Guru Granth Sahib 2015 sacrilege: How Sikh elite is gripped by post-1984 fear, financial interests
More than a hundred thousand Sikhs — mostly rural — converged on Punjab's Bargari over the past two Sundays to protest the desecration of Sri Guru Granth Sahib in 2015.
As is characteristic of any large gathering of the community in Punjab, fringe elements infiltrated the October 7 and 14 events, which commemorated a flashpoint that brought about the disgraceful fall of the Shiromani Akali Dal in the Sikh-majority state.
It goes without saying these tiny elements supplied sufficient fodder to sections of the media that quickly labels any sea of Sikh turbans "radical" and "fundamentalist" if it flows against the Badals.
It's so very easy to paint popular Sikh dissent against the allies of the BJP as "anti-national" — just have cameras turn their focus on a handful of so-called Khalistani posters and slogans at such congregations.
This theatre, which appears to be designed specifically for media consumption, serves several purposes all at once.
The tactic not only turns Punjab's large Hindu population wary, it also scares away well-read and well-informed Sikh elite living outside of the state.
But all this branding doesn't really impact the rural Sikhs of Punjab, when it comes to holding legitimate protests peacefully over legitimate issues.
The massive demonstrations on October 7 and October 14 at Bargari in Faridkot district centred around the nucleus of the Sikh faith — Sri Guru Granth Sahib.
The desecrations of 2015 and the recent indictment of the then Badal government by the Justice Ranjit Singh commission for police firing on demonstrators protesting it at Behbal Kalan three years ago spurred the Sikh protests afresh to demand immediate prosecution of the suspects.
Most of the tens of thousands of protesters assembling at the Bargari ground zero were villagers.
But the October 14 anniversary of the 2015 police firing — which left two people dead and which was officially slammed by the Justice Ranjit Singh commission — went largely unobserved outside of Punjab.
In Delhi, for instance, just a small number of Sikhs, some of them political aspirants, held a service at a historic gurdwara.
There was no major congregation otherwise in Delhi, home to the second-largest population of Sikhs outside of Punjab.
A deafening silence swept through Delhi's Sikh intellectual organisations, intelligentsia, entrepreneurs and military veterans alike.
Coincidently, they have also remained mum over serious accusations of financial scams in the city's top Sikh religious administration.
This silence, as I observed, stems from multiple factors.
One of them appears to be the Delhi Sikh elite's abject surrender to power. This phenomenon seems to have its roots in 1984.
The pogrom in Delhi and other cities still weighs heavily on the Sikh psyche in the capital.
As a minority, the community's intelligentsia here has chosen to maintain a low profile.
The Sikh elite in Delhi, therefore, thinks it's "wise" not to land itself in the "bad books" of ruling political parties and their allies.
The other factor behind this approach is business and professional interests.
Most Sikh industrialists in Delhi have their businesses spread across the country and overseas.
For many of them, it's an open invitation to trouble if they raise a voice against alleged power abuse by a party that has its stakes in the national government.
The events of Bargari never made it to national airwaves or dailies. The Sikh youth in Delhi remained largely unaware of them for months and years because it hardly subscribes to Punjabi newspapers which carried the stories.
The Badals won't propagate the desecrations as it would puncture their own ground. On its part, the city's Sikh intelligentsia shrugged it off.
In the decades that followed 1984, Delhi's crème de la crème has eventually allowed itself to be co-opted by powerful politicians.
Their religiosity is not suspect but their radio silence does symptomize a malaise with longer-term consequences.
With its elite blacked out as a voice, the Sikh community in cities outside of Punjab is bound to lose its relevance in bigger scheme of things.
I still would like to stir Delhi's Sikh intelligentsia from its dormancy with a couple of quotes from American writer Rebecca Solnit’s book, The Mother of All Questions.
"Silence is what allowed predators to rampage through the decades unchecked. It’s as though the voices of these prominent public men devoured the voices of others into nothingness, a narrative cannibalism," the author writes. "They rendered them voiceless to refuse and afflicted with unbelievable stories.
"Unbelievable means those with power did not want to know, to hear, to believe, did not want them to have voices. People died from being unheard."
The ball, therefore, lies in the court of the urban Sikh intelligentsia. If it still chooses the status quo, it should prepare itself to be cast out of value. And that may happen sooner than thought.