefore, work and community are necessary. Labor that does not benefit the family or the community -- which is what the artificial, minimal price of wheat ensures -- therefore becomes a source of immense dissatisfaction at the grass roots level. The militancy of the Sikhs, by virtue of which the government of India is branding every Sikh a terrorist, has historically been a result of fighting for freedom against the Mogul rulers and later, the British. At present the fight for economic, social and religious freedom is arousing militancy that every Sikh can call up because of the historical past. During the fight for independence against the British, the reputation for being a warrior sect served to make many Sikhs fight and die for India. It served as well to make Sikhs enlist in the Indian Army in large numbers -- many of them realizing that the farms were getting smaller from generation to generation and that farming would not be profitable if everyone farmed. So the Sikhs went into the Army. They also emigrated, in the twentieth century, in large numbers. Most Sikh families have at least one member who lives abroad -- and sends money home. The simplest research can reveal that it is not the farming alone that makes Punjab prosperous because the Government's fixed price and policy of allowing only 18 acres of land to any family ensures otherwise. It is the emigrants who send money home, who buy land, subsidize their families, pump foreign currency into the economy. Village banks have most of their investments from abroad while at the same time the local farmers remain indebted to them. So the Indian government, the ruling urban, westernized, elite, afraid of Punjab's self-transformation afraid that its wheat and its immigrants, in a free economy would take the power and wealth from the center and make Punjab an island of prosperity which the rest of India does not hope to achieve, is determined to keep Punjab a colony of India. Under the religious issue, which has become a rallying symbol for the Sikh fight for freedom, lies the threat to the center of Punjab's desire for social independence -- its determination to throw off the neo-colonialist rule of the urban aristocracy. Punjab is determined to step into a new life and not remain in what George Balandier in Sociologie Actuelle de l'Afrique Noire called "the surviving remnant of the colonial period," by which is meant that no man's land between traditional culture and the new life which keeps a society static. Having an inadequate concept of the structure of every village community, applying programs and laws across the board without taking into consideration diversities of culture, the center has failed to take India anywhere. Corruption, poverty, starvation, and religious animosities that have now arisen out of the failure of the elite that governs India. India, to the dynamic and hardworking Sikhs, seems to be going nowhere. And Punjab and its people have come to realize that they have to be free to transform themselves and in the process to shake off the parasite that feeds on them.] [ SIKH MASSACRES IN INDIA -- THE BEGININGS OF ANOTHER HOLOCAUST? On this the 40th anniversary of the holocaust it is not only important to remember those tragic events it is also important to ensure that they will never be repeated. We can achieve that in two ways; we must first attempt to recognize events that bear any resemblance to those that led up to the holocaust and then we must speak out against them and their perpetrators. In this context it was disappointing to observe the general lack of outrage and condemnation, especially amongst the western democracies, at the carnage that took place in India following the assasination of Indira Gandhi. It is not that violence is unheard of in the Indian subcontinent, but what is unusual is that it was directed specifically at the minority Sikhs, much as the Jews were singled out in Nazi Germany. Like the Jews in Nazi Germany the Sikhs in India are a tiny but visible and prosperous minority. Just as in Germany, the masses in the country were aroused by an anti-Sikh hate campaign and the violence often had the sanction of the government. The riots that killed several thousand innocent Sikh men, women and children were master-minded and organized by right wing elements of the major political party. Police and paramilitary forces looked on and in some cases joined in the looting, burning, raping and killing. Fortunately, there were a few non-Sikhs who saw the injustice and had the courage to shelter some of the potential victims at great risk to their own lives. The media and press were used by the government to either misrepresent or supress the extent of the violence towards the Sikhs. The killings were trivialized to the point that the government saw no need to hold an inquiry. And just as during the supression of the Jews, the rest of the world stood by silently. Let us, in remembering the anniversary of the holocaust, resolve that we will never hesitate to speak out when we see something like this happening. That is the surest way to not let history repeat itself.]