Despite the crackdown in Punjab on Monday, two headlines in that day’s issue of this newspaper – “37 rail stations set on fire in Punjab” and “Adik rules out resignation – and similar ones in the same day’s issue of other contemporaries sum up the political scene in the country as no two other developments can.
On a surface view, there is no connection between the activities of Akali extremists in Punjab and the attempt by the Maharashtra deputy chief minister, Mr. Ramrao Adik, to brazen out the charge of having disgraced himself and the country abroad. But in reality there is a connection and a deep one.
Mr. Adik, it must be emphasised, is an extreme case. No other well-known public figure has ever behaved as disgracefully abroad as he has – on the flight from Bombay to Frankfurt, during the brief stopover there and during his stay in Hanover where he had gone in connection with India’s participation in an industrial fair. But two additional points need to be made. Mr. Adik’s conduct, which has rightly attracted so much attention this time, is not out of character; he has been known to lack restraint in such matters. And he is not a wholly unrepresentative character among India’s ruling elite.
Again, there is a connection between these two points. Regardless of the fact that the press has by and large been rather discreet about Mr. Adik’s behaviour in the past, his activities have been known to his colleagues in Maharashtra and the party leaders in New Delhi. It, therefore, follows that he could not have enjoyed the kind of support he has among Congress legislators in the state and that he could have been allowed to rise as high as he has in the ruling hierarchy if the threshold of tolerance was not as high as it clearly has become in the past decade or so not only in Maharashtra and other states but in New Delhi as well.
Mrs. Gandhi may have found it necessary to tolerate his appointment as deputy chief minister in Bombay out of sheer expediency. But the fact remains that she has tolerated it. Mr. Nehru would not have. More important, he could never have been confronted with such a problem. The country’s and the party’s political culture was then very different.
Lost Respect
As a result of the activities of public figures such as Mr. Adik, politicians in office, and, indeed, even out of office have lost the respect of those over whose destinies they preside. This loss of moral authority has had a devastating effect. On the one hand, the people have become less and less inclined to obey those in authority and, on the other, the capacity of the machinery of state to enforce its decision has steadily declined. Brute force can work for a time; it cannot work for ever, especially in a democracy such as ours. The extremist upsurge in Punjab is partly the result of this complex process.
It cannot be anybody’s case that the law and order machinery that we inherited from the British was perfect. It was not. In any case it was too unresponsive to the needs and problems of the people. It also cannot be anybody’s case that the people’s representatives should not mediate between the people and the state machinery which tends to place itself above the people. But we all know the havoc our politicians in office have played with the law enforcing apparatus. The Punjab police are among the worst affected. They were among the first to have virtually revolted in the seventies. So no one need be surprised that they have proved incapable of coping with the extremist challenge. It is in fact widely doubted that they are at all interested in doing so. The large number of arrests on Monday are not likely to remove this impression.
This was precisely the point I sought to make in the article “The Sikhs Are In Danger” (March 7| 8) when I wrote: “Punjab was converted into a smugglers’ paradise long before the Akalis launched what has turned out to be a war of attrition.” It is extraordinary that some individuals should have interpreted this statement to imply a connection between the smugglers and the Akalis. That the implication was different should have been obvious, particularly in the context of the previous sentence which said that those in authority in the country as a whole had allowed the machinery of state to deteriorate “to a point where it finds itself bereft of the necessary moral authority and, indeed, of the physical capacity.”
In the absence of firm evidence, I did not then wish to press the issue further and argue that the smugglers had made the border with Pakistan extremely porous and that arms could be as easily smuggled across it as watches, cameras, gold and narcotics. Even now it is difficult to establish it beyond doubt that Akali extremists are being trained and armed in Pakistan. But it cannot be seriously disputed that arms are flowing in freely from that country.
Porous Border
In an article “Punjab: Disgrace Abounding”, in the April 14 issue of Mainstream, the CPI leader, Mr. Satpal Dang, writes: “In some districts of Punjab anyone can purchase a stengun (smuggled from Pakistan) for Rs. 3,000 or more.” Incidentally, he also gives instances to show that the Punjab police are either not capable of doing their job or not interested in doing it, or are too afraid.
Unfortunately I have lost an anonymous letter from a self-proclaimed Akali, lawyer by profession. So I am unable to quote it precisely. But I wish to draw attention to a couple of points in the letter. My correspondent has argued that the Akali battle is for power – kissa kursi ka, to quote him. The Akalis, he says, saw how Congress leaders in office engaged in a loot and wanted to join it. So they were willing to go in for a coalition with the Congress. Congress leaders in the state headed by Mr. Darbara Singh spurned feelers to this effect. Then the Akalis evolved a plan of action which allotted the highest priority to the demoralisation of an already demoralised and ineffective police force and to selective murders and attacks on public property.
For all we know, the individual concerned does not live in Punjab and has no direct contact with Akali leaders who might be as much victims of forces beyond their control as the rest of us. But that cannot detract from the importance of the issues he has raised – the loot in which Congress ministers have engaged and the demoralisation of the police force. He underscores the connection between corruption and the decomposition of the state machinery, though only by implication, perhaps because he does not know how the spread of corruption eases the way for the entry of criminals and smugglers into politics. Indeed, there is a similar connection between corruption and the rise of extremism.
The proposition is by now well established in the case of Muslim societies. While Iran provides the best known illustration, it is by no means the only one. Indeed, there is hardly a Muslim society where corruption among the ruling elites has not provoked a fundamentalist backlash of varying intensity.
To the best of my knowledge, the rise of Sant Bhindranwale has not been studied in a similar light, most commentators having contented themselves with the observation that, to begin with, he received a great deal of support from Giani Zail Singh (now President of the republic) who was then locked in a power struggle with Sardar Darbara Singh. It will, therefore, be wrong, or at least premature, to advance a general theory in respect of Sant Bhindranwale. We do not know enough about him to be able to do so. But it is beyond dispute that he is a fundamentalist in the same sense that Imam Khomeini is a fundamentalist.
Jat Ascendancy
It is obvious that the fundamentalist leanings of Sant Bhindranwale could not have produced the havoc they have if “helpful” social and economic conditions did not exist. Despite all the support he is supposed to have received from whatever faction in the Congress, he could not have conjured into existence the kind of powerful movement we face. But what precisely are those social and economic conditions which have helped him. Again we are in the dark. If there is a worthwhile study on the subject, most of us are unaware of it. Some of us have seen some so-called Marxist analyses. But these unfortunately do not add up to much.
The Akali perception of the Sikh faith as it has developed in the past one century or so beginning with the establishment of the Singh Sabhas and the chief Khalsa Diwan is, of course, a pertinent factor. The Akalis have seen the Sikhs as a separate religious and political community. But equally relevant is the ascendancy of Jat Sikhs in Akali politics since the early sixties when the influence of Master Tara Singh began to decline and that of Sant Fateh Singh began to rise. This ascendancy cannot be said to be the result of the green revolution, though that might have helped sustain it. For the ascendancy antedates the green revolution.
This struggle within the Sikh community has been obscured by controversies first over the formation of a Punjabi suba and then over the future of Chandigarh, distribution of river waters, territorial adjustments and so on. And the Akali leadership has also managed to create two sets of foes – one within, such as the Nirankaris and Radha Soamis, and the other without – the Punjabi Hindus, the Union government and the Congress – and thereby muffled the intra-Sikh struggle. But the struggle is a fact.
Plainly the current agitation has several facts – Hindu-Sikh, Punjabi-Hindi, Gurmukhi-Devnagri, Jat Sikh-non-Jat Sikh, rural-urban and so on – which makes it necessary to study it in various contexts – in the context of fundamentalist movements in Islam and the peasant uprisings of different kinds, for example. But behind all complexities one stark fact stands out which is that an honest and efficient political leadership backed by a lean and competent administrative machinery could have disposed of the challenge reasonably quickly and pushed forward the twin programmes of modernisation-secularisation and nation-building.
A democratic polity has the capacity to achieve these goals without too much violence and turbulence if it is wisely led. For, by its nature it seeks to accommodate, that is, recognise and respect separate identities and at the same time blunt the edges of those identities. But Punjab has not been well led for over two decades. Dishonest men have produced dangerous progenies.
The Times of India, 18 April 1984