The long shadow of Amritsar

The history of the Sikhs in independent India is a history involving laughter and tears. On the one hand they were identified with both irrepressible joy and industriousness, qualities converging in the figure of the farmer. Propagandist photographs of the success of Punjab’s “green revolution” necessarily required a picture of a Sikh on a tractor. Alongside such uplifting stereotypes were ruder ones, comprising the well-known “Sardarji” (the Hindi colloquialism for the Sikh) jokes, portraying a dim but well-intentioned personage.

This was an age prior to political correctness and anyway Sikhs were presumed to be big-hearted enough not to mind (Singh — the surname of most male Sikhs — translates as “lion”). If the first two and a half decades of independence in India represent an idyll (granted, an inexorably endangered one), then the Sikhs play an essential role in it of what an idyllic community, even an ideal minority, in a somewhat arbitrarily conceived federal set-up might look like.

The history of tears begins, where the contemporary Sikh is concerned, with the entanglement of Sikh politics in the politics of divide and rule, inherited from the British and given a personal modulation by Indira Gandhi in her urgent quest to subvert the nuisance of parliamentary democracy. Federalism in India as we have seen it since the late 1980s germinated in Punjab in the form of provincial Sikh coalitions, a development Indira felt compelled to unravel in the interests, no doubt, of a strong, secular nation state and herself.

In order to do so, she created Frankenstein’s progeny (she playing Frankenstein) in the Sikh Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who eventually rebelled against his inventor and struck out on his own for a Sikh homeland. Bhindranwale was killed, along with hundreds of Sikh “militants” and Indian soldiers, in the attack on the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984.

The karmic repercussions of divide and rule led to the assassination of Indira by her two Sikh bodyguards; then to the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi by Congress party thugs. The Sardarji jokes evaporated for ever.

That there should be laughter again in that community — that the secessionist movement should have been crushed and contained — could be called miraculous, if that word weren’t so inappropriate to horrifying injustices that still remain unaddressed. Still, Sikhs were, from the 1990s onwards, at the core of the formulation of the “new” free-market, globalised India (an India now already old and rotten), in the domain of both the economy and popular culture — in such figures as the reformist Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, and the bureaucrat Montek Singh Ahluwalia, or in bhangra, the rural-techno efflorescence that gripped the late 1980s.

How exactly the resurgence happened is not clear. There has historically been little truth about the Delhi pogrom and whatever reconciliation took place was a result of resilience and accepting injustice as a permanent state of affairs, rather than due to policy. That the Sikhs bounced back in the 1990s is as relevant to the narrative of India’s evolution as any other story. But it cannot be ascribed to the “miracle” that is India — a miracle that ensures that its nastiness, in the end, just goes away.

The pogrom is hurled back at Congress each time it challenges the credentials of Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate, for presiding over the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

The quasi-farcical question of British involvement in Operation Bluestar (as Mark Tully pointed out, had Special Air Service really been involved, it is likely the destruction would have been achieved with considerable finesse) is secondary to the horror that will not go away.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist and professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.