The transformation of the relationship between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Sikhs embodies the problems the community faces in a climate where the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s worldview prevails in the country. The story begins with a photo the Bharatiya Janata Party would once display with great pride, of a turbaned Modi disguised as a Sikh, to hide from the government clampdown during the Emergency. Nearly fifty years later, stranded on a flyover in Punjab because of protesting farmers, Modi was to declare that he felt his life was in danger from the same community that he once used as a shield.
This change in perception says less about the Sikhs than it does about Modi. His disguise was only an acknowledgement that the single most determined opposition to the Emergency had come from the Sikhs, and he was seeking shelter among people he was sure would keep him safe. But in doing so, he was also traducing the most basic facet of the Khalsa identity. The physical appearance of the Khalsa was always meant as an open declaration of one’s identity, especially to anyone who would want to threaten or persecute it. To use this identity as a disguise against repression was an insult to the very spirit in which the identity was instituted.
Such cowardice was again in evidence on the flyover. The farmers protests had promoted no violence, and the prime minister had the opportunity to just walk over to citizens of his country and talk to them about their concerns. Instead, he sat in his car, surrounded by his security wielding weapons against a non-existent threat. As he left from the nearest airport in Punjab, he reportedly said, “Thank your CM that I returned to the Bathinda Airport alive.”
The ease with which Sikhs transitioned from being protectors to threats in Modi’s mind is in keeping with how the RSS views the community. The community is to be praised when it is a useful instrument in institutions such as the army, but as and when it voices its own self-interest in terms unacceptable to the RSS, it becomes a threat.
The RSS has always claimed that Sikhs are part of the larger Hindu fold. At one time, the RSS even floated a body called the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat, which is now largely defunct. The Sangat claimed that an independent identity for the Sikhs was a “conspiracy” of the British government and Max Arthur Macauliffe, a British administrator and historian of the Sikhs. It is true that Sikhs experienced ferment, just as all Indian religious communities did, during the colonial period. But at least a decade before VD Savarkar fumbled in his attempts to define the term Hindu in his book Hindutva in 1923, this ferment had largely been processed. If anything, it can be safely said that contemporary Sikh identity has a longer documented history than the term Hindu used as it is today to describe a large community subscribing to one religion.
The self-perception of the Sikhs of belonging to a separate well-defined religious community, distinct from any broad interpretation of the term Hindu, has always aroused strong emotions among the RSS. This has been best expressed by MS Golwalkar, the second sarsanghchalak, or supreme leader of the RSS—idolized, among others, by Modi. “There are communalists in Hindu Society itself, who originally came into existence in the form of creeds as a manifestation of the manysided Hindu genius, but who later on forgot the source of their inspiration and creation and began to consider themselves as being different from Hindu samaj and dharma, and who on that premise demand separate and exclusive political and economic privileges, and to achieve those demands proclaim themselves to be different from Hindu Society and take to various agitations,” Golwalkar wrote. “Neo-Buddhists and Sikhs are of this type.”
The RSS has, however, always exercised the same duplicity that saw Savarkar pleading with the British to be forgiven his trespasses while in jail. Despite endorsing Golwalkar’s views, it was willing to make common cause with the Akalis, when they spearheaded the large Sikh opposition to the Emergency. While the RSS played both sides, claiming to oppose the Emergency while reaching out to the government with overtures, the Akalis invited the full wrath of Indira Gandhi.
The subsequent story is well documented. Indira Gandhi made her peace with the RSS through men like Madhukar Dattatraya Deoras—the third RSS leader—but she could never forgive the Akalis. She joined hands with Damadami Taksal head Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale to outflank the Akalis through his extreme and violent brand of Sikh fundamentalism. Even today people need to read the final version of the Anandpur Sahib resolution adopted by the Akalis in 1978 to understand how little was required at the time to handle the matter with sagacity.
The ensuing disaster in Punjab was born out of the interaction between Bhindranwale and Indira, their common front against the Akalis turning into a bitter enmity fed by their differing ambitions. The terror unleashed by Bhindranwale was met with a ham-handed response by Indira in the form of the disastrous Operation Bluestar that was supported by Sangh hawks such as LK Advani. When the Punjab insurgency finally ended in the early 1990s, the BJP, relegated to being a bit player, once again tied up with the Akalis, despite the Akalis taking a clear stand on a Sikh identity separate from the Hindus.
In the context of the Sikh insurgency, prior to Bluestar, the demand for Khalistan only played a peripheral part. This claim to a separate Sikh homeland was articulated mainly by Jagjit Singh Chauhan—who was based in the United Kingdom—in the 1970s. Even Bhindranwale never lay claim to this demand. After Bluestar, the demand was articulated by the numerous militant groups that grew and thrived across the state, but it died with the end of the insurgency. Since then, it has found traction largely only in the diaspora, both in Canada and the UK.
Within India, the term Khalistan is now a bogey, a label to affix to any Sikh who the ruling government finds inconvenient. This became evident as the farmers protests against the laws passed by the Modi government grew in strength and did not dissipate even over the course of a year. The compliant media under this administration was quick to amplify statements by peripheral figures and label the entire protest Khalistani. People like Deep Sidhu, hitherto unknown, having figured in public only as part of the entourage around BJP member of parliament Sunny Deol, were picked by media persons and made into representatives of radical politics.
None of this managed to stem the protest and the government had to back down. It was seen as a clear loss of face for Modi, perhaps the most public setback of his political career. It left him and the RSS in a quandary: how could they explain the Sikh resistance to an RSS backed government headed by Modi, which claims to represent all Hindus. As long as the Sangh chooses to believe that the Sikhs are Hindus, the electoral map of Indian Punjab remains a constant irritation. The state remains a permanent obstacle to the BJP control over the entire region that lies north of the Vindhyas.
Unable to target the Sikhs in the same fashion as they do Muslims, the RSS is left with only one tactic—to claim that the Sikhs are being misled by the Khalistanis in their midst. Statements made by RSS outfits when the farm laws were repealed make this clear. The RSS-affiliated Swadeshi Jagran Manch stated the Modi government, by repealing the laws, had defeated “the ill intentions of the anti-national and separatist forces.” Their co-convenor Ashwani Mahajan said, “It is unfortunate that in the name of opposition to farm legislations, many separatist forces had entered into the agitation, endangering the integrity and security of the nation.”
In the RSS view of the agitation, the farmers’ demands were unjust, and the repeal was only a strategic move to weaken the increasing influence of separatists over the movement. Such a view made no distinction between farmer, including those from Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh, and Sikhs, or between Sikh opponents of the government and separatists. Once this view took root, the Modi government began to hype the Khalistani threat. At The Caravan, we have been raising apprehensions about this approach from the time of the farmers’ protest. A piece in 2020 on the decision to label Gurpatwant Singh Pannun a terrorist, stated that this raises “questions about the threshold for being branded a terrorist, and whether the home ministry has portrayed a man without local support or presence as a greater threat than he actually poses.” In any case, Pannun, sitting in the United States, strikes far more extreme postures on India than any Canadian Khalistani, but the Modi government never seems to have made this an issue during discussions with the US.
A 2020 book by GBS Sidhu, a former official of the Research and Analysis Wing—India’s external intelligence agency—posted in Canada in the late 1970s, claimed that the threat of Khalistan was largely non-existent. As I wrote at the time the book was “heavily promoted by right-wing commentators seeking to target the then Congress administration. But these very same figures are now setting the country along a similar path by labeling the protests the work of Khalistanis.” Through such figures as Ajit Doval, the national security advisor, “this government shares a continuity of thinking with the kind of machinations that had led Punjab to disaster in the first place.”
The Khalistanis are a minority in the Sikh diaspora even in places such as UK and Canada, yet the government has made much out of a few irrelevant referendums where tens of thousands of votes are supposed to reflect the fate of tens of million people. In any case, the mindset of the Sikh diaspora that espouses this view is a different story, but understanding the nature of diasporic fantasies does not change the reality of the issue confronting the Indian government.
Modi recently raised the issue of the vandalism of a Hindu temple in Australia with his counterpart. However, the Australian police is veering to the view that it was an inside job. Against this background, the Indian government’s reaction to the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s charges of an Indian hand in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar—a Canadian citizen and head of the separatist organisation Khalistan Tiger Force—betrays a lack of understanding of how institutions work in other parliamentary democracies. Investigation agencies do not usually line up behind a government to back untrue charges to help it win elections. The Indian establishment can hardly argue with any credibility that investigating agencies in both Australia and Canada are toeing their respective government lines and working with the Khalistanis to discredit the Modi government and Hindus in the diaspora.
Given this, we need to consider the two different lines of thinking that ostensibly lie behind the Indian outrage. The first begins with a complete denial of charges. It requires us to believe that Trudeau, who is trailing in the polls to the point where every single Sikh voting for him in Canada will make no difference, has set aside all good sense, Canadian interest and international credibility to charge India with such an offense. And if even that is the case, the best course for India would have been to act from a position of strength and engage with Canada and the larger Five Eye intelligence sharing network of the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
The second line of thinking, not openly expressed, but present in all the discourse, is the view that if the Indians did take out Nijjar, then the West has no grounds to protests given how they have targeted Al Qaeda in a number of countries. Again, Pakistan does not stand in the same power relation with the US that Canada does with India. Nor is the Indo–Canadian relationship at this point like the relationship between Russia and the UK. Finally—and this is the weakest link in this particular chain of argument—what is the level of threat Nijjar posed that would require such action? Nothing in what has been stated about him makes him the kind of target that would require alienating a country like Canada.
Stripped down to its essence, the noise and the anger expressed by the Modi government over Khalistan makes no strategic sense. The only international traction that the Khalistan movement gets is through the attention the Modi government pays it. Devoid of this oxygen it begins to die, as was the case in the decade before the Modi victory in 2014. Since then, the greater the noise made by the Indian government externally and the greater the internal support to the idea of Hindu Rashtra, the greater the seeming legitimacy of the Khalistan demand.
After all, if there can be the demand for a Hindu nation, subscribing to Hindu norms, it becomes easier to demand a Sikh nation. The problem is evident: the demand strips the minorities of Punjab of their rights—they would no longer be equal citizens in a Sikh homeland. That is very much the same problem with the Hindu Rashtra. While Khalistan is a chimera, a mythical beast, with not even a slight chance of emerging into reality, a Hindu Rashtra is already a nightmare upon us, with Muslims facing the brunt off its exclusionary design. The only people who can argue against the demand for Khalistan on reasoned ethical grounds are those that believe in a secular India, which is why the RSS and the Modi regime carry no conviction when they decry Khalistan.
The Sikhs also remain aware that this Hindu Rashtra can as easily turn against them, and in fact does under the guise of the Khalistan label as and when it chooses. If the malevolence of a Hindu Rashtra remains in check regarding the Sikhs, it is only because of the ideological lens through which this RSS looks at the world. In this worldview, the Sikhs are a gale ki haddi, the proverbial bone stuck in the RSS gullet, which can neither be swallowed nor ejected.
https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/khalistan-stick-rss
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The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi: Inquiry Commission Report (1969)
Gandhi’s Assassin. By Dhirendra K Jha
Gandhi During Partition: A Case Study in the Nature of Satyagraha
RIP Bhiku Daji Bhilare: the man who saved Gandhiji’s life in 1944
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