by Jagmohan Singh
It was striking that a frail man, a one-time monk, living in the backwaters of Delhi, well informed about world developments should take so keen an interest in Sikh affairs and particularly the human rights violations of the Sikhs in the last few decades. Such was Ram Narayan Kumar.
He is no more. He expired on Sunday June 28 in his house in Kathmandu.
When the powers that be in Punjab and India were ruling Punjab under their jackboots, this skinny activist was running helter-skelter mustering support for the Sikhs. He was seen interacting with lawyers, families of militants and the militants themselves whenever he had an opportunity to do so.
I had a brief association with him. Whenever I met him, he used to say, "your party (Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar) has a lot of potential, but somehow is not able to catch the bull by its horns". He wanted me to "come on his side". He wanted me to quit politics and take up serious human rights activism. It is sad, that now that I am keen to do so, he is no more.
Not many people would know that despite having a house in Delhi, Ram Narayan Kumar would live for months in a hotel room so that he could complete his book on the Sikhs without disturbance. I am sure there are a few handful who know what risks he undertook to familiarise himself with all aspects of the Sikh struggle.
On the Passing of a Great Man, True Friend, Inspired Soul
Cynthia K. Mahmood
The WSN presents, humbly and proudly, both at the same time, this tribute and personal remembrance by Cynthia K. Mahmood, celebrated scholar on Sikh issues and one of Ram Narayan Kumar’s co-travellers on the path to seek an egalitarian world. Mahmood is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Senior Fellow, Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, US. Exclusive to the World Sikh News...click here to read
Notwithstanding some people's doubts and cynicism, the Sikhs will certainly remember you for the monumental work that you have done in spearheading the Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab. Last year, around this time, Ram Narayan Kumar and Ashok Aggarwal of CIIP came to Chandigarh and declared that they would, now “focus on legal research, besides building of clarity and solidarity on the issues like the principles of liability, in understanding aggregated violations, which the matter of cremations encompasses, and in developing standards to legally capture and quantify suffering, damages and losses for the purpose of evolving standards of reparation”.
Contemporary history of the Sikhs will not be complete without reference to your work in action and your academic inputs in the writing of Reduced To Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab co authored by Amrik Singh, Ashok Agrwaal and Jaskaran Kaur. This compilation at a time when the whole country was not willing to touch the Sikhs with a barge pole and the international community was found wanting in supporting or even taking up the case of the Sikhs, speaks volumes for your commitment to the cause of fighting state impunity.
There will be some who will contest your contention that the issue of Sikh sovereignty was used by the State to divert attention from real issues of democracy, constitutional safeguard and citizens' rights, but there will none to doubt your steadfastness in upholding human rights and the search for truth and nothing but the truth.
Rest in Peace, friend of the Sikhs
The Ultima Ratio
Ram Narayan Kumar
The World Sikh News deeply mourns the death of Ram Narayan Kumar, a friend of the Sikh community and of all those who believed in human beings' fundamental right to a dignified life. His efforts at fighting the brutality of state suppression of armed conflicts in Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, Northeast India, Nepal and other parts of the subcontinent shall be remembered for ever and serve as inspiration to many. We reproduce here a piece that Kumar wrote as a Preface to his book The Sikh Struggle, published by Chanakya Publications, Delhi, in 1990.
Anti-Sikh riots in Delhi following Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination by two of her Sikh body guards on 31 Oct. 1984 gave me the first traumatic insight into the bane which Hindu India could become to its religious minorities. The assassination itself was a riposte to the army assault on the GoldenTemple in Amritsar in June 1984, ordered by Mrs. Gandhi to wipe out the Sikh rebels ensconced inside, under the leadership of Bhindranwale, the apostle of Sikh separatism. Besides taking - according to Sikh estimates - around four thousand lives, the assault had reduced to rubble the Akal Takht, the symbolic seat of Sikh temporal authority inside the temple complex, built by Guru Hargobind during Mughal days in defiance of the Delhi Takht.
The Delhi riots after the assassination were not so much spontaneous as systematically orchestrated. Getting involved with a group formed in Delhi immediately after the outbreak of the mayhem to rescue and rehabilitate the victims, I became acquainted with the organization of the violence which claimed three thousand innocent Sikh lives in six days. I heard eyewitness accounts of how the rioters in gangs of two hundred or three hundred led by Congress bosses, with policemen looking on, had swarmed into Sikh houses, hacking the occupants to pieces, chopping off the heads of children, tying Sikh men to tires set aflame with kerosene, burning down the houses alter sacking them. The “rehabilitation camp’ that I had helped set up in Shakkarpur, a trans-Yamuna locality of Delhi, housed two thousand refugees, among them a large number of widows and children with nightmarish memories.
The demand for an independent Sikh state as the ultima ratio of their frustrated desire for greater autonomy within a genuinely federalistic Indian State will impress us as less unfeasible if we remember that the present array of states in the Indian subcontinent is an artefact whose ephemeral validity is suggested by great fluidity of lines on the political map of the subcontinent in the past.
The Delhi violence has been documented by the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties and the Peoples Union of Democratic Rights in their joint report - Who are the Guilty? -which mentions the names of sixteen Congress politicians, thirteen police officers and one hundred and ninety eight others, accused by survivors and eyewitnesses of responsibility for the carnage. Early in January 1985, journalist Rahul Bedi of the Indian Express and Smitu Kothari of the PUCL moved the High Court of Delhi demanding a judicial inquiry on the strength of this documentation. Justice Yogeshwar Dayal kept the petition dangling for a few weeks and finally dismissed it with a comment about “those busybodies out for publicity, who poke their nose into all matters and waste the valuable time of the judiciary!”
When shortly after the pogrom, the Congress party, riding on the wave of Hindu sentiments against Sikhs, had secured an unprecedented popular mandate, the Sikhs understood that the Hindu democratic sanction of the genocide would ensure that the instigators and participants would not be called to account. As if to confirm the point, the new Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi inducted into his cabinet several of the main suspects of the organization of the slaughter.
The behaviour of the government added moral verve to the Sikh separatist ambitions. The police took to an extra-judicial approach by torturing and killing suspected separatists in their custody, with courts refusing to take action against the guilty officials. The mainstream press too toed the line of the establishment. Anti-terrorist campaigns in Punjab received imprimatur as cover stories, with officials being quoted: “For one innocent person killed by terrorists, the police will kill ten of them.” News on the situation in Punjab consisted of little more than the reproduction of official statements on terrorists killing and alternatively being killed: Investigative journalism conveying critical background information would have been “unpatriotic”.
Knowing from my earlier experiences as a social activist of the chasm that separates Indian reality from Indian make-believe, of the callous disregard of those who count for those who don’t, I decided to document violation of human rights in Punjab, traveling in the state from March 1985 when I became free from other compulsions. The picture of atrocities that emerged before my eyes was so distressing that I found myself overwhelmed to the exclusion of interest in other aspects of the Sikh problem. However, through my personal contact with knowledgeable Sikhs, I came to realize that a report on official atrocities alone would leave little scope for a rational understanding of the roots of the turmoil in Punjab.
Pressed by these considerations, I decided to extend the scope of my intended report by (focusing) on the history of the Sikhs in the perspective of their present struggle. For what at first sight might appear as haphazard, irrational and unjustified in Sikh aspirations and behaviour, acquired new meaning if one read it in terms of the birth and evolution of their community, the distinct features of their religion, and most of all their earlier attempts and ordeals of national self-assertion. The demand for an independent Sikh state as the ultima ratio of their frustrated desire for greater autonomy within a genuinely federalistic Indian State will impress us as less unfeasible if we remember that the present array of states in the Indian subcontinent is an artefact whose ephemeral validity is suggested by great fluidity of lines on the political map of the subcontinent in the past. If there is a recurring pattern in pan-Indian history, it is the cyclic emergence of ultimately self-serving imperial structures again broken by the political self-assertion of vigorous minority-nations. I hope that (my) attempt(s) would promote better understanding of the Sikh aspirations and their struggle among peoples of India and abroad.
1 July 2009
It was striking that a frail man, a one-time monk, living in the backwaters of Delhi, well informed about world developments should take so keen an interest in Sikh affairs and particularly the human rights violations of the Sikhs in the last few decades. Such was Ram Narayan Kumar.
He is no more. He expired on Sunday June 28 in his house in Kathmandu.
When the powers that be in Punjab and India were ruling Punjab under their jackboots, this skinny activist was running helter-skelter mustering support for the Sikhs. He was seen interacting with lawyers, families of militants and the militants themselves whenever he had an opportunity to do so.
I had a brief association with him. Whenever I met him, he used to say, "your party (Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar) has a lot of potential, but somehow is not able to catch the bull by its horns". He wanted me to "come on his side". He wanted me to quit politics and take up serious human rights activism. It is sad, that now that I am keen to do so, he is no more.
Not many people would know that despite having a house in Delhi, Ram Narayan Kumar would live for months in a hotel room so that he could complete his book on the Sikhs without disturbance. I am sure there are a few handful who know what risks he undertook to familiarise himself with all aspects of the Sikh struggle.
On the Passing of a Great Man, True Friend, Inspired Soul
Cynthia K. Mahmood
The WSN presents, humbly and proudly, both at the same time, this tribute and personal remembrance by Cynthia K. Mahmood, celebrated scholar on Sikh issues and one of Ram Narayan Kumar’s co-travellers on the path to seek an egalitarian world. Mahmood is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Senior Fellow, Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, US. Exclusive to the World Sikh News...click here to read
Notwithstanding some people's doubts and cynicism, the Sikhs will certainly remember you for the monumental work that you have done in spearheading the Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab. Last year, around this time, Ram Narayan Kumar and Ashok Aggarwal of CIIP came to Chandigarh and declared that they would, now “focus on legal research, besides building of clarity and solidarity on the issues like the principles of liability, in understanding aggregated violations, which the matter of cremations encompasses, and in developing standards to legally capture and quantify suffering, damages and losses for the purpose of evolving standards of reparation”.
Contemporary history of the Sikhs will not be complete without reference to your work in action and your academic inputs in the writing of Reduced To Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab co authored by Amrik Singh, Ashok Agrwaal and Jaskaran Kaur. This compilation at a time when the whole country was not willing to touch the Sikhs with a barge pole and the international community was found wanting in supporting or even taking up the case of the Sikhs, speaks volumes for your commitment to the cause of fighting state impunity.
There will be some who will contest your contention that the issue of Sikh sovereignty was used by the State to divert attention from real issues of democracy, constitutional safeguard and citizens' rights, but there will none to doubt your steadfastness in upholding human rights and the search for truth and nothing but the truth.
Rest in Peace, friend of the Sikhs
The Ultima Ratio
Ram Narayan Kumar
The World Sikh News deeply mourns the death of Ram Narayan Kumar, a friend of the Sikh community and of all those who believed in human beings' fundamental right to a dignified life. His efforts at fighting the brutality of state suppression of armed conflicts in Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, Northeast India, Nepal and other parts of the subcontinent shall be remembered for ever and serve as inspiration to many. We reproduce here a piece that Kumar wrote as a Preface to his book The Sikh Struggle, published by Chanakya Publications, Delhi, in 1990.
Anti-Sikh riots in Delhi following Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination by two of her Sikh body guards on 31 Oct. 1984 gave me the first traumatic insight into the bane which Hindu India could become to its religious minorities. The assassination itself was a riposte to the army assault on the GoldenTemple in Amritsar in June 1984, ordered by Mrs. Gandhi to wipe out the Sikh rebels ensconced inside, under the leadership of Bhindranwale, the apostle of Sikh separatism. Besides taking - according to Sikh estimates - around four thousand lives, the assault had reduced to rubble the Akal Takht, the symbolic seat of Sikh temporal authority inside the temple complex, built by Guru Hargobind during Mughal days in defiance of the Delhi Takht.
The Delhi riots after the assassination were not so much spontaneous as systematically orchestrated. Getting involved with a group formed in Delhi immediately after the outbreak of the mayhem to rescue and rehabilitate the victims, I became acquainted with the organization of the violence which claimed three thousand innocent Sikh lives in six days. I heard eyewitness accounts of how the rioters in gangs of two hundred or three hundred led by Congress bosses, with policemen looking on, had swarmed into Sikh houses, hacking the occupants to pieces, chopping off the heads of children, tying Sikh men to tires set aflame with kerosene, burning down the houses alter sacking them. The “rehabilitation camp’ that I had helped set up in Shakkarpur, a trans-Yamuna locality of Delhi, housed two thousand refugees, among them a large number of widows and children with nightmarish memories.
The demand for an independent Sikh state as the ultima ratio of their frustrated desire for greater autonomy within a genuinely federalistic Indian State will impress us as less unfeasible if we remember that the present array of states in the Indian subcontinent is an artefact whose ephemeral validity is suggested by great fluidity of lines on the political map of the subcontinent in the past.
The Delhi violence has been documented by the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties and the Peoples Union of Democratic Rights in their joint report - Who are the Guilty? -which mentions the names of sixteen Congress politicians, thirteen police officers and one hundred and ninety eight others, accused by survivors and eyewitnesses of responsibility for the carnage. Early in January 1985, journalist Rahul Bedi of the Indian Express and Smitu Kothari of the PUCL moved the High Court of Delhi demanding a judicial inquiry on the strength of this documentation. Justice Yogeshwar Dayal kept the petition dangling for a few weeks and finally dismissed it with a comment about “those busybodies out for publicity, who poke their nose into all matters and waste the valuable time of the judiciary!”
When shortly after the pogrom, the Congress party, riding on the wave of Hindu sentiments against Sikhs, had secured an unprecedented popular mandate, the Sikhs understood that the Hindu democratic sanction of the genocide would ensure that the instigators and participants would not be called to account. As if to confirm the point, the new Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi inducted into his cabinet several of the main suspects of the organization of the slaughter.
The behaviour of the government added moral verve to the Sikh separatist ambitions. The police took to an extra-judicial approach by torturing and killing suspected separatists in their custody, with courts refusing to take action against the guilty officials. The mainstream press too toed the line of the establishment. Anti-terrorist campaigns in Punjab received imprimatur as cover stories, with officials being quoted: “For one innocent person killed by terrorists, the police will kill ten of them.” News on the situation in Punjab consisted of little more than the reproduction of official statements on terrorists killing and alternatively being killed: Investigative journalism conveying critical background information would have been “unpatriotic”.
Knowing from my earlier experiences as a social activist of the chasm that separates Indian reality from Indian make-believe, of the callous disregard of those who count for those who don’t, I decided to document violation of human rights in Punjab, traveling in the state from March 1985 when I became free from other compulsions. The picture of atrocities that emerged before my eyes was so distressing that I found myself overwhelmed to the exclusion of interest in other aspects of the Sikh problem. However, through my personal contact with knowledgeable Sikhs, I came to realize that a report on official atrocities alone would leave little scope for a rational understanding of the roots of the turmoil in Punjab.
Pressed by these considerations, I decided to extend the scope of my intended report by (focusing) on the history of the Sikhs in the perspective of their present struggle. For what at first sight might appear as haphazard, irrational and unjustified in Sikh aspirations and behaviour, acquired new meaning if one read it in terms of the birth and evolution of their community, the distinct features of their religion, and most of all their earlier attempts and ordeals of national self-assertion. The demand for an independent Sikh state as the ultima ratio of their frustrated desire for greater autonomy within a genuinely federalistic Indian State will impress us as less unfeasible if we remember that the present array of states in the Indian subcontinent is an artefact whose ephemeral validity is suggested by great fluidity of lines on the political map of the subcontinent in the past. If there is a recurring pattern in pan-Indian history, it is the cyclic emergence of ultimately self-serving imperial structures again broken by the political self-assertion of vigorous minority-nations. I hope that (my) attempt(s) would promote better understanding of the Sikh aspirations and their struggle among peoples of India and abroad.
1 July 2009
