VIEWPOINT
Romit Bagchi
Lal Bahadur Shastri was then the Prime Minister. Indira Gandhi was not even a Member of the Parliament at that time. Yet she was very worried over the chairperson of the Parliamentary Committee S Hukam Singh, who was also the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, preparing his report on the advisability of the formation of a Punjabi-speaking state. She was dead against such a state being carved out of the existing state of Punjab and she made no bones about it. Let us see what Hukam Singh himself wrote in his article, ‘The Other Side’ : “According to her statements in “My Truth”, ‘Unfortunately, Mr Shastri had made S Hukam Singh- the Speaker of the Lower House-the Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Punjabi Suba although he was very biased in favour of Punjabi Suba…I went to Mr Chavan and said I had heard that S Hukam Singh was going to give a report in favour of Punjabi Suba and that he should be stopped…once the Prime Minister’s appointee had declared himself in favour of Punjabi Suba, how could we get out of it?’’ Mrs Gandhi along with Mr Chavan could meet Mr Shastri with much difficulty and when they did Mr Shastri just said he was fully in touch with the situation.’
Indira Gandhi further wrote in her book: “…I was very bothered and I went around seeing everybody. Of course once the report came, it was too late to change it.”
Now the question is: why was she so bothered over the formation of a Punjabi-speaking state? She herself explained it in the same book. “The Congress found itself in a dilemma; to concede the Akali demand would mean abandoning a position to which it was firmly committed and letting down its Hindu supporters in the Punjabi Suba.”
Hukam Singh further wrote: “The Congress could not depend upon Sikh voters and out of political considerations, it could not suffer losing Hindu votes. Therefore, the Congress failed to do justice to the Sikhs.”
Significantly, even Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was stubbornly opposed to carving out a Punjabi Suba even though it was based on linguistic identity and not on the Sikh-Hindu religious lines. Let us now look back on history. Although the demand for a separate State for the Sikhs was first raised by the redoubtable Sikh leader Master Tara Singh way back in 1929 during a Congress session in Lahore the term ‘Khalistan’ was first used in March 1940 when Veer Singh Bhatti used it for the first time in a pamphlet titled ‘Khalistan’ in response to the Muslim League’s Lahore declaration for the creation of Pakistan on the basis of the two-nation theory. Soon after independence, the Akali Dal launched a prolonged movement for the formation of a Punjabi-speaking state within the Union of India. The successive Congress governments at the Centre were thus edgy about this emotive demand of the Sikhs, fearing that it would finally culminate into the revival of a separate Sikh State demand.
Interestingly, during the first two censuses (1951 and 1961), the Hindus living in the existing state of Punjab disowned Punjabi language and chose Hindi as their mother tongue instead under the influence of the Arya Samaj and Hindu Mahasabha, ignoring the Akali exhortation to the contrary.
The Dar Commission, appointed by the government to deliberate on the sensitive issue of the reorganisation of states, recommended in 1948 postponement of the reorganisation, citing the logic that if the process was started in southern India it might provide a fillip to the Sikh demand of Punjabi Suba in the north. The JVP Committee comprising Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabbhai Patel and Pattabhi Sitaramayya concluded that no effort of altering the boundaries of the provinces in northern India should be made at that time though they implicitly accepted the justifiability of forming linguistic states.
However, the inevitable could not be put off for long and the Punjab Reorganisation Act was passed by the Indian Parliament in 1966, resulting in the constitution of two separate states- Punjabi-speaking Punjab and Hindi-speaking Haryana.
Elections were held in 1967 and, in tune with the national electoral trend, the Congress faced severe drubbing in Punjab. A coalition government of the Akali Dal and Jana Sangh came to power. The former Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral wrote in an article, ‘The Sequence’: “But the Congressmen found it hard to stay out in the cold for too long. They encouraged Lachhman Singh Gill to defect and to form a government with their support.” However, the Akali Dal-Jana Sangh coalition government returned to power. But then came the 1972 elections amidst the euphoria of India’s emphatic war victory against Pakistan and the Congress was swept back to power, riding piggyback on that spectacular victory. Giani Zail Singh became the chief minister. Gujral wrote: “With his earthy shrewdness, Zail Singh understood his limitations. He decided to draw upon Sikh sentiment by turning the state machinery into a glorified institution of dharam prachar…For a while it looked as if the Congress had indeed been de-secularised. This was all good so long as he was in power. He perhaps did not realise that in the long run it was not possible to out-match the Akalis on their home-ground. They responded with the Ananadapur Sahib Resolution.”
Then, the electoral fortunes reversed again as Congress was voted out of power in the 1977 assembly election and the Akali Dal-Janata Party coalition government came to rule the state. According to Gujral, the coalition government carried the vendetta too far against Zail Singh, leaving him with the only option of hitting back through embarrassing the Prakash Singh Badal regime by activating his erstwhile allies and friends who would take fantastic stands on religious cum political issues inside the Akali Party. “Bhindranwale is a find of that period,” the ex-PM wrote.
Things changed yet again as Congress returned to power with landslide victories both in the Centre and in Punjab in 1980, riding on the people’s anger against the Janata government fiasco. While Zail Singh became the Union home minister Darbara Singh was elected Punjab’s chief minister. It was then that the tumultuous time began for Punjab; it got stained with blood and gore spilled in communal violence unleashed. With Bhindranwale openly inciting violence, his fanatic band of followers perpetrated selective massacres of Hindus not just in Punjab but in Haryana too. It seemed that the government had abdicated its responsibility of reining in the reign of terror. And then suddenly happened the cataclysmic climax, the Operation Bluestar and its even more macabre aftermath.
The question that has never ceased tormenting me is: why did the Indira Gandhi government allow the situation to come to such a sanguinary pass when the cult of violence, confined to a few, could have been nipped in the bud quite easily? Different opinions were presented for and against the then government on this matter. But it seems plausible that the then Central government allowed the situation to build up to the dramatic climax with the inexorability of a Greek tragedy as part of a premeditated electoral strategy of consolidating the Hindu votes behind a ‘strong’ government that claimed to have saved the unity of the country by crushing down the violent forces of Sikh secessionism?
But what was the role of the Sikh people in this horrific saga of machinations and maneuvers? Khushwant Singh poignantly wrote: “…99% of these Sikhs had nothing whatsoever to do with Bhindranwale, Akalis, the government or politics of any sort.” Yet, they suffered the most.
This is what we must bear in mind when desperate attempts are now being made by a miniscule and misguided section of Sikh diaspora community to revive the ghost of the long-buried Khalistan movement.
