British Sikhs — divide and rue

On the face of it, every country has the sovereign right to do as it pleases with its citizenry as long as the flotsam does not lap over to another country's shores. There need be no quarrel with the exertions of a Sikh faction in Britain to list the community in the 2021 census as a separate ethnic group, except that the impetus seems to be from some highly suspicious quarters. The moving spirit seems to be the remnants of the International Sikh Youth Federation (ISYF), once banned under the UK Terrorism Act, who have combined with two recent Sikh entrants to the House of Commons to revive the All-Party Parliamentary Group for British Sikhs (APPGBS) that is behind the petition by 100 MPs for listing the Sikhs as a separate group.

The British have a century of experience in sowing differences  and reaping the rewards from a divided polity that ensues. For all their claims to a scientific temperament, decidedly crude markers were employed to divide Indians into castes, races and communities. That experiment, whose ill-effects expanded exponentially during the British colonial rule, is today debunked as scientific racism. In today's context, the ongoing exercise too does not appear to be guided by altruistic motives of providing identity markers to a minority community but a crude continuation of the principle of separate electorates which created the notion of India as a land of various nations: Hindu, Muslim, Sikh etc. 

The involvement of shadowy forces in propelling this demand gets exposed by the fact that the ``grand push’’ for the cause does not square up with its poor support base: as against the claim that it was a ``universal demand'', only about 20 per cent British Sikhs signed the petition.  The so-called protagonists, in Britain and Canada, are often Khalistan propagandists. At the same time, India too needs to take steps that diminish the emotional appeal for subscribing to a cause based on the recall of the events of 1984. This would ensure that the issue remains restricted to its main purpose: harvesting sufficient data for the allocation of resources for public services.