Raj karega Khalsa, aaki rahe na koeye Khawar hoeye sab milenge, bache sharn jo hoeye (The Khalsa shall rule, there shall be no rebels; those who are left out will join, those who take refuge in the Khalsa shall be saved.)
It is with these words that Singhs and Kaurs worldwide have ended their prayers since 1699 when the Khalsa was formed to defend the values the gurus stood for. Spoken by Guru Gobind Singh (the tenth guru), these words, say some Sikh scholars, were intended to boost the community's morale under the tyranny of the Mughals. But the community believed that the Khalsa would rule, and that belief became a reality a hundred years later when Maharaja Ranjit Singh captured Lahore, giving the world the first Sikh Empire—the only one so far.
The belief in the magical promise of the ardas (prayer) continues, especially against the backdrop of the political aspiration of the Sikhs. It gets more deeply entrenched in their hearts, with every new loss, injustice or alienation, like every time the map of Punjab was redrawn. “The community was born out of a struggle that has moulded the psyche. The identity has to be protected at all costs,” says Jagtar Singh, author of Khalistan Struggle: a Non-Movement.
When the identity and growing popularity of the young faith came under attack from the Mughals, who tortured Guru Arjan Dev, the fifth guru, to death, the community got its first martyr. His son Guru Hargobind built the Akal Takht across the Golden Temple. He raised a 12ft-high platform where he conducted affairs of the state, defying Jehangir’s edict that only the emperor could sit on a platform higher than three feet!
The Akal Takht represents the temporal authority of the Sikhs to this day. Even Ranjit Singh was summoned before it—never mind that he was spared the lashes on his back, and had to pay a heavy fine. He had the top three storeys of the Akal Takht built and the dome gilded with gold. These floors are tilted eastward. Sevadars at the Golden Temple tell visitors that this is no flaw but intended to let the world know that the Akal Takht has an eye on Delhi even today.
The Sikh empire was indeed huge, stretching from the Khyber Pass in the west to western Tibet in the east, from Mithankot in the south to Kashmir in the north. The decline of the Sikh empire began soon after Ranjit Singh’s death in 1839. Following the defeat in the Second Anglo-Sikh war in 1849, it disintegrated into small princely states and the British province of Punjab. And the British trimmed it further. The Punjab province was what is today Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Chandigarh, Pakistani Punjab and Islamabad.
Moreover, Christian missionaries began converting Sikhs, and the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj, too, were propagating their philosophies. There was a common perception that Sikhs were part of the Hindu religion. To counter this view, the Singh Sabha movement was born in 1873. The goal was to re-establish the Khalsa prestige, which took a hit with the fall of the Sikh empire, by propagating Sikhism, promoting the Punjabi language and the Gurmukhi script.
But there were diverse views among Sikhs, too. One such took the form of the Nirankari sect. Its founder Baba Dyal Singh felt that the military successes of the Khalsa were distracting them from prayers. He also felt the assimilation of others into Sikhism was bringing in idol worship, shunned by Guru Nanak. The sect further split, with the Sant Nirankari Mission coming into being in 1929. The mission believes in a living guru, which more than ruffled the Khalsa as the Sikhs revere the Granth Sahib as the eternal guru.
Meanwhile, on several occasions, the British offered the Sikhs an autonomous region to rule on their own if they broke ranks with the Indian National Congress and the Hindu majority. The Sikhs rejected it every time. Like Baldev Singh told the press after his visit to London with Jawaharlal Nehru, Lord Mountbatten and Liaqat Ali Khan on May 17, 1947, the Sikhs “have no demands to make on the British except the demand that they should quit India. Whatever political rights and aspirations the Sikhs have, they shall have them satisfied through the goodwill of the Congress and the majority community”.
With partition, Punjab shrunk some more—Guru Nanak’s birthplace, Nankana Sahib, and Kartarpur, where he established the first Sikh commune, both went to Pakistan, as did many other places of religious importance. But the Sikhs, resilient as always, rebuilt their lives in free India. Representatives of the community, however, felt that their need for a distinct identity was not addressed in the constitution draft and refused to sign it. Later, while opposing the Punjab Reorganisation Bill, 1966, Kapur Singh, a retired civil service officer who later became a Shiromani Akali Dal MP, told the Lok Sabha that the Bill had “reduced Punjab to a glorified zila parishad”. Sikhs were scattered in the Una district of Himachal, Terai region of Uttar Pradesh (parts that now constitute Uttarakhand), Sri Ganganagar district of Rajasthan, Karnal and Kurukshetra districts of Haryana and in the Union territory of Chandigarh.
Though some may see it as the spread of the Sikhs throughout north India their collective clout was clearly diluted. In the same speech, Kapur Singh read out a resolution passed by the working committee of the Shiromani Akali Dal, which is even today seen as a ‘Panthic party’ representing Sikh aspirations. The resolution demanded the inclusion of all “Sikh areas deliberately and intentionally cut off” in the new Punjab, so as to bring all contiguous Sikh areas into an administrative unit to be called the Sikh Homeland within the Union of India.
There was a feeling among the Sikhs that India did not protect their religion, and deprived their farms of precious water. Land-locked, Punjab then had neither a port nor an international airport. And, being a border-state, it bore the brunt of Indo-Pak tensions.
It was in such a Punjab that there was a flashpoint in 1978—that too on Baisakhi, when the birth of the Khalsa is celebrated. The Sant Nirankari Mission was holding a convention in Amritsar. And, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who headed the Sikh seminary (Damdami Taksal) a few kilometres out of the holy city threatened to behead the Nirankaris. He and Fauja Singh, who headed another orthodox outfit, led a huge procession to the convention. Fauja Singh was about to behead Nirankari sect chief Gurbachan Singh when he was shot down by his bodyguard. In the melee that followed, 16 people were killed.
And, the idea of a return of Khalsa raj found roots in Bhindranwale's mind. He targeted those he saw as enemies of the Sikhs. Fauja Singh's widow, Bibi Amarjit Kaur, formed the Babbar Khalsa, aimed at creating an independent Sikh country—Khalistan. The Babbar Khalsa became Babbar Khalsa International, and has been designated as an international terrorist organisation. Punjab's bloodiest years had begun.
The violent years were punctuated by the Indian Army’s entry into the Golden Temple to flush out Bhindranwale and his followers in June 1984, the killing of prime minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh guards, retaliatory anti-Sikh riots in the capital and elsewhere, more killings in what then seemed a bottomless pit of misery. The bloodshed and disruption of life took a toll on the community, and left its pride and confidence in shreds.
Slowly and steadily, the community picked itself up, and the political process restarted, thanks to the leadership in Delhi, leaders of all parties in Punjab and the police under supercop K.P.S. Gill. In the post militancy years, both the Shiromani Akali Dal-BJP coalition and the Congress have won elections and formed governments. A few weeks ago, the Shiromani Akali Dal, which once wanted “autonomy like Jammu and Kashmir”, formally supported the Modi government's act of scrapping Article 370.