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Fish Justice
Bhai Sahib
Sirdar Kapur Singh
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Encapsulating the form of governance and justice in
India,
the modern National Professor of Sikhism refers to it by
alluding to Matsyanyaya or Fish Justice mentioned in Kautilya’s
Arthashashtra. In simple words, it is big fish eating the small
fish. In modern political parlance it is the denouement in
which ethnic minorities and political dissenters find themselves
when in countries like
India
the hegemony of a few dominates the life and times of many.
The
present article is an extract from the essay, They Massacre
Sikhs, written to explain the Sikh position after the attack on
innocent Sikhs in April 1978. Only those portions which bring
out the similarities between the cults in their opposition and
disposition towards Sikhs are reproduced here.
At some places in the text, Jagmohan Singh has taken the liberty
to intersperse in paranthesis the contemporary notes regarding
Gurmeet Ram Rahim to confirm the comparison. Special care has
been taken to ensure that it no way affects the hypothesis so
ably elucidated by the learned author -Editor |
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 Retreat from
religious and absolute moral values is a world-vide phenomenon and
permissiveness, sex-promiscuity, moral laxity and social
disintegration is, by no means, peculiar to India today; the
phenomenon is world-wide and ecumenical, the reasons for which are
deep seated and historical. Nor is this phenomenon exceptional to
modern times. It erupts, it seems, whenever there is an onset of
decay and deterioration in social cohesiveness and moral vitality of
a culture or civilisation.
Gibbon has noted
emergence of all sorts of sects and societies, “Oriental religions”,
as he calls them, when the
Roman Empire
weakened and disintegrated. In Bhagvadgita, we are told that, “as
moral decay sets in men take to adulation of and subservience to
mortal humans and abandon worship of the unseen God”: sivanam
puja paritya jaye manussanam upasanam. The Sikh pious texts of
Bhai Gurdas (d.1637) tell us that a symptom of moral decay is that,
“social censure and absolute moral judgement disappear and men
become plaything of their own passing fancies and corruptive
passion”, koi kisai na varijai soi karai joi mana bhavai.
Guru Gobind
Singh provides us with a key to an understanding of this phenomenon
by revealing that, “there shall arise an Absolute God in every
house, altogether contemptible and degraded men these”: ghar ghar
hoe behenge rama tinu te sari hai na kou kama.
Sri Dina Nath,
Sidhantalankar an eminent writer, in the April, 1973 issue of the
Hindi montlhy, Jana Gyan (p.30) tells us that:
“there is a
deluge of bogus gods-incarnate and hypocritical gurus in
India,
these days.....”
 The issue
between the Sikhs and Gurbachan Singh (or Gurmeet Ram Rahim) and his
caucus is three fold: (1) The main thrust and the real salience of
this movement is anti-Sikhism, and its permissiveness and
promiscuity is secondary. (2) Its methodology is denigration and
coarse ridicule of Sikh doctrines and practices and malicious
outraging of Sikh religious sentiments, and insulting Sikh religious
beliefs. (3) Its dynamism is politics, promoted and prompted by
political powers that aim at degrading and demoralising the Sikh
people, permanently to deprive them of the control of their own
history and their spiritual potential, thus reducing them into
secondary citizens and camp-followers so as eventually to divest
them of their living separateness, shrinking them into a footnote in
history.
The chief of
these pseudo-nirankaris (as does Gurmeet Ram Rahim) strictly
observes the outward garb and forms of a saintly Sikh and so do his
aides and lieutenants. And not without malice aforethought. Almost
all these pseudo-nirankaris are ignorant, unlettered commonality
familiar with nothing about religion and sophisticated though (some
of the Sirsa Dera lot is comparatively better educated) except the
portmanteau jargon of Sikhism, in Lewis Carroll’s sense of a word
packed with sense and sound of many words, capable of being employed
successfully for ridiculing and creating confusion about Sikhism.
 In their writing
and preaching their main and primary concern and pre-occupation is
to misinterpret and to corrupt Sikh doctrines and Sikh beliefs and
thus to confound and insult the Sikh scripture publicly. The
point is not that the Sikhs demand or expect everybody to accept the
Sikh scripture the way the Sikhs regard it; the point is that they
resent and rightly so, its profanation and calculated insult to it
by others.
Gurbachan Singh
and his cronies (ditto for Gurmeet Ram Rahim and his) have, in this
instance, not only fully equated Gurbachan Singh with God the
Almighty and the Transcendent but
in the process, have denigrated the Sikh vision of God, the Sikh
understanding of the human existential situation, with the evil and
malicious intention of confounding the Sikh religion and outraging
the religious feelings of the Sikhs.
This cult
(similarly the Sirsa dera cult), is demonstrably a conspiracy, a
ploy and a facade for destroying Sikhism through a crude methodology
of corrupting and insulting Sikhism and outraging Sikh beliefs.
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“There
is a deluge of bogus gods-incarnate and hypocritical gurus
in India, these days.” |
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The real
political dynamism behind this high conspiracy to demoralise and
destroy Sikhism as a world-religion and to liquidate Sikhs as a
political people, has been known in knowledgeable circles for the
last over a dozen years, but there has been a conspiracy of silence,
to keep mum over it, by the national media and the political power
weilders, for reasons of expediency. In an early last week issue of
April, 1978 of the
Chandigarh
edition, the daily Indian Express, however, a public-spirited
leader, Sat Pal Baghi of Ferozepur has spelt out briefly some of the
unvarnished truth as follows:
 “The genesis
of the real trouble between the Nirankaris and Akalis goes back to
the years when Mrs. Indira Gandhi headed the Union Government. She
wanted to weaken the Shiromani Akali Dal but found that Akalis could
not be brought to heel. She thought of an elaborate plan to
strengthen the Nirankari sect not only in
Punjab
but throughout the country and abroad also. Official patronage was
extended to the Nirankaris much to the chagrin of Akalis who have
always considered the Nirankaris as heretics.”
In pursuit of
this policy of divide and rule, Mrs. Gandhi personally gave
clearance for a diplomatic passport to be issued to the Nirankari
chief and the Indian High Commissioners and Ambassadors abroad were
instructed to show him respect and regard. (In exactly the same
manner, the Congress government of Haryana is patronising Gurmeet
Ram Rahim and providing him land, political patronage and Z-plus
security protection.)
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This
cult (similarly the Sirsa dera cult), is demonstrably a
conspiracy, a ploy and a facade for destroying Sikhism
through a crude methodology of corrupting and insulting
Sikhism and outraging Sikh beliefs. |
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During Mrs.
Gandhi’s regime, the Nirankaris were known to be receiving financial
help from secret Government funds not open to audit or scrutiny by
Parliament (It is an open secret that similar logistic assistance is
also being provided to the Sirsa Dera cult.)
 Apart from this
high political hostility, the Sikhs in
India face other
grave impediments to their viability and honourable existence.
Firstly, the die-hard, obscurantist element of Punjab Hindus have
openly viewed Sikhs and Sikhism as their enemy number one, a
sentiment which obstreperously erupted, in the seventies of the 19th
century, after the loss of the hegemony and political sovereignty of
the Sikhs in the north of India, with no foreseeable possibility of
its recovery. The impulse and shape of this utter hostility is
spelt-out in the ‘Secret’ document, A Report on Developments in Sikh
Politics (1900-1911), by Mr. D. Petrie, Assistant Director, Criminal
Intelligence, Government of India, Shimla dated, the 11th
August, 1911, now preserved in the National Archives, New Delhi,
which has the following as its paragraph no. 6:
“Hinduism has
always been hostile to Sikhism whose Gurus powerfully and
successfully attacked the Hindu principle of Caste, which is the
foundation on which the whole fabric of Brahmanism has been reared.
The activities of Hindus have, therefore, been constantly directed
to the undermining of Sikhism both by preventing the children of
Sikh fathers from taking the pahul and by seducing professed Sikhs
from their allegiance to their faith. Hinduism has strangled
Buddhism, once a formidable rival to it and it has already made
serious inroads into the domains of Sikhism”.
This Hindu
hostility to Sikhism has become a permanent strain in the
sub-conscious psyche of the citified Punjab Hindu, not urbanised,
not mentally cultured or intellectually elevated, but
surface-polished and dulled within. The present day noisy disavowal
of the principle of Hindu caste on political level and for political
reasons in India, has not, in the least, mellowed the rigour of this
urban crust of the Punjab Hindus of their hostility to Sikhism and
the Sikhs, and every opportunity is avidly seized upon to down the
Sikhs, weather it is the question of Punjabi language, a
Punjabi-speaking state or ready support to any movement or trend
aimed at weakening or destroying Sikhs.
This mainly
explains the orchestrated anti-Sikh and pro-Gurbachan Singh stances
consistently adopted by fascist Hindu leaders and the Urdu and Hindi
Press of Jullundur, and exclusive monopoly of this anti-Sikh brigade
(in the present instance the BJP leadership and the mainstream
Indian media). Fortunately for the Sikhs, this irrational and
primital hostility towards the Sikh is not shared by the Hindus in
the East and South of India or trans-Jamuna Gangetic plain,
generally.
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“The
Hindus are the masters and rulers of India. They have
regained political power after many centuries, and are fully
aware of it, perhaps, over-aware.....As the current jargon
describes all the non-Hindus, they are only minorities.” |
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The famous
Indologist, Al-Biruni (973-1048) has noted in his Kitabul-Hind a
peculiar trait in Hindu psyche that puts it apart from the
generality of other cultures and societies, that of complete
bifurcation between conceptual thought and spiritual commitment. He
points out, with unconcealed amazement, that a Hindu would
passionately and with great ability and skill, argue and defend a
thesis or concept, but under no circumstances, would involve his
entire and total commitment to its practical defense. After a
splendid and erudite debate over a proposition, he would retire to
the peace of his home and hearth, the mundane concerns and interests
of himself and his family, never risking his life or property in its
active defense. The truly cultured Hindu regards such totalist
commitment as low and vulgar, the mark of a raw, uniformed and
undisciplined mind. Al-Biruni states that:
“On the whole
there is very little disputing about theological topics among
themselves; at the utmost they fight with words, but they will never
stake their soul or their body or their property on religious
controversy.”
 Albert
Schweitzer (1875-1965) in his Indian Thought and its Development
contends that for a Hindu, religious faith and belief is just a
matter of celebration, of unalloyed intellectual comprehension and
impersonal verbal statement, and it does not touch the core of his
being, the emotive structure of his personality wherein nestle the
blank, featureless waste-land of advaita, non-dulity. “a
position unacceptable of a European mind.” This unique trait of a
basic Hindu perception explains honest and unbiased disapproval of a
Sikh regarding his religious faith and belief as a matter of life
and death for him and his active deed to assert his commitment, as
an act of “fanaticism”, illicit encroachment on others’ rights and
privileges, gross intolerance and uncultured outlook. The basic
hostility of the urban crust of the Hindu of northern
India towards
Sikhism and his own fundamental attitude towards religious faith and
belief, explain the orchestrated hostility the Hindu Press of
Jullundur has manifested in relation to this recent massacre of
Sikhs.
But a similar
anti-Sikh posture assumed by the Punjabi language Communist Press
and the Communist Party has a different explanation. In his essay,
on the importance of Militant Materialism, Lenin has accorded the
destruction of all religion as the first priority in the Communist
scheme of things, resolutely condemning “any manifestation of a
conciliatory attitude towards religious ideology.” Communist thought
also rejects any notion of immutable ethical principles. Lenin said:
“Our morality is entirely subordinated to the interest of class
struggle”. Everything that allows and aids the triumph of Communism
is moral and everything that stands in its way is immoral. Sikhs are
staunch champions of religion and Sikhism as the upholder of
absolute moral principles is the greatest hurdle to the triumph of
Communism in this part of the world.
Gurbachan Singh
and his cult (Gurmeet Ram Rahim and his cult too) is basically
anti-religion, antagonistic to abiding, irksome ethical values, and
specifically aims at annihilation of Sikhism. Therefore, communist
logic compulsively implicates that this massacre of the Sikhs should
be approved and justified. The communist skill in ethical acrobatics
is further reinforced by a psychotic sense of guilt which
perpetually haunts these Punjab Communists, mostly of Sikh origins,
for having turned their backs on the religion of their forefathers
and the fundamental insights into reality of their ancestors, which
to less superficial and impulsive minds could have afforded full
scope and sanction to their genuine urges for social justice and
necessary social transformations.
This terrible
guilt complex haunts and distorts the psyche of every sensitive
Sikh-turned a communist and fierce hostility towards Sikhism and the
Sikhs is their mode of escape from the torture of this
guilt-complex. For these reasons these Communists have become
bed-fellows of a section of the citified Hindus of Punjab in
opposition and hostility to the Sikhs.
The Sikh Gurus
have bidden them to reply to the whiprack of an oppressor with a
thunder-bolt and not to die with a whimper but to “die-fighting to
the bitter end.” In Sikh history there are recorded, half a dozen
cases where the Sikh Guru themselves and Sikhs afterwards, have
deemed it as a question of life and death where deliberate and
malicious insult or outrage to their religious susceptibilities and
their human dignity was shown, irrespective of what the
circumstances and what the consequences.
Sri Aurobindo
Ghose (1872-1950) is the great ideologue of the modern Hindu
nationalism. It is this Hindu nationalism that has come out as
supremely triumphant out of the tragic partition of
India, in 1947.
Nirad C. Chaudhry is a cultural analyst of international repute and
is a living reliable interpreter of contemporary Hindu mind. Both of
them have something pertinent to say that puts the current tragic
predicament of the Sikhs in India into lime-light focus. In his
prestigious book, The Foundations of Indian Culture, Aurobindo Ghose
points out that emergence of Sikhism in India “is a strikingly
original” phenomenon in the long cultural history of India, as it is
the only movement which is forward-looking and not merely
re-interpretative, renascent or retrograde, as all other cultural or
religious movements in India during the last two millennia have
been. Thus, Sikhism alone has the potency and will to grapple with
the future and to come to terms with it, without compromising the
enduring values of Hindu culture. Possibly basing his intuitive
understanding on a study of Sikh history, he says:
“The culture
which gives up its living separateness...which neglects
its active
self-defence, will be swallowed up and...........(the people) which
lived by it will lose its soul and perish.”
 What options are
being left, in free
India, to the
Sikhs: to agree to spiritual suicide by quietly and submissively
relinquishing their living separateness or exercising no active
self-defence and thus to lose their soul and perish? This is the
ancient maxim of Hindu politics, outlined in the Athashastra (1st
century), under the nomenclature of Matsyanyaya,
the ‘Fish Justice’, laying down that the obligation and final
destiny of a small fish is to submit to being gobbled up by the big
fish.
It is on record
that during early fifties, when the Sikh leader, Master Tara Singh
reminded Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru of the solemn promises
given to the Sikhs so that they can freely flourish as Indian
nationals according to their own genius. Nehru informed Master Tara
Singh that, “now the circumstances have changed.” Home Minister
Katju, openly told Master Tara Singh during the same period that the
true destiny of Sikhs now is to give up their separate identity and
merge indistinguishably into the inchoative mass of Hinduism.
It is believed
on good grounds, that the pseudo-Nirankari movement (and the likes
of the Sauda dera cults) has been boosted and catapulted into power
and influence by set policies of the rulers at
Delhi, to help
dissolution of the Sikh Identity, paralyse their spiritual potential
and deprive them permanently of their control of their own history.
Nirad C. Chaudhry, in his book, The Island of Circe is
forthright in indicating as to who might be the architects of this
blue-print to achieve, as the modern political euphemism might say,
“the final solution of the Sikh problem”, which in earlier, less
sophisticated times, used to be called, ‘genocide’. Nirad Chaudhry
tells the world that today,
“The Hindus
are the masters and rulers of
India.
They have regained political power after many centuries, and are
fully aware of it, perhaps, over-aware.....As the current jargon
describes all the non-Hindus, they are only minorities.”
Since 1947, the
Sikhs have strained their every nerve and staked their entire
potential in developing and defending
India, on the
agricultural farm and in the industrial factory, for fraternal
togetherness and for victory on the field of battle. But they are,
so they feel and not without reason that, their destiny has been
fixed by the rulers of Delhi as expendable, as manure and as a
vanishing quantity in the crucible of the Indian political
laboratory.
Bhai Sahib Kapur
Singh was a scholar of Sikhism par excellence. Educated in
Punjab and
Canterbury, the outspoken political scientist was a master of many
languages –ancient and modern. An able civil services administrator
and a bold parliamentarian he wrote many books and documents
relating to Sikh ideology. Awarded the honour of National Professor
of Sikhism, Kapur Singh has left behind a legacy which has not been
easily emulated.
16
July, 2008
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