Some well-meaning Sikh intellectuals have finally begun to wonder what has hit their community (see Dr Gopal Singh’s article “Hindu-Sikh Fraternity”, July 14 and Mr SS Gill’s article, “Wail of a Stricken Sikh”, August 4 in this newspaper). This is rather surprising. For the answer lies there for anyone to discover, if only one is genuinely interested. Akalis and Sikh intellectuals have brought the present tragedy on the Sikh community.
A myth has been built, and it is currently sought to be reinforced, about the heroic role of the Akalis in the Independence struggle. This witting or unwitting distortion of the truth cannot but add to the prevailing confusion and aggravate the tragedy that is threatening to overwhelm the Sikh community. At least now Sikh intellectuals interested in the well-being of their community should be willing to face the truth.
The Akalis, let us face it, were not an independent Sikh component of the larger freedom movement as the Khudai Khidmatgars in the NWFP were a Muslim component of it. They could not be. For they were the products of a British-inspired movement among the Sikhs which emphasised their separateness from the Hindus. This emphasis was not accidental. It was part of the well-established “divide and rule” policy. The Akalis, of course, had their problems with the British but these related to their view of Sikh interests; these had nothing to do with India’s independence.
This is not to suggest that only the Hindus could be genuine nationalists. But it may be recalled that while nationalist Muslims emphasised their points of agreement and commonness with the Hindus, Mr. Jinnah, in • order to justify his demand for Pakistan, . proclaimed Indian Muslims to be wholly different from the Hindus. It was not for nothing that the British had taught the Sikhs to emphasise their differences with the Hindus and not their roots in Hinduism. The intention, clearly, was to promote political separatism; they were fairly successful.
Two Factors
The Akalis did not, unlike the Muslim League, become a full-fledged secessionist organisation in united India. Two factors inhibited this development. First, the Sikhs did not constitute the majority of the population, even in a single district of united Punjab, which the Akalis could claim as their homeland; finally, the Cabinet Mission, in 1946, turned down their demand for a homeland on this ground. Secondly, the Akalis, whatever they and their supporters might have said subsequently, did not then wish to be left in a Muslim-dominated Pakistan and were, therefore, opposed to partition. This made them Congress allies of a sort, but of a very superficial sort.
Partition and the immediate forced migration of the Sikh community from the newly created Pakistan should have shocked the Akalis into a new outlook, which should have encouraged them to underscore their membership of the larger Hindu community which, known as it is for tolerating and indeed encouraging differences, could not possibly constitute a threat to their special identity and status within the family. But traumatic as the developments were, they did not achieve such a change of outlook. Essentially the Akalis remained separatist in their deepest being. They were asking for a Sikh state within months of partition, and the holocaust accompanying it.
It would, however, be more accurate to speak of a schizophrenic Akali personality in the post-independence period. While many leading Akalis recognised the need for cooperation with the ruling Congress in the interest of the rehabilitation and well-being of the Sikh community, many of them were not able to give up their separatist way of thinking. A good illustration of the Akali schizophrenia would be the merger with the Congress in the fifties to be followed by the denunciation of the Congress as being anti-Sikh and revival of the Akali Dal by Master Tara Singh to defend “the Panth in danger.” Many Akalis stayed on in the Congress but they remained good Akalis.
The story goes that the Akalis modified their demand for a Sikh state in 1948, in favour of a Punjabi suba on the advice of Dr. Ambedkar, who told them that the Congress would never concede the principle of a community-based state. But this did not change the reality of the demand. The Akalis wanted, to begin with, a state where Sikh hegemony was assured, and they continued to want such a State, even if they called it Punjabi Suba. They finally won such a state in 1966. Around 40 per cent of the population of the new state was Hindu. But it was reduced to a subordinate status, regardless of whether it voted for the Congress, or the Jana Sangh, or both. For while the Congress accepted the principle of Sikh hegemony in the new state, the Jana Sangh was in no position to resist it, because it could never get into power.
Sikh Control
Rationally this hegemony could be best exercised through the Congress party because it could offer a junior partnership to the Punjabi Hindus and thus secure their willing acquiescence into a Sikh-dominated order. The record of all Congress ministries in the State since 1966 would bear this out. The Sikhs controlled around 80 per cent of all senior jobs in the State government and the administration. But this arrangement could never be acceptable to the Akalis, who were also in control of the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee and through it all of gurdwaras in Punjab and gurdwara funds running into crores of rupees. To underscore the importance of this control, it may be noted that Sikhs congregate in gurdwaras on over three score occasions a year.
Alternatively, Sikh hegemony in Punjab could be exercised by the Akalis in cooperation with the Jana Sangh. This could assure them both the necessary majority in the legislature, which they could not win on their own, and the acquiescence of the Hindus in their rule. But they could not manage such an alliance or long, partly because they themselves were (and are) prone to factional splits.
Thus the formation of the Punjabi Suba did not ensure power for the Akalis. Thus for them, the Panth remained in danger, precisely because their power was not assured Interestingly, many urban Sikh intellectuals, who otherwise felt totally excluded from having any say in the affairs of the Dal, especially after the mid-’sixties when the urban-based leadership of Master Tara Singh gave way to the rural-based leadership of Sant Fateh Singh, transferred their own sense of insecurity to the community. The separatist literature that has poured from Sikh centres of learning in Punjab is truly impressive.
Certain socio-economic developments such as the sharp increase in the number of the landless as a result of poor Sikh peasants leasing out and richer ones leasing in land, the reluctance of educated Sikh youth engage in agriculture and their inability to find jobs in urban centres appropriate to their view of their status in their own rural communities are said to have contributed to the “radicalisation” (communalisation) of the Sikh youth. There is obviously some merit in these and other similar semi-Marxist sociological explanations. But we prefer to explain political developments in terms of political actors.
Proceeding on that basis, we would sum up the situation in the late ‘sixties in the unilingual Sikh-dominated Punjab as: there could be no long-term peace in the State with the Akalis as a major factor and they could not be eliminated, whatever anyone did, so long as they were assured of control over the gurdwaras.
Wholly Communal
The Akalis are condemned to intense factionalism by virtue of the nature of the rural Sikh society which they represent. But they cannot also be a natural ruling party in a polity which contains 40 per cent non-Sikhs, making it necessary for the ruling party to win at least its acquiescence. They are wholly communal and they are wholly Punjab-centred, with the result that their politics must go also against the interests of the Sikhs in the rest of the Union as well. If this contradiction was not obvious earlier, it was because the Congress consistently ignored the essentially separatist character of the Akali Dal.
The Akalis have faced two options in the unilingual Punjab – either to allow the Sikh community to settle down and themselves face decline, or to keep the community agitated and thereby ensure their own survival. They have always chosen the second alternative. The result has inevitably been unsettling for Punjab. But this was a manageable business for the Indian State up to the ‘seventies, when several developments took place which, on the one hand, sapped its capacity and, on the other, gave the Akali separatism a new external dimension.
We do not need to rehearse developments beginning with the Congress split in 1969 and culminating in the Emergency in 1975-77 except to make two points. First, the split gravely weakened the only political organisation the country possessed which was capable of coping with serious social and economic conflicts which plague India. Secondly, the declaration of Emergency was an admission on Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s part that she could not manage the country’s political affairs, within the parameters of the normal Constitutional processes.
On the other side of the fence, the Emergency helped forge and strengthen bonds between the Akalis and powerful anti-social elements such as smugglers and distillers; they found themselves in the same jails. Another process had started long before the Emergency, which was to prove far more significant for the Akalis and the country. A section of the Sikhs settled in Britain and Canada had begun to move under the influence of men who had suddenly decided that they needed a Sikh homeland.
The movement had begun to command the attention of some perceptive Indian diplomats in Britain and Canada in 1966-67. But their reports were consistently ignored. The movement received a new impetus after 1971, when India helped the rise of Bangladesh as an independent nation. Contacts were established between the Khalistanis abroad and the Akalis at home. The Anandpur Sahib Resolution was partly the result of these contacts.
The Times of India, 11 August 1986