Sikhs gathered at Harvard University to dig deep into the philosophical underpinnings behind the political trends leading to the 1984 attack on Darbar Sahib by the Indian army, and to think about a focused direction for the future of the panth.
Prabhsharandeep Singh, who teaches college-credit classes on Sikh religion, culture, literature and politics at the University of California at Berkeley, lectured a group of about 35 students and young adults from the Boston area, last month.
“We know that events have a significant place in history, and its events that either shape history or change the course of history,” he said. “We focused on 1984, which was actually a consequence of a previous major calamity - the 1849 British occupation of the Sikh country.”
Tarun Preet Singh, a senior studying economics at Harvard, invited him after attending a conference at Berkeley in June, where Prabhsharandeep Singh and Balbinder Singh Bhogal, Sikh chair-holder at Hofstra University in N.Y., were among the speakers. He organized the Harvard event with the help of the South Asian student association, which provided the venue at the university’s Science Center at the Cambridge, Mass., campus. He notified students and young professionals through gurdwara announcements and Facebook networks. And, within a month, the event was underway, on July 25.
“It was a collective idea,” Tarun Preet Singh said. Amardeep Grewal, co-president of the association, sent out an email last month to hundreds of its members about 1984. Both were interested in doing an event “considering it was the 25th anniversary of the Indian military attack known as Operation Blue Star, he said.
Tarun Preet Singh’s presentation of a historical timeline from 1849, the fall of the Sikh empire, to the present, set the stage for Prabhsharandeep Singh’s lecture on the concept of a nation-state, what it means to be a modernist society, and why the Indian government’s reason for attacking Darbar Sahib, to protect the Indian nation-state, was fundamentally flawed.
There is a lot of information on 1984 but why it happened “gets lost in Internet chatter and propaganda from both sides,” Tarun Preet Singh said. “The difference between this seminar and others was that it provided a unique approach. Few lecturers or speakers are engaging in academic discourse. I didn’t feel like the material was being watered down.”
When the British came to India, they brought with them a philosophical standpoint, a Western principle, he said. Sikhs have had to engage with that, using their framework, the Christian framework. The Singh Sabha movement was great, but they got caught up in that framework.
Other attendees also said they learned for the first time the big picture of why 1984 happened.
Banni Kaur, who graduated this year with a liberal arts degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said she learned about how Sant Jarnail Singh Bindranwale came into politics and how he became the head of Damdami Taksaal. But it’s naďve to say the Indian army killed thousands of men, women and children and desecrated Darbar Sahib and other gurdwaras in Punjab only to capture him.
“All this for one guy?”
In 1938, Sikhs opposed the British compromise to form three nation-states, including one for Sikhs, upon their leaving South Asia. But because Sikhs did not trust that imperialist Britain would give them complete freedom, they opposed it.
“We lost the battle because no one took part but us,” she said.
Sikhs continued to fight for their rights after the formation of India, but the government never wanted to grant any rights. “Not until 1984 did it have an excuse” for quashing their demands, she said.
“The real reason was to suppress Sikhs,” she said. “It was an issue of power.
“I never knew the big picture, why it happened and why it happened this way,” she added. “It was a genocide, clearly a genocide.”
The lecture ended with a question: What is the conclusion, what’s next?
“The ‘modern’ thought is a Eurocentric concept, a way to keep other cultures down,” said Kuljit Singh, a young professional from Shrewsbury, Mass. “We need to look at history and events from our own perspective because everything is biased. We need more historians and writers to tell our story.”
Trends Leading to 1984
By Prabhsharandeep Singh - a recount of a major part of his Harvard lecture.
The impetus for the Indian army’s attack on Darbar Sahib in 1984 was that the Sikh militants had become a threat to the unity of India.
First, what is the validity of the nation-state called India, and the concept of nationalism behind it?
Second, India claims to be a modern secular nation, we need to examine what the term ‘modern’ means, then what the term ‘secular’ means, and what the term ‘nation’ means.
‘Modern’ comes from the French philosopher, Rene Descartes, who lived from 1596 to 1650. He created a division between body (matter) and mind, and defined human beings as thinking beings: “I think, therefore I am.” The process of rationalization became the modern process.
The idea of ‘secular’, ‘laicite’ in French, developed during the French Revolution, 1789 to 1799. French Republicans invented the Protestant Church to counter the Catholic Church’s authority.
German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770 to 1831, developed the idea further, translating God into an absolute spirit, thereby secularizing the entity that is God. Everything was historicized and made dialectic: "The rational alone is real." He was the main figure behind imperialistic discourse.
When the British went to the Indian subcontinent, Christian missionaries went with them. Their definition of religion was grounded in Hegelian discourse. They coerced the native people to define their respective religion in European terms, which they called the ‘modern’ definition of religion.
The Ramakrishna Mission, the Arya Samaj and the Brahmo Samaj were three major modernism reform movements. They formed a political party called the Indian National Congress to appropriate British colonial rule and to extend the model of the European nation-state in the South Asian subcontinent.
Prior to the British, the South Asian subcontinent, currently known as India, had more than 700 principalities, sovereign states and political units, with different ethnic, linguistic and cultural provinces, many religions and hundreds of languages.
The shape of the subcontinent was even more diverse than Europe. It was not a nation-state. The only reason it became a nation-state was that the British occupied the entire region.
Sikhs started the Singh Sabha movement in the early 1900s and then the Gurdwara Reform movement, out of which emerged a modern Sikh political party, the Shiromani Akali Dal. Indian National Congress leaders hijacked the Akali movement and made it a part of the national movement. This was a mistake.
Sikhs in California and Canada started the Gadar Party to liberate the subcontinent from British rule. About 90 percent of its members were Sikhs, the rest Hindus and Muslims. Bhai Randhir Singh of the Akhand Kiratni Jatha organized its activities from Punjab. Sohan Singh Bhakna led the party in California. Many of its members went to Punjab to initiate a mutiny, fighting for the freedom of panth, not India. Most were arrested, some hanged. Randhir Singh spent 16 years in jail, from 1914 to 1930.
The movement was hijacked by Lala Hardayal, a Hindhu leader. Bhai Randhir Singh, had clarity but the mainstream Sikh Political party, SAD, did not have that clarity and became part of the Indian freedom struggle, redefining Sikhi in modernist terms.
At the 1932 roundtable conference in London, the British offered Sikhs their own country, one of three states that they proposed carving out of the subcontinent, if they stopped the freedom struggle. They believed the British just wanted to stop their resistance against imperialism, and would not keep their promise when they left the subcontinent. Sikhs declined and kept up the resistance against British imperialism.
That is why British divided the subcontinent between India and Pakistan, and decimated Sikhs completely. The Sikh pop at the time was 1.6 percent, but they made 80 percent of the sacrifices.
Sikhs were only leaders, the only threat to the British.
It made sense for the British to make an offer to the Sikhs. The Indian National Congress never asked for freedom, it just wanted reforms within the British learning system. The declaration of complete self-rule by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1929 was not a call for freedom, but for self-rule under the British Empire. When Gandhi started the Quit India movement in the middle of World War II, in 1942, the British had already decided to leave all of their colonies after the war. They had their man initiate freedom, made him a hero and handed India over to his party, which was formed by the British. He was their man, the Congress Party was founded by the British, and he was working for the British.
Sikhs were 1.8 percent of the population and made 80 percent of the sacrifices. What was Gandhi doing? Nothing.
The idea of India to be made a nation-state was based on accidents of history that do not make any sense for the Sikhs to recognize.
With 700 principalities, 16 languages and different cultures, India is more like Europe than one of its nation-state, such as Germany or France. It was not legitimate for the British to create an Indian state where the majority would have authority to subjugate minorities and try to merge them into the majority culture and religion.
The Sikhs, whose country was Punjab, was never a part of India prior to 1849. Their country was divided into two countries. A large majority had to migrate to the Indian side in 1947 because of one political decision by the British. There was no legitimacy in the entire process.
Therefore, in 1984, it was not legitimate for the Indian state to attack Darbar Sahib and other gurdwaras by basing its decision on its apprehension that the Sikhs were a threat to the unity and integrity of a nation-state called India.
Note:
By Anju Kaur
Sikh News Network staff journalist
anjukaur@sikhnn.com
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