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Banda Singh Bahadur –the founder of
the first Sikh republic
Sirdar Kapur Singh
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On the occasion of the 292nd martyrdom anniversary of
Banda Singh Bahadur, WSN pays tribute to the saint-warrior, who
boldly and painstakingly put the principles enunciated by the
Gurus into practice and who was mercilessly killed by the Mughal
forces. This extract from the speech of none other than Bhai
Sahib Sirdar Kapur Singh, delivered to young Sikh students under
the auspices of the All Canada Sikh Federation in 1974 is a
befitting tribute to the work of Baba Banda Singh Bahadur, whose
legacy has been forgotten by mainstream Sikh religious and
political bodies and has been hijacked by others who are
muddling his personality. |
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 After
the passing of Guru Gobind Singh and after the ordination of the
Khalsa, that is since the beginning of the eighteenth century
when Guru Gobind Singh passed-away, the Sikhs have played, a by no
means insignificant part, in the history of Asia and indirectly, the
history of the world.
In 1711, they
set-up a republic in the heartland of the Moghul Empire in India,
wherein they gave land to the tillers in a feudal society,
proclaimed equality of all men as citizens of a state, and declared
that power emanated from and justly belonged to the people and not
to a hereditary privilegentsia. This republic was set up by Banda
Singh Bahadur.
These remarkable
and most modern principles, which were not only avowed but which
were put into practice, although for a very short while, are
historical phenomena with which not many people in the West or even
the East were then acquainted with; but which, if properly
understood and appreciated, would make men marvel as to how it was
that in a conservative, tranquil, progressive-and-struggle-avoiding
East, such revolutionary and remarkably dynamic ideas not only could
spring-up but could be put into practice and could be applied to the
actual polity of a state which was founded, but which,
unfortunately, did not last.
 This state of
the Sikhs lasted only for six or seven years. Emperor Bahadur Shah
marched with all the resources of the Moghul Empire from Deccan, the
distant South, to destroy this Sikh republic in the north of India,
which extended from the confines of Ludhiana to the outskirts of
Panipat, the rivers Ravi to Jamuna. It was posited in the heart of
the north of India, and if it had endured, or had it been possible
to make it endure for another forty or fifty years, not only the
Moghul Empire would have fallen much earlier than it did, but in
India itself such a social and political revolution would have been
brought about that it would have been India which might have been
the fore-runner of modern ideas of equality, liberty and brotherhood
which we now credit to the French Revolution and which now have
inspired and enthused modern political activity during the last one
century.
The Sikhs,
inspired as they were by the teachings of the Gurus, proclaimed and
actually applied another Sikh principle in this short-lived
republic. It was on the 10th of December, 1710 that an Imperial
Ordinance was issued from Delhi by the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah,
which runs to the effect that: nanak-prastan ra harkuja kih
biyaband ba qatal rasanand---"Every Sikh, wherever he is
found,wherever he is seen, should be put to death without any
hesitation and without any further thought".
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The
Ordinance of 7th April, 1711, issued by the Sikh Republic under
the seal of the state and sign manual of their chief executive,
Banda Singh Bahadur, proclaimed: "We do not oppose Muslims or
Islam, but only tyranny and usurpation of power." |
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This was the
solution which the Moghul Empire in India had conceived of, to
solve, what they might have described as, "the Sikh problem" and it
is even a fiercer and a more frightful notion than the one which
entered the head of Hilter during the Second World War, when he
wanted to accomplish, what he euphemistically called, "the solution
of the Jewish problem", by exterminating every living Jew wherever
he could be found and apprehended.
This Ordinance
was issued on the 10th of December, 1710,
and it was against those people who were small in numbers but were
the bearers of the principles of a new society, for the purpose of
setting up a modern polity for the guidance of world society in the
future centuries to come. Their reaction to this imperial edict of
totalitarian and utmost barbarism is worth noting.
On the 10th of
December, 1710, the Royal Ordinance of ruthless destruction of all
Sikhs, was issued; and on 7th April, 1711, hardly three months and a
few days afterwards, an Ordinance in reply was issued by the Sikh
Republic under the seal of the state and sign manual of their chief
executive, Banda Singh Bahadur, which proclaimed: "We do not oppose
Muslims or Islam, but only tyranny and usurpation of power."
The substance of
this Ordinance of The Sikh Republic is recorded in contemporary
documents, such as the Persian Ruquati--Aminul-davallah,
Dastural--Insaha and the Imperial Daily Diaries, the
day-to-day records made by authority of what passed in the royal
court.
 They are now
available for everybody to see, that hardly three months after this
drastic Ordinance which was issued for the utter destruction of the
Sikh people, the Sikhs had the political maturity and the greatness
of heart to reply by issuing an Ordinance which said, “We do not
oppose Muslims. We do not oppose Islam. We only oppose tyranny,
and we only oppose the usurpation of political power which belongs
to the people and not to privileged individuals or to Mughals."
This outlook,
this temper, this sentiment, is so democratic, of such high cultural
calibre and such exalted ethics, that it would not be easy--one may
search the pages of the contemporary history of those days, of
seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century history--one will not
come across its equal or its parallel in the political policies and
practices of a state anywhere in the world of those days.
After that, when
this initial effort of establishing a Sikh republic in the heart of
northern India failed, in which republic the Sikhs tried to apply
the high principles of ethics and politics enunciated by the Sikh
Gurus, there comes a period of about half a century of relentless
persecution and genocide pogroms against the Sikh people by two
contending empires, the mightiest empires of Asia of those days:
the Mughal and the Pathan Empire. The Pathan empire persecuted and
tried to uproot the Sikhs and to destroy them root and branch, under
the leadership of Ahmad Shah Abdali, one of the greatest generals,
of the stature of Chenghiz Khan, Halagu and Nadir, the greatest
generals which Asia has produced. Under his might and under his
generalship, and that of his successors, for almost fifty years, the
Pathans as well as the Mughals tried their worst and tried their
utmost to cow-down the Sikhs, to finish the Sikhs and to make them
submit.
But the Sikhs
withstood this terrible onslaught. They neither submitted nor
abandoned their harsh cry of "death or liberty", a sentiment foreign
to and unknown in the Eastern societies, ancient or modern. This is
a sentiment which is unique in the history of Asia, though in Europe
you do find traces of it. But for fifty years, under the most
callous and under the most terrible persecutions where the aim was
complete genocide, the Sikhs not only refused to submit but refused
to abandon their cry: "We want death or liberty! We want death or
liberty." And in the end they had their liberty. Sikh supremacy
was then established. And then it slid into the form of the Sikh
Empire, which was called the Sarkar Khalsa that is “the
people’s Commonwealth” from the middle of the eighteenth-century to
the middle of the nineteenth-century.
25
June, 2008
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