SikhSpectrum.com Quarterly Issue No.17, August 2004
Shiromani Khalsa Dal
Head Office : Shree Darbar Sahib, Amritsar
26 May 2004
Dr. Manmohan Singh
Prime Minister of India
New Delhi, India
Dear Dr. Singh,
We congratulate you for achieving a new pinnacle in your already
distinguished career. With immense optimism we welcome the news of
your appointment as Prime Minister of India. We are sanguine foremost
because of your competence and integrity, and only secondarily because
you are a Sikh.
With your remarkable appointment as the Prime Minister of India, we
are hopeful that the India will be more faithful to the rule of law.
We noted with optimism that one of your first public statements was
that you will not allow grisly events such as 1984 and Gujarat to
happen again. It was heartening to hear you acknowledge that the
judicial process in Gujarat had been subverted, and that you would
ensure that justice prevails.
Your decision (assuming it was yours) however, to induct Jagdish Tytler into the cabinet did give us pause. We are particularly
surprised since you had implied parallels between the violence in
Delhi in 1984 and in Gujarat in 2002. In both cases minorities were
targeted. In both cases the government was complicit. In both cases
local politicians encouraged violence. And in both cases these
politicians managed to subvert the judicial process. You promise that
in Gujarat this subversion will not be permitted. Isn’t it possible
that similar subversion happened in Delhi?
Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar and all others have successfully beaten
the rap using the same tools that were used by politicians in Gujarat.
Intimidation and coercion of witnesses, political pressure on the
judiciary and the prosecutors, and most importantly friends in high
places led to the same travesty of justice in Delhi as it did in
Gujarat.
We realize that unfortunately political expediency can often coerce
compromise even from the most ethical person. Perhaps you would at
least consider personally visiting the widows of the Delhi pogroms.
Since you are a sensitive person, you can imagine the humiliation of
those ladies who know that the men responsible for the rapes and
murders of their family members now roam the streets of their
neighborhoods with impunity.
In our view playing the role of victims does not reconcile with Sikh
ethos, and we certainly don’t plan to exploit the suffering of Sikhs
for ignoble political gains. We don’t seek rhetorical apologies for
what the Indian state did in June and November of 1984. Prime
Ministers Dev Gowda, Inder Gujral and Atal Bihari Vajpayee have all
expressed regret in various tones about what happened in 1984. These
statements of regret mean little to us. We trust you are too sincere
a person to oblige the self-serving politicians of Punjab with another
condescending apology.
Instead of rhetoric we suggest that you consider actions, which would
be far more meaningful. Punjab has been bankrupted by corrupt
politicians, a dishonest and oversized bureaucracy, a dysfunctional
educational system, an agricultural economy that has seen limited
growth in many years, and an extraordinarily high debt burden on the
farmers. We ask you to form and fund a task force staffed not by
bureaucrats or politicians, but forward-thinking academics,
intellectuals, industrialists, farmers and businessmen from Punjab and
around the world, to present concrete proposals within six months for
economic reform in Punjab.
We would expect that such a task force
would leverage existing credible work, such as the Johl Committee
report. If our additional input is sought, we can offer both concrete
suggestions and potential participants for such an effort.
We ask you to seriously consider opening the border with Pakistan.
This one act may not be a panacea for Punjab’s ills, but it may have
the favorable consequence of opening up new trade routes and providing
Punjabi farmers (on both sides of the border) new markets for their
produce. An economist of your stature does not need us to enumerate
the potential benefits of such a bold move.
Thirdly, we suggest that you consider a radical solution to the
intractable political problems of the sub-continent. The subcontinent
was a diverse mosaic of many nations, tribes, cultures,
languages, religions, and peoples. Colonial powers methodically
leveraged and manipulated this diversity for their own commercial
ends. When these diverse groups banded together to resist
colonialism, the British carelessly abandoned the sub-continent. A
territory that had taken some 150 years to unite into British India
was disbanded in a matter of a few years.
As British India crumbled, the English executed short-sighted and
hasty policies that not only caused cataclysmic violence in 1947, but
also have continued to cause turmoil in the sub-continent. Aside from
conflict between the nations of the sub-continent, much of the
conflict within these nations—the Mohajirs in Pakistan, the Sikhs in
India, the Chakmas in Bangladesh, the Tamils in India and Sri Lanka,
the Brahmins in Bhutan, the Hindus in Bangladesh, the Gorkhas in
India, the Maosts in Nepal, to name only a few of the “thousand
mutinies” as V.S. Naipaul might call them—can be fairly attributed as
a legacy of colonialism.
We submit that a radical re-think that involves all the diverse people
of the sub-continent is required because their fates are
interconnected. It is premature to suggest what the outcome of such a
dialogue would be, but what might emerge is a Sub-Continental Union
(SU).
The SU would be similar to the European Union (EU) in some ways, but
also different in that the SU would not merely transplant European and
Western ideas without ensuring their relevance to the unique
historicity and culture of the sub-continent. Should such a Sub-
Continental Union preserve the rights of self-determination for the
many nations and peoples of the sub-continent, we are confident that
such a political structure would truly allow the people of the subcontinent
to finally bask in the “glow of freedom,” economic,
religious, social and political.
In conclusion, since the Shiromani Khalsa Dal was only recently
constituted, allow us to introduce ourselves. We represent that
segment of Sikhs and Punjabis that was disillusioned with India, and
after 1984 turned decidedly unfriendly towards her. We respect your
intellect too much to reiterate India’s sordid history of Hindisation
and Hinduisation, apropos neologisms for the homogenization of the
once splendid diversity of cultures, languages, tribes and faith
traditions extant on the sub-continent before 1947. Nor will we dwell
on the crescendo of violence visited upon the Sikhs that reached a
gruesome climax in 1984, followed by a decade of extra-judicial killings that even the Supreme Court of India was compelled to deem
“genocide.”
Suffice it to say that we speak for those who were forced to resist
state violence by all means necessary after the Indian state granted
impunity to those who kill Sikhs. No doubt many rogues and thugs
exploited this conflict to add to Punjab’s horror, but that is the
nature of violence. Unbridled violence, especially by the state,
always has macabre consequences.
An enduring legacy of that violence is not only scores of devastated
homes in Punjab, but also many young Sikhs in jails, and some even
awaiting death in Indian prisons. India remains one of the few
countries in the world that chooses to kill an incarcerated human
being. In this regard perhaps you will consider Maharaja Ranjit Singh
as a role model for he is reputed to have abolished the death penalty
in his kingdom.
As Sikhs committed to our Guru’s traditions we genuinely seek harmony
and are committed to the Sikh principle of persevering to resolve
issues peacefully. After twenty years of resistance, during which we
have lost many brothers and sisters to fake and real encounters with
the Indian state, we once again endeavor to pursue our objectives
through peaceful means, as the Sikhs did in the three decades before
1978.
We look forward to hearing from you, and continuing a thoughtful and
courageous dialogue. We also beseech the Tenth Nanak, the Rider of
the Blue Steed, to grant you courage, wisdom and compassion as you
provide leadership to India, Punjab and we hope the entire subcontinent.
Sincerely,
Daljit Singh
President
Shiromani Khalsa Dal
and members of the working committee.
Note: This letter was sent to the office of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
