Even at the risk of further misunderstanding, it must be said that the response of most articulate and educated Sikhs to recent developments in Punjab has been disappointing and that this has made it difficult for the rest of us to maintain a sensible dialogue with them.
It is understandable that Sikh intellectuals, like many of their Hindu counterparts, should hold Mrs Gandhi personally guilty of avoiding an agreement with the “moderate” Akali leaders and some of her prominent colleagues of having deliberately built up Bhindranwale. But it is painful that they should fail to recognise the obvious fact that whosoever might have been responsible for it, a situation had been reached by the end of May when it had become unavoidable to call in the army and flush out the terrorist-extremists from the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar and other gurdwaras.
An intellectual is distinguished from the common people by his capacity to look dispassionately at highly emotional issues such as the army’s entry into the Golden Temple complex and the damage to the Akal Takht. Sikh intellectuals have by and large not demonstrated such a capacity. If they had, they would have acknowledged that by amassing aims and fortifying the complex the way they had and then using it as a base to murder unarmed civilians in the state, the followers of Bhindranwale had compelled the authorities to order the army to go into the complex and that the terrorists were primarily responsible for the damage to the Akal Takht. Indeed, like most of their countrymen, they would have expressed admiration for the restraint that the army had shown in the discharge of its duty.
The argument about Mrs Gandhi does not cut one way, as her critics imagine; it cuts both ways. If she was motivated by petty electoral considerations in dealing with the “moderate” Akalis as her detractors believed and alleged, they should in the larger national interest have advised the Akalis to suspend the movement lest she pushed matters to a point where she could justify the use of the army. With a couple of exceptions, it is difficult to think of Sikh intellectuals who took such a view of the problem and acted accordingly. Apparently they did not feel that it was their patriotic duty to avoid the disaster Mrs Gandhi’s alleged intransigence was bound to produce unless the Akali movement was withdrawn.
Khomeini Parallel
It is equally shocking that Sikh intellectuals should have failed to recognise the menace Bhindranwale had come to constitute not only to national unity and security but also to them and other members of the Sikh intelligentsia and indeed the entire Sikh community. This failure is in fact even more shocking because it antedates the army’s entry into the Golden Temple complex and follows the widespread awareness of the consequences of Ayatollah Khomeini’s triumph in Iran.
Some Akalis were aware of the danger. One of them wrote to me an anonymous letter dated April 2, 1984, which said: “Khomeini ascended the throne in Iran himself but Bhindranwale can never do so. He won’t be allowed to do so by our political leaders. We cannot have Idi Amin ruling in Punjab. He would destroy everything and take us back by two centuries. So he may even have to be liquidated.”
This letter was in response to my article in which I had called Bhindranwale a fundamentalist and compared him with Khomeini. My unknown correspondent disputed this comparison on the ground while Khomeini was a “scholar and a theologian of the first order” who had “written a couple of very good books on Islam”, Bhindranwale “is an illiterate fanatic”. That is presumably why he compared him with Idi Amin. The comparison is not wholly apt if only because the situation in Punjab is very different from Uganda or any other part of Africa.
But that is not the central issue. The central issue is that the correspondent did not require much effort to convince himself that once Bhindranwale had played his role in forcing Mrs Gandhi to yield to the Akalis through his campaign of murder, loot and arson, he could be disposed of. In my opinion other educated Sikhs had similarly convinced themselves. This was extraordinary blindness on their part. Apparently they had paid no attention to the Iranian experience and had no idea either of the man they were dealing with or of the vice-like grip he had acquired on his supporters.
Messianic Figure
It is possible that Bhindranwale would not have come up as rapidly as he did if he had not received valuable support from some prominent Congress leaders. It is also possible that his bid for supreme leadership of the Sikhs could have been frustrated if those in power in Chandigarh and New Delhi had acted firmly in 1978 when he organised the attack on the Nirankari Bhawan or even in 1981 when he arranged the murder of Lala Narain, proprietor-editor of the Hindi Samachar group of papers. But it is equally pertinent to note that he was a messianic figure who could mesmerise those around him to do whatever he asked them to do, that the widespread feeling of discrimination against them among the Sikhs, the adoption of the omnibus Anandpur Sahib resolution by the Akalis and the movement launched by them in support of the demands contained in the resolution created a situation which he could exploit, and that he was remarkably quick to seize the opportunity the Akalis presented him.
It would be wrong to say that Bhindranwale looked upon himself as the eleventh guru just as it has been wrong to say that Khomeini regards himself as the twelfth Imam who, according to the Shia tradition, is supposed to return to inaugurate the reign of righteousness. But just as Khomeini has placed himself above everyone else in Iran, Bhindranwale was placing himself above every centre of religious and political authority among the Sikhs. The Akali leaders lived in terror of him and so apparently did the five head priests. They certainly allowed him to occupy in the Akal Takht a floor above the one where the Guru Granth Sahib is kept, fortify it and in the process desecrate it; and they did not issue a hukumnama, as they should have, prohibiting the killing of innocent Hindus.
Unlike Khomeini, Bhindranwale was not engaged only in an attempt to overthrow a government he disliked. He had to secure the division of India if he was to establish his supremacy among the Sikhs. In this enterprise he could not have succeeded. But he had already created an atmosphere in which no Sikh could dare speak frankly unless he was prepared to risk his life, an atmosphere which had begun to undermine liberal values and breed the psychology of siege among a community known for its expansive ways, its valour and hard work.
Method In Madness
It was not a mere accident that Bhindranwale’s campaign for leadership opened with the attack on the Nirankari Bhavan. There was a method in this madness. Orthodoxy had to be enforced among the Sikhs even as the external enemies – the Hindus in Punjab and what he called the Hindu state in New Delhi – were tackled. He also did not care if there was in fact a Hindu backlash against the Sikhs in the rest of the country and he said so to anyone who cared to ask. Incidentally he said that to foreign diplomats. All in all, he constituted a grave threat to the well-being and progress of the Sikh community, a threat which Sikh intellectuals as a class failed to perceive and respond to.
From talks with Sikh intellectuals it also emerges that they do not have a proper appreciation of the nature of the Indian state. Like the Muslim Leaguers before partition, they are saying that the Indian state is essentially a Hindu state; that this Hindu state will lay down the terms under which the minorities will be permitted to lie; and that it is for the minority to accept these terms or reject them and fight for their rights.
Nothing can be farther from the truth. The people called Hindus by virtue of their not being Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains, do constitute a majority. But they do not constitute a community in a political sense of the term. Some of them occasionally get together to kill some Muslims in the event of a riot. But that does not make them a political community capable of acting coherently and consistently over a period of time. The failure of the political wing of the RSS, earlier known as the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and now as the Bharatiya Janata Party, to cross the 6.25 per cent vote mark in the country as a whole in any general election speaks for itself. One can go further and say that all political conflicts in India are essentially intra-Hindu conflicts. The Hindus sustain the liberal and the secular ethos in which other communities can prosper precisely because they are so constituted. They do not do so deliberately; they do so instinctively. So it is plainly ridiculous to speak of a Hindu state wanting to dictate terms to other communities. The Sikh intellectuals should not fall into such a trap of their own making. Things are dangerously difficult in Punjab and they might remain so for quite some time. But those who possess the capacity to think should not complicate the situation by their erroneous formulations and loose talk.
The Times of India, 4 July 1984