Toronto Star Article

[Sher Khalsa]

Todays Toronto Star

India's Punjab is at peace

Northern Indian province was once beset by violence

Today, the only shooting is of Bollywood films

MARTIN REGG COHN

ASIA BUREAU

AMRITSAR, India—Sikh devotees prostrate themselves to kiss the threshold of the Golden Temple, the holiest site for the faithful.

Religious hymns waft across the sunbaked courtyard as pilgrims circumambulate, barefoot, along its searing marble tiles. Turbaned worshippers bathe in the pool of immortality, an artificial lake engulfing the gold-plated spires of the sanctum sanctorum.

This is the centre of enduring Sikh spirituality — tranquil, dignified, devout.

This was the epicentre, two decades ago, of a political earthquake — turbulent, deadly, destructive.

A scene of unfathomable sacrilege: guerrillas with guns revolting against the Indian Army. Tanks rumbling past marble colonnades to flush them out.

Bullet holes are visible to this day, but there is little else to remind the world of the bitter fighting that once reverberated across the globe.

The lumbering wheels of Canadian justice, however, have brought back faded memories of this long-forgotten insurgency. The acquittal this month in a Vancouver courtroom of two Sikh-Canadians charged with planning the retaliatory 1985 bombing of an Air India flight — and the deaths of all 329 people aboard — reminded the world of this footnote to history.

The verdict leaves Canada's biggest-ever terrorist crime unsolved. But dramatic courtroom testimony about the events behind the bombing raises another, unanswered question:

Why did the blood-soaked battle for Khalistan— a separate Sikh homeland — fade away so fast into irrelevancy? Uniquely among ethnic and religious conflicts of recent history, the Punjab is at peace.

Resolving the puzzle of the Punjab may provide little consolation to the Indo-Canadian families of the bombing victims. But in a world wracked by separatist violence from Ireland to Sri Lanka, are there larger lessons to be learned?

Where once corpses littered its marble pathways, today foreign politicians beat a path to the Golden Temple, posing for photo-ops to please Punjabi voters back home. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien made the pilgrimage here late last year, and his successor Paul Martin had planned to follow in his barefoot path last January until the tsunami forced a change in his schedule.

The erstwhile battlegrounds that once lured angry young Sikhs to take up arms have been supplanted by ubiquitous cricket fields, where aspiring sportsmen now choose bats over bullets. Farmers are back on the Punjabi plains tilling wheat and cotton crops, free from nighttime intrusions by police seeking their sons or militants demanding their daughters.

These days the only shooting is by Bollywood movie crews, not men with Kalashnikovs. The hit film Bride and Prejudice was shot here last year and Punjabi fans swooned over the Mumbai starlets on location.

How did this nest of terrorism, near the Pakistani border, recover its religious harmony and political stability? After the deaths of more than 17,000 people, why did history change course?

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Among the tens of thousands of Punjabi Sikhs who crowd into the Golden Temple day and night, it's hard to find any sign of the raw, emotional cries for vengeance that emanated from this same battle-scarred courtyard two decades ago.

The grievances underpinning the insurgency — youth unemployment, second-class treatment and demands for autonomy — culminated in 1984 with the Indian Army's botched raid on heavily armed insurgents who had transgressed the temple, leaving 1,000 people dead.

Both sides descended to unspeakable acts of violence — shooting the enemy on sight and slaying innocent civilians on a whim.

Ultimately, though, Punjabis preferred the human rights violations of the police over the untrammelled criminality of the militants.

By the early 1990s, the tide had turned. The rebels were repudiated by their own people and — with solid intelligence from the village level — routed by the police. The militants who had once terrorized the Punjab, seeking a state within a state, realized their movement was going nowhere.

Harbahjan Singh, 70, a retired businessman who survived the insurgency, prays at the temple every day in search of serenity. But memories of the madness and sacrilege still haunt him.

"Sometimes I feel pain, sometimes I don't," he says softly, leaning against one of the temple walls crammed with memorial plaques to fallen Punjabi regiments in the Indian and British armies.

"During the agitation, both innocents and terrorists lost their lives at the hands of police, who shot young people on sight," he remembers. "But the terrorists were looting the innocent and the poor, so it became intolerable."

Singh says he'd had enough and so did most of his fellow Sikhs. As the police got the upper hand, villagers gave them more of a hand by tipping them off to terrorist movements.

"People got fed up when the terrorists inflicted atrocities on innocent people," he says. "When people realized that there was no improvement in their lives, public support melted away."

From his high-ceilinged office overlooking the worshippers, where he occupies the highest Sikh temporal seat, high priest Giani Joginder Singh Vedanti acknowledges that the movement lost its way. The militants veered from the path of a pure Sikh state, deviating into criminality.

"The violence was not accepted by the Punjabi masses, so it was unsustainable," says Vedanti, 64, clad in a maroon turban and long white kurta shirt, and speaking in his capacity as Jathedar Akal Takht — the world's highest Sikh authority. "Some unscrupulous elements joined the movement and gave it the wrong direction."

With his long, thinning grey beard and piercing brown eyes, Vedanti represents the Sikh religious establishment that lined up against the central government for much of the 1980s and 1990s.

He still calls for greater Sikh autonomy to promote the Punjabi language, and blames New Delhi for provoking the insurgency with its tough tactics.

But his tone has mellowed over the years.

"We don't want a separate territory," says Vedanti in his sparsely furnished office, where old books line the windowsills. "We don't want to be separate from the Indian nation, because we are very much part of the Indian nation."

Still, the defeat left a bitter taste in the Sikh establishment, where many longtime activists say they were simply outmanoeuvred and outmuscled by the state.

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Manjit Singh Kalkatta, an influential Sikh preacher who sits on the temple's governing body — the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee — argues that it was never a fair fight.

"The violence has been defeated by the mightier violence — it is the silencing of the guns of the few individuals by the mighty guns of the mighty state," fumes Kalkatta, a one-time firebrand politician who proudly hosted Chrétien's visit here 18 months ago and often lobbied Sikh-Canadians for support.

"Peace was only imposed, but the mind of the Sikh is still in revolt. He just can't find any legitimate means to do it."

Kalkatta concedes that the political climate has changed dramatically, that Punjabis take pride from the fact that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a Sikh, rules India. Even the army chief of staff is now a Sikh.

It is becoming hard for Kalkatta to claim that Sikhs are outsiders in India when Sikhs run the government and the army from the inside.

Harder still for him to explain why his Sikh-based party, the Akali Dal, was turfed out of the state government by Punjabi voters in 2002 and replaced by the once-reviled and utterly secular Congress Party.

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In the late 1980s, the government brought in K.P.S. Gill, a Sikh and a cop, to restore order in the Punjab.

As a Sikh, he knew the mindset of the militants far better than outsiders from Delhi or Mumbai. And as a police officer, he commanded rank and file cops who had their ears to the ground and their families living on the same soil.

The deployment of local personnel made a crucial difference, succeeding where India has failed in other insurgencies like Kashmir and the northeast where outside conscripts still do Delhi's dirty work.

"This was the only operation that was a police operation, and that makes it unique," says Gill. "The army never had good intelligence...The police had to live there, they came from the same stock."

They also died there. More than 1,800 police officers died in the Punjab during the fighting, but their deaths helped turn the tide.

When soldiers from other states are killed in an insurgency, they are buried back home; when the militants die, they are hailed as martyrs by their comrades.

In the Punjab, that dynamic changed. When local cops died in action, they were buried in their villages, where their sacrifices could be seen and felt by their neighbours.

"That affects people," Gill says. "We created fighters. It took some time, but when people saw that police actions were taking more casualties than the terrorists, sympathies started going toward the police."

Watching police die in the line of fire persuaded the populace that they were serious about fighting — and winning.

"It was only after they were convinced that we were going to win that they turned around and supported us," he says.

Now, "the movement for Khalistan is dead," Gill declares. "As far as the Punjab is concerned, it is totally and absolutely dead."

Gill got much of the credit for subduing the militants, and the media dubbed him "supercop." But Gill was also blamed for severe human rights violations including staged "encounters" — a euphemism for targeted assassinations of militants.

"He was a super butcher, not a super cop," says Kalkatta. "He is the most hated person among the Sikhs."

Independent analysts agree, however, Gill's tough tactics helped turn the tide at a time when the outlook was bleak.

The judiciary was severely intimidated and the courts utterly paralyzed. Unable to secure convictions for known terrorists, the police took the law into their own hands by invoking the laws of war.

Ordinary Punjabis were caught in the middle; but they eventually chose sides, says political scientist Harish Puri, who has studied separatist movements here and as far away as Quebec.

"On the one hand they had prowling policemen, and on the other hand the preying terrorist, but the people didn't support the terrorists," Puri argues. "Predominantly, it was criminality, and the primary victims were villagers."

Nor did many people support the goal of a separate Sikh state. Sikhs had opposed the partition of British India in 1947, when many of their brethren were massacred before they could flee Pakistan; few Sikhs had the appetite for another violent redrawing of borders in the 1980s.

For all of Gill's determination, he could never have triumphed over the terrorists without strong public support, says analyst Suba Chandran, of New Delhi's Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

"I would argue that local society defeated them first, and that made it easy for the police," Chandran says. "All Gill did was capture a dead tiger. Society had already killed the tiger by then."

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The tiger may be long dead, but its corpse still twitches. The stench of urine is overpowering in the concrete staircase leading to the dingy offices of the Dal Khalsa movement, whose few remaining members are fighting, to their last breath, for an independent Sikh homeland. For Khalistan.

Its leader, Kanwar Pal Singh, fought for 12 years in the underground and went to jail for it. Now 40, he remains unrepentant about the struggle, though he admits defeat.

"The movement lost direction," he concedes. "People had had enough of the violence, enough of the bloodshed."

Two decades ago, however, it was unstoppable.

"We were out for revenge," he says.

[Sher Khalsa]

"We don't want a separate territory," says Vedanti in his sparsely furnished office, where old books line the windowsills. "We don't want to be separate from the Indian nation, because we are very much part of the Indian nation."

[smartsingh24]

:'( :homer <_< _oh_OLD: why is he speaking for all of us? That isn't fair!!! I didn't get asked this question!!!!

[buddasingh]

"Unable to secure convictions the police took the law into their own hands." Now it is pretty clear to me who the terrorists are in those circumstances.

Khalistan was repeatedly dubbed as an "absolutely dead" movement starting about 15 years ago. But the need to repeat the death just won't die? hmmm someone a bit insecure out there?

Today, post Air India trial egg in the face of certain political motives... there is another associated echo of "khalistan is dead" not only in the Toronto Star but in many papers read by Sikh communities. How does something absolutely die over and over again? Why the need to repeat again and again that something is dead if it truly is dead?

Because when you attempt to obliterate the spirit of people through torture and terrorism, and those people uphold the principles of Guru Gobind Singh ji, you will always speak in uncertain fear of justice.

Sikh Dignity will not be defined and coined by state terrorist agenda which tries to create an echo that "it's over". They attempt repeated associations with the word "movement" so it has a permanent tinge of evil. So the word takes on a life of it's own. Those who are independent in spirit will define Sikh Dignity.

Sikh Dignity is not a terrorist or violent movement, it never was. Sikh Dignity is an anti-terrorist and anti-violence movement. Sikh Dignity is not exclusive, it is inclusive. Sikh Dignity stares fear in the eye fearlessly and peacefully, speaks up and demands self respect and dignity for every human being whether they be Sikh, Hindu, Muslim...etc. Sikh dignity does not start or stop at a homeland. Sikh dignity is about self respect first so we can aid others with self respect. If this means a homeland in which one can be secure and have a constitution of self respect then that homeland is a basic human RIGHT.

What they try to label a khalistan movement in their attempt to hold sikhs as slaves is simply part of Sikh Dignity and the dignity of any self respecting human being or human community.