Namdhari Only Sikh Mp Outside Punjab

Azaad · May 20, 2009

Elections to the 15th Lok Sabha will be long remembered for they featured around Sikhs so much. “Sikh Prime Minister” was not only a decisive poll issue in North India, but also in the rest of the country as the Congress for the first time sought votes in the name of a Prime Ministerial candidate who did not belong to the Nehru-Gandhi family.

In fact, the election process started with a storm of protest over grant of Congress ticket to Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar, whom the Sikh community continues to suspect as brains behind the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. The Congress relented and withdrew their ticket.

A few of senior Congress leaders, including former Union Railway Minister Buta Singh, former Haryana minister Tara Singh, former Punjab Deputy Speaker Bir Devinder Singh and former MP Gurcharan Singh Galib, quit the party on the eve of the elections. While Galib and Bir Devinder joined the Akali Dal, the former unsuccessfully contested the election from Ludhiana.

Buta Singh, too, contested as an Independent from Jalore, a constituency in Rajasthan, which he had represented before.

Another Sikh politician, who made the headlines in the elections this time, has been controversial Inder Singh Namdhari, a qualified teacher in electronics. He has become the only Sikh from outside Punjab to be elected to the LS as an Independent from the Naxal belt of Jharkhand. He contested from Chatra and defeated Dhiraj Sahu of the Congress in a straight contest. The JDU candidate forfeited his security deposit.

Namdhari, who was born in Noshera in Gujarat, now in Pakistan, in 1942, moved to Bihar after Partition. Though he came from a business family, he took to teaching and became a lecturer in electronic engineering at the Bihar Institute of Technology, Sindri.

His love for politics, however, got him into the Rashtriya Jana Sangh in 1967. In 1980, he was elected to the Bihar assembly on BJP ticket. Eight years later, he became president of the Bihar unit of the BJP. From 1990 to 2009, he remained an MLA, both in Bihar and subsequently Jharkhand.

In 2000, he became the first Speaker of the Jharkhand assembly. In between, he had quit BJP because of differences with the party high command and joined the Janata Dal. He was Transport and Revenue Minister in Lalu Prasad Yadav government but quit after the fodder scam in 1995. In 2007, he quit the Janata Dal, resigned from his assembly seat and contested and won again, this time as an Independent. Now in 2009, he has become the first Sikh to win as an Independent from outside Punjab.

“I have been able to connect to people both in Bihar and now in Jharkhand where unfortunately politics is still linked to caste, religion, muscle power and money power,” says Namdhari.

Though the Namdhari sect, headed by former MP and Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee chief HS Hanspal, is considered pro-Congress, Inder has stayed away from the party of the first Sikh Prime Minister of the country.