Lord Wavel, attempting to understand M. K. Gandhi, has in his Viceroy’s Journal has described him as both a bania and an advocate. As a bania, he would drive a hard bargain and as an advocate he would provide for wriggling out of what little he had conceded. The same would be true of the functioning of the federal system in India. Whatever little had been entrusted to the states, has since been effectively eroded by a hundred clever manipulations. The obvious method of amendments to the constitution has been most frequently been employed. Many of the near hundred amendments of the constitution have achieved this end result. Informal means have had their part to play. Extra-constitutional growth of certain organisations like the Planning Commission, University Grants Commission, para-military and central forces, fiscal controls and so on have taken their toll of state autonomy. The result is that the states today are no more than glorified municipalities and constitutional experts often describe them as such.

Going further, the Panjab has been rendered a sub-state by means of the Panjab Reorganisation Act. Things have been so managed that it has had to share its capital with two other states and so also the High Court. All Panjabi speaking areas do not form a part of the Panjab. Extensive areas are a part of the neighbouring Hindu majority states of Haryana, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh.

It has no control over its river waters or hydroelectric power though both these subjects are mentioned in the State List over which the state is to enjoy absolute sovereign rights.

Same results of undermining the autonomy of the state have been achieved by indiscriminate use of Article 356 for the dismissal of duly elected state governments. This Article was first of all used against the then Sikh majority state of Panjab & East Panjab States Union. Dr. Ambedkar, speaking on the second imposition on the same state, said in the Rajya Sabha in no uncertain words, “this is a rape of the constitution.” Since then it has been often employed to dismiss regularly elected Akali governments in the state.

The Ruling Caste Hindu Establishment (RCHE) has not been above using the judiciary for the purpose of denying the benefits of its natural resources to the Panjab and for other nefarious purposes. (See appendix).

The Sikhs and other minorities were assured that India would be a secular State. Positively, in the Indian conditions, it involved constitutional special rights to minorities to afford them equality of opportunity normally available under a democracy. It also meant statutory proportionate representation of minorities in legislature and other organs of the state. Since government is the biggest employer in India, it meant reservation in state services.

Equality before law would normally be another expression of secularism.

Most important of all, secularism translates itself into practise by ensuring that the dominant permanent majority would not be able to impose its views on other cultural and religious groups, particularly, with the help of the state power.

Let us now have a closer look at the realities prevailing in India. It is now fairly certain that these promises were merely meant to lure the minorities to join the Indian Union willingly. Though solemnly made, they were never meant to be actually kept. This strategy was particularly relevant to the situation of the Sikhs who were a third party to the freedom of India on the Indian sub-continent and would not have joined in the absence of such assurances. Wintson Churchill was the first one to publicly declare that the actual aim of the Hindu Congress in India was to form a Hindu State. Speaking in the House of Commons on 12 December 1946, he gave clear warning of the coming events when he cautioned: “I am sure that any attempt by the Congress Party to establish a Hindu Raj on the basis of majorities measured by standards of Western civilisation, or what is left of it, and proceeding by forms and formulas of government with which we are familiar over here, will at a very early stage be fatal to any conception of the unity of India.”

We may borrow words from Ramsay MacDonald (see Indian Constitutional Documents) to perceive the shadow cast by coming events. He says, present constitution does not contain, “checks and balances” which are necessary “to protect minorities from unrestricted and tyrannical use of the democratic principle, expressing itself solely through majority power.”

It is not surprising that ground realities turned out to be much different from their official projection of them. Very briefly, what was meant to be a de-colonisation process transformed itself into a re-colonisation process. The Sikhs, their Panjab and other minorities were effectively made a colony of the RCHE. Other states, notably, Nagaland, Mizoram and Jammu & Kashmir, also became colonies of the brand new colonial power. What emerged from the Constituent Assembly was not a ‘sovereign, democratic, socialist republic’ as was given out but an imperialistic state, having an over-riding ambition of extending its hegemony to small and weak neighbouring countries. This was India’s much trumpeted “tryst with destiny.” India awoke not into light and freedom but into neo-imperialism, which would in due course become the worst its inhabitants had ever seen. The cruellest, the bloodiest and the most dehumanising of all establishments that mankind had ever seen, emerged out of India’s constituent Assembly which did most of its nefarious work from 15 August 1947 to 26 January 1950 – the pitch black thirty months.

For want of better of expression, we have christened this new imperial power as Ruling Caste-Hindu Establishment, RCHE for short. As has been said before, this RCHE is the most violent, the cruellest and the most de-humanising imperial power known to history. This is saying much. The Panjab, in the last five hundred years, has had very violent confrontations with the Persian, Afghan, Mughal and the British empires. It is in a position to vouchsafe that the present dispensation is the bloodiest and the most unjust of them all, both qualitatively as well as quantitatively.

Because of and in addition to the above, the Indian State, in the tradition of Dhritrashtra, is characterised by its love of particular groups and biased in favour of an economic order that serves their interests. This breeds two fatal vices, propensity to be infatuated with preserving the status quo and the built-in inability to implement its own laws. From the Sikh point of view the immorality of the State is complete. It acquired the status of the peoples’ enemy when it, not withstanding its illegitimate character, went ahead to unleash unprecedented oppression on the Sikh people. The only choice with the cultured person was to either bear the naked oppression of the illegitimate state or to oppose it by just violence that was the only alternative before them.

Many people of conscience refused to reconcile themselves with an unjust and repressive world around them. The attempt they made to achieve their liberation from State oppression was necessary to preserve their culture. They owed it to their conscience, God, political maturity, sense of honour and human dignity. Many people of all faiths, had sympathy for the Sikh movement and some Muslims and Hindus also joined it because of the universal appeal of the values it upheld.

The Militant is right in designating it a fundamental cause of conflict between the state and the socially awakened, religiously inclined, moral individual. The problem is magnified many times over when it is realised that Order of the Khalsa was conceived of as a society of altruistic knights charged with destroying evil in all its forms. In modern times the martyr Sant Baba Jarnail Singh Khalsa Bhinderanwale was the supreme personification of the spirit of the Khalsa and by common consent assumed the leadership of the Sikh movement. In numerous speeches, interviews and discourses, the Sant made it clear that as a cultured man, who had the immeasurably beneficial cultural mores to defend, he and his associates had no choice but to resist the violent and brutally unjust state. As a practising Sikh, he felt he had no choice in the matter.

Sikhism is one of the religions, which believes, that the real purpose of existence is spiritual. It is to serve God, which at one level, is to carry forward His purpose in History. It is on this that ones salvation solely depends. It believes that human birth is a rare opportunity, and that beyond this is endless transmigration into lower life forms –long life of eternal subservience, sub-human undignified existence and insecurity. So every Sikh owes it to his soul to seek summum bonum in the present human form. `One who misses the ladder this time is caught in the eternal pangs of transmigration’. (is pauri te jo nar chooke, aai jaai dukh paida and bhai parapat manukh dehria, gobind milan ki eh teri baria). The serious business of life has several pre-requisites to make life spiritually worthwhile. It requires, first and foremost, that one should be able to practise religion of ones choice. No government must coerce a person to follow or not to follow a particular religion. The burning of Churches and priests, the desecration of Sikh scriptures and killing of people professing `a particular faith’ appears to have become the policy of the modern day Indian RCHE.

It is spiritually degrading for a practising Sikh in more ways than one, to live under such a dispensation without protesting. Another basic trait of the RCHE, which has remained consistently prominent, is that of living off the rest of the society. In one form or the other, the Vaish and the Shudra have always been there to serve them and provide for their daily needs. At the height of Shivaji’s Empire, accepted by all today to be the acme of ‘Hindu pad padshahi’, the Shudras required for cleaning the toilets and the streets, and for removing garbage were admitted into the capital only at night. This literally prevented them from casting their polluting shadows on the twice born. Even at the dead of night they had to walk with brooms tied to their waists and had to drag these behind them so as to obviate the possibility of the upper caste people stepping on the foot prints left by them and thereby getting polluted. The food grain produced by the same people was however accepted as having no polluting potential. This fine art of exploiting the labour of others has been disguised as an aspect of Brahmanism. Some believe it is the whole of Brahmanism.

The official Sikh interpretation of Brahmanism is that it is a foul growth on the body of pristine Hinduism. It is regarded as a superstructure and an inessential part, which has developed into a heavy burden for the mother body or host culture. (ved kateb kaho mat jhoothe, jhootha jo na inhe vichare). The Sikh Gurus were taking a revolutionary step of gigantic proportions when they asked their followers to ‘earn by honest labour and to share the fruits thereof with others if they aspired to lead a spiritually meaningful life’ (ghal khae kich hathon de, Nanak rah pachane se; and kirat karo, nam japo, wand chhako). These two commands have assumed the status of basic trilogy of the Sikh faith at one level.

Let us now probe further into the real nature of Indian polity, which we have discovered while trying to understand the statement of the militant. Response of the Ruling Caste Hindu Establishment (RCHE) has always been one of violence once the status quo is perceived to be threatened. Strange as it may seem, because the bulk of the public opinion has been conditioned to think otherwise, the RCHE has always sought a violent solution to political problems confronting it. In all ages the response has been identical. In 1947 its answer to accommodating the Muslim minority was a violent vivisection of the country. Violence is employed to suppress attempts at freedom. In Kashmir, Hyderabad, Goa, the northeastern States and in the Panjab it has been the same story. The integration of the princely states with India was done by coercion, under overt or covert threats of violence and disturbances.

In the distant past, we have the enslavement of Dalits with immense violence, the victorious march of Aryans under the legendary Indra and Durga over the `demons,’ the conquest of the South India symbolised by the subjugation of Sri Lanka under the `demon king’ Ravana, the Mahabharat. Stories of Shambhuk and of Eklavya effectively demonstrate how the violation of settled order even by individuals was violently suppressed. The mowing down of the tribal Raja Bhunjdeo in Orissa, of Raja Man Singh of Deeg, of the Naxalites in the late sixties or of the Sikh militants recently, has all been done by the RCHE for the purpose of maintaining its caste rule in the name of ‘Hindu India.’

India’s action in Hyderabad and Goa, for instance, can be contrasted with the attitude of China mainland towards Formosa and Hong Kong. From the remotest antiquity to the most recent past, RCHE has never sought a rational or just, peaceful solution to any political or religious problem, which has confronted it. Buddhism was violently wiped out of the sub-continent. This is the reason that throughout the period of agitation for the Panjabi Suba, the most prominent response of the RCHE always was ‘kuchal denge.’ That is why the tanks were sent to kill Sants, scripture readers, temple servants, pilgrims, children in the June of 1984 and to violate, desecrate and finally to demolish the holiest shrines of great antiquity.

India, strangely again, has never approached the problem of dissidence, separatism, or insurrection rationally, in the Panjab or the Northeast. Canada has found a viable solution for the problem of the French speaking Quebec. Even Indonesia has solved the problem of West Irian and is now trying to grapple with trouble in East Timor in a much fairer manner. The most civilised way of satisfying the dissent in the Panjab, J & K and North East of India would be to call for a referendum supervised by an independent authority such as the United Nations. This is what we had promised in respect of Kashmir before the world body some half a century ago. The very fact of not resorting to the device and of going back on internationally pledged word is indicative of the fear that given half a chance, many states would simply bolt from the 'animal farm' as appeared imminent in the erstwhile Soviet Union at one time.

So far we have proceeded to verify the statement of the militant on the lines suggested by him. That is what we had set out to do. It is possible to argue that his militant mode of looking at contemporary reality is not necessarily objective. So, it would be quite in order to concentrate on the barest minimum functions the state is expected to perform anywhere in the world.

Two basic functions of the State in all ages have been to ensure protection to life and property of individual citizens. If even this is not to be done, by the State then the entire basis of people coming together to form one is completely eroded. It is possible to say that in relation to the Sikhs, the Indian state has not only failed in its primary duty but has even taken the next step on the Nazi model. In the last two decades, the state has actively sided with and has actually aided the forces of destruction seeking the annihilation of Sikhs and their property. It is well known that the large-scale killing of Sikhs all over India was ordered by Rajiv Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, in November 1984. The killing of hundreds of thousand Sikhs, particularly in the Panjab, during the two bloody decades, is unthinkable without the active support of the Indian establishment.

It is also possible to go further and to convincingly demonstrate that the RCHE aims at destroying not only the Sikhs but also Sikhism. Crack Indian Armed Forces, aided by heavy guns, armed personnel carriers and even tanks, attacked Sri Darbar Sahib in June 1984. Being, as you know the bravest force in the world (except of course when it faces our “brothers” the Chinese), killed all the unarmed temple servants, scripture readers in just about three days or so. We may note the sequence of this armed forces operation. The Akal Takhat was destroyed, 'enemy' was eliminated, firing died down and about a thousand casual visitors to the shrine were made ‘Prisoners of War.’ Then the brave Indian Army led by the brave generals with bulldog courage and supported by the RCHE, went ahead to set fire to Sikh Reference Library and reduced it to ashes in no time.

This library housed some thousands of manuscripts bearing the signatures of prophets of the Sikh faith. Nothing so barbaric had ever been done in the entire history of mankind (even the act of Lakhpat Rai attempted on behalf of the contemporary RCHE was a tame affair in comparison). To find a real parallel, we have to go back to the burning of the world famous library of Alexandria by the Romans or to the similar affront offered to civilisation by the Turks after the sack of Constantinople in 1453.

So, maybe the militant is right in his perception that the RCHE controlled state leaves no option to the cultured person but to oppose it. If we are Sikhs, we may even rejoice that a befitting response, the only one in keeping with the dignity of the great faith, was mustered by the comparatively unarmed and untrained individuals we have chosen to designate militants.

If the militant is perceived to be right, then we are confronted by a moral dilemma of stupendous proportions. Can we go on supporting the usurping RCHE which is dehumanising the Sikhs, looting the natural resources of the Panjab at gun point, attempting to destroy our culture and spiritual heritage and is guilty of enslaving our people? An easy escape from the situation would be to condemn the militants as 'blood-thirsty terrorists' and to pretend that we are really disgusted at their doings. We can hope against hope that tomorrow will not confront us.

I thank you all for a patient hearing.

In January 1982, a writ petition (public interest litigation) was filed under Article 226 in the Panjab & Haryana High Court (HC) at Chandigarh. It challenged the validity of Section 78 of the Panjab Reorganisation Act 1966 as well as the central government’s decision to allocate the Beas river water to non-riparian state of Haryana. Four other similar suits were filed on the same day and they were tagged on to this writ.

According to the High Court procedure, the suits are admitted after a preliminary hearing. These petitions were thrown to the next bench by the one asked to hold preliminary hearing. This in turn threw them on to the next and for almost two years. This passing the buck continued. On 1 November 1983, a bench consisting of Chief Justice Sandhawalia and Justice S. S. Sodhi admitted the petition and directed it to be heard by the full bench of the High Court on 15 November 1983.

Some states moved like lightning and filed Special Leave Petitions in the Supreme Court of India (SC) to reverse the orders of the High Court in admitting the petitions. On three occasions, the SC refused to interfere thus upholding the validity of the HC orders. Full bench consisting of CJ Sandhawalia, J. S. S. Sodhi and J. Mittal was constituted to hear the petitions on 15 November 1983.

At this stage the RCHE became alarmed that a real possibility of Justice being done to the Panjab immediately existed. On the morning of 14 November 1983, Attorney General of India appeared before the SC and made an oral request to stay the proceedings. The CJ of India obliged. In the afternoon of the same day CJ Sandhawalia who harboured the dangerous thought of doing justice to the Panjab was transferred to the Patna High Court in the state of Bihar.

On 18 November 1983, the SC granted the SLP it had thrice earlier denied. It also passed orders taking up the five petitions before the HC to itself in exercise of powers conferred by Article 139A of the constitution. The fact is that Article 139A confers no such powers on the SC. It reads, “where cases involving the same or substantially the same questions of law are pending before the Supreme Court and one or more High Courts or before two or more High Courts --- the Supreme Court may withdraw the case or cases pending before the High Court or the High Courts and dispose of all the cases itself: --”.

The condition laid down in the article did not obtain and the SC had no jurisdiction to interfere. What is more, the petitions were transferred without giving any notice to the petitioners although by the rules prescribed by the SC itself one month’s notice is mandatory in such cases.

[Source: “Anatomy of a Case,” Popular Jurist, 1984].