“Why do you waste your life in hatred, vengeance and conflict?” (Guru Granth Sahib). Today’s youth are much less likely to accept Nehruvian shibboleths unquestioningly, preferring nuanced narratives that discern fealty to the civilisation beneath a superficial civic nationalism.
The Sikh youths are also harking back to traditionalism, free from reformist reductionism, procrustean interpretations, and shrill, hypocritical rhetoric. It is a good time to consider alternative narratives around Operation Blue Star and the century that lead up to it. Operation Blue Star was not the first time the Golden Temple Complex was assaulted post-Independence. In 1955, protesters gathered there demanding a Punjabi-language State were assaulted by the police.
The Khalsa has traditionally been an independent entity, like any Akhada in the Indian spiritual tradition. Even in Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s empire, it remained outside his authority and interference. This was a typical model of social trusteeship between different organs of civilisation, but it appears to have been a concept foreign to Indira Gandhi’s mindset. She sought to harness religious figures and institutions of all hues in the service of political power, attacking those who did not oblige.
State media ran propaganda about implacable Sikh separatism. The pogrom of Sikhs on Rajiv Gandhi’s watch followed, fuelling an insurgency that shook the foundations of the State. In parallel, decades of economic mismanagement had come to a head, pushing India to the brink of becoming a failed state — a precipice that the Narasimha Rao administration held at bay. From then on, challenges to the hold of the Nehru-Gandhi coterie on India grew stronger.
Inexplicably, Rajiv-era propaganda absolving Indira of any decisive role was regurgitated on Indian TV this year. But her actions immediately after the operation continued, calculated aggression. Lt Gen KS Brar mentions Indira’s letter of appreciation for the operation. More importantly, while remaining in occupation of the temple complex, she challenged the Akali Dal’s hold over the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee and its power to elect head priests. Like the British in earlier times, she sought to insert herself into the organisation of Sikhism. The subsequent burning of the Sikh Reference Library and confiscation of its historic artefacts, many still unaccounted for, indicate that Indira’s target was not Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, but the backbone of the Sikh tradition itself, holding nothing sacred.
What brought Sikhism into the Indira coterie’s crosshairs? Reasons go back to Nehru’s betrayal of Partition-era promises to Sikhs regarding “a territorial area within the nation to develop its own life and culture (…) with a great deal of autonomy for its constituent units.” (October 1945; reiterated in July 1946). Sikhs had lost a great deal and felt a need to culturally consolidate within India. But the most immediate trigger for Indira was the fact that Sikhs had been the most well-mobilised protesters against her Emergency rule of 1975-77. She targeted the RSS, too, for the same reason. A photograph of a young Narendra Modi in Punjab during the Emergency, disguised as a Sikh, might have a story to tell.
Under Emergency, the Indira coterie railroaded three culturally significant changes to the Constitution. The first of these decreed India a “socialist” country, a formalisation of existing ad hoc policies and political expedience under which India lurched from one economic crisis to another.
The same amendment decreed that India shall be “secular”, abdicating any special responsibility towards nurturing native Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and Sikh traditions as part of world heritage. It relativised native traditions on the same level as powerful, expansionist, transnational religions. An analogy would be treating Indian SMEs on an equal footing with multinational, foreign government-backed corporate behemoths.
Indira’s third intervention framed rules perpetuating English in State institutions and as the sole medium of higher education, ending even the pretence of indigenisation — another promise Nehru procrastinated by playing one Indic language against another, justifying the English-dominant status quo as “compromise” — a stratagem straight from the Panchatantra tale of the monkey and quarrelling cats.
Historically, Sikh misl-kingdoms fostered Punjabi, Hindi, Persian and the Urdu creole. Ram Prasad Niranjani published the first recognised work of modern Hindi prose under the Patiala court’s patronage (1741). But the British promoted English and Urdu across the north. Nevertheless, Hindi and Punjabi grew, but politics contrived a conflict. The linguistic reorganisation of States was completed by 1956, but Punjab was dragged through religious identity-politics and re-partitioned in 1966.
The Nehru-Indira coterie had an interesting cast: Pro-Soviet diplomat TN Kaul cheekily coined the term “Kashmiri mafia” to refer to themselves. Fabian socialist PN Haksar, who strategised Indira’s rise to dictatorial power in the mid-70’s, was part of the Planning Commission and the first chancellor of JNU. In the last decade of his life he went blind and expressed regrets about “secularism”. Economist PN Dhar was a key confidant. Ambassador to Moscow DP Dhar served as Union Minister for Planning. He had marched with Sheikh Abdullah in 1946 against Maharaja Hari Singh of Kashmir, later serving as Minister under the Abdullah Government. The Abdullah and Mufti families remained close. Stranger than fiction, Nehru’s and his first Minister of Education, Abul Kalam Azad’s, grandfathers both held top positions at the last Mughal court. Azad’s great-grandfather arrived with Abdali’s invasion, stayed as Qazi of Punjab and was killed by Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s forces.
By 1989, with Rajiv Gandhi blundering on several fronts, VP Singh formed a Government. Immediately, Kashmir exploded: The drama of Union Home Minister Mufti Sayeed’s daughter’s kidnapping forced India to free terrorists. A murderous exodus of Kashmiri Hindus followed — the seventh in a series of genocidal rounds of ethnic cleansing since 1389. Kashmir was the pin in the grenade of the post-Independence power structure in the Subcontinent’s politics — ironically crafted by an Anglicised coterie that touted their Kashmiri Hindu ancestry, but threw their country cousins to the wolves.
An inclusive faith, traditional Sikhism mobilised for civilisational integrity earlier, in less favourable circumstances (as far back as 1858, Nihang Sikhs made an attempt to reclaim Ram Janmabhumi). With the entrenchment of ideologies antithetical to traditional Indian pluralism, waves of Sikh discontentment grew. The proverbial canary in the coalmine was not the source of danger but a reaction to it. The Anandpur Sahib Resolution of 1973 formalised a charter of Sikh demands. National in scope there isn’t a shadow of “separatism” in it. When “secularisation” (read Anglicisation) of youth and the State’s social engineering became increasingly apparent, it spawned a grassroots counter-movement.
The Sikh microcosm had presaged and reacted to ideological forces that were working across the Indic macrocosm. This perspective throws a new slant on recent history and the vital role of the Sikh experience in crafting the subcontinent’s future.
(The writer is an information technology consultant, currently based in Washington DC)
