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Truth and reconciliation

Last year, around this time, a convicted rapist and a murderer, Gurmeet Ram Rahim, managed to get about 36 of his own followers killed to prove his clout.

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Rajesh Ramachandran

Last year, around this time, a convicted rapist and a murderer, Gurmeet Ram Rahim, managed to get about 36 of his own followers killed to prove his clout. Recently, a bishop brought in busloads of his flock of faithful sheep to show his strength when he was getting questioned in a rape case. We, as a society, are so blind, ignorant and greedy that any felon could get a few truckloads of supporters to defend him. Religious and social organisations have copied the depraved politicians so well that the charlatans have all become one indistinguishable vile whole. What fuels these tricksters is money. The pro-Khalistan sloganeers among the Punjabi diaspora are no different. When a poor Punjabi is offered asylum in the name of religious persecution, he is forever obliged to shout the slogans of those who made him a citizen of the first world. The logic is so simple and compelling that the Khalistan 2020 rally in London was merely a rerun of many things past.

Why just blame the asylum-seeker? Even a well-heeled columnist while seeking foreign hospitality recently snarled at The Tribune for this very same reason. The Tribune has been taking on foreign governments in its editorials and news pages for supporting, sponsoring and sheltering religious secessionists. So, like one of those faithful in the bus (business class for sure), this columnist too shouted slogans against The Tribune. Ideally, such people ought to be writing for The Civil and Military Gazette (the pro-British newspaper which was The Tribune’s competitor in Lahore) or its contemporary Internet versions. The Khalistan agenda is not an issue of freedom of speech as the UK government recently tried to make out. The Khalistan religious secessionist movement has claimed the lives of a Prime Minister, a Chief Minister and thousands of innocent Punjabis, mostly Sikhs. So, a Khalistani flag symbolises two decades of terror, deprivation and death. And that was unfurled early this month at Trafalgar Square because the UK government seems to be completely unaware of all those years of murder and mayhem in Punjab and thought it was the secessionists’ right to “gather together and demonstrate their views, provided that they do so within the law”.

Whose law? The imperial law obviously, which did not apply to the colonies. The religious secessionist militancy is truly dead and buried in Punjab. All the attempts to revive it are only being made abroad, primarily in Canada and the UK. In fact, the religious fanatics seeking a separate Islamic state of Kashmir, too, made common cause with the Khalistanis in London. Well, the British policy on J&K was explicit from the days of the initial trouble in October 1947. “It would have been natural for Kashmir to eventually accede to Pakistan on agreed terms,” Narendra Singh Sarila quotes the then British secretary of state for Commonwealth relations in his brilliantly researched book, The Shadow of the Great Game.

The creation of Pakistan, this former ADC to the last Viceroy Mountbatten argues quoting chiefs of staff, was a British strategic requirement. General Leslie Hollis even predicted an India-Pak war as early as May 1947: “Our link with Pakistan might have a stabilising effect on India as a whole, since an attack by Hindustan on Pakistan would involve Hindustan in war, not with Pakistan alone, but also with the British Commonwealth.” The Partition was done not out of love for Jinnah but for strategic facilities like the Karachi port and the north western air bases. The Muslim League was routed in the 1937 elections, winning just 108 out of the 408 seats reserved for Muslims. Even the North West Frontier Province, with 95 per cent Muslims, had overwhelmingly voted for the Congress, thus proving beyond doubt that the separate electorates did not automatically endorse the two-nation theory. Yet, the British nourished and nurtured Jinnah to the eventual strategic objective of India’s Partition. General Hollis had explained it plainly: “Quite apart from the positive arguments in favour of this course we would draw your attention to the sorry result of refusing an application by Mr Jinnah — which would, in effect, amount to ejecting a numerous and loyal people from the British Commonwealth. We should probably have lost all chances of ever getting strategic facilities anywhere in India (the subcontinent); we should have shattered our reputation in the rest of the Muslim world and could not look for the continued cooperation of Middle Eastern countries. From the military point of view such results would be extremely bad.”

It was the British military goal of containing a rising Soviet Union and manipulating the oil-rich Muslim world that led to the holocaust and the forced migration of millions of people. But why should the UK host the Khalistan 2020 meet now, particularly when the Indian agencies are shouting from the rooftop that they have proof of ISI involvement in the entire enterprise? Now that Pakistan and China are staunch allies and Russia is supplying hardware and training the Pakistanis, does it really serve the Anglo-Saxon purpose to keep mutilating the Indian soul? The assault on the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee head in the US and the heckling of Congress president Rahul Gandhi in the UK by Khalistanis are proof of the hospitality offered to them.

No people have loved their old colonisers as much as Indians. Our national movement was a strange combination of admiration for colonial institutions like the judiciary and hatred for foreign rule. Shakespeare is more important for us than Bhasa. But as a society we need to rethink whether it is a good idea to invest in countries that promote religious secessionism in India. You can always get a few people in your bus to call us names, but that only underscores our integrity.

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