Placed below is the main text of the presentation, a summary of which was read at the UN Human Rights Council, through the courtesy of the Interfaith International on June 12, 2008 at Geneva. It is reproduced here, with thanks, from blog of Gurtej Singh: Editor
1. I am grateful to this assembly for the opportunity to relate the story of the Sikhs in India. After an amendment to the constitution, the preamble now describes India as a “socialist, secular and democratic republic.” It is one of the bulkiest constitutions of the world. Like everything else that sounds good in its ample body, the preamble too is borrowed from another constitution. Regrettably in all other cases also, words have been copied while the noble spirit that animated them originally has been grossly distorted and rendered into the ugliest ever witnessed.2. The word secular does not mean what it meant to originators of the secular movement of the mid nineteenth century. By series of judicial interpretation, it has been ascribed a special meaning. Consequently, in the Indian context it has come to mean that the state has no religion of its own, that it is not concerned with the religion of its citizens and observes complete neutrality towards all religions. The truth however is quite different. Complete functioning of the state is tailored solely according to the interests and norms prescribed by the culture and traditions of the permanent Hindu majority comprising of about 85% of India’s population.
3. In the context of the Sikh people, we may try to understand the situation that prevailed and still prevails not withstanding the 42nd Amendment.
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4. The Sikh faith (Sikhi) is a revelation based, universal, and a sovereign dispensation. It seeks to liberate humans socially, politically and to insulate them against religious tyranny. It frees the mind from all superstition and enjoins the worship of One God alone. It acknowledges the important role of human values and human reason in the spiritual development of humans. It claims to be nearest to Truth. It aims at creating a volunteer force of spiritually elevated people charged with implementing, in human affairs, the Will of God as realized by the Sikh Gurus. The Will is wholly benign and is the product of Divine love for creation. The very act of implementing His Will is mukti, moksha, salvation, nirvana or the final release for a Sikh. The goal is to be achieved by selfless incessant striving, personal conduct, gentle persuasion, service and sacrifice. All Sikhs are expected to take a formal vow of dedicating their lives to the implementation of the Will. This is done by formal initiation called the amrit ceremony. Those who participate in it are expected to observe rigorous spiritual self-discipline and are expected to actively confront evil without pausing, without tiring. The force of arms in resisting evil is sanctioned but only in the last resort, when it becomes absolutely inevitable to control the disruptive and destructive forces. Sikhi is not a proselytising religion in the sense that Islam and Christianity are and accepts the validity of all faiths that are true to their own preaching.
5. Hinduism is a caste based faith built painstakingly around the firm belief in human inequality and the notions of purity and pollution that attach to individuals by birth. Its rituals are grounded in the proposition to afford unlimited privilege to the ‘higher’ castes to exploit the labour and persons of castes deemed inferior. It has a hierarchical system of exploitation built into religious practises and ends up in Brahmins exploiting all other castes. The driving force of the entire system is hatred and the denigration of the human personality.
6. Though Sikhi has no enmity with any religion, Hinduism feels itself threatened by the mere existence of egalitarian Sikhi that stands for the ‘whole truth’ and ‘complete justice’ to the individual. First step of the strategy worked out by Hinduism to destroy Sikhi is to completely deny the historically evolved separate Sikh identity and sovereign nature of the dispensation. It has further made it its primary business to erase the Sikh consciousness with a view to absorbing the Sikh faith into Hinduism. This has been the perception of our most enlightened people including Bhai Kahan Singh Nabha and Sirdar Kapur Singh, the universally respected intellectuals. This is also the finding of independent observers.
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7. From 1710 CE when the first “People’s Republic led by the Khalsa” was carved out, the Sikhs were a sovereign people up to the middle of the nineteenth century. In the year 1918 the Montague-Chelmsford Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms recognised the Sikhs as an independent political identity. Since then, the Sikhs have been a third party (along with the Hindus and the Muslims) to share the sovereignty of India and were represented at all the national and international conferences at which the constitution for the to-be de-colonised India was hammered out. De-colonisation resulted in the vivisection of India into two (now three) sovereign nations; India and Pakistan from which, the third, Bangladesh was later on carved out. In 1947, the Sikhs had an option of joining either of the two entities or they could make an effective bid for meaningful autonomy in either entity. They chose to remain in India primarily on the strength of the solemn promises made to them by the most respected Hindu leaders that they would have statutory autonomy in India. It was promised that their province, the Punjab, would be autonomous and that they would be empowered to protect their culture and language. They were also promised reservations in legislatures according to their numbers, separate electorate and share in government service (then the biggest and the most influential employer). These commitments were made voluntarily, publicly and were reduced to writing in the form of the “objective resolution” of the constituent assembly and were incorporated into the first and the second drafts of the constitution then being deliberated. By such allurements as that the Sikhs would still be ruling over themselves even as a part of India and would have the additional advantage of belonging to a vast country, the Sikhs were persuaded not to plead for a separate autonomous territory at the crucial time of British de-colonisation. By the same allurements they were persuaded to keep away from the other entity which made sincere efforts to associate with them.
8. Ever since the de-colonisation of India in 1947, the Hindus have come into political power on the strength of sheer numbers and the Sikhs, as a people, have been re-colonised mainly because they are just two percent of the total population of India. This has had its grave repercussions on the Hindu-Sikh relations and the political and cultural destiny of the Sikhs in particular. Immediately after securing the reins of power in its hands, the overwhelming permanent majority started taking measures for the ruin of the Punjab, the homeland of the Sikhs and for wiping out the Sikhs as a people.
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9. Sikh difficulties began in the beginning. The partition of the country brought about solely by the representatives of the Hindu was primarily the partition of the Punjab and Bengal. Punjab, the Sikh homeland was torn asunder in almost two equal halves. The process was accompanied by large scale bloodshed in which six lakhs of (0.6 million) people perished and 6 million suffered forced migration. Hindu Congress leaders at the helm of affairs encouraged strife with the aim of promoting permanent enmity between the Sikhs and Muslims on either side of the international border. Very significantly, they did not give a thought to the exchange of population suggested both by Jinnah and the Sikhs leaders. That alone could have preserved more than half a million lives.
10. In October 1947, just within three months of the most violent upheaval in human history of which Sikhs were the main victims, an order was issued by the Governor of the Punjab, instructing the all powerful district officials to treat the migrating Sikhs as a criminal people who were a threat to the peace-loving Hindus of the state and to suppress the Sikhs with the force of arms. It automatically offered immunity to the officials who would order the killings of the unarmed, uprooted and defenceless population entrusted to their care by the turn of historical events. There is no doubt that this order of ‘general massacre’ was generously implemented with the declared object of bringing home to the Sikhs that their homeland, the Punjab was just a colony of the new Indian Union and that they themselves were no more than slaves.
11. The Muslims who migrated to Pakistan were generously compensated for the properties they had left behind in India. They were routinely given four to five times the lands that they owned here. A decision was made in Hindu India to rehabilitate the Sikhs only in the Punjab. This severely limited the amount of compensation they would get as most of the landowning Muslims had migrated from other parts of India. It sometimes resulted in the Sikhs getting mere 5% to 20% of what they had been forced to abandon in the Pakistan This is cited as a measure of the deep-rooted Hindu desire to economically destroy the decimated, displaced and impoverished Sikhs and to confine them into a closely monitored area. The position remains the same even today. No one has been held responsible, much less censured for seeking to promote violence by formulating sinister policies of hatred and for using the newly acquired instrument of state power against a section of its own population professing a different faith.
12. The next step was also that of further economically crippling the Punjab into which the Sikh people had been consciously dumped. The beginning was made in 1955. A scheme was devised whereby the river water over which, according to the constitution of India, the Punjab alone was sovereign was allocated to the neighbouring Hindu states of Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi. Rivers Ravi, Beas and Satluj flow through the territory of the Punjab alone thus making the Punjab, a sole riparian state. Of the total water of the Punjab rivers that has been allocated after re-colonisation, 80% has gone to the non-riparian states of Delhi, Jammu & Kashmir, Rajasthan and Haryana. All the three rivers of the Punjab have 32 Million Acre Feet (MAF) of water. To irrigate its 105 lakh acres of land, the Punjab needs at least 52.5 MAF. It is presently left just with about 17 MAF of its own river water and is forced to depend upon ground water for irrigation. At ten to twenty times the cost, it pumps out 55 MAF of water annually with its 15 hundred thousand tube wells run on costly electricity and mostly on costlier diesel. The Punjab is being forced to use its precious ground water. I am a farmer and my wheat crop this season had to be totally irrigated with underground water. The effect of this according to many studies, including some by the UNO, is that the Punjab is slowly turning into a desert and that the process is likely to be completed by the year 2025. This has so destroyed the environment that a large number of the Sikhs are daily migrating to foreign lands just to escape the imminent disaster ominously looming large over the Punjab. This is a result of illegal policies of water management followed by the Indian state to the detriment of the Punjab, the only homeland of the Sikhs. The matter of the river water has been taken to the Supreme Court of India several times but no judicial pronouncement could be obtained because our courts are quick to discern the state policy and to comply accordingly.
13. The matters have come to such a pass that the Punjab does not have enough fresh water to drink.The entire Malwa belt (substantial part of the Punjab) is forced to drink the polluted water into which raw untreated sewage of several towns and the waste of industrial units finds disposal. The matter is so serious that the DNA of the affected people has been altered and children are taking birth with devastating diseases and deformities (cleft lip for instance). It is the most modern way of committing genocide by the ‘peaceful Gandhian methods.’ This could also be termed the latest version of Hitler’s “total solution.” Cases of cancer abound in every village. My younger brother, my elder brother’s daughter-in-law, my cousin’s son and my wife’s aunt have died of cancer within the last two years.
14. One of the long standing grievances of those propounding the Sikh cause has been that money collected from the Punjab is siphoned off by the banking system to invest elsewhere in India; thus depriving the Punjab of immediate development and its long term fruits. This has been done in the name of maintaining ‘regional balances.’ When reckoned on a long term basis the negative impact of the export of bank capital on the economy of the state is at least crippling.
15. The Hindu theory of suppression from the beginning has been built upon the denial of the separate Sikh identity. Against all reason the Hindu tactically believes that Sikhi is just a minor sect of the Hindu religion. Consequently the persistent Sikh call for framing the Sikh personal law has fallen on deaf ears of the government of India for the last sixty years. It was a major demand of the peaceful Sikh agitation that rocked the Punjab for almost a decade. The Anand Marriage Act of 1909, inadequate as it was, had been rendered ineffective for decades by several kinds of judicial manipulations. Now that the registration of marriages has been made compulsory by law, and considering that this Act has no provision for registration (except in the Punjab since April 2008), even the only Sikh personal law enacted by the British almost a century earlier, has been all but obliterated from the statute book. The irony is that the Islamic state of Pakistan has enacted the Sikh Marriage Act by way of Sikh Marriage Ordinance 2008, for about 13000 Sikhs living in their part of the Punjab and ‘secular, democratic’ India which has at least 20 million Sikh population is still toying with the idea –very lightly at that.
16. Other methods used for liquidating the Sikh identity, include re-writing of history with a view to denigrating Sikh heroes, preventing genuine Sikh leadership from emerging and promoting the Sikh leadership that serves Hindu interests, stealing Sikh heroes, (for instance Banda Singh Bahadur), promoting Sikh apostates as Sikh heroes, propping up false prophets with government support, preventing the Sikhs from ruling themselves even when legitimately returned to power, neglecting primary education in the rural Punjab to keep the Sikh population ignorant, promoting spurious literature as Sikh scriptures and discouraging the use of Punjabi, the mother tongue of the Punjabi Sikhs and the language of their scripture. In a myriad ways such as portrayal of the Sikhs in the popular Hindi cinema as half-wits and misrepresentations of Sikh culture in the Media, a powerful propaganda machine has been created to coerce the Sikhs into effacing the pride in the Sikh culture and nationhood. Sometimes the inner strength of the Sikh culture throws up competent leadership that wipes out such disadvantages in a short time and under it the Sikh nation rises anew from the ashes. It is then that that leader, for instance, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhinderanwale, is eliminated and another general massacre of the Sikhs is made to happen.
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17. The decimation of 1947 was not the last one that the Sikhs have had to endure. There have been more. A thorough study of the Hindu-Sikh relations, equips one to assert that since the very birth of the Sikh faith the Hindus have regarded it an antagonistic belief that must be destroyed root and branch for the sake of preserving Hinduism. This sentiment has been translated into administrative action whenever the Hindus have become capable of harming the Sikhs.
18. In the beginning of the eighties, the largest political party in India which swore by secularism felt that in the rising tide of Hindu religious nationalism, it would soon become irrelevant. It decided to formally incarnate into a Hindu party. It also decided to anoint the new incarnation of the Congress with the blood of the Sikhs. They were the most available for blood-letting as they, being a small minority and a colonised nation, would have no sympathy anywhere in the world.
19. In pursuance of that policy, it decided to utilise the ongoing Sikh agitation in the Punjab. In the early eighties of the last century peaceful agitation to stem the prevailing religious discrimination, to secure the legitimate economic rights of the Punjab, among which were the questions of river water, separate Sikh identity and personal law, took place. Many compromises with the agitating Akalis and other Sikhs were arranged by several intermediaries commissioned by the Prime Minister of India. She rejected them all and kept on dexterously stoking the fires of Sikh hatred among the Hindus of India. She freely used the forum of the parliament for the purpose. Not much effort was required to harness the Media. Being composed mainly of the Hindus, as always it was only too willing to lead from the front. Having made these preparations, she came down heavily on the Sikhs and ordered the Indian defence forces to attack at least forty Sikh shrines with the aim of physically eliminating the highly motivated Sikhs and for destroying Sikh pride and prestige.
20. It was a diabolical and a multi-pronged plan. Curfew was imposed on the entire Punjab to facilitate the attack. This was deliberately timed to coincide with one of holiest days of the Sikh calendar when attendance at the shrines was expected to be the thickest. Curfew was lifted for a few hours prior to the attack to entrap the maximum number of Sikhs inside. No warning of the attack was given. The prime minister of India and the official Media continued to mislead the people until the last. It was stated inside and outside the parliament, that there would be no attack. The Indian forces killed a large number of temple servants, priests, pilgrims, women and children and took the remaining as “prisoners of war.” They burnt the famed Sikh Reference Library that had thousands of manuscripts some dating back to the times of the Sikh Gurus and several of them bearing their signatures. This surely was the most barbaric act indulged in by religiously surcharged forces since the sack of Constantinople in 1453 CE. They trampled underfoot every inch of the soil made sacred by the touch of the Sikh Gurus and the blood of Sikh martyrs. They made a gaping wound in the heart of every living Sikh and assured by their barbarity that none in future will be born without it. An enquiry into the circumstances leading to the invasion has been sought for over two decades now but no government has condescended to accept the plea. The SCI too declined the opportunity to investigate. Efforts of the Citizen’s Court set up by some distinguished people were frustrated by the judiciary. Neither have the foreign independent human rights bodies been allowed to investigate the matter on the spot. I myself have been a part of deputations to at least three successive prime ministers of India to demand that the list of the killed be made public. All other requests have also been ignored. The common perception is that the army attack was calculated to bring home to the Sikhs that the profession and the practise of their faith, is a taboo in Hindu India.
21. The persistent attempts of the Hindu empire, to wipe out the Sikhs from the face of India, found another expression. From October 31, 1984 to November 4, 1984, was perpetrated the general massacre of the Sikhs in Delhi and other north Indian states. The president of India was constrained to call it a “holocaust” in his memoirs. It made the later prime minister of India hang his head in shame before the world. After the murder of the then prime minister by her own (Sikh) bodyguards, the succeeding prime minister and other politicians ordered massacre of the Sikhs. For five days, Delhi saw open persecution of the Sikhs by the Hindu hordes in connivance with and aided by the entire administration including the police and the political establishment.
22. It started with attack on the caravan of the Sikh president of India. On the first day it was confined mainly to setting ablaze properties of the Sikhs and to beating up the Sikhs wherever seen. For the next four days, it was the dance of destruction of Shiva (Tandav) that the Sikhs endured. While politicians identified Sikh homes and properties, the police transported and supplied goons with liquor, arson material, lethal weapons and gave them protection. It disarmed the Sikhs to render them an easy prey. Complaints of the Sikhs were generally not registered, or were registered in a manner that identification of the culprits would become impossible. Protected goons went about freely and indiscriminately ‘burning, maiming, looting, raping, burning alive and killing.’ For full four days it was the reign of terror for the Sikhs.’ In his description, the president did not mention that his own convoy was attacked and his car was hit.
23. Requests for the registration of cases were mostly rudely refused from November 1 to November 4 or the registration was not properly done. There was no follow up or arrests or prosecution. No deterrent action was taken. The army was called in but only to parade around the town, to assure the violent mob that no action against them was contemplated. Government did not cooperate with the relief camps opened by non government organisations and obstructed their working.
24. Speaking to the state controlled media, the prime minister justified the killings with the words, “when a big tree falls, earth shakes.” This statement was relayed again and again by the state owned television along with ‘blood for blood’ slogan of the killer gangs. Such was the seething hatred that the whole administration cooperated with the prime minister in thwarting effects at providing relief to the victims. Several doctors refused to treat the injured and threw them out in the injured state. Three thousand Sikhs perished in Delhi alone in the winter of 1984 with the entire world Media looking on. Except for one or two inconsequential persons, none has been brought to book for the carnage. Some victims are still struggling (in 2008) to get their complaints registered.
25. In continuation of the above mentioned undeclared war against the Sikhs hundreds of thousands of innocent Sikh young men, women and children were killed by the armed forces of India during the ‘bloody decade’ from 1983 to 1996. Some of them were abducted from their homes, tortured, killed and their bodies were cremated as “unidentified.” Private investigation discovered what had happened and eventually in 1996 (a Sikh judge) of the Supreme Court of India took notice of what it was pleased to call “genocide.” The SCI entrusted the matter to the National Human Rights Commission and the Central Bureau of Investigation. The Bureau was to ascertain criminal liability for death in police custody. It has not launched a single prosecution since 1996. The Commission and the Bureau limited the investigation to just three cremation grounds in one of the districts, Amritsar only although the killings had taken place all over the Punjab. It finally further limited the scope of the enquiry to just finding out why the bodies were not handed over to the parents although it was known who the deceased were. No criminal liability for abducting and killing is sought to be fixed because almost to the man these young people were Sikhs. Two thousand and fifty-nine cases were investigated by human rights bodies and the events from arrest to the disposal of bodies in the cremation ground were traced. Country’s premier investigating agency and the National Human Rights Commission refused to go beyond that. Meagre compensation is being provided to the relatives of some victims just for the fact that the bodies were not handed over to them. To this extent is the state protecting its armed forces, para-military forces and the police that no case of murder is being registered and none for abduction. There is ample evidence that hundreds of thousands of people with religious beliefs deemed inconvenient by the state were killed by its armed forces on instructions of political masters. There is enough evidence that large-scale killing of the young Sikh people was a considered policy of the state. This is worse than what some of the totalitarian states have done.
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26. The inadequate and intrinsically infirm European concept of ‘one nation one state’ and its selective use have become the bane of many societies around the world. The aura of written constitution’ and the Anglo-Saxon concept of rule of law which flows from it are being exploited by the Indian state to annihilate, the minorities and other nations in India. This annihilation is both psychological as well as physical. It contravenes natural justice and the provisions of many international charters sponsored by the UNO. Secularism or neutrality in religious affairs of the citizens is amongst the most abused of concepts that has been harnessed to deny religious freedom and identity to the Sikhs in India.
27. The Sikh initiation ceremony of amrit was continuously discouraged, during the ‘bloody decade’. Official instructions were issued to the army to regard the duly initiated Sikhs as terrorists. These instructions were issued in June 1984 when the anti- Sikh sentiment in the entire country had been whipped up into frenzy by the then prime minister. This Hindu tendency has been in operation for long and was also noticed in 1911 by D. Petrie, Assistant Director Central Intelligence, Government of India. This is the real cause of the Hindu-Sikh conflict. Amritdharis are still suspect and are liable to be picked up by police under suspicion of illegal activity no matter how unfounded the suspicion may be. In a recent case of a bomb blast in a cinema hall at Ludhiana approximately 500 such amritdhari young men were picked up and tortured.
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28. The effect of this is to discourage the young people from taking formal and wholly innocuous religious vows on pain of torture and even death. The religious policy of elimination of Sikhi from India, with its necessary adjunct of periodically decimating the Sikhs to demoralise them, has been so projected by the political leadership of the Hindus that, it has effectively become a mega project deemed necessary for national Hindu self assertion, preservation of the Hindu faith and for safeguarding the ‘unity and integrity of India.’ When this policy is implemented by the politicians in power at the national or the state level, all organs of the state including the Media cooperate with them fully. The situation may be better understood on consideration of how these pillars of state in modern polity have behaved since 1947.
29. It is with the full cooperation of the parliament, the executive particularly the police, the courts right up to the SCI and of the communal Hindu permanent majority that the extremely oppressive state machinery has been erected by the Hindu leaders. The Punjab has been permanently turned into a police state more oppressive for the Sikhs than Hitler’s Germany ever was for the Jews when it is considered that his was a wartime madness of a singularly unusual dictator while the Hindu policy is a cold, calculated, a deliberate and a permanent policy of a state selling itself as the ‘largest democracy of the world.’ It is a policy to the formulation and sustenance of which every political party has contributed what it deemed politically proper.
Legislature
30. The Indian parliament has too meekly accepted the dictates of the executive to formulate lawless laws in pursuance of the sinister annihilation plan initiated by the party in power. It consented to being used to enact laws that were specifically aimed at demoralising and persecuting the Sikhs. The potential for misuse was not properly assessed. Draconian laws were enacted in spite of the more effective laws being actually present on the statute book. That has had a gravely adverse effect on the destinies of the Sikh nation. The parliament failed to properly scrutinise the anti-Sikh laws or to question their rationale even when the courts had struck down some of them. It continued to help the executive in re-enacting them again and again. In crucial cases it refuses to stand by the constitution when it is found to be operating in favour of the Punjab, for instance, the riparian law. It has failed to defend even the demarcation of the Punjabi Region that it had made earlier. The worst kind of communal hysteria has been whipped up against the Sikhs by the misuse of the parliamentary forum without drawing a protest from any quarter.
Judiciary
31. All over the world, the courts of justice are regarded as temples of democracy, as particular places especially sacrosanct where God Himself dispenses justice through the agency of high-minded judges. Every judge worth his salt believes he is deputising for God and is weighed down by the tremendous obligation of his office to make decisions according to the evidence before him. That is not the position in India. A judge even of the highest court, particularly where Sikh interests are involved, feels obliged to tow the party line dictated by the perceived Hindu interests. If judicial pronouncements of the Supreme Court of India, since 1947, are scrutinised they will exhibit strict conformity to that unwritten law of Indian jurisprudence. Some half a dozen such cases have been analysed here and are believed to bear out the truth of the statement being made.
Police
32. During the period of the modern holocausts, the law and order, which is a state subject was strictly controlled by the Union Government. In the above circumstances, the Indian police with a long tradition of cringing before colonial masters, came down heavily on the Sikhs. For it there has been nothing cheaper than the life of a Sikh. Policemen officially received bounties for torturing and killing Sikhs. More often than not, they killed them in full public view. This happened on many, many occasions. The police maintained convenient witnesses to ensure conviction in even the cases it cooked up against the innocent. They were not brought to book for the murders. Attempts were made by the Hindu chauvinist party the BJP, to formally grant them blanket amnesty in 2001. Eventually, they had to make do with an informal but an equally effective one. In May 2008, it was revealed that those policemen who had been convicted for murder, never went to jail but continued to serve in the police force and some even retired after taking full pension. K. P. S. Gill who earned the sobriquet of “the butcher” in one quarter and of “supercop” in the other, was even rehabilitated after retirement as a president of the Indian Hockey Federation.
33. Policemen, conscious of the immunity they were granted, often advertised themselves as the killers. Innocence or guilt had nothing to do with qualifying a person for execution. One just had to be known as a good Sikh. A new term “suspected unknown Sikh terrorists” came into vogue and was freely applied. Six farmers going on a bullock cart were mowed down as ‘suspected Sikh terrorists.’ In another case a young man who was on his way to drop his guests at a railway station on his wedding day, was killed when he failed to notice the police signal to stop. I brought this case to the notice of the Governor of the state. He had the audacity and callousness to tell me that he ‘could understand his being fired upon if he did not stop on being asked to.’ My question to him, “how could you do that for a traffic offence?” elicited just a cold, blank and arrogant stare.
34. The police and other forces in the Punjab go about murdering innocent Sikhs on the promise of enjoying effective impunity. Another term that served the police well in its murderous spree was “encounter.” It claimed to have killed many young men when they fired on the police thus engaging it in encounter. In actual practise they were all cold-blooded murders. The patronage that the police are receiving for murdering hundreds and thousands of Sikhs is sufficient to confirm that it is executing the state policy.
Media
35. Media surveys and studies are routinely undertaken in western countries but are rare in India. The world never gets to know the reality prevailing in the Indian Media and consequently in India. According to a survey that took place sometime back the electronic and print Media is fully controlled by Brahmins and upper caste Hindus for the benefit of their order and to the detriment of all others. The survey took into account 37 Media establishments considered to comprise the whole of the ‘national Media.’ It found the modern democratic establishments caught in the vice of ancient Manu’s caste system. It was discovered that 71% high caste Hindus held the topmost decision making positions. In the nineties of the last century, India’s Dalit population was 150 million but not even one Dalit was working as a correspondent or a sub-editor with any daily paper. This controlled Media, subscribing to the permanent majority’s perception about the Sikhs as enemies, has always played a leading role in India’s suppression drives against the Sikhs.
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36. Some who may have been offended with reference to the Punjab as a colonised state and the Sikh people as slaves of imperial Hindu India, may ponder over the facts narrated here. If I have not been able to adequately describe the death dealing situation in which the Sikhs are placed in India, the fault is attributable to my inadequate articulation. The reality remains extremely menacing. India is a veritable death trap for the Sikhs. The Sikhs, belonging to the youngest of world religions and representing a unique culture with all its meaningful gifts for humankind, is in the immediate danger of being obliterated as a result of deliberate state policy formulated by an overwhelming permanent majority that has the Indian state in its vice like grip. To wipe out the Sikh culture may be the requirement of an ancient irrational society struggling to find justification for existing in the modern world. The permanent majority in accordance with its tradition of always hiding behind a thick veil of deception while committing the worst crimes against every hapless minority that has come its way throughout its march in history, is resorting to the same strategy again. The Sikhs are worried that the deception is working. Tallest in the world feel proud to shake hands with leaders of a country, who stand upon the bleeding corpses of hundreds of thousands of Sikhs, Muslims, Dalits and the Tribals entrusted by destiny to their care. The Sikhs have a right to expect that the comity of nations will start questioning the diabolical designs of the most callous administration in the world. The Sikhs want to live. During the five hundred and forty years of their existence they have supported a universal culture, defended worthy causes, befriended the right minded, have promoted excellent work ethics, have proved to be a productive people everywhere, have remained steadfast in their moral commitments and have never shirked their duty to love and serve humankind. They have contributed their mite to worthy causes, have proved to be useful and law abiding citizens of every country they have gone to. This much cannot be said of many other peoples. They expect that some friends somewhere will understand their plight and will lend them a helping hand, in the hour of their need.
- Gurtej Singh
Blog: www.singhgurtej.blogspot.com
1. I am grateful to this assembly for the opportunity to relate the story of the Sikhs in India. After an amendment to the constitution, the preamble now describes India as a “socialist, secular and democratic republic.” It is one of the bulkiest constitutions of the world. Like everything else that sounds good in its ample body, the preamble too is borrowed from another constitution. Regrettably in all other cases also, words have been copied while the noble spirit that animated them originally has been grossly distorted and rendered into the ugliest ever witnessed.2. The word secular does not mean what it meant to originators of the secular movement of the mid nineteenth century. By series of judicial interpretation, it has been ascribed a special meaning. Consequently, in the Indian context it has come to mean that the state has no religion of its own, that it is not concerned with the religion of its citizens and observes complete neutrality towards all religions. The truth however is quite different. Complete functioning of the state is tailored solely according to the interests and norms prescribed by the culture and traditions of the permanent Hindu majority comprising of about 85% of India’s population.
3. In the context of the Sikh people, we may try to understand the situation that prevailed and still prevails not withstanding the 42nd Amendment.
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4. The Sikh faith (Sikhi) is a revelation based, universal, and a sovereign dispensation. It seeks to liberate humans socially, politically and to insulate them against religious tyranny. It frees the mind from all superstition and enjoins the worship of One God alone. It acknowledges the important role of human values and human reason in the spiritual development of humans. It claims to be nearest to Truth. It aims at creating a volunteer force of spiritually elevated people charged with implementing, in human affairs, the Will of God as realized by the Sikh Gurus. The Will is wholly benign and is the product of Divine love for creation. The very act of implementing His Will is mukti, moksha, salvation, nirvana or the final release for a Sikh. The goal is to be achieved by selfless incessant striving, personal conduct, gentle persuasion, service and sacrifice. All Sikhs are expected to take a formal vow of dedicating their lives to the implementation of the Will. This is done by formal initiation called the amrit ceremony. Those who participate in it are expected to observe rigorous spiritual self-discipline and are expected to actively confront evil without pausing, without tiring. The force of arms in resisting evil is sanctioned but only in the last resort, when it becomes absolutely inevitable to control the disruptive and destructive forces. Sikhi is not a proselytising religion in the sense that Islam and Christianity are and accepts the validity of all faiths that are true to their own preaching.
5. Hinduism is a caste based faith built painstakingly around the firm belief in human inequality and the notions of purity and pollution that attach to individuals by birth. Its rituals are grounded in the proposition to afford unlimited privilege to the ‘higher’ castes to exploit the labour and persons of castes deemed inferior. It has a hierarchical system of exploitation built into religious practises and ends up in Brahmins exploiting all other castes. The driving force of the entire system is hatred and the denigration of the human personality.
6. Though Sikhi has no enmity with any religion, Hinduism feels itself threatened by the mere existence of egalitarian Sikhi that stands for the ‘whole truth’ and ‘complete justice’ to the individual. First step of the strategy worked out by Hinduism to destroy Sikhi is to completely deny the historically evolved separate Sikh identity and sovereign nature of the dispensation. It has further made it its primary business to erase the Sikh consciousness with a view to absorbing the Sikh faith into Hinduism. This has been the perception of our most enlightened people including Bhai Kahan Singh Nabha and Sirdar Kapur Singh, the universally respected intellectuals. This is also the finding of independent observers.
III
7. From 1710 CE when the first “People’s Republic led by the Khalsa” was carved out, the Sikhs were a sovereign people up to the middle of the nineteenth century. In the year 1918 the Montague-Chelmsford Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms recognised the Sikhs as an independent political identity. Since then, the Sikhs have been a third party (along with the Hindus and the Muslims) to share the sovereignty of India and were represented at all the national and international conferences at which the constitution for the to-be de-colonised India was hammered out. De-colonisation resulted in the vivisection of India into two (now three) sovereign nations; India and Pakistan from which, the third, Bangladesh was later on carved out. In 1947, the Sikhs had an option of joining either of the two entities or they could make an effective bid for meaningful autonomy in either entity. They chose to remain in India primarily on the strength of the solemn promises made to them by the most respected Hindu leaders that they would have statutory autonomy in India. It was promised that their province, the Punjab, would be autonomous and that they would be empowered to protect their culture and language. They were also promised reservations in legislatures according to their numbers, separate electorate and share in government service (then the biggest and the most influential employer). These commitments were made voluntarily, publicly and were reduced to writing in the form of the “objective resolution” of the constituent assembly and were incorporated into the first and the second drafts of the constitution then being deliberated. By such allurements as that the Sikhs would still be ruling over themselves even as a part of India and would have the additional advantage of belonging to a vast country, the Sikhs were persuaded not to plead for a separate autonomous territory at the crucial time of British de-colonisation. By the same allurements they were persuaded to keep away from the other entity which made sincere efforts to associate with them.
8. Ever since the de-colonisation of India in 1947, the Hindus have come into political power on the strength of sheer numbers and the Sikhs, as a people, have been re-colonised mainly because they are just two percent of the total population of India. This has had its grave repercussions on the Hindu-Sikh relations and the political and cultural destiny of the Sikhs in particular. Immediately after securing the reins of power in its hands, the overwhelming permanent majority started taking measures for the ruin of the Punjab, the homeland of the Sikhs and for wiping out the Sikhs as a people.
IV
9. Sikh difficulties began in the beginning. The partition of the country brought about solely by the representatives of the Hindu was primarily the partition of the Punjab and Bengal. Punjab, the Sikh homeland was torn asunder in almost two equal halves. The process was accompanied by large scale bloodshed in which six lakhs of (0.6 million) people perished and 6 million suffered forced migration. Hindu Congress leaders at the helm of affairs encouraged strife with the aim of promoting permanent enmity between the Sikhs and Muslims on either side of the international border. Very significantly, they did not give a thought to the exchange of population suggested both by Jinnah and the Sikhs leaders. That alone could have preserved more than half a million lives.
10. In October 1947, just within three months of the most violent upheaval in human history of which Sikhs were the main victims, an order was issued by the Governor of the Punjab, instructing the all powerful district officials to treat the migrating Sikhs as a criminal people who were a threat to the peace-loving Hindus of the state and to suppress the Sikhs with the force of arms. It automatically offered immunity to the officials who would order the killings of the unarmed, uprooted and defenceless population entrusted to their care by the turn of historical events. There is no doubt that this order of ‘general massacre’ was generously implemented with the declared object of bringing home to the Sikhs that their homeland, the Punjab was just a colony of the new Indian Union and that they themselves were no more than slaves.
11. The Muslims who migrated to Pakistan were generously compensated for the properties they had left behind in India. They were routinely given four to five times the lands that they owned here. A decision was made in Hindu India to rehabilitate the Sikhs only in the Punjab. This severely limited the amount of compensation they would get as most of the landowning Muslims had migrated from other parts of India. It sometimes resulted in the Sikhs getting mere 5% to 20% of what they had been forced to abandon in the Pakistan This is cited as a measure of the deep-rooted Hindu desire to economically destroy the decimated, displaced and impoverished Sikhs and to confine them into a closely monitored area. The position remains the same even today. No one has been held responsible, much less censured for seeking to promote violence by formulating sinister policies of hatred and for using the newly acquired instrument of state power against a section of its own population professing a different faith.
12. The next step was also that of further economically crippling the Punjab into which the Sikh people had been consciously dumped. The beginning was made in 1955. A scheme was devised whereby the river water over which, according to the constitution of India, the Punjab alone was sovereign was allocated to the neighbouring Hindu states of Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi. Rivers Ravi, Beas and Satluj flow through the territory of the Punjab alone thus making the Punjab, a sole riparian state. Of the total water of the Punjab rivers that has been allocated after re-colonisation, 80% has gone to the non-riparian states of Delhi, Jammu & Kashmir, Rajasthan and Haryana. All the three rivers of the Punjab have 32 Million Acre Feet (MAF) of water. To irrigate its 105 lakh acres of land, the Punjab needs at least 52.5 MAF. It is presently left just with about 17 MAF of its own river water and is forced to depend upon ground water for irrigation. At ten to twenty times the cost, it pumps out 55 MAF of water annually with its 15 hundred thousand tube wells run on costly electricity and mostly on costlier diesel. The Punjab is being forced to use its precious ground water. I am a farmer and my wheat crop this season had to be totally irrigated with underground water. The effect of this according to many studies, including some by the UNO, is that the Punjab is slowly turning into a desert and that the process is likely to be completed by the year 2025. This has so destroyed the environment that a large number of the Sikhs are daily migrating to foreign lands just to escape the imminent disaster ominously looming large over the Punjab. This is a result of illegal policies of water management followed by the Indian state to the detriment of the Punjab, the only homeland of the Sikhs. The matter of the river water has been taken to the Supreme Court of India several times but no judicial pronouncement could be obtained because our courts are quick to discern the state policy and to comply accordingly.
13. The matters have come to such a pass that the Punjab does not have enough fresh water to drink.The entire Malwa belt (substantial part of the Punjab) is forced to drink the polluted water into which raw untreated sewage of several towns and the waste of industrial units finds disposal. The matter is so serious that the DNA of the affected people has been altered and children are taking birth with devastating diseases and deformities (cleft lip for instance). It is the most modern way of committing genocide by the ‘peaceful Gandhian methods.’ This could also be termed the latest version of Hitler’s “total solution.” Cases of cancer abound in every village. My younger brother, my elder brother’s daughter-in-law, my cousin’s son and my wife’s aunt have died of cancer within the last two years.
14. One of the long standing grievances of those propounding the Sikh cause has been that money collected from the Punjab is siphoned off by the banking system to invest elsewhere in India; thus depriving the Punjab of immediate development and its long term fruits. This has been done in the name of maintaining ‘regional balances.’ When reckoned on a long term basis the negative impact of the export of bank capital on the economy of the state is at least crippling.
15. The Hindu theory of suppression from the beginning has been built upon the denial of the separate Sikh identity. Against all reason the Hindu tactically believes that Sikhi is just a minor sect of the Hindu religion. Consequently the persistent Sikh call for framing the Sikh personal law has fallen on deaf ears of the government of India for the last sixty years. It was a major demand of the peaceful Sikh agitation that rocked the Punjab for almost a decade. The Anand Marriage Act of 1909, inadequate as it was, had been rendered ineffective for decades by several kinds of judicial manipulations. Now that the registration of marriages has been made compulsory by law, and considering that this Act has no provision for registration (except in the Punjab since April 2008), even the only Sikh personal law enacted by the British almost a century earlier, has been all but obliterated from the statute book. The irony is that the Islamic state of Pakistan has enacted the Sikh Marriage Act by way of Sikh Marriage Ordinance 2008, for about 13000 Sikhs living in their part of the Punjab and ‘secular, democratic’ India which has at least 20 million Sikh population is still toying with the idea –very lightly at that.
16. Other methods used for liquidating the Sikh identity, include re-writing of history with a view to denigrating Sikh heroes, preventing genuine Sikh leadership from emerging and promoting the Sikh leadership that serves Hindu interests, stealing Sikh heroes, (for instance Banda Singh Bahadur), promoting Sikh apostates as Sikh heroes, propping up false prophets with government support, preventing the Sikhs from ruling themselves even when legitimately returned to power, neglecting primary education in the rural Punjab to keep the Sikh population ignorant, promoting spurious literature as Sikh scriptures and discouraging the use of Punjabi, the mother tongue of the Punjabi Sikhs and the language of their scripture. In a myriad ways such as portrayal of the Sikhs in the popular Hindi cinema as half-wits and misrepresentations of Sikh culture in the Media, a powerful propaganda machine has been created to coerce the Sikhs into effacing the pride in the Sikh culture and nationhood. Sometimes the inner strength of the Sikh culture throws up competent leadership that wipes out such disadvantages in a short time and under it the Sikh nation rises anew from the ashes. It is then that that leader, for instance, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhinderanwale, is eliminated and another general massacre of the Sikhs is made to happen.
V
17. The decimation of 1947 was not the last one that the Sikhs have had to endure. There have been more. A thorough study of the Hindu-Sikh relations, equips one to assert that since the very birth of the Sikh faith the Hindus have regarded it an antagonistic belief that must be destroyed root and branch for the sake of preserving Hinduism. This sentiment has been translated into administrative action whenever the Hindus have become capable of harming the Sikhs.
18. In the beginning of the eighties, the largest political party in India which swore by secularism felt that in the rising tide of Hindu religious nationalism, it would soon become irrelevant. It decided to formally incarnate into a Hindu party. It also decided to anoint the new incarnation of the Congress with the blood of the Sikhs. They were the most available for blood-letting as they, being a small minority and a colonised nation, would have no sympathy anywhere in the world.
19. In pursuance of that policy, it decided to utilise the ongoing Sikh agitation in the Punjab. In the early eighties of the last century peaceful agitation to stem the prevailing religious discrimination, to secure the legitimate economic rights of the Punjab, among which were the questions of river water, separate Sikh identity and personal law, took place. Many compromises with the agitating Akalis and other Sikhs were arranged by several intermediaries commissioned by the Prime Minister of India. She rejected them all and kept on dexterously stoking the fires of Sikh hatred among the Hindus of India. She freely used the forum of the parliament for the purpose. Not much effort was required to harness the Media. Being composed mainly of the Hindus, as always it was only too willing to lead from the front. Having made these preparations, she came down heavily on the Sikhs and ordered the Indian defence forces to attack at least forty Sikh shrines with the aim of physically eliminating the highly motivated Sikhs and for destroying Sikh pride and prestige.
20. It was a diabolical and a multi-pronged plan. Curfew was imposed on the entire Punjab to facilitate the attack. This was deliberately timed to coincide with one of holiest days of the Sikh calendar when attendance at the shrines was expected to be the thickest. Curfew was lifted for a few hours prior to the attack to entrap the maximum number of Sikhs inside. No warning of the attack was given. The prime minister of India and the official Media continued to mislead the people until the last. It was stated inside and outside the parliament, that there would be no attack. The Indian forces killed a large number of temple servants, priests, pilgrims, women and children and took the remaining as “prisoners of war.” They burnt the famed Sikh Reference Library that had thousands of manuscripts some dating back to the times of the Sikh Gurus and several of them bearing their signatures. This surely was the most barbaric act indulged in by religiously surcharged forces since the sack of Constantinople in 1453 CE. They trampled underfoot every inch of the soil made sacred by the touch of the Sikh Gurus and the blood of Sikh martyrs. They made a gaping wound in the heart of every living Sikh and assured by their barbarity that none in future will be born without it. An enquiry into the circumstances leading to the invasion has been sought for over two decades now but no government has condescended to accept the plea. The SCI too declined the opportunity to investigate. Efforts of the Citizen’s Court set up by some distinguished people were frustrated by the judiciary. Neither have the foreign independent human rights bodies been allowed to investigate the matter on the spot. I myself have been a part of deputations to at least three successive prime ministers of India to demand that the list of the killed be made public. All other requests have also been ignored. The common perception is that the army attack was calculated to bring home to the Sikhs that the profession and the practise of their faith, is a taboo in Hindu India.
21. The persistent attempts of the Hindu empire, to wipe out the Sikhs from the face of India, found another expression. From October 31, 1984 to November 4, 1984, was perpetrated the general massacre of the Sikhs in Delhi and other north Indian states. The president of India was constrained to call it a “holocaust” in his memoirs. It made the later prime minister of India hang his head in shame before the world. After the murder of the then prime minister by her own (Sikh) bodyguards, the succeeding prime minister and other politicians ordered massacre of the Sikhs. For five days, Delhi saw open persecution of the Sikhs by the Hindu hordes in connivance with and aided by the entire administration including the police and the political establishment.
22. It started with attack on the caravan of the Sikh president of India. On the first day it was confined mainly to setting ablaze properties of the Sikhs and to beating up the Sikhs wherever seen. For the next four days, it was the dance of destruction of Shiva (Tandav) that the Sikhs endured. While politicians identified Sikh homes and properties, the police transported and supplied goons with liquor, arson material, lethal weapons and gave them protection. It disarmed the Sikhs to render them an easy prey. Complaints of the Sikhs were generally not registered, or were registered in a manner that identification of the culprits would become impossible. Protected goons went about freely and indiscriminately ‘burning, maiming, looting, raping, burning alive and killing.’ For full four days it was the reign of terror for the Sikhs.’ In his description, the president did not mention that his own convoy was attacked and his car was hit.
23. Requests for the registration of cases were mostly rudely refused from November 1 to November 4 or the registration was not properly done. There was no follow up or arrests or prosecution. No deterrent action was taken. The army was called in but only to parade around the town, to assure the violent mob that no action against them was contemplated. Government did not cooperate with the relief camps opened by non government organisations and obstructed their working.
24. Speaking to the state controlled media, the prime minister justified the killings with the words, “when a big tree falls, earth shakes.” This statement was relayed again and again by the state owned television along with ‘blood for blood’ slogan of the killer gangs. Such was the seething hatred that the whole administration cooperated with the prime minister in thwarting effects at providing relief to the victims. Several doctors refused to treat the injured and threw them out in the injured state. Three thousand Sikhs perished in Delhi alone in the winter of 1984 with the entire world Media looking on. Except for one or two inconsequential persons, none has been brought to book for the carnage. Some victims are still struggling (in 2008) to get their complaints registered.
25. In continuation of the above mentioned undeclared war against the Sikhs hundreds of thousands of innocent Sikh young men, women and children were killed by the armed forces of India during the ‘bloody decade’ from 1983 to 1996. Some of them were abducted from their homes, tortured, killed and their bodies were cremated as “unidentified.” Private investigation discovered what had happened and eventually in 1996 (a Sikh judge) of the Supreme Court of India took notice of what it was pleased to call “genocide.” The SCI entrusted the matter to the National Human Rights Commission and the Central Bureau of Investigation. The Bureau was to ascertain criminal liability for death in police custody. It has not launched a single prosecution since 1996. The Commission and the Bureau limited the investigation to just three cremation grounds in one of the districts, Amritsar only although the killings had taken place all over the Punjab. It finally further limited the scope of the enquiry to just finding out why the bodies were not handed over to the parents although it was known who the deceased were. No criminal liability for abducting and killing is sought to be fixed because almost to the man these young people were Sikhs. Two thousand and fifty-nine cases were investigated by human rights bodies and the events from arrest to the disposal of bodies in the cremation ground were traced. Country’s premier investigating agency and the National Human Rights Commission refused to go beyond that. Meagre compensation is being provided to the relatives of some victims just for the fact that the bodies were not handed over to them. To this extent is the state protecting its armed forces, para-military forces and the police that no case of murder is being registered and none for abduction. There is ample evidence that hundreds of thousands of people with religious beliefs deemed inconvenient by the state were killed by its armed forces on instructions of political masters. There is enough evidence that large-scale killing of the young Sikh people was a considered policy of the state. This is worse than what some of the totalitarian states have done.
VI
26. The inadequate and intrinsically infirm European concept of ‘one nation one state’ and its selective use have become the bane of many societies around the world. The aura of written constitution’ and the Anglo-Saxon concept of rule of law which flows from it are being exploited by the Indian state to annihilate, the minorities and other nations in India. This annihilation is both psychological as well as physical. It contravenes natural justice and the provisions of many international charters sponsored by the UNO. Secularism or neutrality in religious affairs of the citizens is amongst the most abused of concepts that has been harnessed to deny religious freedom and identity to the Sikhs in India.
27. The Sikh initiation ceremony of amrit was continuously discouraged, during the ‘bloody decade’. Official instructions were issued to the army to regard the duly initiated Sikhs as terrorists. These instructions were issued in June 1984 when the anti- Sikh sentiment in the entire country had been whipped up into frenzy by the then prime minister. This Hindu tendency has been in operation for long and was also noticed in 1911 by D. Petrie, Assistant Director Central Intelligence, Government of India. This is the real cause of the Hindu-Sikh conflict. Amritdharis are still suspect and are liable to be picked up by police under suspicion of illegal activity no matter how unfounded the suspicion may be. In a recent case of a bomb blast in a cinema hall at Ludhiana approximately 500 such amritdhari young men were picked up and tortured.
VII
28. The effect of this is to discourage the young people from taking formal and wholly innocuous religious vows on pain of torture and even death. The religious policy of elimination of Sikhi from India, with its necessary adjunct of periodically decimating the Sikhs to demoralise them, has been so projected by the political leadership of the Hindus that, it has effectively become a mega project deemed necessary for national Hindu self assertion, preservation of the Hindu faith and for safeguarding the ‘unity and integrity of India.’ When this policy is implemented by the politicians in power at the national or the state level, all organs of the state including the Media cooperate with them fully. The situation may be better understood on consideration of how these pillars of state in modern polity have behaved since 1947.
29. It is with the full cooperation of the parliament, the executive particularly the police, the courts right up to the SCI and of the communal Hindu permanent majority that the extremely oppressive state machinery has been erected by the Hindu leaders. The Punjab has been permanently turned into a police state more oppressive for the Sikhs than Hitler’s Germany ever was for the Jews when it is considered that his was a wartime madness of a singularly unusual dictator while the Hindu policy is a cold, calculated, a deliberate and a permanent policy of a state selling itself as the ‘largest democracy of the world.’ It is a policy to the formulation and sustenance of which every political party has contributed what it deemed politically proper.
Legislature
30. The Indian parliament has too meekly accepted the dictates of the executive to formulate lawless laws in pursuance of the sinister annihilation plan initiated by the party in power. It consented to being used to enact laws that were specifically aimed at demoralising and persecuting the Sikhs. The potential for misuse was not properly assessed. Draconian laws were enacted in spite of the more effective laws being actually present on the statute book. That has had a gravely adverse effect on the destinies of the Sikh nation. The parliament failed to properly scrutinise the anti-Sikh laws or to question their rationale even when the courts had struck down some of them. It continued to help the executive in re-enacting them again and again. In crucial cases it refuses to stand by the constitution when it is found to be operating in favour of the Punjab, for instance, the riparian law. It has failed to defend even the demarcation of the Punjabi Region that it had made earlier. The worst kind of communal hysteria has been whipped up against the Sikhs by the misuse of the parliamentary forum without drawing a protest from any quarter.
Judiciary
31. All over the world, the courts of justice are regarded as temples of democracy, as particular places especially sacrosanct where God Himself dispenses justice through the agency of high-minded judges. Every judge worth his salt believes he is deputising for God and is weighed down by the tremendous obligation of his office to make decisions according to the evidence before him. That is not the position in India. A judge even of the highest court, particularly where Sikh interests are involved, feels obliged to tow the party line dictated by the perceived Hindu interests. If judicial pronouncements of the Supreme Court of India, since 1947, are scrutinised they will exhibit strict conformity to that unwritten law of Indian jurisprudence. Some half a dozen such cases have been analysed here and are believed to bear out the truth of the statement being made.
Police
32. During the period of the modern holocausts, the law and order, which is a state subject was strictly controlled by the Union Government. In the above circumstances, the Indian police with a long tradition of cringing before colonial masters, came down heavily on the Sikhs. For it there has been nothing cheaper than the life of a Sikh. Policemen officially received bounties for torturing and killing Sikhs. More often than not, they killed them in full public view. This happened on many, many occasions. The police maintained convenient witnesses to ensure conviction in even the cases it cooked up against the innocent. They were not brought to book for the murders. Attempts were made by the Hindu chauvinist party the BJP, to formally grant them blanket amnesty in 2001. Eventually, they had to make do with an informal but an equally effective one. In May 2008, it was revealed that those policemen who had been convicted for murder, never went to jail but continued to serve in the police force and some even retired after taking full pension. K. P. S. Gill who earned the sobriquet of “the butcher” in one quarter and of “supercop” in the other, was even rehabilitated after retirement as a president of the Indian Hockey Federation.
33. Policemen, conscious of the immunity they were granted, often advertised themselves as the killers. Innocence or guilt had nothing to do with qualifying a person for execution. One just had to be known as a good Sikh. A new term “suspected unknown Sikh terrorists” came into vogue and was freely applied. Six farmers going on a bullock cart were mowed down as ‘suspected Sikh terrorists.’ In another case a young man who was on his way to drop his guests at a railway station on his wedding day, was killed when he failed to notice the police signal to stop. I brought this case to the notice of the Governor of the state. He had the audacity and callousness to tell me that he ‘could understand his being fired upon if he did not stop on being asked to.’ My question to him, “how could you do that for a traffic offence?” elicited just a cold, blank and arrogant stare.
34. The police and other forces in the Punjab go about murdering innocent Sikhs on the promise of enjoying effective impunity. Another term that served the police well in its murderous spree was “encounter.” It claimed to have killed many young men when they fired on the police thus engaging it in encounter. In actual practise they were all cold-blooded murders. The patronage that the police are receiving for murdering hundreds and thousands of Sikhs is sufficient to confirm that it is executing the state policy.
Media
35. Media surveys and studies are routinely undertaken in western countries but are rare in India. The world never gets to know the reality prevailing in the Indian Media and consequently in India. According to a survey that took place sometime back the electronic and print Media is fully controlled by Brahmins and upper caste Hindus for the benefit of their order and to the detriment of all others. The survey took into account 37 Media establishments considered to comprise the whole of the ‘national Media.’ It found the modern democratic establishments caught in the vice of ancient Manu’s caste system. It was discovered that 71% high caste Hindus held the topmost decision making positions. In the nineties of the last century, India’s Dalit population was 150 million but not even one Dalit was working as a correspondent or a sub-editor with any daily paper. This controlled Media, subscribing to the permanent majority’s perception about the Sikhs as enemies, has always played a leading role in India’s suppression drives against the Sikhs.
VIII
36. Some who may have been offended with reference to the Punjab as a colonised state and the Sikh people as slaves of imperial Hindu India, may ponder over the facts narrated here. If I have not been able to adequately describe the death dealing situation in which the Sikhs are placed in India, the fault is attributable to my inadequate articulation. The reality remains extremely menacing. India is a veritable death trap for the Sikhs. The Sikhs, belonging to the youngest of world religions and representing a unique culture with all its meaningful gifts for humankind, is in the immediate danger of being obliterated as a result of deliberate state policy formulated by an overwhelming permanent majority that has the Indian state in its vice like grip. To wipe out the Sikh culture may be the requirement of an ancient irrational society struggling to find justification for existing in the modern world. The permanent majority in accordance with its tradition of always hiding behind a thick veil of deception while committing the worst crimes against every hapless minority that has come its way throughout its march in history, is resorting to the same strategy again. The Sikhs are worried that the deception is working. Tallest in the world feel proud to shake hands with leaders of a country, who stand upon the bleeding corpses of hundreds of thousands of Sikhs, Muslims, Dalits and the Tribals entrusted by destiny to their care. The Sikhs have a right to expect that the comity of nations will start questioning the diabolical designs of the most callous administration in the world. The Sikhs want to live. During the five hundred and forty years of their existence they have supported a universal culture, defended worthy causes, befriended the right minded, have promoted excellent work ethics, have proved to be a productive people everywhere, have remained steadfast in their moral commitments and have never shirked their duty to love and serve humankind. They have contributed their mite to worthy causes, have proved to be useful and law abiding citizens of every country they have gone to. This much cannot be said of many other peoples. They expect that some friends somewhere will understand their plight and will lend them a helping hand, in the hour of their need.
- Gurtej Singh
Blog: www.singhgurtej.blogspot.com
