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SIKHS: Change We Must
Kalam Nishan Singh
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The Indian Nation
State is luring the Dalit domain into similar mainstreaming.
Barack Obama refused to be “mainstreamed”. He called for Change,
and showed that he is the Change. We have to be made of
different stuff than we are out to fight against. It is here
that the lessons of an Obama win lie for Sikhs and for the
marginalised Dalits, the Blacks of India. |
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 Thomas Jefferson
made a promise in 1776. This was a promise of a free world. Thomas
Jefferson also owned slaves. This was a flaw in the entire project
of democracy. In 1776,
America made a
promise to facilitate a dream. Something happened there. Something
that most Americans were not very comfortable about. It took 14th
Amendment, Civil War, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcom X
and the diligent fight of the lovers of true democracy for years but
then came Barack Obama.
Something
happened in the US of A. History's wrongs can never be righted by
one sweep. But Obama's victory was the one decisive step the
Americans took to make a valiant attempt.
Sikhs have many
lessons to learn from Obama's victory. Marginalised in their own
country, pushed to the brink, stereotyped at one stage as
terrorists, painted as language chauvinists in the 1960s, seen as
spanner-throwers in the run up to the freedom struggle and branded
as separatists in the most negative sense, the fate of the Sikhs in
India is no better than the fate of the Black man in the USA in the
1960s.
Brahmanical
forces hold the levers of power in
India, and the
country's best and the brilliant cast their lot with these forces.
Even the most accomplished and gifted weigh in on the side of the
establishment, and right now there is not a single political party
in India that is not controlled by Brahamnical forces. So
intelligent are these forces that they have created a confusion
between Brahmins and brahamanical forces, thus ensuring that the
fissures between the haves and the have-nots of power structure
become further solidified.
Barack Obama
came from a class and race that Indians can best understand in their
own indegenous terms of sociology. Barack Obama was the Dalit of the
US
society. Dalits are the Blacks of India. Sikhs are the marginalised
of India. Punjab is the backwater of New Delhi's concerns.
The lesson from
Barack Obama's victory are simple in their nature, grave in their
appeal, weighty in their meaning and challenging in their form.
India saw some
resurgence of the power of the marginalised in the last few years.
Dalit empowerment started crawling towards political agenda of
certain parties, and the old brahamnical power structures started
feeling threatened. But they have faced these challenges repeatedly
in the past.
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Barack Obama's was a force of honesty. The graciousness of
Senator John McCain, a truly genuine hero of the United States,
in his concessional speech was a tribute to the honesty and the
hope generated by Obama. Unfortunately in India, the
brahamanical forces have so corrupted the agenda of empowerment
of the Dalit that they have succeeded in Brahamanising the Dalit
movement.
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For the first
time, there were serious questions being raised by saner people
about the exalted theories of India's genius to 'create unity out of
diversity;, 'the wonderful assimilative power of Hinduism' and the
unparalleled intellectual glories of the Vedic-brahmanic traditions,
to quote a rather eye opening passage from Braj Ranjan Mani's De-Brahamanising
History (Manohar Publishers).
Like the promise
of a truly free world and the land of the dreams that was talked
about as far as the US was concerned even when there was much path
to be still covered, in India the brahamanical strategy was to
create the lure of the Oriental exotica, and many a so-called
progressive radicals fell for it. Such was the patriotic pedagogy
that was created from colonial historiography and fine tuned in the
conundrum of Dayananda, KC Sen, Bankim, RC Dutta, Tilak,
Vivekananda, Ranade,
Lajpat Rai, BC
Pal, Aurobindo, gandhi, Savarkar and SP Mukherjee. This is the
poison that the children in schools in India are fed with cheap
charts of portraits of "Our Great National Leaders" that sell for a
penny and from which the kids clip and paste pictures in their scrap
books.
The project of
popular education in brahamanical mode thus feeds on itself.
Brahamanise the Sikhs, brahamanise Budhhism, and now there is a new
script being staged by the brahamanical forces.
Brahamnise the
Dalits.
Since a
charismatic African-American is now set to arrive in the White
House, expect the debate in
India to turn to
whether we can ever have a Dalit as Prime Minister.
Such debates are
always fraught with some dangerous assumptions. Indira Gandhi was a
woman, so is Sonia Gandhi. What contribution did they make to the
cause of women empowerment? What contribution did the string of
Muslim presidents of
India make to
the fate of Muslims? By how much was the stock and fate of Sikhs as
a nation improve due to Giani Zail Singh and Manmohan Singh being in
positions which we thought can and often make a difference?
Barack Obama's
was a force of honesty. The graciousness of Senator John McCain, a
truly genuine hero of the
United States,
was a tribute to the honesty and the hope generated by Obama.
Unfortunately in India, the brahamanical forces have so corrupted
the agenda of empowerment of the Dalit that they have succeeded in
Brahamanising the Dalit movement.
So out of such
strategy has emerged the current avatar of Mayawati. In about six
months, the Indian electorate will be asked to give its verdict on
who the next Prime Minister should be. The larger question is: are
Indian voters prepared to consider the Bahujan Samaj Party president
Mayawati’s quest for the top post?
Many would ask
if she is indeed the Dalit as people know a dalit? The similarity
between her and Mr. Obama, if any, is the race factor that has a
bearing on the
U.S. elections
and could be equated with the issue of caste that invariably
determines the outcome in the Indian elections. But can Ms. Mayawati
emulate the Obama strategy? Is she prepared to draw lessons from the
Obama campaign?
Mr. Obama has
faced a series of challenges over the last two years. That he has a
way with words is well established. His ability to expand his voter
base by drawing the otherwise sceptical American youth into the
vortex of politics is the second of his two outstanding attributes.
He assiduously built his image as a politician who has a grip on the
complex challenges faced by Americans in an increasingly globalised
world.
Dalit
empowerment advocates in
India need to
learn.
Just as Sikhs
need to learn. What we need is a continuous engagement with the
issues, with the world. Why is there no stand of the community on
the neo-liberal policies? Why is Manmohan Singh our hero but not
Utsa Patnaik? Why are the Sikhs, the community that established the
tradition of langar to not only ensure that caste barriers are
broken but to ensure that the poor have a stake in your development
is not engaging itself with the complex interconnections between the
global food crises and the economic recession?
We will be told
that global recession is not a religious issue. By that reckoning,
Guru Nanak's hymns about Babur may not fall within the religious
domain. The concept of Miri-Piri does not leave anything outside the
scope of our religious engagements.
Obama had done
his homework, and his engagement is a life time's work. Anyone with
any doubt can go read the text of the
Philadelphia
speech on race. We must as a community resist from our usual tactics
of swift-boat attacks and steer away from acrimonious and avoidable
debates.
In the year of
the tercentenary of Gurta Gaddi, the Sikhs must vow to return to the
traditions of engagement with the Word, engagement with knowledge
acquisition that helps us in understanding the world and its
interconnections, engagement with the incomplete work of creating an
egalitarian society, engagement with the larger value system that
Sikhism holds.
An engagement
with being a Nyara Khalsa, a unique human being.
One of the Sikh
community’s true heroes, Prof Randhir Singh, the Marxism scholar,
once said it was unfortunate that Sikhs too have become mainstream.
He enumerated a number of evils that plague people from other
religious affiliations, and then said he can match all this with
Sikh names too. It is such mainstreaming that the Sikhs have slipped
into that we should avoid.
The Indian
Nation State is luring the Dalit domain into similar mainstreaming.
Barack Obama refused to be “mainstreamed”. He called for Change, and
showed that he is the Change. We have to be made of different stuff
than we are out to fight against. It is here that the lessons of an
Obama win lie for Sikhs and for the marginalised Dalits, the Blacks
of India.
Will we be the
Change? Change we need, Change we want, Change we must.
5 November
2008
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