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They all remember the Master,
but how?
WSN Bureau
 LUDHIANA/CHANDIGARH:
Peeved by the failure of the Akali Dal and the state government to
mark the 124th birth anniversary of legendary Akali Dal leader
Master Tara Singh, his grand daughter Kiranjot Kaur vent out her
spleen saying it was a shame that not a single place in
Amritsar was
named after him. Kiranjot, a former general secretary of the SGPC,
has increasingly found herself on the margins of power structure in
the Akali Dal even though she is one of the few educated women
leaders with credentials going back two generations in the Akali Dal.
Kiranjot was
speaking at a function to mark the anniversary of Master Tara Singh
at a college named after him in
Ludhiana. She
has been repeatedly overlooked and at one stage, when Bibi Jagir
Kaur was heading the SGPC, was almost snubbed on the issue of
getting Golden Temple into UNESCO World Heritage Sites list.
As long as she
was being adjusted, Kiranjot's was a silent voice. Much of what she
said was true and Master Tara Singh continues to be a much ignored
leader, considering his stature and the role he played during the
run up to the days of the bloody Partition and later right up to the
Punjabi Suba agitation.
Within hours of
Kiranjot's strong remarks which largely appeared in Punjabi media,
the state government's Public Relations Department issued a press
release in which CM Parkash Singh Badal paid "glowing tributes" to
the Panth Rattan but called him "one of the key architects of modern
India."
One wonders how
much Master Tara Singh would have approved of such an epithet, but
no voice of dissent was heard from Kiranjot. Badal credited Master
ji for having "waged a long and relentless battle for preserving the
present geographical entity of the country."
Neither Kiranjot
nor any other leader even alluded to the situation in Akali Dal
where undercurrents of casteism prevail very clearly and the fact of
Master Tara Singh not being a Jat weighs heavily upon his treatment
by later leadership.
Even currently,
the non-Jat component of leadership within the Akali Dal is
miniscule but the issue is conveniently buried in public by saying
that casteism holds no water in Sikhism, a factoid completely true
but innocent of the real conditions on the ground.
For his part,
Akali Dal President Sukhbir Singh Badal called Master Tara Singh "an
icon for new generation" but then he has never been known to even
utter the great leader's name while raising his new force called the
Student Association of India (SOI).
Neither Kiranjot
Kaur nor the Akali leadership cared to recall Master Tara Singh's
singularly brave and historic act of March 3, 1947 in front of the
Lahore Assembly when he denounced the formation of Pakistan and set
in motion the historical forces which ensured that entire Punjab did
not move on to the other side of the Radcliffe Line..
25
June, 2008
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