Let us Bury the Ghost of Khalistan Forever
One wonders if four decades are not enough time for the Sikhs to learn that the mere raising of slogans of Khalistan has decisively been used and abused by the nationalists and ultra-nationalists for promoting the Hindutva agenda and to disorient the Sikh politics in Punjab. Otherwise, the saner section among the Sikhs should have been vocal enough now in opposing Amritpal Singh and his ilk who raised the issue of Khalistan afresh and faked themselves as a ‘liberators’ of the community. And even the Akal Takht Jathedar and other Sikh sects sought to play politics in the case of Amritpal Singh who imitated Sikh militant leader Sant Jarnail Singh Bhinderanwale’s style of dress and his movement. Acting like Bhinderanwale, he carried ten personal/ private bodyguards to the mobilization of more hot-headed Sikh youths behind him. Also, he donned the aura of a reformist leader by proclaiming his ‘mission’ of weaning the Sikh youth away from drugs by motivating them to partake ‘amrit’ (Initiation). A clean-shaven Amritpal came down to his native village Jallukhera in Amritsar district from Dubai last year and he himself partook ‘amrit’ only six months ago. In fact, before him, not even a self-styled Sikh leader ever attempted to use ‘amrit partaking’ as an instrument for his Khalistani politics. Unfortunately, religious Sikh leaders and the supreme Sikh religious body- SGPC chose to keep mum on this issue.
For projecting him as a Sikh militant leader, Amritpal Singh managed to become the head of ‘Waris Punjab De’, virtually a defunct Sikh organization floated by late actor Deep Sidhu. Strategically, Amritpal arranged his ‘coronation as head of the organization’ at Rode, the native village of Sant Bhinderanwale. After that, he moved around in Punjab in luxurious cars, later in Mercedes perhaps gifted by a drug lord while being encircled by a dozen gun totting and paid bodyguards.
Amritpal talked tough declaring in his interviews to the media outlets that “Sikhs are slaves in India, needed to be liberated”. To hit the headlines, even ‘national media’ thronged to him as mouthing of Khalistan earned a sizable TRP for the digital media and social media platforms. As usual with proponents of Khalistan, he, too, never explained/clarified ‘what type of Khalistan regime would be and what path of struggle, armed or otherwise, he would adopt to achieve it’.
No doubt, Amritpal’s advocacy for Khalistan earned him instant popularity among the Sikh youth and a section of diaspora Sikh community while the elder generation of Sikhs who had experienced traumatic events of the 1980s and 90s chose to be silent for the moment. His supporters on social media trolled and abused the liberal Sikhs as ‘anti-Sikh and sycophants”. However, the moving cavalcade of Amritpal was an instant attraction for the raw Sikh youth. While in Dubai, Amritpal himself was active in trolling and abusing the liberal Sikhs and Left leaders of Farmers’ Morcha at Delhi borders in 2020-21.
Politically mature Sikhs, however, viewed Amritpal’s phenomenon rise, with suspicion and some of them were vocal enough to say that his projection as a Sikh leader in the media and otherwise seemed to be planned and orchestrated by hidden forces. The critics also raised eyebrows on the way the police were softly handling Amritpal and his men while they threw away chairs and benches from inside of two gurdwaras on flimsy grounds and consigned that furniture to fire in the public view. Some people even raised an accusing finger at him when he spoke against the peaceful mode of struggles one for the closure of a chemical factory at Zira and another at Mohali for the release of the Sikh detenues. And a majority of the Sikhs opposed Amritpal when his followers marched to the Ajnala police station with a sacred ‘bir’ of Guru Granth Sahib’ ( Sikh Scripture) in the lead to secure the release of his follower. Using the ‘bir’ as a ‘shield’ for the forced entry into the police station was taken by the Sikhs as an act of sacrilege of the sacred Scripture.
The recent police swoop on Amritpal and his followers beginning on 18 March (2023) needs to be analyzed in a larger perspective examining the unscrupulous and hidden strategy of “Political Executives” targeting a minority to create a ‘vote-bank’ for them among the large majority population. Former R&AW senior officer and diplomat GBS Sidhu provides a good insight in his book “The Khalistan Conspiracy” (HarperCollins publishers-2020). He says “Till Indira Gandhi returned to power as prime minister in January 1980, Sikh extremism and Khalistan were non-issues…… The general election for the eighth Lok Sabha was due before January 1985, and in preparation for it the Congress decided to focus on the Bhinderanwale-Khalistan issue a two-phase special operation (Op 1 and Op-2) referred to as the Punjab-centric operation launched by 1 Akbar Road Group from Indira Gandhi’s residence in Delhi with chosen Congress leaders (as operators). Op-1 started in January 1980 and Op-2 ended with Operation Blue Star in June 1984. In this context, GBS Sidhu writes that to whip up the Khalistan issue “most of the newspapers, journals, and other media suitably ‘managed’ by the Government of India’s officers, agencies concerned, gave colored, if not distorted, views of developments (in Punjab)”. Referring to his diplomatic service days, Mr. Sidhu further says “In Canada till the end of 1979, the idea of Khalistan was totally alien to them (Sikhs) and Bhinderanwale was a complete nonentity”. He has also given details (in his book) of how the Indian Government opened seven diplomatic missions in America and Canada to give currency to the demand for Khalistan among the immigrant Sikhs there. Former Cabinet Secretary BG Deshmukh in his book “From Poona to Prime Minister” stated that during his 1981 visit to Punjab to study the actual position found that there was no Khalistan issue there. Similarly, BD Pande, who was the Governor of Punjab in 1984, writes in his book “In the Service of Free India” that carries his memoirs that the press played a politically motivated role in Punjab. And observed that “why unending propaganda that Punjab is in the flames ……… this fake reporting is mostly carried out by the Hindu owned national press …. The worst offenders are the Hindu chauvinists and I would put the neo-fascist type on top, like the Hindu Shiv Sena of Punjab with backing from reactionary and political forces”.
Why Khalistan is an emotive issue for the Sikhs? The concept of Khalistan — an exclusive Nation-State of Sikhs — entered the Sikh mind in the 1940s when the Muslim League passed the resolution for the creation of an exclusive Muslim State of Pakistan in Lahore and which came into being in 1947 with the Partition of Punjab. Because of several factors working adversely against the tiny and scattered Sikh population, their leadership chose not to take up the issue of separating a State for the Sikhs. The leadership chose to join the Indian Union “unconditionally”. Later on after half a century the Akali Dal (Badal) representing the Sikhs, joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the same terms. The BJP has been committed to the creation of a Unitary India which conceptually turns the Sikhs and other minorities subservient to the Hindutva version of its nationalism that projects India as a ‘Hindu Nation/Rashtra’.
The above developments clearly vouchsafe that the Akalis, with a sizeable base among the Sikhs, became part of the Central nationalist forces bent upon segregating and suppressing the proponents of Khalistan. Practically, the Badal Akali Dal’s 20-year-long rule in Punjab, after the Army attack on the Golden Temple in June 1984, has been at the forefront in unleashing repression on the Sikh youths in the name of curbing terrorism. The same Central policy is being continued by the ruling BJP even now which has also forced the Bhagwant Mann’s AAP Government to fall in line. That is why, the mere raising of the ‘Khalistan’ issue has proved enough alibi for the Punjab police actively supported by Home Minister Amit Shah to unleash repression, even if there was no extremism/ violence before and after the arrest of hundreds of Sikh youths. In fact, there are political motives behind such hyped police actions which are meant to suppress the emergence of true regional/ democratic forces in Punjab. So-called tackling of Sikh separatism, nonetheless, also earns extra propaganda mileage for the rulers to emerge as “savior of the majority and protector of the country’s unity and democracy”. In political terms, the bashing of a minority has in practice served the Hindutva politics aimed at consolidating a ‘vote bank’ among the majority.
Congress regime of Indira Gandhi in the 1980s was the first to switch over to this brand of politics and the party gained rich electoral dividends in the December 1984 Lok Sabha polls by securing 404 out of total of 540 seats. Later, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took up the Hindutva agenda more blatantly which has already established the “Hindu majoritarian regime” under Prime Minister Modi. And, in the process, the Hindutva’s ultra-nationalistic politics have got so much deeply entrenched among the overwhelming Indian majority that the chance of getting back to the secular polity has become rare and remote.
So the police cracking down on Amritpal and his followers and slapping of NSA and other stringent black laws against the militant Sikhs should be read as motivated, political action launched jointly by Punjab’s AAP government and the BJP rulers of New Delhi.
Referring to the current political situation eminent French scholar Christopher Jeffrelot described “In Modi’s India (Westland 2023) (https://thewire.in/books/ christophe-jaffrelot-modis-india-review), national populism has transitioned to electoral authoritarianism with the capture by the executive of key institutions and the domestication of “mainstream” media with the help of crony capitalists. Elections are still taking place because the political executives needs the legitimacy of a popular mandate for prevailing over other power centers but elections are not a level playing field anymore, not only because of the media’s bias, but also because of the flooding of the public space that big money permits through dubious financial means such as issurance of electoral bonds. The need of the hour is to educate the misguided youth about the Chimera of Khalistan and its harmful implications for the entire Sikh community. It also needs to be widely propagated this is the conspiracy of the powers to be to keep the Sikhs mired in this ghetto mentality and deprive them of the opportunity to fully realize their real potential and acquire the status of a distinct vibrant religious community among the comity of nations in modern age. It is time for the Sikhs to get rid off their medieval past and acquire modern tools of higher education, deft diplomacy and their clout at the international level to live with dignity within the hostile environment.
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