Letter to Prime Minister of India

Manish Bhatia
Oct 6, 2004
Suprisingly Thoughtful Views of a Jailed Sikh Militant

Recently, I came across a Punjabi letter written by Daljit Singh ’Bittu’, a Khalistani leader currently in jail in Nabha, Punjab. The open letter was published in a small but radical Sikh journal, Shahadaat, published from Ludhiana. The letter was also sent to all the news , and while no one published it other than Shahadaat, some mainstream newspapers did make passing reference to it.

I was suprised by its insightful content, and so I present here an English translation for everyone to consider, and evaluate.

Dr.
Prime Minister of
New ,

Dear Dr. Singh,

We congratulate you for achieving a new pinnacle in your already distinguished . With immense we welcome the news of your appointment as Prime Minister of . We are sanguine foremost because of your competence and integrity, and only secondarily because you are a Sikh.

With your remarkable appointment as the Prime Minister of , we are hopeful that will be more faithful to the rule of . We noted with that one of your first public statements was that you will not allow grisly events such as 1984 and to happen again. It was heartening to hear you acknowledge that the judicial process in had been subverted, and that you would ensure that prevails.

Your decision (assuming it was yours) however, to induct Jagdish Tytler into the cabinet did give us pause. We are particularly surprised since you had implied parallels between the violence in in 1984 and in in 2002. In both cases were targeted. In both cases the was complicit. In both cases local politicians encouraged violence. And in both cases the politicians managed to subvert the judicial process. You promise that in this subversion will not be permitted. Isn’t it possible that similar subversion happened in ?

Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar and all others have successfully beaten the rap using the same tools that were used by politicians in . Intimidation and coercion of witnesses, political pressure on the judiciary and the prosecutors, and most importantly friends in high places led to the same travesty of in as it did in .

We realize that unfortunately political expediency can often coerce compromise even from the most ethical person. Perhaps you would at least consider personally visiting the widows of the pogroms. Since you are a sensitive person, you can imagine the humiliation of those ladies who know that the men responsible for the rapes and murders of their members now roam the streets of their neighborhoods with impunity.

In our view playing the role of victims does not reconcile with Sikh ethos, and we certainly don’t plan to exploit the suffering of Sikhs for ignoble political gains. We don’t seek rhetorical apologies for what the Indian state did in June and November of 1984. Prime Ministers Dev Gowda, Inder Gujral and Atal Bihari have all expressed regret in various tones about what happened in 1984. These statements of regret mean little to us. We trust you are too sincere a person to oblige the self-serving politicians of Punjab with another condescending apology.

Instead of rhetoric we suggest that you consider actions, which would be far more meaningful. Punjab has been bankrupted by corrupt politicians, a dishonest and oversized bureaucracy, a dysfunctional educational system, an agricultural that has seen limited growth in many years, and an extraordinarily high debt burden on the farmers. We ask you to form and fund a task force staffed not by bureaucrats or politicians, but forward-thinking academics, intellectuals, industrialists, farmers and businessmen from Punjab and around the world, to present concrete proposals within six months for economic in Punjab. We would expect that such a task force would leverage existing credible work, such as the Johl Committee report. If our additional input is sought, we can offer both concrete suggestions and potential participants for such an effort.

We ask you to seriously consider opening the border with . This one act may not be a panacea for Punjab’s ills, but it may have the favorable consequence of opening up new routes and providing Punjabi farmers (on both sides of the border) new markets for their produce. An economist of your stature does not need us to enumerate the potential benefits of such a bold move.

Thirdly, we suggest that you consider a radical solution to the intractable political problems of the sub-continent. The sub-continent was a diverse mosaic of many nations, tribes, cultures, languages, religions, and peoples. Colonial powers methodically leveraged and manipulated this for their own commercial ends. When these diverse groups banded together to resist colonialism, the British carelessly abandoned the sub-continent. A territory that had taken some 150 years to unite into British was disbanded in a matter of a few years.

As British crumbled, the English executed short-sighted and hasty policies that not only caused cataclysmic violence in , but also have continued to cause turmoil in the sub-continent. Aside from conflict between the nations of the sub-continent, much of the conflict within these nations—the Mohajirs in , the Sikhs in , the Chakmas in , the Tamils in and , the Brahmins in Bhutan, the Hindus in , the Gorkhas in , the Maosts in , to name only a few of the “thousand mutinies” as V.S. Naipaul might call them—can be fairly attributed as a legacy of colonialism.

We submit that a radical re-think that involves all the diverse people of the sub-continent is required because their fates are interconnected. It is premature to suggest what the outcome of such a dialogue would be, but what might emerge is a Sub-Continental Union (SU).

The SU would be similar to the Union (EU) in some ways, but also different in that the SU would not merely transplant and Western ideas without ensuring their relevance to the unique historicity and culture of the sub-continent. Should such a Sub-Continental Union preserve the of self-determination for the many nations and peoples of the sub-continent, we are confident that such a political structure would truly allow the people of the sub-continent to finally bask in the “glow of freedom,” economic, religious, social and political.

In conclusion, since the Shiromani Khalsa Dal was only recently constituted, allow us to introduce ourselves. We represent that segment of Sikhs and Punjabis that was disillusioned with , and after 1984 turned decidedly unfriendly towards her. We respect your intellect too much to reiterate ’s sordid history of Hindisation and Hinduisation, apropos neologisms for the homogenization of the once splendid of cultures, languages, tribes and traditions extant on the sub-continent before . Nor will we dwell on the crescendo of violence visited upon the Sikhs that reached a gruesome climax in 1984, followed by a decade of extra-judicial killings that even the Supreme Court of was compelled to deem “genocide.”

Suffice it to say that we speak for those who were forced to resist state violence by all means necessary after the Indian state granted impunity to those who kill Sikhs. No many rogues and thugs exploited this conflict to add to Punjab’s horror, but that is the nature of violence. Unbridled violence, especially by the state, always has macabre consequences.

An enduring legacy of that violence is not only scores of devastated homes in Punjab, but also many young Sikhs in jails, and some even awaiting in Indian . remains one of the few countries in the world that chooses to kill an incarcerated human being. In this regard perhaps you will consider Maharaja Ranjit Singh as a role model for he is reputed to have abolished the penalty in his kingdom.

As Sikhs committed to our Guru’s traditions we genuinely seek harmony and are committed to the Sikh principle of persevering to resolve issues peacefully. After twenty years of , during which we have lost many brothers and sisters to fake and real encounters with the Indian state, we once again endeavor to pursue our objectives through peaceful means, as the Sikhs did in the three decades before 1978.

We look forward to hearing from you, and continuing a thoughtful and courageous dialogue. We also beseech the Tenth Nanak, the Rider of the Blue Steed, to grant you courage, wisdom and as you provide leadership to , Punjab and we to the entire sub-continent.

Sincerely,

Daljit Singh