by Amarjit Kaur
The situation today is no less fraught with danger than before. In fact it is far more delicate and fragile and requires consumate skill in handling. The government of the day owes it to the people to take definite steps to create a favourable atmosphere where, to begin with, every Sikh does not feel like a culprit. The government should accept the Punjabi political and economic demands unilaterally which will contribute greatly to normalize the situation.
What has been and is happening in Punjab is not the concern of the Punjabis only. It concerns the entire nation. Had a solution been found in time, and it was feasible to do so, this catastrophe need not have occurred. Had the nation as a whole been taken into confidence the sense of alienation that the Sikh community is now suffering from need not have taken place. Finally, is it fair to place an entire minority community in the dock for the sins of a few and to divert attention of the country from the failings of the administration?
Myth and Reality
M V KAMATH
In the summer of 1979 I visited Punjab as a state guest. I was then editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India and was planning a special issue on Punjab and had been assured of the fullest cooperation. The state was then governed by an Akali-Janata coalition headed by Mr Prakash Singh Badal, a heavy-set man who seemed to have lost the art of smiling. His officials, however, were more than helpful and I could not have been received with more kindness and hospitality.
It was my first visit to Punjab and I was anxious to see as much as possible. Later I set down my impressions. I repeat them here to get my own bearings:
Punjab is not just a state. It is a state of mind. And Punjabis are more than a people. They function as a family, if a somewhat extended one. One suspects that it is the cohesiveness of Punjabis and their deep sense of identity with their soil that together have made Punjab what it is.
Today’s Punjab is a far cry from the great Punjab of pre-Partition days. Though Hindus are a substantial minority, the present-day Little Punjab is for all practical purposes a Sikh state. But paradoxically; while the stress is on Punjabi and the Gurmukhi script, the largest paper in Punjab is the Hind Samachar printed in Hindi (circulation 65,000) and its youthful editor, Ramesh Chander, will not let anyone forget it. Similarly, while Sardarjis may swear by their mother tongue, the number of English medium schools is increasing.
Punjab has all the characteristics of West Germany – except cleanliness. Soon after Partition, the state was in a total mess. The towns and cities lay desolate, spattered with communal blood. Two of the five rivers, virtually all the canal system and some of the best land went to Pakistan.
Add to it the fact that Punjab has neither coal nor heavy industry nor oil. Yet in wheat yield per hectare the Punjabi farmer has beaten farmers in the United States, the Soviet Union, Canada and Pakistan. In rice yield he has bested China and plans to beat Japan as well. The motto is ‘Can Do.’ Of every 100 kg of rice, Punjab’s contribution to the union government is 56 kg. Of every 100 kg of wheat the government buys, Punjab provides 63 kg. And this from a state that does not eat rice and treats it as something to be eaten when one is sick!
Some believe that Punjabi prosperity has been made possible by money coming from Sikhs living abroad. To a small extent, possibly. In Jullundur district alone, according to one report, Punjab National Bank has foreign exchange deposits worth Rs 270 crore. Punjabis want all that money to be used in Punjab for development purposes. They say it is all ‘their’ money. The Reserve Bank, however, is chary of liberalizing credit facilities. Punjabis resent this.
All that Punjab wants, Chief Minister Sardar Prakash Singh Badal told me over the breakfast table, is re-casting centre-state financial relations. That meant, he said, revision of the Gadgil formula, reduction in the indebtedness of the state to the centre, change in the pattern of the loan assistance from the World Bank and equitable sharing of market borrowing between the centre and the states. Mr Badal said that the plain fact was that Punjab had been financing its plan effort largely through its own resources and that he was unhappy with the declining trend of central plan assistance to Punjab. Finance Minister S. Balwant Singh explained that the debate on fiscal autonomy should not be confused with talk of separatism, because it had nothing to do with it. Akalis were not separatists.
Punjabis want textile mills to be set up in their state. Why should Punjabi cotton have to go to Maharashtra to be spun and woven and sold back to Punjab at a profit? This they call in their naivette, colonialism.
With the establishment of Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, Punjab is for all purposes a Sikh state and as important as Punjab government is, the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) is capable of displaying as much authority as the government itself. It is sometimes hard to find out where politics ends and religion begins. Jathedar Jeevan Singh was of the opinion that Sikhs wanted greater autonomy for the state so that they can aim at results without having to clear everything with Delhi.
No two communities could be more akin to each other than the Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs and no two communities could be more dissimilar in their attitudes and reactions. The Sikhs want an autonomous Punjab and the extremists among them agitate for a sovereign Punjab; the Hindus want the powers of the state further reduced.
The Sikhs have carried on a long struggle to secure for Punjabi the exclusive status of official language while the Hindus disown it. The Sikhs take pride in Punjabi culture; the Hindus dismiss it as folk culture.
The Sikh migrants look to Punjab nostalgically and retain their links with it. The Hindu migrants feel relieved to have been spared the tensions of Akali politics. For the Punjabi Hindus the heroes are not the Sikh gurus who were themselves originally Hindus, but Maharana Pratap and Shivaji. The Punjabi Hindus, at once unorthodox and conservative, are more concerned about Hindu identity than about Hindu ritual.
I was told that between the Punjabi Sikh and the Punjabi Hindu there was a conflict of culture. The problem had been complicated by the Partition of India, notably of Punjab. Both Hindus and Sikhs had to flee West Punjab. A majority of the Sikh refugees were accommodated in the Indian Punjab on the land left behind by the Muslims. But there was not much room for the Hindu refugees. The trades and professions in which they specialized were already crowded with Indian Punjabi Hindus. Moreover, the Hindu refugees, scorched by the divisive politics of the Muslims, wished to be settled away from the separatist politics of the Akalis. Happily for all, the Punjabi Hindu refugees posed no problem to their host states. They made no special demands for their language and culture. They adopted the language of their hosts and tried to identify themselves with it. This adjustment was the result of their conditioning in pan-Hinduism as against territorial patriotism. One writer told me: ‘But what has helped Punjabi Hindus outside Punjab is proving to be a problem for them in Punjab. They do not accept the regional languague, Punjabi. They want Hindi instead. As long as Haryana remained a part of Punjab, Punjabi, of course, could not be the sole official language. But when, in 1966, the Hindi-speaking areas were separated and Punjab became a unilingual state, the Hindus left in Punjab felt orphaned. There is still no peace for the Punjabi Hindus. And there will be no peace for them until the Sikhs, conditioned to respond to the stimulus of a sovereign Sikh state, relent.’
One would have imagined that perfect amity would prevail between Hindus and Sikhs, considering that they come from almost the same stock. Most of the Sikh gurus had been originally Khatris. Of the nine gurus who followed Nanak, the first five had given spiritual strength and the last five had reinforced Hinduism with armed might. One publicist told me that tragedy struck Punjab the day when the Sikh Sabha, which had been formed to defend Sikhism against Christian attacks, declared that the Sikhs were not Hindus. For years, the Hindus in Punjab had to face Islamic efforts at conversion. Later still, challenges had come from the Christian missionaries. Then, to be disowned by Sikhs who were flesh of their flesh and blood of t
heir blood was hard for Hindus in Punjab to bear. Their reaction was to seek strength in pan-Hinduism. But no encouraging response was forthcoming from the Hindus elsewhere in India which found the Congress better suited to their interests. The Congress based its politics on territorial patriotism. According to this, India had no religious communities, only linguistic groups. And ultimately this was to prove to be the nemesis of Hindus in Punjab. Either they accepted Punjabi as their language and stayed on in Punjab playing second fiddle to Sikhs who had disowned them, or they once again left their hearths and homes to find a place for themselves in the Hindi belt, in a second and even more traumatic migration. Was that possible?
At the Golden Temple where I was received with great respect, I was presented with a set of books by the Dharam Prachar Committee of the SGPC which I read with much interest and fascination. It included Heritage of Sikh
Culture by Pritam Singh Gill, a former principal of Lyallpur Khalsa College, Jullundur. It was an eye-opener to me. I quote from it:
‘Sikhs have their own culture quite distinct from that of other people inhabiting the rest of India. Their religious beliefs differ; their heritage differs; so their culture differs…
‘In Bharat, the new India (after Partition) the concept of nationalism has remained the same in the minds of the Hindu community because they have connected language with religion even now. Hindi has been considered to be a language of all Hindus irrespective of the region they live in (emphasis added). For them Hindi is the national language. They want to impose their language, religion and culture on the minority communities directly or indirectly. They want to kill their cultures and make India a mono-cultural state. In reality, they are after will-of-the-wisp. India would never have one culture, but this has been the tendency in the post-Partition period. Nationalism has been connected with Hindi, Hinduism and Hindu culture. This would certainly lead to a revolt and it may culminate in further disintegration of the country. The old definition of nationalism requiring community of language, religion and culture does not suit the Indian conditions. India being a multi-lingual, multi-racial, multi-religious and multi-cultural country, a new concept of composite nationalism will have to be evolved. This is a problem before the country ...
‘The Sikhs have a history; they have a home; they have traditions; they have a well-developed language; they have a religion; they have a distinct society, morality and aesthetics. Thus they have a separate culture which they want to protect...’
Mr Gill devoted a whole chapter to show that Sikhs have been ‘Victims of Hindu Nationalism’. As he put it: ‘Indians got freedom, but not the Sikhs. Hindus left the enemy country and migrated to a country of their brothers. So did the Muslims. But the Sikhs left the enemy country and migrated to (another) enemy country. Out of frying pan they fell into fire. They were made to choose between two evils.’ Mr Gill wrote: ‘Kill the language, kill the culture, kill the community is the triple precept of Hindu diplomacy. This would make India mono-lingual, mono-cultural and mono-religious, they claim. This is the dream of Hindu nationalists... Any non-Hindi speaking man who declared his mother tongue as Hindi, became a hero; it was a simple method; it required telling a lie only. Hindus of the Punjabi-speaking area in Punjab told the biggest collective lie, when, at the time of census of 1951, all of them declared en bloc, that their mother tongue was Hindi and not Punjabi... Consequently, Punjabi was not given the status of full official and administrative language till 1966 and even after the reorganization of Punjab, it is being recognized half-heartedly and in the manner that it may die ultimately. At every step an attempt is made to place Hindi by its side. This is the position of a language which has been recognized as one of the regional languages in the constitution. This is with regard to Punjabi as a medium of administration.
‘As regards the medium of instruction, an organized attempt is made to kill it. It has been left to the sweet choice of parents to decide about it. All Hindu institutions adopt Hindi as the medium; only the Sikh institutions take to Punjabi. In the government institutions there is a partition on a small scale, into Hindi-speaking student community and Punjabi-speaking student community. In the former, Hindus are predominant and in the latter, Sikhs. This partition is the making of Hindus and not the Sikhs...
‘The crux of the problem is that Hindus do not want to be dominated by any other community in any state (province) because they are the ruling race... They are Hindus first and then Indians...The cultural minorities are at the mercy of their voting power, therefore, they are in search of some means of protecting their culture: they don’t want to be absorbed. They need safeguards for the protection of their cultures. So there are two distinct tendencies, centripetal and centrifugal. This clash would remain as long as India lives in the past, especially the majority community. The attitude of the minority communities is a reaction against the behaviour of the majority community whose rights are now beyond any danger. For the minorities, it is a question of life and death. So it is up to the majority community now to change the concept of nationalism and not the minority communities...’
Mr Gill went to great lengths to show that Sikhs, somehow, are different from, and not to be confused with, Hindus. Mr Gill did not quite go to the extent of saying that Sikhs must have a separate state, but the trend of his argument was clear.
Since his book was presented to me by the SGPC, I would imagine that it approves the general trend of Mr Gill’s argument.
In his chapter on the politico-cultural history of Punjab, Mr Gill clinched his argument thus:
‘It is useless to assert that India has one culture. Diversity is there nobody can deny but some say that there is unity in diversity This is nothing but self-deception and a wishful thinking of the few.
Is there any unity of the religious teachings of Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism and Zoroastrianism? No, their fundamentals differ.
Is there any unity of language, race and heritage? No.
How many people marry out of their religion? They can be counted on fingers.
How many people are untouchables? Millions.
Have people shed their prejudices of food and dress? No.
How many are considered to be second rate citizens? The majority community can tell.’
The gist of Mr Gills’ theorizing is that India never was one, never can be one and therefore never should be one.
One would presume that because Mr Gill’s book is distributed by the Dharam Prachar Committee of the SGPC, it reflects the thinking of the SGPC. But does the SGPC reflect the sentiments of all Sikhs? We do not know and cannot tell, short of holding a referendum in Punjab.
I remember how shocked and sad I felt when I read Mr Gill’s book for the first time. Sad, not because Mr Gill attacked Hinduism, or that he gave a perverted view of the development of Hindu society, but that anybody, in this day and age, would want to be an alien in his own land.
When I re-read the book in the context of recent events, I began to wonder whether it could just be that a substantial majority of Sikhs feel like him, even if they do not want a Khalistan or Sikhistan.
In the long history of Punjab there never was a time – except for a brief period of fifty years – when Sikhs ruled the area. The concept of Punjab itself has changed over the centuries, if not decades. The concentration of Sikhs in Indian Punjab is the result of an historical accident. The Sikhs as a people themselves have a history of not more than 300 years. If one is strictly to go by history, Khalistan should include Pakistan Punjab as well with Lahore as its capital. And in a Khalistan, are Sikhs going to make it mandatory for all non-Sikhs to learn Punjabi against their will? And is it expected that all Sikhs outside Khalistan should be treated as second-class citizens, unworthy of being trusted? Somewhere, logic comes apart in a welter of emotions.
The creation of Pakistan has had its own trauma among Muslims left behind in India. The burden of their complaint is that th
ey are now being treated as second-class citizens. Should a Khalistan come about, how are the Sikhs in the Indian Army to be treated: as mercenaries? Or is it expected that they are disbanded and sent to a mythical Khalistan? And is it further expected once again to exchange populations with Sikhs living in India repatriated to Khalistan and such Hindus as now living in today’s Punjab repatriated to a residual India? How ridiculous can one be?
One of the major tragedies of India is that we have come to associate parts of the country with a particular language and the people who speak the language as separate from others who don’t. Linguistic states have been the bane of post-Independence, neither during the British period nor during the reigns of numerous kings and queens. The Maratha empire encompassed lands where many languages were spoken. The Vijayanagara empire included both Telugu and Kannada areas. Language was never a problem. The poisonous seeds of linguism were sown by the Congress and the public is now reaping the fruits.
Interestingly enough, the situation in Punjab has a parallel in – of all places in Goa. During the time of the Portuguese rule, when the local language, Konkani, was under seige, Hindus determinedly stuck to it, while it became fashionable for the upper crust of Catholics to discard it in favour of Portuguese. Konkani had no status in its own homeland. Goan Hindus making their livelihood in Bombay would more often give Marathi, the dominant language of the region, as their mother tongue in order to associate themselves with the dominant group and thereby to get such crumbs from the dominant group’s table as became available.
When the Portuguese were finally driven out, the Catholics, who are in a minority in Goa, suddenly found themselves bereft of their patrons. To learn Portuguese was no more a paying proposition; it did not set them apart as the ruling class. On the contrary, it showed them somewhat sharply as an alien minority. But never having associated themselves with the Marathi dominant group, they could not now claim Marathi as their mother tongue. Their salvation lay in asserting themselves as Konkani-speaking people. But this new-found love for Konkani had become suspect, besides which the majority Hindus having sought favour from the dominant group and received it were now reluctant to acknowledge publicly that Konkani was their mother tongue, even though they spoke the language at home! The Hindu-Catholic cleavage in Goa remains sharp with the Goan Hindus, like the Punjabi Hindus who claim Hindi as their mother tongue, claiming Marathi as their own, even though, unlike the Punjabi Hindus in Punjab, they are the majority in Goa. Though the Hindus were – and remain – the majority community in Goa, for five centuries they had remained out of power and behaved like a minority. Their association with Marathi was instinctive and security-related. This is in the nature of life itself. Had the Sikhs been in a minority in Punjab, the Hindus probably would have had less inhibitions in claiming Punjabi as their mother tongue. The Catholics in Goa alienated the Hindus linguistically; without probably meaning to, the Sikhs in Punjab have alienated their Hindu brothers. There is somewhere, here, an object lesson. When language is associated with power, it assumes highly emotive connotations.’ When language and religion get linked, the mixture can become explosive. If Goa has not exploded it is merely because Christianity had a sobering influence on the people, the Goans besides, being themselves a sober people given to literature, music, theatre and the arts and not to sabre-rattling. Compromises come easily to them.