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Let’s carry each other’s heads
Cynthia Keppley
Mahmood
 Today
I read in the newspapers about a bill brought before Parliament
about the possibility of Canadian victims of terror being able to
bring suit against perpetrators of violence and the countries
harboring them, i.e. the notion of “alien torts.” How admirable!
How very civilized! Far better, certainly, than the response we got
in the United States toward Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks,
which was a growled, “I’ll git’m alive or dead” from President
Bush. Down the road from that cowboy threat, we and our allies find
ourselves mired in two wars, and hated as never before across the
Muslim war. Surely some sort of recourse to international law, to
international courts, or in the end to domestic courts, would have
been preferable to even this greatest and most heinous of crimes.
 When
Canada
suffered its heaviest terrorist blow, the downing of the Air India
jetliner in 1985, it turned to its intelligence and judicial
agencies for what became the lengthiest and costliest investigation
in Canadian history. That resulted, as we all know, in the
Vancouver trial
of Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri, the two remaining
accused, in 2006, in which both were acquitted.
But on this day
when we are commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Indian Army’s
storming of the Golden Temple of the Sikhs at Amritsar and
concomitant massacre of several thousand innocent worshippers -
going essentially unnoticed in the Canadian media amidst the hubbub
over Tiananmen Square – we must fairly take note of the fact that
despite the world’s respect for the Canadian justice system, this
verdict exonerating these Sikhs of the Air India bombing has simply
not been taken to heart by the wider Canadian society. They simply
don’t believe it’s true. This disbelief is not helped by the
inflammatory journalism of two BC reporters, one openly in contact
with Indian intelligence agents in
Canada,
and the other who actually subtitles her book, “How the Air Bombers
Got Away with Murder.”
 The result of
all this is a widespread silencing of the Canadian Sikh community,
normally, as everybody knows, a particularly boisterous, outspoken,
and unquietable segment of Canada’s multicultural mosaic. This is
coming for two reasons, I suspect: first, Sikhs sense that non-Sikh
Canadians don’t view them, anymore, as quite “Canadian,” the taint
of the terrorist mythos lingers; and second, within the Sikh
community deadly divisions have been sewn in which every person
suspects the other of being either a CSIS or a RAW (Indian
intelligence) agent. Now, every time I approach a podium in
Canada,
some Sikh or the other rushes up to me and whispers, “Don’t say
anything about Khalistan. Don’t say anything about Air India. And
so on, a litany of self-censorship, amongst the very refugee
community who fled to Canada precisely for its freedom to speak
without fear.
In Punjab itself
one finds the same strange silence, eerie now as economic growth and
the natural hustle-and-bustle of Punjabi life covers over the
history of suffering that is so recent that so-called “normal” life
is in fact pathologized: farmer suicides are one of the facts of
life that no longer seem odd; alcoholism, once unthinkable among
Sikhs, is now common; drug use has become the teen “problem” it is
in other countries. This is the new normal. But underneath the
surface, tensions remain, the same old grievances have never been
resolved and the guilty have never been held accountable. Look at
last week after the sad
Vienna
episode! Immediately, spontaneous violence breaks out across
India,
wherever there are Sikhs. Yes, they are back to “normal,” but any
spark can set them off.
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All is not well
in Sikhdom right now, and we all know that. It’s a threshold
moment, a time of transition. The armed insurgency has come
and gone. What, at this moment, needs to be done by a world Sikh
movement aiming to support Sikh interests in
Punjab and everywhere? |
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In my studies as
an anthropologist with Sikh-Canadian families in the B.C. area, I
and my students find that many parents are not even passing along
the stories of what happened to the Sikhs of Punjab during 1984 and
the decades thereafter; the fact that they themselves had been
jailed and tortured or perhaps raped; that their house had been
burned; that two uncles had disappeared in the night, never to
return; or yes, that another uncle had taken up arms to fight for
Khalistan and had been shot down in an encounter with police. Why
are some parents declining to pass along this key part of this
history, this very reason why many immigrated to Canada in the first
place? Because they are scared. Even here in Canada, they are now
afraid that something could happen
In one of the
great films of all time, “Le Scaphandre et le Papillon” (The Diving
Bell and the Butterfly), directed by Jean-Dominique Bauby, the true
story is told of a man who, in an accident, is paralyzed from head
to toe. He can move only his left eyelid. At first, he desires
nothing but death. But after a while, he comes to realize with the
help of a patient nurse that he could construct a sort of code by
blinking that left eyelid in stuttered sequences and thereby
communicate. With greatest difficulty, he eventually manages in
this manner to dictate an entire book, the story of his life and his
insights about life and freedom. A sad film, a tragic film? Yes,
of course. Very hard to watch. But at the end this is a story of
liberation and of human dignity, because the protagonist realizes
that despite all, he still has his voice and thereby his humanity.
He can still “speak.”
So important is
the power of speech in being human that governments attempting to
crush resistance movements start and end with quashing their ability
to get their message out – as Foucault realized, to “speak truth to
power.” In northern
Uganda,
where the Acholi people and the Lord’s Resistance Army are fighting
a bloody war with the central Government, one could open any
newspaper daily to find a picture of a face mutilated by having the
entire mouth and lip area gouged out. The symbolism is obvious.
Yes, the person was killed. But importantly, the person was not
able to speak.
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The killers of Sikhs, some of them on a large scale, were never
held up for public shame. The Sikhs, who had sacrificed so much
for the nation of India, by the 1980’s, were like the offending
weeds that no longer belong in the national garden. Good men did
nothing as one by one, Sikh men, women and children died in the
fields of Punjab. The same Indians who otherwise gathered for
protests or organized aid when Christians were attacked, somehow
stood aside when the victims were Sikhs. |
In
Mozambique,
where one of the world’s bloodiest civil conflicts took place, my
colleague reported that you could find in the marketplace the
classic three monkeys showing the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak
no evil” postures. But, she noted, in the “speak no evil” pose, the
fingers covering the lips were parted oh-so-slightly – the carver’s
wink to his/her unknown future customer that yes, somehow, we will
get this message out. Somehow, we will bear witness. Somehow, the
world will hear about this.
The world has
still not really “heard” about the travails of the Sikhs, and I want
to explore why. After all, India is a democracy, “the world’s
largest democracy,” and it has laws to protect against abuses of
rights and to protect minorities. It has an independent judiciary
and a relatively free press, and relatively calm and fair
transitions of power.
The fact is,
however – and I have learned this in the post-9/11 United States as
well as in my research in India – that being a “democracy” by law
alone is not enough to ensure the vibrancy and flourishing of human
voices that alone guarantees human rights.
Let me present
you with a seemingly paradoxical picture. Along with the Sikhs, I
have also begun to study the
Kashmir
conflict, and I have visited both sides of
Kashmir many
times. Once during the Zia years in
Pakistan
– that is, during the years of military dictatorship – I was
traveling along the Line of Control that marks the informal border
of India and Pakistan. Streaming out of the mountains were hundred
upon hundreds, probably thousands, of refugees (these are the
Himalayas, mind you, no easy trek), most of them suffering various
levels of frostbite and starvation, many bleeding from wounds now
starting to scar or freeze over. The point of note is that these
refugees were flowing from
India
to Pakistan. From the democracy to the dictatorship, that is. And
on the Pakistan side one could see vast miles of tent camps, as far
as the eye could see, where Islamic aid groups were handing out
blankets and tea and medical help (the beginning of another story).
Why would
somebody leave a democracy and, at great cost, flee to a
dictatorship? This picture points to what the Italian philosopher
Giorgio Agamben calls “the razor-thin line” between democracy and
dictatorship despite the fact that in our political theory we treat
them as polar opposites. The fact is that the macro-structure of
Indian democracy doesn’t mean much for the texture of daily life in
one of the regions where a “state of exception” rules; that is to
say, where the government has decided that for security reasons
certain rights may have to be temporarily abrogated and certain
special laws called into place. In the United States, we know about
the exceptional laws, the exceptional limitations of rights, brought
into play during the crisis after 9/11:
Guantanamo
Bay, civilian wire tapping, new categories like “enemy detainee,”
foreign renditions, waterboarding.
It is through
the concept of “the state of exception” that we can understand how
it can be that
India,
though a democracy on the macro-scale, can show a highly dictatorial
face to any given region deemed “exceptional” because of a security
crisis. Now Punjab, later Kashmir; now the northeast, then
Gujarat, later Chattisgarh – kind of like popcorn. Let us not
forget, as we celebrate “the world’s largest democracy” that only
exceptionally abrogates its commitments to human rights, that Hitler
too came to power electorally, and that most of the holocaust
occurred under “exceptional” laws passed for a time of crisis in
what was otherwise a highly civilized nation. I just could not
believe it when, in our small town in the United States, in a town
meeting after the 9/11 attacks, my fellow townspeople readily agreed
with the chief of police that torture may be necessary if we should
– and here’s the climate of paranoia for you – find terrorists
attempting to take over the local mall. I wanted to raise my hand
to point out, amidst the unanimous slippage into a proto-fascist
mode of operation, that torture was completely illegal both
domestically and internationally – didn’t my educated fellow
citizens in South Bend know that, for gosh sakes? But with a Muslim
last name, I decided that prudence was perhaps the better part of
valour for that moment, and I remained the quiet observer.
It happens
easily. Democratic laws, Charters of Rights and Freedoms, do not in
themselves protect our rights. It is an active and vigilant
citizenry, making use of those laws, who are actually the bulwark
against abuses like torture, concentration camps, illegal
wiretapping. Picture the detainee in the jail cell, weak, probably
naked, on a cold floor, living on scraps of food, emaciated,
awaiting he knows not what future. It is not he who can draw on the
laws that protect our rights and freedoms. He relies on others, his
fellow citizens, to use those laws to get him out of that detention,
to make public the abuses, to end the state’s use of exceptions to
get round its commitments to basic human rights.
In the case of
the Sikhs in
Punjab,
the problem was that there was nobody to come to their aid. With a
few rare exceptions, most of
India’s civil
rights and humanitarian organizations turned their backs on the
Sikhs. People with turbans quickly became a pariah population:
“socially dead,” to use Orlando Patterson’s fortuitous phrase. To
put it bluntly, no one in India really cared if they lived or died.
Why? Because the image was cleverly and quickly created of
the-Sikh-as-terrorist, and therefore the Sikh as unworthy victim.
The same Indians who otherwise gathered for protests or organized
aid when Christians were attacked, somehow stood aside when the
victims were Sikhs. And the killers of Sikhs, some of them on a
large scale, were never held up for public shame, let alone legally
prosecuted; as Zygmunt Baumann said of perpetrators of the
holocaust, designers of genocide are usually actually proud of their
accomplishments, applauded by their audiences, who view the
offending population as weeds that no longer belong in the national
garden. The Sikhs, who had sacrificed so much for the nation of
India, by the 1980’s fit this description perfectly. Good men did
nothing as one by one, Sikh men, women and children died in the
fields of
Punjab.
I for one find
it horribly frightening to note that the silencing of Sikh voices in
India
has now crossed the ocean to extend its tentacles to
Canada
as well. Will history forget the thousands of grandmothers and
grandfathers, aunts and uncles, fathers and mothers, sons and
daughters, who did in pain and indignity, whose ashes were blown
away into
Punjab’s
blue skies or simply flushed unceremoniously down some canal to a
foreign land? I understand the fears, the wish to protect. But I
also believe very strongly in the power of the human voice, the need
of the human voice to at least set history straight, to make sure
that history is written not only by the powerful, to make sure that
those deceased and disappeared are never forgotten. It is not
“democracy” or “academic freedom” that will take care of that task.
It is you and I.
In Sikhism the
metaphor of living with one’s head in one’s hands is powerfully set
into the very basis of the tradition; it means living humbly,
without ego, living to serve. Recognizing the fragility of the
planet on which we live and the brief moments we share upon it, I
like also to imagine that we also carry each other’s heads in our
hands, you and I. What precious cargo!
I have lived
among the Sikhs these past many years, in any case, in this fashion,
knowing that my love and respect is reciprocated by a community too
often stereotyped and too little listened to. I have learned about
chardhi kala from the Sikhs I’ve known, and I think I’ve become more
generous and yes, more courageous from the model of the Singh and
the Kaur around me.
But not all is
well in Sikhdom right now, and we all know that. It’s a threshold
moment, a time of transition. The armed insurgency has come and
gone, the movement for Khalistan has risen high and . . .? and
what? Some still believe a separate state is the only avenue for
justice, while others barely talk about it anymore. In the diaspora,
a first generation’s emotional response has yielded to a second
generation’s more educated and measured leadership, and we can
expect a third generation yet more capable in areas of law and
organization and civil discourse – less ready to turn to fisticuffs
over old feuds and arguments. But what, at this moment, needs to be
done by a world Sikh movement aiming to support Sikh interests in
Punjab and everywhere?
As a sympathetic
and educated observer I may offer a few humble suggestions.
Thus far, the
energies of the movement have been almost wholly inwardly focused.
Newspapers, radio and television broadcasts, camps, and so on, and
so on, have all aimed at the internal Sikh community, attempting to
rally it round, sort out its differences, educate its youth. These
remain important tasks.
But what the
world Sikh movement has not done is to turn its energies toward the
outside – to seek out, educate, and make partners of the wider
non-Sikh society. This has been critical in every successful case
in which a Diaspora community has mobilized in support of a homeland
base. Here, the taint of “terrorism” and the continuing feeling
that the Sikhs are not worthy of sympathy make such outreach all the
more important. This community has a lot of catching up to do.
The Tamils, the Kashmiris – two other Diaspora communities with
which I am familiar – are way, way ahead. Sikhs have, by contrast,
made a ghetto of themselves.
Let me give you
a simple example. In the guide to Toronto provided by the hotel
where I’m staying, there’s a list of places of worship. One can
find churches, synagogues, mandirs, mosques, Buddhist temples – but
no gurdwaras. Why not? Simply, no Sikh group has taken it upon
itself to be sure that every city guide in
Canada
lists a gurdwara in its visitors’ catalogue. A simple thing, but a
telling example. The Sikhs, though a key part of the Canadian
multicultural mosaic, are also simply out of the mainstream.
If the Sikh
community could really pull together, could transition from the
shouting to the working phase, it could do several things that I
think are first steps toward real effectiveness as a global movement
First, it would
be necessary to conduct a series of well-thought-out workshops on
the question of how the Sikh religion intersects with Punjabi
culture. Sikhism is a universal faith, of course, yet we all know
plainly that most gurdwara services are conducted in Punjabi, that
Punjabi cultural values permeate everything Sikh. There are so many
valuable things about this heritage. But, on the language issue
especially, the continued use of Punjabi mono-lingually at events
such as this one, at which one is trying to approach non-Sikhs who
clearly do not understand the language, cannot be of help to a
movement that is serious about its aims. In this age of technology,
simultaneous translation running on a screen behind the speaker is
easily possible; I’ve seen it among Kashmiris, who are way ahead of
the Sikhs in terms of professionalization of a movement.
Second, I think
it is time that the community hire on a permanent basis a small team
of top flight international lawyers, who can be at the ready for
opportunities like alien torts (through which, for example, an
Indian human rights abuser could be sued in a Canadian court), who
could approach UNESCO on the World Heritage Status of the Golden
Temple Complex, who could be called upon on issues regarding the
international humanitarian laws of war. This team could proactively
work to ensure recognition of Sikh rights in every country where
Sikhs live, instead of waiting for individual cases to react to. It
could work on what the notion of self-determination actually means,
in this 21st century, and explore other options for representation
of sub-state collectivities.
Third, the
community should hire real lobbyists, professional lobbying firms,
in Washington, Ottawa, and London. Not just a few Sikhs with the
passion for a cause, but a professional firm trained to advertize
and push through an agenda. This is exactly what the government of
India has done, and it is what you must do, as well. The sense of
mistrust for non-Sikhs is antiquarian, and must be gotten over.
Simply expect to hire and pay for the best. They will come to know
well the environments of the capitals, know which bills should be
supported and how to support them, and be able to think through how
the assertion of Sikh rights, or a potential Sikh state, could
benefit others.
Fourth, there
should be a rotating youth initiative, perhaps set up as
internships, to keep track of how the community is being perceived
on the internet and to push the Sikh agenda electronically.
Likewise, this group of young people, being unattached, could spring
into action when opportunities presented themselves such as
organizing aid to flood victims in New Orleans. Or, for example, I
just found out tonight that the Council of Bishops in the Catholic
Church have a firm principle that places of worship are
inviolable. Young people, find out such a fact and having grown up
here, more familiar with other faiths, could approach the Bishops
and find out how to perhaps use this principle to protect the Golden
Temple, perhaps to mobilize Catholics around the Sikh cause.
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I for one find
it horribly frightening to note that the silencing of Sikh
voices in
India
has now crossed the ocean to extend its tentacles to
Canada
as well. Will history forget the thousands of grandmothers and
grandfathers, aunts and uncles, fathers and mothers, sons and
daughters, who did in pain and indignity, whose ashes were blown
away into
Punjab’s blue skies or simply flushed unceremoniously down some canal to a
foreign land? |
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Fifth, the Sikh
diasporan community must set up its own academic foundation. This
foundation would fund scholarly research and writing projects on the
Punjab conflict, human rights, and Sikhism in order to make sure
that the tragic episode of the past two decades cannot be ignored in
the historical record. It could also conduct workshops to help
Punjabi scholars learn the standards of international academic
publishing, and perhaps help link Western scholars to Punjabi
scholars for entrée into Punjab. Most important, its financial
support would enable the subaltern or nonstandard Sikh Studies,
which views matters from the ground up rather than from New Delhi
down, to continue to function and flourish.
Finally, the
community must define and support the development of an archive and
museum along the lines of the holocaust museums of the Jews. For
this type of enterprise, one must be serious; one must hire a
professional archivist and expect to spend money on restoration and
preservation of artifacts. But doing this centrally will in the end
cost less than every gurdwara having its own little library, as is
now the case. Such a central archive and museum can also be
accessible electronically worldwide, if the decision is made to
locate the original outside of India.
The military
side of the Khalistan movement was never quite serious enough for
its activists to really train as soldiers the way, say, special-ops
forces do, or to learn about guerilla tactics and theory by reading
about other insurgencies comparatively. It relied instead on the
deep passion and commitment of the “saint-soldiers” and their
willingness to martyr themselves in their cause. This is a common
first phase of a movement like this one. It evokes much popular
admiration and establishes legendary, even mythic, reputations, but
it rarely wins battles.
The same is true
on the political side. Loud demonstrations have their place,
certainly, and so do vehement essays and provocative speeches that
boil the blood of those whose souls have been wounded. But in a
more mature second phase, the hard work of actually making something
happen has to be brought into place. It takes discipline, time, and
a long-term vision – probably a generational vision. The Irish had
that vision and held onto it. Can the Sikhs?
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Loud demonstrations have their place, certainly, and so do
vehement essays and provocative speeches that boil the blood of
those whose souls have been wounded. But in a more mature
second phase, the hard work of actually making something happen
has to be brought into place. It takes discipline, time, and a
long-term vision. |
It is true that
my list of desiderata will cost a great deal of money. But then,
the stakes are very high – the preservation and protection of a
religion, the defense of human rights, the self-determination of a
nation. It is up to every Sikh to decide whether it is worth it.
In my view spending money in a disciplined, accountable manner of
proven effectiveness is far preferable than the current wastage in
which cash slips through the cracks of gurdwara elections,
individual court cases, this or that local action, one upmanship
between factions. Get with it! Make your funding and your hard
work count.
As for the
silencing with which I began my remarks, I beg you . . . to hell
with it! In my community we have a saying that the nail which
sticks up will get hammered down. That may be true, but still I’ve
always gone ahead and been that nail. A book I’ve been reading
called “A Person of Interest,” by Julia Choi, provides another
metaphor: a field of poppies, in which the tall ones are likely to
get plucked. With Sikhs wearing those lovely saffron turbans, that
is perhaps the better analogy. Please, for God’s sake, for the sake
of Sikhi, don’t be those poppies that bow their heads down, trying
to hide somehow in the crowd. Be the tall, proud poppies that stand
out in your Canadian field, where every law protects your right to
do so.
The author is
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Senior Fellow, Joan B. Kroc
Institute for International Peace Studies,
University of
Notre Dame. This article is based on a speech she delivered at the
World Sikh Organisation’s Annual Parliamentary Dinner Meeting at
West Block, House of Commons, Ottawa, on 4 June 2009 in the matrix
of the theme Past in Perspective –Future in Focus; Commemoration of
25 years of Saka Akal Takht.
10
June 2009
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