On the Passing of a Great Man, True Friend, Inspired Soul

The WSN presents, humbly and proudly, both at the same time, this tribute and personal remembrance by Cynthia K. Mahmood, celebrated scholar on Sikh issues and one of Ram Narayan Kumar’s co-travellers on the path to seek an egalitarian world. Mahmood is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Senior Fellow, Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, US. Exclusive to the World Sikh News...click here to read

The Ultima Ratio
Ram Narayan Kumar

Anti-Sikh riots in Delhi following Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination by two of her Sikh body guards on 31 Oct. 1984 gave me the first traumatic insight into the bane which Hindu India could become to its religious minorities. The assassination itself was a riposte to the army assault on the Golden Temple in Amritsar in June 1984, ordered by Mrs. Gandhi to wipe out the Sikh rebels ensconced inside, under the leadership of Bhindranwale, the apostle of Sikh separatism. Besides taking - according to Sikh estimates - around four thousand lives, the assault had reduced to rubble the Akal Takht, the symbolic seat of Sikh temporal authority inside the temple complex, built by Guru Hargobind during Mughal days in defiance of the Delhi Takht.

The Delhi riots after the assassination were not so much spontaneous as systematically orchestrated. Getting involved with a group formed in Delhi immediately after the outbreak of the mayhem to rescue and rehabilitate the victims, I became acquainted with the organization of the violence which claimed three thousand innocent Sikh lives in six days. I heard eyewitness accounts of how the rioters in gangs of two hundred or three hundred led by Congress bosses, with policemen looking on, had swarmed into Sikh houses, hacking the occupants to pieces, chopping off the heads of children, tying Sikh men to tires set aflame with kerosene, burning down the houses alter sacking them. The “rehabilitation camp’ that I had helped set up in Shakkarpur, a trans-Yamuna locality of Delhi, housed two thousand refugees, among them a large number of widows and children with nightmarish memories.

The Delhi violence has been documented by the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties and the Peoples Union of Democratic Rights in their joint report - Who are the Guilty? -which mentions the names of sixteen Congress politicians, thirteen police officers and one hundred and ninety eight others, accused by survivors and eyewitnesses of responsibility for the carnage. Early in January 1985, journalist Rahul Bedi of the Indian Express and Smitu Kothari of the PUCL moved the High Court of Delhi demanding a judicial inquiry on the strength of this documentation. Justice Yogeshwar Dayal kept the petition dangling for a few weeks and finally dismissed it with a comment about “those busybodies out for publicity, who poke their nose into all matters and waste the valuable time of the judiciary!”

When shortly after the pogrom, the Congress party, riding on the wave of Hindu sentiments against Sikhs, had secured an unprecedented popular mandate, the Sikhs understood that the Hindu democratic sanction of the genocide would ensure that the instigators and participants would not be called to account. As if to confirm the point, the new Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi inducted into his cabinet several of the main suspects of the organization of the slaughter.

The behaviour of the government added moral verve to the Sikh separatist ambitions. The police took to an extra-judicial approach by torturing and killing suspected separatists in their custody, with courts refusing to take action against the guilty officials. The mainstream press too toed the line of the establishment. Anti-terrorist campaigns in Punjab received imprimatur as cover stories, with officials being quoted: “For one innocent person killed by terrorists, the police will kill ten of them.” News on the situation in Punjab consisted of little more than the reproduction of official statements on terrorists killing and alternatively being killed: Investigative journalism conveying critical background information would have been “unpatriotic”.

Knowing from my earlier experiences as a social activist of the chasm that separates Indian reality from Indian make-believe, of the callous disregard of those who count for those who don’t, I decided to document violation of human rights in Punjab, traveling in the state from March 1985 when I became free from other compulsions. The picture of atrocities that emerged before my eyes was so distressing that I found myself overwhelmed to the exclusion of interest in other aspects of the Sikh problem. However, through my personal contact with knowledgeable Sikhs, I came to realize that a report on official atrocities alone would leave little scope for a rational understanding of the roots of the turmoil in Punjab.

Pressed by these considerations, I decided to extend the scope of my intended report by (focusing) on the history of the Sikhs in the perspective of their present struggle. For what at first sight might appear as haphazard, irrational and unjustified in Sikh aspirations and behaviour, acquired new meaning if one read it in terms of the birth and evolution of their community, the distinct features of their religion, and most of all their earlier attempts and ordeals of national self-assertion. The demand for an independent Sikh state as the ultima ratio of their frustrated desire for greater autonomy within a genuinely federalistic Indian State will impress us as less unfeasible if we remember that the present array of states in the Indian subcontinent is an artefact whose ephemeral validity is suggested by great fluidity of lines on the political map of the subcontinent in the past. If there is a recurring pattern in pan-Indian history, it is the cyclic emergence of ultimately self-serving imperial structures again broken by the political self-assertion of vigorous minority-nations. I hope that (my) attempt(s) would promote better understanding of the Sikh aspirations and their struggle among peoples of India and abroad.