Login Register
Follow Us

Naive to ignore dangers to Punjab peace

The political discourse in Punjab faces a serious danger of tipping over into a bloody social strife.

Show comments

HARCHARAN BAINS
Adviser to former CM Parkash Singh Badal

The political discourse in Punjab faces a serious danger of tipping over into a bloody social strife. Only the biased or the politically naive would fail to see or downplay this danger. For those who have seen thousands of innocent lives lost, families ruined and deep psychotic wounds still festering, the possibility of Punjab descending, yet again, into violence is no ruse nor a distractionist ploy to preserve this or that political legacy. 

The tendency to reduce the whole debate to personalities is overwhelming. But it does not require any profound historian to tell us that the Punjab and Sikh crises pre-date Parkash Singh Badal, Amarinder Singh or even Longowal and Bhindranwale. Their legacies are a small issue compared with the larger issue of peace and communal harmony in the state.

Individuals irrelevant

Punjab has never really had a settled political history — even without a helping hand from across the border. The real issue is the minority-majority matrix which the Congress in Punjab is trying desperately, and dangerously, to turn on its head. The temptation to reduce the debate to an Amarinder here or a Badal there reveals a myopic sociological and political vision. The roots of the crisis go deep into an age-old resentment over injustice and discrimination — perceived or real — meted out to the Sikh community by successive Congress regimes. The demolition of Akal Takht, the tragic assassination of a Prime Minister and an even more tragic massacre of thousands of innocent Sikhs — this legacy and our failure to deal with it is what threatens peace, Badal or no Badal.

The Congress knows that the Army operations at Harmandar Sahib and the 1984 massacre are blots impossible to erase. Its strategy is to build a counter-blast: demonise the very voices which keep reminding the Sikhs of this blot — the Akalis in general and jathedar Gurcharan Singh Tohra and Parkash Singh Badal in particular. Tohra is no longer on the scene. Thus, Badal alone must take the full impact of the vicious, ideological Congress counter-attack. The massive anti-Akali blast is turned into a full-throated Badal baiting because nothing destroys a party quicker than the loss or destruction of its most powerful symbol — which Badal is in the present case.

Badal’s moderate temper has stood him in good stead. But it is also costing him dear now. Should he and the Akali governments have fixed their political enemies forever by ordering an effective inquiry into the tragic event of the eighties? An honest inquiry may not have been effective in the face of an entrenched bureaucracy and the police looking towards Delhi for patronage. But the Akalis could have done what Amarinder is doing now: set up a commission, fabricate a report and damn political opponents. Peace be damned.

Diverting attention 

It helps to hide all the failures and unfulfilled promises as a government behind the Behbal Kalan dust. Who bothers about undelivered jobs, unwaived farm loans, unhiked shagun and pension amounts, unbuilt free houses for the poor, when the honour of Guru Granth Sahib is at stake?

 The best time to order such a probe was 1985 — by the Barnala government, immediately after the Punjab Accord, and to a lesser extent in 1997. Former CMs Surjit Singh Barnala and Parkash Singh Badal, besides Gurcharan Singh Tohra, were convinced that this course would achieve nothing more than prolonging ‘confrontationist politics’ and continue the narrative of witch-hunt, and worse, of bloodshed. They opted for what Tohra once described as the ‘Nelson Mandela option’ — conciliation, consensus and closure. 

In retrospect, in purely political terms, such a probe would have been immensely beneficial for the Akalis, especially Badal and Tohra. But both perhaps acted on the hope that Punjab would settle into normalcy based on a larger Punjabi consensus. That such a hope was belied is part of the continuing tragedy of the state. 

Blaming the Akalis for not ordering a probe into the events leading to the tragedy of 1984 is like blaming the prey for the sins of the predator. In the meantime, the Congress tried its own version of ‘closure’ — asking a Sikh Prime Minister to apologise to the Sikhs for the tragedy of the Sikhs!  The negative symbolism of this naive political gesture was lost on none. 

Embers burn...

But now, to keep embers burning, we have to deal with the fallout of the report of a Commission of Inquiry headed by Ranjit Singh, a former judge. The report is all guesses, hints, assumptions, insinuations and pontifications, all directed towards one political goal — the demonisation of the Akalis, especially their tallest leader, Badal.  

Just two things suffice to reveal the political vulgarity implicit in this ‘judicial’ decision. One, Capt Amarinder Singh publicly announced the ‘judgment’ of the commission — long before it was constituted — pronouncing Badal guilty. A judge should have refused to be associated with a case whose judgment had been pronounced by a politician prior to his hearing the case. Second, the terms of reference of the commission, which excluded acts of sacrilege during the Congress government, made it clear that it was only to give a judicial seal to the Congress attempt to declare Badal guilty. 

Even so, the worst thing the commission could come up with against Badal was to find him awake and worried about the Kot Kapura situation. By Ranjit Singh’s own admission, that night, Behbal Kalan was not even the issue nor did it feature in Badal’s conversation. The report admits that it was only about Kot Kapura. And yet, the judge went ahead to quote this very conversation as a basis for his indirect hint that ‘Badal may have known about the firing at Behbal Kalan’.

The judge truthfully documents, and then ignores, the testimony which confirmed that CM Badal wanted the issue ‘to be resolved peacefully without the use of force’! Nowhere does the report say that the CM ordered or approved the police firing. It merely insinuates. But insinuations are enough to serve as a lethal political weapon against Badal.

In the end, the Ranjit Singh report ends up being 182 pages of unrestrained hostility towards Badal. The tragedy of Punjab in the 1980s was scripted around similar minor and innocent ‘blunders’. No one seems to have learnt any lesson. The danger to peace in Punjab can be ignored only through a criminal refusal to heed these lessons.

Show comments
Show comments

Top News

Most Read In 24 Hours