ILLUSTRATION 

1. Sikh prisoner abused by police

2. Portraits of Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh

3. Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale

4. Painting of the Golden Temple Complex after operation Blue star

5. Map of Punjab

6. Women weeping after Delhi “riots”

7. Indian security forces at Amritsar

8. “Five Beloved Ones”

9. Dead Sikh Youth

10. The aftermath of a bomb blast

11. An amrithdhari woman

12. Demonstratoin in Washington, D.C

13. Child as solider

PREFACE

This book is the result of a difficult project that could not have been undertaken without the guidance, generosity, tolerance and trust of a great many people. First to be mentioned must be the Khalistani Sikh community, whose members put themselves at risk by welcoming an inquisitive stranger. The hospitality of countless 51kb households and gurudwaras made the interviews on which this research is based possible, and many individuals spent hours and days away from their homes and their work to answer my endless questions. In particular, I appreciate the grace with which militant Sikhs have greeted my disagreements with them and encouraged me to put these divergent opinions in speeches and writings. This generosity of spirit and sense of respect for difference will be, I hope, the enduring cornerstone of the Sikh community.

With regard to the Sikhs, I want to make a few things perfectly clear at the outset, though they will be made clear throughout the book as well. First, the Khalistani militants form a very small subset of the Sikh community as a whole. This book is not about “the Sikhs J It is about the militants. Any attempt to treat what is written here as a generalization about Sikhs in general would be highly misguided, and I would condemn it wholeheartedly. The book is not even about all of those Sikhs who support the idea of an independent homeland; it focuses specifically on those who have taken up arms in order to achieve it and on the communities that support them.

Three years of intermittent fieldwork with expatriate Sikhs in ten North American cities forms the basis for this book, which are both an oral history of the militant movement and a dialogical ethnography of a cultural community. Some of the people with whom I worked are permanent residents or citizens of the United States or Canada, others are here as recent refugees, and still others live outside of North America but met me in various locations for the purpose of recording their narratives. The tapes on which they were recorded have been destroyed, and for the protection of my interlocutors no record of names, places, or other identifying information has been preserved.

The photographs in this book require special comment. Some of them I took myself and publish here with the full consent of the people portrayed. Others however are part of a collection of photos that circulate-around the human rights and Khalistani communities. A few were taken t out of Punjab under difficult conditions and have been reprinted many times, which accounts for their poor quality. The inherent drama of their subject matter, I believe, more than compensates for their technical deficiencies. I chose not to enhance them in anyway.

Though I cross-checked most of what was told to me with other sources, I cannot vouch for the veracity or accuracy of every episode reported to me by Sikh militants. There will obviously be divergent accounts of many of these, particularly from their enemies. The portrait of militancy in this book is therefore not an “objective” or “balanced” description of the Punjab conflict. It is a glimpse into the world of Sikh militants as I have experienced it. I will welcome the broader contextualization of this work by other scholars.

Finally, let me be entirely forthright about my own political stance I here, about which readers may be rightfully curious. I am not a supporter of Khalistan. I think the Sikh militants have some serious grievances with the state of India. I abhor many of the methods militants have chosen to address them. Since I am not a Sikh, nor a Punjabi, nor an Indian, I don’t have

4

a “position” on the question of Khalistan, and I feel that the idea of what Khalistan would be is unclear enough at this point to make taking such a position inadvisable in any case. I don’t think the militants are crazy or evil, however; I don’t think India has seen the last of Sikh separatism; and I think that the best way to understand why militants fight is to talk with them about it. I think that the only way to prevent outbreaks of violence such as Punjab has witnessed over the past fifteen years or so is to ensure human rights and freedoms, including attention to the principle of self-determination. These are my political views, in short.

Not all scholars are comfortable with highly sensitive topics such as this one, and some of them are my close colleagues. I therefore thank members of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maine for their tolerance of this work, and I particularly value the guidance and support of Henry Munson throughout the project. Steve Bicknell worked on the illustrations, and Kris Sobolik was a constant source of encouragement.

A wide circle of anthropologists who are pioneering the ethnographic study of conflict provided necessary intellectual and moral support. Jeff Sluka, Carolyn Nordstrom, Tony Robben, and Kevin Avruch have been particularly helpful. The courage and insight of Joyce Pettigrew continues to be a major source of inspiration, and her comments and criticisms my work have been indispensable. Mark Juergensmeyer, Peter van der Veer, Al Wolfe, and Paul Wallace also read the manuscript of this book and offered excellent suggestions for revision. Bertrand Masquelier was a source of encouragement and support not only during this project but over the past fifteen years.

Finally, I must comment on Patricia Smith of the University of Pennsylvania Press, who supported this book from the start and persisted through various ups and downs to ensure its realization. I consider her a colleague-an “intellectual comrade”-as well as an editor. Others at the Press contributed substantially to this project, and I thank them for their energy and effort.

None of these individuals, however, bears any responsibility for the final form taken by this book. Mistakes and indiscretions, and certainly all opinions, are entirely my own.

As for my husband Khalid, no one else could have been as steadfast in support of a highly problematic research project, as reliable in keeping confidences, and as acute in political judgment.

My daughter Naintara cheered me up when too much thought of conflict got me down, and with her sunny presence reminded me daily of why we have to figure out a way to live without violence.

OF NIGHTMARES AND CONTACTS

Last Night I was awakened by a nightmare, the same recurring dream I have suffering for the past year or so. I was in Cambodia, a Cambodia I know only through TV images of Vietnam War vintage. It was hot, humid; the air was heavy with tropical smells but vibrating with danger. I was climbing a long stone stairway in a kind of tower, looking down through crumbling windows at a busy marketplace below. People carrying baskets of fruit on their heads; bald-headed monks begging for alms. Suddenly, I heard shots, the rat-tat-tat of automatic weapons fire, and men in camouflage suits started running here and there in the crowd. I stood on the steps, frozen in fear and horror. People in the marketplace were screaming and falling down, but I was too far away to see blood. Gathering my wits about me, I ran, breathless, out of the tower and away from the market square. After running for some time, I looked back to see the entire area blow up in a sudden inferno of flame. I fell to the ground and woke up, bolt upright, in a cold sweat.

The story of my research on Sikh militancy is also a story about my personal confrontation with violence. To mask it here as more neutral, more distanced than it is would be to deny the nights of terror, displaced to another, safer, venue, that I experienced off and on since I began this project. And to write about Sikh militants as if I had not become personally, existentially entangled with them and their quest would be an inexcusable hypocrisy. As a scholar, I know what it means to look for all sides of a question, to be critical of sources, to be “objective.” As an anthropologist, I am familiar with the peculiar inside-outside stance of the ethnographer, which allows glimpses into other realities while retaining a quintessentially Western academic outlook. In trying to understand what militant Sikhs are doing, however, I find that the anthropology of another era is also useful, not the anthropology claiming to be science but the one that sees the confrontation of ‘man with man” in all his naked mystery as the heart of the anthropological enterprise Like many anthropologists of my generation, I find myself questioning some of the basic axioms of my field, which, however stimulating intellectually, seem somehow inadequate to the task of understanding real human beings.

Immanuel Kant, a forgotten ancestor of contemporary anthropology, took the traditional ‘What is man?” question to be the heart of what an academic discipline of anthropology should be. But for Kant this question subsumed three subsidiary issues that have been largely ignored: “What can I know?” “What ought I to do?” and “What may I hope?” It is this last query in particular that is rather jarringly out of place in the modern academic climate, though Edward Burnett Tylor, too, author of our classic 1871 definition of culture, emphasized not only the “habits” of human beings but their “capabilities” as well.1 Is it not part of the anthropologists enterprise to ask what heights humans are capable of reaching? Our discipline’s insistence on the value of the everyday, so important in countering neglect of the ordinary in other areas of scholarship, also has the effect of somewhat eclipsing the reality of the out-of-the ordinary, the truly heroic, in human endeavor. Taken as a whole, the picture painted of humankind by the collections of ethnographic literature many of us have on our bookshelves is sadly inadequate. True, most human beings live quotidian, habituated, ordinary lives most of the time. But what about when they don’t? What are people capable of when the everyday is disrupted by famine, by war or pestilence, when they are

6

called upon to do more than fetch water and grow crops and make love and rear children, to be more than “just human?” Our literature doesn’t contain many portraits of people in extraordinary, rather than ordinary, circumstances.

Sikh militants in the northwestern state of Punjab in India have been engaged in an armed insurgency for the past decade and a half. Their ultimate aim is the formation of a sovereign nation of Khalistan, “land of the pure.” It is not clear what percentage these militants and their supporters form of the total Sikh population; there are many others who would like to see an independent nation emerge but reject violence as a means of achieving it, and still others who are firmly loyal to India and reject the Khalistani ideology outright. Conditions in Punjab have been so disrupted by violence on the part of both the militants and the government forces arrayed against them, and the exchange of ideas has been so severely curtailed by various forms of censorship, that assessing accurately what the people there really want is probably impossible. What is clear is that tens of thousands of people-militants, government troops, and bystanders-have been killed in the past fifteen years or so of the conflict.2 This level of violence is equivalent to that of many of the so-called “low intensity conflicts” that dot the global landscape today (compare for example, the 3,000-odd casualities of the Northern Ireland conflict) and places most members of the Sikh community in what we night well call “extraordinary” circumstances. Certainly the Khalistani militants, now scattered in exile across several continents, live their lives at an emotional pitch far from the everyday reality of most of the people we know and study.

Anybody who has thought about whether the Nicaraguan contras were “freedom fighters” or “counter-revolutionaries” or whether the PLO is “terrorist” or “nationalist” organization will recognize the element of relativism that comes into any serious discussion of political conflicts like die one in Punjab. Unfortunately, the rather obvious fact that things look different from the inside of one of these groups than from the outside has been lost on many people involved in policymaking and negotiation, who tend to underestimate the radical differences in world view that obtain between the U.S. State Department, for example, and militant Islamists intent on blowing up the World Trade Center. The fact is, we don’t know enough about how the latter think to effectively talk with them. We can’t easily imagine what the world looks like from extraordinary viewpoints. And ethnographies of village life in Egypt, however important in themselves, don’t enlighten us much about World Trade Center bombers.

There is a growing feeling among younger anthropologists that our discipline has suffered a not entirely unwarranted marginalization over be past few decades. Even as the methods and language of ethnography are being taken up by colleagues in fields as diverse as political science and English literature, and even as “cultural studies” usurps anthropology’s primary concept of culture, the discipline itself cannot be said to he a central voice on the current intellectual scene. It is particularly worrisome that anthropologists are called on as infrequently as they are in the policy arena, which depends on accurate information about and assessment of actors whose worldviews may be wildly different from our own. In a culturally plural world, those whose calling is translation across cultural divides have a critical role to play.

Anthropologists, professionally oriented to recognize the kind of radical otherness represented by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and his band, are in an especially good position to explore the nature of the extraordinary cultures that emerge in conditions of conflict. We are habituated to the situation of listening to people with judgment suspended, whether they be Philippine headhunters (Renato Rosaldo, Ilongot Head-hunting) or impoverished mothers

7

in Brazil (Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping). That anthropological “translation” occasionally comes across as exoneration is a Particular problem when we are dea1ing with political violence, a subject far nearer to most readers than the traditionally exotic subject matter of classic ethnography. A scholar who chooses to study the culture of a street gang or a guerilla army will certainly find herself a more difficult ethical and methodological predicament than scholar who studies kinship patterns in highland New But, convinced that Street gangs and guerilla armies are at least in sonic sense “cultures” amenable to the same kind of ethnographic exploration anthropologists have pursued in the jungles of Africa or the outback of Australia, more and more scholars have turned to the study I localities of violence as One important way in which anthropology can make a constitution to the public discourse of our times.

MEETING SIKHS

My interaction with Khalistani Sikhs began at a South Asian restaurant in Berkeley in November 1992. A friend somewhat involved in the Kashmir issue knew that I had written about the problems that various communities in India faced and asked whether I would like to meet some Khalistani activists from the Bay Area. I agreed, albeit hesitantly, and mulled over and Over again in my mind whether I really wanted to meet people associated with a major guerilla insurgency in a foreign country. I had just returned from India the previous spring, whet-c I had become embroiled in a debate about the fate of tribal peoples in Bihar, entangled in that state’s notoriously contorted politics (which includes academic politics), and at the end, physically assaulted by a street gang in Patna. As it was, I wondered whether I had any future research career in India. To study Khalistani Sikhs, known to be among the most violent of the many groups today challenging Indian state authority, would mean perhaps relinquishing further hopes of extended visits to India. Scholars I worked with in Patna virtually forbade me to pursue ‘the Punjab problem” further. The topic is extremely volatile, and despite a strong commitment to academic freedom in India, a fair amount of self-censorship goes on all the time, particularly in peripheral locations.

Nevertheless, I went to the Berkeley dinner, inspired in part by Carolyn Nordstrom’s session on “Dangerous Anthropologies” at the American Anthropological Association meetings then being held in San Francisco. I was not the only anthropologist to find that the study of culture leads, in today’s world, to the study of politics, and, in many cases, to the study of violent conflict, With both trepidation and overwhelming curiosity, I met three Sikhs at the office of our common friend and we went on to a local South Asian restaurant.

Over vegetarian curries we talked about India, Sikhism, and conflict they were noncommittal; I was curious. Of the three Sikhs present, one had short hair and a trimmed beard, and the other two sported classic flowing beards and saffron turbans. One of the turbaned Sikhs was obviously the spokesperson, while the other -as silent. The silent one had dark, clear eyes that never left my face. I was very conscious of his gaze as I talked with the

others.

Rightly suspicious, these three Sikhs, whose position in “the movement” I didn’t know at the time, asked more questions than they answered. But what they did say struck me as remarkably open; they were not a bit furtive or evasive in talking about Khalistan and seemed to speak from heartfelt feelings rather than from ideology. They asked me about my family background; I told them about my father, who was a labor activist and a pacifist. They asked about my research on Buddhism; I told them about the ancient Buddhists and how I believed their movement to have been social and political as well as religious, putting them in a

8

dangerous position vis-a-vis the powerholders at the time. I told them about my recent trip to India in which I became convinced that the rights of tribal peoples, now involved in their own insurgencies, were being severely abused-sometimes with the complicity of academics. The Sikhs listened intently. When we were through with our meal, they all shook my hand warmly, and the solemn one grasped my hand in both of his.

My- second contact with Khalistani Sikhs took place about eight months after that Berkeley dinner. Letter and phone conversations with Dr. Amarjit Singh, the vocal one at the restaurant, resulted in my flying out to the West Coast again. Amarjit and another gentleman took me to the San Pedro detention facility in Los Angeles harbor, where several dozen Sikhs were imprisoned for immigration offenses. That was the first of a series of encounters with Sikhs, varying in content and form but always quite intense, that forms the basis of this book. Over the course of the next three years, I interviewed dozens of militants at length, stayed in the homes of militant families, spoke in Sikh gurudwaras (temples) and attended Sikh conventions. That first trip to San Pedro nonetheless remains crystal clear in my mind, for it was then that I really committed to the idea of writing a book about Sikh militancy.

As the gates of the jail clanged behind us, I realized that I had never actually been in a prison before, although I had seen so many in movies that the scene felt not at all strange. After the two Sikhs with me deposited that daggers at the entryway (all orthodox Sikhs carry swords of some form with them at all times), we proceeded upstairs to a large room that had been set aside for Sikh religious services. Amarjit and the other gentleman with us had agreed to conduct prayers for the inmates, providing a neat excuse for our access to the prison. Slowly the Sikh prisoners filed into the room, their regulation orange uniforms incongruously matching the scraps of saffron cloth, sacred to Sikhism, pinned or tied in their hair. They were barefooted, and left tracks on the dusty linoleum. As each passed us, he gave the traditional gesture of respect and greeting, palms together in front of the chest, or bowed down quickly to try to touch the fee of Amarjit. Lie seemed embarrassed by this gesture, and discouraged it. I later learned why the men were showing him this honor, however: Amarjit, among the first Sikhs I met, was spokesperson for a committee that plays a leading role in the Khalistani insurgency. Though his own role is purely political, it quickly became clear to me that he was respected by many Sikhs involved in both militant and non-militant sides of the struggle.3

The men, some quite young, boys, really, gathered in one corner of the room and sat cross-legged on the floor, Before I knew what was happening, I was in front of them, standing by as the other Sikh led them in the recitation of verses from the Sikh scriptures. When they stopped, Amarjit started explaining who I was.

“Why don’t you say a few words?” he suggested.

Totally unprepared for this, I was, not surprisingly, hesitant. The men with dark hair, dark beards, dark eyes, and all those orange uniforms, sat expectantly-respectful but wary. One or two looked quite dazed. I glanced out the window and saw an exercise yard and barbed-wire fencing beyond. Again, the ridiculous memory of TV movies crossed my mind. Television encourages a kind of game-playing mentality, I believe, especially in the realm of violence that many of us suburbanites have never really experienced in any other form. But this was not a game. I remembered my own minimal experience with violence-the assault in Bihar, a rape in New Orleans-and this brought me back to the grim reality of the people before me. There was nothing exciting about their situation. There was no music, as one Vietnam vet commented about buildings blowing up in the non-cinematic real world.

9

I caught the eye of one young fellow at the back, and his mouth crinkled very faintly at the corners in a wisp of a smile. Taking that as encouragement, I thought of what I could say. I knew that many Sikhs have suffered in the counterinsurgency that has swept Punjab in the past twelve years, and I decided to try to establish a link with these prisoners through the natural sympathy one feels for victims of repression. Some of them might well have also been on the trigger end of acts of terrible violence, but I knew that if I highlighted that possibility in my mind a wall between me and them would rise up quickly to block out our human bond.

I knew that I couldn’t be afraid of them, or I would never manage to understand what they were doing. So I decided to insinuate myself into their world gently, getting to know them first as sufferers, only later as fighters. I now find that though I disagree with and condemn many of their actions, I ant never paralyzed by the amorphous sense of fear that-rulers most of our discussions about “terrorism.” If only militant Sikhs were monsters, psychopaths, criminals, or “evil men” (Khushwant Singh’s term4), it would be easy. But they’re not, and my hope is that bringing out the world of Sikh militancy in human terms here will make clear the real problem of conflict resolution: that both sides are populated by human beings, in most cases behaving as decently as they know how in immensely difficult circumstances.

“I know that many of you have been through great ordeals,” I started, slowly. I didn’t know what to say, and the enormous chasm between signing Amnesty International letters and facing the victims of human rights abuses eye to eye suddenly yawned before me. I knew

J was inadequate to the task of saying anything meaningful to people who had probably been tortured, maybe raped, certainly humiliated and harassed before they fled India.

“Nobody knows what is happening to the people of Punjab,” I continued. “I know just a little bit about it, enough to know that your stories ire worth hearing and worth retelling. I want to hear them from you, if you will allow me to. I want to write a book about Punjab and tell them to other people as well.”

I went on in this vein. I no longer remember just what it was that I was saying, but I do remember with acute clarity the expressions on the faces of my audience. As a teacher, I am used to paying attention to how my audience is reacting, hut I think I never scanned the faces of the crowd more earnestly than during those initial moments at San Pedro, Many of hem remained totally blank throughout my talk. When I was through some of the men stayed where they were but others came up to greet me.

“1 didn’t know what to say,” I confided apologetically to Amarjit.

“It’s all right,” he said, “They were listening not to your words but to your heart. They can hear that you are sincere.”

Sincere. This was a word I was to hear many times over the next few years, for sincerity, authenticity, being who one says one is, is a trait especially valued by Sikhs. Conversely, insincerity, duplicity, or failure to live up to what one should be is the greatest sin. “He’s not sincere,” can be a scathing insult; “He is sincere,” a compliment applied even to enemies.

Amarjit and I sat down at a long table and one of the prisoners, an older man with gray in his beard, sat down across from us. He was thin; bones stood out everywhere.

“I used to be a farmer,” he said. “My family was farming for many generations. We are simple people without much education, but we work hard.” He glanced at lie to see I imagined, whether not being educated might affect my estimation of him.

10

“My family was simple too,” I said. “They left Germany when they-couldn’t practice their religion the way they wanted to, and came to Pennsylvania to farm. I was the first member of my family to go to college.”

At this gesture of empathy, he seemed to relax. He then told a story that I came to see as typical: the Indian army’s attack on the holiest shrine of the Sikhs in 1984 prompting a renewed identification with the faith: a relative who got involved in the militant resistance; repeated harassments and finally arrest at the hands of Punjab police. I didn’t know how to ask about torture but I had read enough human rights reports to he aware of how frequent it was in that part of the world.

“Would it be all right if I ask him about torture?” I asked Amarjit. He nodded. But I hesitated, looking for words, and Amarjit finally jumped in for me.

“Were you abused while in police custody?” he asked. “The Doctor [an honorary reference to me] would like to hear about those experiences so she can put them in her hook.”

I got ready to write down what he said in my notebook, but at the same time recognized an certain inhumanity in the mere gesture of picking up my pen. I put it down again and shoved my notebook to one side.

“First I was stripped naked,” the man recounted. “The police officers started shouting questions at me, in very insulting ways,” he said. “They were quite drunk.”

“Were they Hindu or Sikh?” I inquired.

“Sikh,” he responded, bringing out one of the features of the Punjab problem too easily skimmed over by media centered on “communal” (interrelations) conflict.

“One of them started hitting me, and he hit me again and again. He started beating me with a lathi [night stick]. After a while when I didn’t say anything they hung me up by the arms, like this.” He demonstrated a position I would later know as “the airplane,” arms pulled up behind to put the strain on the shoulder girdle. In some cases the feet were weighted to pull on the joints even further.

“I got electric shocks on my head and on my private parts. I told them I didn’t have any information, I didn’t know anything, but they kept on shocking me and abusing me with that stick.”

Amarjit said quietly by my side, “Sometimes they are abused anally too, but they won’t talk about it.” Amarjit had a medical background, and found it easier than other Sikhs to talk about anatomy. I nodded in response to his comment, banishing the image conjured up by it, and listened as our interlocutor continued.

“After that they took me down from there and threw me in a cell. There were two other guys there, but no toilet or any thing. Just a bucket the corner and it was overflowing. One of the guys was badly bruised and he was moaning and groaning, lying on the wet floor. We kept trying to tub his legs. He was in a lot of pain.

‘That night we three prayed for hours. We didn’t sleep. We just prayed and prayed.” “Did you think that you might not survive?” I asked.

11

“No one knows whether they will live or die when they are picked up 1w police. I put my trust in Waheguru [God].

He cleared his throat. “Next day, I was taken out again and more of the same was done. More the next day. Then they made me sit on the floor and put the roller on me.”

I later learned what “the roller” was. A heavy wooden cylinder is rolled across the thighs of a prisoner, weighted by people standing on both ends, to crush and tear the muscles of the upper leg. Months after this interview, I was able to see the results of “the roller” on the legs of one Sikh unembarrassed enough to show me. That one also had burns from a hot iron staggered up and down his back and chest.

“What were you thinking as you were being tortured? Can you tell me what was going through your mind?” I asked, indelicately.

“Nothing. My mind was empty. When I thought of something I only thought to say the name of my God, Waheguru.”

Again, I later learned how common it was for people under torture to lose all sense of their surroundings, and literally, their wits. Elaine Scarry, who wrote an intriguing book about torture and war called The Body in Pain, pointed out that this fact of radical narrowing of one’s world while in extreme pain calls into question the alleged aim of torture, namely, to get information. Even when people do have information to give, they typically lose track of it utterly in the torture situation. The goal of torture therefore must b understood in terms other than the mere acquisition of knowledge, despite the common claim of torturers the world over that that is why they torture.5

“After several days of this treatment some people of my village managed to gather up some money and they demanded my release. I got out and then decided to leave India. But I came to the United States without proper papers and now I am in jail.”

“How long have you been here?” I asked. “Four months:”

“Are you being treated all right?” I queried.

‘Yes, but…”Suddenly this gaunt survivor was looking away from me, his face contorted with emotion. I hardly dared to ask, but I did.

“What is it?”

“My wife . . . I was. . . since I have been here I got a letter, she . . was taken into custody..”

He couldn’t go on. I saw water filling his eyes, and he turned away.

‘Your wife was dishonored? asked Amarjit. It’s a euphemism for rape. He nodded, and I watched a tear drop onto his beard. I didn’t know whether it was appropriate or not, but I reached across the table and put my hand on his ann. He didn’t move it away.

12

Later I would sit through many sessions like this, see many eyes full of tears. Amarjit, however hardened to the realities of what he sees as a guerilla war, became watery quite often. He has a peculiar gesture of swiping at the corners of his eyes with one finger, which he does surreptitiously, as if no one notices. But I do, and seeing that raw emotionalism in a man at the forefront of a major separatist movement always prompts me to recognize anew the complexity of trying to write effectively about people involved in conflict.

I heard tale after tale of atrocities suffered by Sikhs during the course of my research, some of which I share in these pages. Reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are also replete with them.6 The texts alone, however, in their understated neutrality, do not show one very critical aspect of the Sikh experience of abuse: that is that physical insults, no matter how horrific, are not as agonizing as attacks on one’s dignity. The really hurtful things involve the humiliation of women, the indignity of anal and genital torture, the slurs on the Sikh faith represented by tearing off turbans and cutting hair (kept long by Sikhs as a’ crucial religious symbol). At one point I was sitting with some Sikhs looking through an album of photos that had been smuggled out of Punjab at great cost. One page was worse than the next for sheer blood and gore. The picture that really caught my attention, however, showed a Sikh man with turban removed, hair flying, crouching in abject fear as an Indian police officer, with an expression of supreme disdain, prepared to slap him. I kept returning to this photo. Sikhs around me who noticed my response said that I must have been a Sikh in a previous life to recognize this particular scene as a particularly and uniquely horrifying one.

Eventually, I did make contact with people who had not only suffered but fought back. Although some individuals declined to talk with me or talked only in highly guarded terms, others were, after a time, willing to tell me their stories. I was actually surprised at the cooperation I received from people involved in the guerilla struggle. Why should they take the risk? Why trust me? What did they have to go on, other than my “sincerity?”

Sincerity, however, may be enough, or at least as good as any other criterion one might apply in a situation like this one. Jeff Sluka, who studies the IRA and other paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, says frankly that friendships are among the most important factors in conducting research in arenas of conflict. (Sluka’s articles on “Participant Observation in Violent Social Contexts” and “Reflections on Managing Danger in Fieldwork’ are the clearest guidance available for those interested in this kind of study.7) Sluka also suggests that one start at the top of any organizatio1 of interest, since access guaranteed by leaders will typically he respected all the way down. Though I had not consciously chosen this strategy, serendipity put Amarjit, a very highly placed individual, in my path. Now my circle of acquaintances among Sikhs has widened, but it is clear that the reason people talked to me at first was solely Amarjit’s presumed approval. After the initial entree, however, I was on my own. There was a snowball effect: one militant would introduce me to another, that one to a third, and so on.

13

Once I realized that I would indeed be talking with people involved on both receiving and initiating ends of acts of violence, I thought carefully about how best to protect both them and me from legal repercussions. (Anthropological fieldnotes can be subpoenaed, a fact some have learned to the detriment of their “informants.”) I first developed an informed consent statement, which I read or told to people at the outset of interviews, which stated that I had no legal privilege and that information told to me could be requested by a court of law. Because of this, I asked Sikhs with whom I talked to change names, places, and details as necessary to disguise their stories. I knew I needed to remain in ignorance of certain things despite the problems it might cause my research, because otherwise I might become inescapably compromised (for example, finding out who committed an unsolved crime).

Most of the conversations I had with militants were conducted in English, spoken fluently by many Sikhs. Some of the narratives, however, were recorded in Punjabi and translated with the help of other Khalistani’s present, usually highly placed ones. The situations in which a translator was required were occasionally particularly interesting, as a telling phrase or two would be purposely left out or modified, apparently not by mistake but in the interests of security. I never pressed at these points; I didn’t want to know whatever it was that highly placed Khalistanis felt I shouldn’t know. The translation process served as a kind of screening for the most sensitive subjects, and I believe I had to allow that screening to take place if I hoped to retain access to the militants.

14

I learned that one of the really important skills in talking with people involved in conflict is having a strong sense of this information threshold, of knowing when to stop probing, when to simply let a topic drop and pursue something else. Paradoxical though it may seem, I believe that a certain gentleness of style here is critical in interviewing people who are involved in armed conflict. Being accustomed to responding to violence with violence, they open up best in a nonconfrontationad setting. Observing the way that journalists tend to interview people on television and radio, often “putting them on the spot,” I find it unsurprising that what they are able to elicit from people engaged in violence is some-tines less than useful. In my experience, putting people on the spot is probably the last thing an effective interviewer in an arena of conflict would want to do.

Having made a plea for gentility, however, I would hasten to add that honest) in expressing one’s differences with interlocutors and firmness in standing by them are also crucial to winning the respect of people in conflict. Perhaps particularly for Sikhs, any hint of fearfulness on the part of an interviewer would be disastrous. Throughout this research, I had the sense that if I started being afraid around Khalistani Sikhs I night as well drop the project entirely. Sometimes, after an absence from the community for a month or two, reading other accounts of their acuities that made them seem frightening indeed, I would start to grow uneasy, feel my heart beat more rapidly at the thought of what I was getting into. But a dose of real Khalistanis would always restore my sense of balance. When I got scared, I knew it was time to touch base with reality-that is, touch base with human beings, not their near-monstrous images-again.

I also told Sikh militants individually and in groups what my book would be like and made sure they understood that they could refuse to participate or end the conversation at any time. When I could, I showed them parts of the finished manuscript to solicit their comments and suggestions. Sometimes I revised the text based on what they said, other times I did not.

This kind of research arrangement is obviously highly problematic. Usually guarantees of confidentiality and anomymity are given, but the researcher herself knows the masked information. Purposely keeping oneself in the dark means most critically that one is unable to verify a lot of information. I don’t see any way around this dilemma. If you don’t want to become a partisan (i.e., are not ready to perjure yourself on behalf of the group or suffer the consequences of sharing sensitive information), you have to keep yourself innocent of many concrete details.

I believe, however, that for the purposes of anthropology (as opposed to, for example, the purposes of intelligence gathering), it is in some sense not the concrete details in which we are interested. Was it in Gurdaspur or Ludhiana that the bomb went off? Was it in this jail or that that the “roller” was used? These are not the kind of things I wanted to learn from militant Sikhs. What I did want to learn about was how it felt to be somebody whose legs have been permanently crippled by torture, or alternatively, somebody who set off a bomb. (Often, not surprisingly, the two are related.) And the trust the Sikhs extended to me was reciprocated by an important trust I had to extend to them: to protect me from becoming compromised by unwanted information. I did not want to become a Khalistani I wanted to remain an anthropologist and I had to have help from my interlocutors to retain this fragile inside-outside position.

The wrist bands worn by Sikhs (kara) represent many things. I got one at a gurudwara near Chicago at one point, and I sometimes wear it and other times take it off. I find myself taking it off when I am feeling too much in danger of “going native” through my close

15

association with the people I study-too much the participant, too little the observer. But I always wear it when I write, and for me that clink of steel around my wrist: serves as a constant reminder of two values. First is the commitment to write the truth as I, in my best effort, understand it; “Truth is pure steel,” says the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak. But in another way the kara reminds me of my indissoluable link to real people in the real world; more generally, the impact of what I do as a scholar on the world outside the academy. We are too easily oblivious to the practical consequences of: our work, claiming arrogantly that truth is truth, we will write it as we see it and let the chips fall where they may. I am too much of a pragmatist to ever be that kind of scholar. I know that what I do affects real people, and I have to try to think through the possible repercussions. Another aphorism of the Sikhs comes to mind: “Truth is the highest good,” they say, “but higher still is truthful living.”

How to reconcile adherence to truth with commitment to human beings is, of course, one of the big challenges facing concerned scholars today. It is also one with which Sikhism as a philosophical tradition has grappled extensively. Maybe we can learn something from them, and they from us.

CONFRONTING VIOLENCE

In this spirit, I began interviewing men and women involved in the armed side of the Khalistan conflict, renegotiating my stance as independent- scholar-yet-constrained-bypolitics at every step. There were missteps, too. But in bumbling my way into the lives of people in conflict, I found myself personally engaged in a way that I had not foreseen, not on a political level but on a deeply philosophical one-what Nordstrom and Robben call existential, rather than cultural, shock.8 I had never really sat down and talked with people who openly accepted the necessity of dying, and killing, for a cause-and who were ready to do either at the drop of a hat. Being around people like this makes you think, and not only about the viability of the state of India. For what am I willing to die? To kill? And aside from this nearly automatic reflexive impulse, what does it mean to live in a community circumscribed by violence, to witness lives in which violence, and the threat of violence, and the memory of violence weave a sinuous path through daily activities and define a world in which survival alone seems a substantial accomplishment?

At the tail end of a generation whose attitudes were largely shaped by he Vietnam War, looming over our consciousness even decades later, I was always generally opposed to military action. Gulf War, no, Somalia or Bosnia, better give it deep thought, and so on. Unlike my father, I was never a pacifist-couldn’t be a pacifist in a world in which the strong so clearly dominated the weak and so clearly would not give up that power by moral pressure alone. One thing was clear, however-violence was a last resort, at best an unfortunate strategic necessity in a world in which power was distributed unequally. One might have to grit one’s teeth, go against one’s better instincts, and make short-term sacrifices in the interests of long-term justice. The idea that violent actions could be meaningful in themselves was a troubling one all too glibly avoided in mainstream Western circles.

At the same time (the sixties and seventies) there was a new academic literature that tried to define aggression as an inherent part of human nature. Books like Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Robert Ardrey’s Territorial Imperative, and Lionel Tiger’s Men in Groups had great popular am peal because they seemed to live up to widespread ideals of peace, while also neatly justifying capitalism, patriarchy, and other aspects of modern western society. Most anthropologists hated this kind of literature and devoted much teaching time to demonstrating that humans were not genetically wired for violence; there were various

16

“harmless peoples” to he found around the globe-look at those Semai, for example, who had such an abhorrence of violence they would not tolerate even a parent reprimanding a child. Yet oddly enough Robert Dentan, one of the key ethnographers of the Semai, noted that when Semai were recruited into the Malaysian army they became fantastic soldiers, experiencing a “blood drunkenness” in battle that horrified onlookers. The Kalahari San turned out to occasionally murder each other, fought with valor in the South African Defense Force, and later joined the guerilla organization SWAYO in some numbers when they realized where their interests lay. Conversely initial reports of “fierce people” like the Yanamamo were supplemented by more balanced portrayals that showed that even they were also capable of gentle and loving actions and sustained peace for substantial periods between their famous bouts of warfare.9 The picture turned out to be complex: every society seemed to exhibit both peaceful and violent behavior, however various the interpretations placed upon them. “W al-c all capable of violence” is one of those truisms that seems to be, in fact, true, at least as far as societies as wholes are concerned.

Outside the halls of academia, the most important forums where matters of human violence are discussed are the military headquarters of the world. Pragmatists all, military writers are rarely inclined to speculate about whether we are “instinctually” aggressive or simply culturally inclined or disinclined to violence. They are interested in one question only: given war, how can we (whoever the “we” is) win it? Yet despite-their pragmatic stance much of the work by military theorists is oddly abstract, talking in coldly rationalistic terms that seem eerily to exclude breathing human beings. Classical military theory is therefore as inadequate to the task of understanding actual violence as the sociobiological literature that reduces it to genetics and the “cultural” literature that makes it epiphenomenal to social circumstance.

Working with Sikh militants has made clear to me that abstract explanations of group violence that neglect the highly individualized quality of participation in violent activities, whether on the part of victims or perpetrators are insufficient. Wars are fought between groups, but pain, death, and risk are deeply personal. Treating people’s actual experiences of violence as central gives a wholly different perspective from that of military theory, and it brings to life Corbin’s insight that human violence is mostly conceptual, not instinctual, emotional, customary, or blind.’0 Sikhs, drawing on an elaborate theology of violence, are particularly articulate about the conceptual order behind their armed resistance, an order fully ensconced in individual, conscious, decision-making human beings. Anyone who attempted to understand Sikh militancy or predict militant actions based on the hyper-rationalized military theory of ROTC textbooks would find themselves wholly out of their element, as in another arena the U.S. military establishment also discovered with regard to the Viet Cong.

Though many academics would like to see ROTC programs out of the universities and have little respect for military writers, it is important to look carefully at military theories about violence because they are spawned by and in turn shape general attitudes toward political violence in our culture. In particular, the legitimation of murder carried out by states and the criminalization of murder carried out by non-state groups or by individuals is a legacy of the Western military tradition that haunts us today, distorting, for example, analyses of the World Trade Center bombing. “How can you sit around talking with people who are responsible for murder?” I was asked by one student with regard to interviews with Sikh militants. I presume that “sitting around talking” to war veterans would not provoke the same sense of outrage. To be sure, there are important differences between state and nonstate political violence, and glossing over these differences can be both intellectually irresponsible

17

and pragmatically dangerous. Nevertheless, the very strong sense of disjunction between the two spawned by traditional military theory continues to inhibit the effective resolution of conflict.

Modern military theory in the West derives largely from the work of Carl von Clausewitz, whose classic essay On Hhr0 still frames the thinking of people involved in the war industry-over a century after its publication. The Clausewitzian worldview, sometimes called the “trinitarian” model, places people, army, and state in a triangular relationship, each aspect independent but interrelated. Being tied to the notion of the state as a political order, the model is therefore limited to a particular moment n Western history, usually defined as the period dating from the Treaty 0f Westphalia in 1648 to the present, in which the state is under attack from both substate identities and superstate allegiances. The model also prompts rejection of any violence carried out by non-state (that is, powerless) groups as acts of “terrorism” or outright criminality. When leftists like Noam Chomsky, then, turn the terrorist label around to apply it to states, they pose a direct challenge to the presumptions of the Clausewitzian mental map.12 If generals and colonels can be “terrorists,” can Khalistani Sikhs then be legitimately thought of as “soldiers?” We can go only so far with this reasoning, as we shall see. But the axiom that states alone are authorized to commit murder complicates the picture of intergroup violence considerably. At the most extreme, it even prompts non-state groups to claim statehood as a way of legitimizing the violence in which they engage.

Clausewitz’s famous dictum, “War is a continuation of politics by other means,” points to a second critical feature of the modern military universe: its emphasis on strategy. (Many radical leftists have taken over this notion as well, accepting the strategic necessity of violence without much further consideration of what that violence means to the individuals who engage in it.) People in Clausewitz’s universe commit acts of violence rationally, because they are part of trained armies that obey orders. It follows from this way of thinking that the most powerful states with the best-trained troops and the best military strategies will win wars.

That this conclusion is in fact patently untrue is illustrated by the Vietnam case, among others. Martin van Creveld uses the U.S. failure in Vietnam as one of the centerpieces of his sustained critique of Clausewitzian theory, The Transformation of War. In this important book van Creveld proposes that the “low-intensity conflicts” now prominent in the world are not a minor variant or modification of state-based warfare but are, in fact, wars, and that ideas about what warfare is have to shift to accommodate this new reality. In guerilla conflicts, unlike wars that follow the Clauseitzian model, the state is not the sole legitimator of violence, and people and army (the other two arms of the trinitarian triangle) are intertwined, even, at times, identical. Van Creveld also points out that countering guerilla insurgencies with Clausewitzian strategy nearly always fails. Moreover die experience of combat itself is quite different for the guerilla; indeed it recaptures some aspects of the kinds of warfare that preceded the establishment of nation states. Personal commitment makes the crucial difference.13

It is one of the great tabooed facts of our age that men and women who have experienced the heat of battle sometimes feel nostalgia for it War is hell, we’re not supposed to like it, and any hint that there is some-thing attractive about killing and risking death might, we feel rather superstitiously make us all cross the threshold into World War III and Armageddon. Any realistic perusal of war literature, however, revea1s that for all the horror of the battlefield, it creates a special pathos that is for many people not replicable in any other

18

human endeavor. Many veterans, for all their nightmares, view their moments in battle as the high points of their lives. What are we to make of this? To talk about aggressive biological instincts is too reductive; to talk of psychopathology, too trivializing. Most of us would rather not face the fact that coming to grips with death, which is largely what the war experience is, is one of the existential tasks facing every human being. It is not an entirely unnatural idea to suggest that this confrontation with human mortality is worthy of some kind of celebration, whatever the circumstances under which it occurs. Figuring out how to approach this difficult topic without contributing to a “pornography of violence,” without glorifying murder, is one of the challenges that face anthropologists trying to write realistically about the human experience of conflict.

The question of why violence occurs in the broad sense raises with it, then, the insistent question of how individuals engaged in violence experience that engagement. To say either that they are, in their thousands, “just following orders” in the rational sense is absurd; so is accusing them all of insanity. Why people fight, why they willingly face death and cause it, is explored historically in John Keegan’s excellent soldier’s- eye view of war, The Face of Battle, which compares what battle was like for combatants at Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme.14 The brave new world not of armies but of peoples, of low-intensity, non-state guerilla struggles defined less in terms of massed battles than of individual encounters, however, invites more of this kind of ethnography of violence that draws on real people’s experiences of what it feels like to face that fusillade or pull that trigger. Unless we understand why it makes some kind of sense for somebody to put a bomb in the World Trade Center, we will not be able to prevent this kind of atrocity from happening again. Heightened security measures are more an admission of defeat than a 1icaniiigful remedy.

Anthropologists have in fact established a considerable literature on the lived realities of human violence, and the ethnographic study of terror and resistance has become something of a subfield of its own. Only a small number of anthropologists are, however, engaged in this important work, and there is still a fair amount of skepticism on the part of colleagues about the validity of our involvement in arenas of violent conflict. Philippe Bourgois, who has studied political violence in Central America as well as urban drug wars in the United States, commented that colleagues seem to take his interest in conflict as personal adventurism rather than a serious academic pursuit (personal communication). Happily the recent publication of several collections of essays on the ethnography of violence,15 and the increasing involvement of anthropologists in the field of conflict resolution,16 bode well for the future of the field. Anthropologists have now studied violence in Central America, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, southern Africa, and elsewhere, and they continue to produce deeply challenging ethnography centering on the lion an experience of conflict.

Militant Sikhs, suffering and causing pain, loss, and death even day, are living in extraordinary, not ordinary, circumstances. Their actions can’t give us a window on everyday human life; they are not “typical” even for Sikhs generally. But to return to Kant’s forgotten question for anthropology, “What may I hope?” I think we can well look to communities under fire like this one to see just what we human beings are capable of. Dignity in the face of unutterable insults, physical and mental, is part of that equation. Unflinching courage in the face of nearly certain death in combat is another. Love for one’s comrades, generosity toward one’s community, devotion to one’s God; these are other qualities of Sikh militants that inspire and instruct. “These people are magnificent,” one of my students commented after hearing some of my stories, and indeed, in an important sense, they are. Obviously, their victims would not agree with this assessment. But this is, in fact, the point: they are

19

magnificent, and the havoc they wreak is devastating. We won’t understand them better by denying either part of that formula.

Seen as a resistance movement, certainly the most heroic light in which to see it, Sikh militancy can be placed along an axis with other respectable resistances like those of the Tibetans, the Kurds, and even the French in World War II. It is also, however, a movement for the consolidation of the Sikh religion. From the viewpoint of loyalist Sikhs who have no interest in Khalistan, the militants are not only dangerous terrorists but also fundamentalists who appoint themselves bastions of orthodoxy from which no deviation is tolerated. There is, then, an axis of religious revivalism along which militant Sikhism must also be placed less flatteringly (for most of us), beside Ayatollah Khomeini and Jerry Falwell. Mark Juergensmeyer has attempted to reconcile these divergent but intersecting axes by calling such politicized fundamentalists “religious nationalists,” a term probably acceptable to people both within and outside of these movements.17

The fact is that though scholars may debate whether the Sikh militant movement is “primarily” one of resistance or one of fundamentalism (a debate largely revolving around the extent of personal sympathy for the movement), it is clearly both. Militant Sikhism has flourished during the l980s and l990s as an obvious reaction to state persecution, but its origins in the 1970s cannot be understood without recourse to the n ton of religious consolidation. The two have worked in tandem to create that volatile mix characteristic of religious nationalist movements. In the Sikh case, too, the militancy is marked by a certain unpredictability that drives those interested in containing it wild and brings pause to every thoughtful observer. There are too many diverse pressures and too much of a “hothouse atmosphere”8 within the militant community to make clear predictions about what a future state led by current militant leaders would be like.

This observation brings me, still reflecting on Kant, to a fourth question I would add to his composite query “What is man?” In knowing Sikh militants, I have a better sense of what I may hope for “man,” but I also find myself asking “What must I fear?” I don’t fear religious nationalism per Se, at least not the Sikh kind, but I would not want to write the element of tragedy-in-the-making out of my meditations here. As the ancient Greeks taught us, the noblest human beings can finish tragically. A movement full of verve and moral right, populated by “magnificent” human beings, can end up creating a political situation that is an abomination. (From the French revolution on, we’ve seen this tragedy too many times to be over-optimistic about revolutions.) The same “saints” who uphold with valor and grace every ideal of the Sikh way of life look the other way when less saintly companions slaughter women and children on buses. These are the contradictions of being human, and they apply equally to the police torturer who nightly tucks his daughter into bed with consummate gentleness and to the Sikh guerilla who bows his head in prayer before gunning down a local official. Each does the best he can to serve what he sees as a just cause, and a hell on earth (as one Amnesty International worker called Punjab, off the record) is created. What must we fear? That good intentions, nobility of effort, will not be enough, neither for police officers nor for guerilla fighters, nor for scholars.

Most of the Sikh militants with whom I speak are sadly (or perhaps happily) unaware of the problematic tendency of revolutionary movements to turn sour. Like revolutionaries everywhere, they are convinced of the uniqueness of their cause and are in any case too busy fighting to worry much about outcomes. The struggle for Khalistan is, perhaps, best envisioned as a quest; the process of striving itself provides an important source of meaning. The evocative qualm’ of the Khalistan theme in Sikh rhetoric far exceeds political issues like

20

borders and national flags, and it makes nobility of effort virtually an end in itself. (The pervasiveness of this theme also explains why Clausewitzian containment efforts have not in fact dampened Khalistani ardor; it is only partially explicable in terms of rational strategy.) Today, when counterinsurgency efforts have in large part succeeded in driving the militant movement underground or overseas, the persistence of a deep commitment to the idea of Khalistan on the part of Sikh “freedom fighters” can only be understood in terms of philosophy, which persists through the ups and down of politics and battles. To ignore this side of things is to suppose that once the militants have been sufficiently repressed the struggle for Khalistan will be over. My experience with Sikh militants strongly indicates that this will not be the case.

My task here, then, is to convey the sense of meaningful striving, the sense of being at the peak of one’s humanity in spite of the hellish conditions around one, that animates Sikh militants as they fight and die for a sovereign Sikh nation. The same sense of participation in a holy quest sustains them in exile overseas as they read reports of the “pacification” of Punjab that seem so at odds with their own experience. Despite the probable accusation from some quarters that I am providing a platform for “terrorists,” I use the militants’ own words where possible to bring to the reader a sense of the immediacy of the Sikh militant world. It is less distant and more accessible than most people think. The militants are more like us than most people think, and I hope this book will make that clear while problematizing what they (and we) are doing.

My relationship with Amarjit continued to grow after that first set of encounters in California. We traveled to many cities of the United States and Canada together, sometimes speaking in tandem at gurudwaras, other times interviewing militants for hours at a stretch, still other times sitting up nights talking about religion, politics, or both. I also started attending meetings of organizations and groups different from or even antagonistic to Amarjit’s, and talked with people bluntly hostile to him. I learned about the controversies and ambiguities of his own position and eventually came to rely more on my own assessments and intuitions regarding the militants. I started meeting non-militant Khalistanis, who want sovereignty but seek peaceful means to get it, as well as loyalist Sikhs, not supportive of Khalistan at all. Eventually, I wrote a few academic papers and started testing on Sikh refugee matters in the United States and Canada.

It is critically important to make an effort to contact people in various wings of a political movement, otherwise one will be branded as a spokesperson of a particular faction. This became of particular concern to me as I gradually learned about the factional disputes with which the Khalistani community is riven. Amarjit himself was aware of this danger, and encouraged me to make contacts of my own with various groups, even with people who regarded him as an enemy or rival. Eventually I developed my own network of Khalistanis, some connected in one way or another with Amarjit but others not. Sometimes I found myself awkwardly listening to accusations and counter-accusations across factions, or hearing wildly different versions of the same event. But I never carried tales from one person or group to another. This kind of discretion is as important in developing trust as keeping confidences with the community generally. I took no positions on internecine rivalries and tried to steer clear of local politics.

What did the Khalistani separatists want from me? Although it became clear that the dialogue between me and some of the militants acquired a personal dimension as we grew to know each other better, it would be naive to supose that the individuals leading the insurgency didn’t have an agenda into which they saw me fitting. Clearly, they are hoping for

21

good PR. “If you just tell the truth, that will be good PR,” says Amarjit confidently. “We know that our movement can stand any amount of scrutiny.”

So I do scrutinize it, I criticize it regularly and publicly, and I write this book telling the truth as I see it with some confidence that Khalistani Sikhs will respect and even appreciate what I have done. Of course, there are zealots; a speaker in a gurudwara once introduced me as “a supporter of Khalistan,” whereupon Amarjit picked up the microphone and corrected, “She is just a scholar concerned to find out the truth about the situation in Punjab and the Khalistan movement.” Since from their viewpoint almost nobody else is concerned to get behind the massive propaganda on the subject put out by the Indian government, my interest alone makes a huge impression. One elderly woman ran up to me after I had recited the litany of human rights abuses in India that somehow never do get the publicity of those in Latin America or China; she gripped me by the shoulders and said in heavily accented English, “The mothers of Punjab thank you.” I didn’t know what to say, feeling wholly inadequate to the task of living up to that kind of approbation. I can’t do much for the mothers of Punjab, except my usual academic thing: tell the truth as I see it.

I am often asked whether it is depressing to engage in this kind of research. In being around militant Sikhs I was in fact reminded of a medical project I once worked on that focused on melanoma, an often fatal form of skin cancer. My job involved keeping track of survival statistics of a large array of patients, and though I found the science part of the work fascinating it was very depressing to produce those incessant 0wnward-sloping curves that illustrated the poor chances of survival beyond a few years past diagnosis. When I got the chance to actually talk with melanoma patients on a W.H.O. project in Australia, I worried about whether I would be able to cope with being around dying people day after day. But the funny thing was that actually being with the people ho had melanoma was far less depressing than dealing with all those tragic numbers. In the abstract, all it looked like was a lot of death. But in the flesh, on the ground with real human beings, there was also courage and humor, creativity and spirituality, love. I was inspired, not depressed by being with them.

I experienced the same phenomenon as I researched violence in Pun- jab. The very first prescription for somebody trying to understand what violent conflict is all about, I therefore suggest, is to talk to, be with, learn from the people involved in it. Without this face-to-face encounter, all one sees is downward-sloping lines.

At one point a meeting was held in which a roomful of militant Sikhs asked me questions about what I was up to and what the product of my research with them might be like. It was, needless to say, a particularly intense example of the kind of thing anthropologists now go through in the attempt to engage in dialogue with the people they study. After our public exchange, one fellow came up to me and hinted that I might like to avoid writing about the episodes in which militants killed innocent noncombatants. Drawing myself up, I commented that as a Sikh, as someone for whom “truth is pure steel,” this individual could hardly be asking me to refrain from telling the truth about the Khalistan struggle (part of which is that innocent people get killed). After a momentary silence, in which everybody around us seemed to be waiting to hear his response, the militant gave a slight bow and said, “Madam, it seems you are a better Sikh than I.” He shook my hand and left.

Oddly enough, the risks of engaging in research on ongoing conflicts are usually either blown utterly out of proportion or totally ignored by colleagues involved in more traditional subject areas. For every colleague who feared that Sikh militants, or the Indian government,

22

or both, might set off a bomb in our building, there was another who dismissed any hint of danger as sheer melodrama. (“You’re in the United States, after all.”) When I started coming into contact with other scholars studying similar insurgencies, I realized that my experience was fairly common. It makes for a certain kind of loneliness and a strong sense of being on one’s own resources in terms of making decisions about the advisability of a particular course of action. I follow my gut instincts, thus far successfully. As Sluka points out, there s a lot of luck in it, too.19 Not every confrontation will turn out as well as the one described above.

I still have nightmares about violence. Violence is my worst nightmare, which makes this research project the most difficult I have undertaken. Though the differences between me and militant Sikhs are vast-aside from myriad cultural differences, they are devoutly religious and I am not-the thing that puts them and mean different sides of an immense divide is the fact that they are involved in a war and I am not Yet I am haunted by the realization that had I been born in different life circumstances, I might well be the one dodging, or throwing, that grenade. Like most anthropologists, I am intrigued by lives not lived, attracted to windows into other possibilities. I rejoice in the richness added to my life by my encounter with Sikh militants, while recognizing the disagreements, many extreme, between us.

Rupinder Singh Sodhi, the Indian Supreme Court attorney who defended two Sikhs involved in the assassination of Indira Gandhi, said that his aim was not to “get them off” in legal terms but to create a space in which their voices could be heard with dignity.20 I sometimes see my mission here in similar terms and, like Sodhi, believe that militant Sikhs respect it. I am “in the system,” I am committed to following the rules, I can’t be a partisan who helps insurgents (“criminals”) evade the law. Assassins get hanged; they and we know that and accept it. But we still can benefit from hearing what they have to say. What makes it worthwhile for somebody to face the gallows? A Sikh later hanged for the murder of an Indian army general said that he imagined the rope around his neck as a lover’s embrace. What sort of worldview does a comment like that spring from?

A strong sense of the incommensurability of different cultural realities pervades American anthropology alongside an equally strong sense of common human ground. Only recently has greater attention been paid to the actual experiences of ethnographers doing fieldwork, which, more than a set of methods, means reaching out to other human beings across a sometimes immense cultural gulf. That fieldwork is such a momentous personal experience for most anthropologists has traditionally been belied by our rhetorical style, which conformed to the misguided notion that a pretended distance from one’s “subjects” was prerequisite to “science.” Now, thankfully, there is more latitude for a range of ways in which ethnographers can viably relate to the people they study and learn from. Exploration of relationships developed through fieldwork (as in Vincent Crapanzano’s Tuhami or Marjorie Shostak’s Nisa) has itself become a subgenre of contemporary anthropology. In fact, ethnography is now best understood as dialogical rather than “objective” (if it ever was) and it is in this spirit that I write about my relationships with Sikhs as well as about Sikhs themselves.

Amarjit attended a few sessions of the American Anthropological Association meetings in 1993, his presence epitomizing the challenging moment at which we are now trying to do ethnography. The people we study have started scrutinizing us, penetrating even to the heart of our professional meetings. Sitting there in his saffron turban, dagger tucked tactfully under a suit jacket, he raised his hand to ask a question after one provocative paper. I got nervous, wondering what he was going to say, whether it would be appropriate, how it would make me look. After lie made his comment (a perfectly reasonable one), I told him

23

about my trepidation and my subsequent relief that in fact he knew how to behave in my world. “Now you know howl feel every time you walk into a gurudwara, he replied, turning the anthropological tables.

Jewish theologian Martin Buber talks about the I-Thou relationship as crucial to human nature: the recognition, in the very otherness of the other and in the wholehearted acceptance of that otherness, of kinship.21 Those I-Thou relationships, impossibly intimate, are at the heart of the anthropological enterprise, whether it concerns Sikh militants or New Guinea tribes people. This is when “informant” or even the now-chic “interlocutor” are pitifully inadequate terms, “friendship” too maudlin to capture the ontological embrace of the alien as, like oneself, wholly human. The moments of epiphany in fieldwork are those in which one confronts the “anguish and expectation” (Buber’s phrase) of being human in another, the “what must I fear” and “what may I hope” we all con- front in such very different forms. It is in this space between one self and another, fraught with meaning, that the ultimate question, “What is man?” might be answered. When that space is wide, as in the confrontation across cultures, this question can be explored in its fullest exuberant richness.

Anthropology as a discipline has lost something of this philosophical wealth. But individual anthropologists find it regularly, and it may help some of us figure out the answer to that other segment of Kant’s query, “What ought I to do?”

 FRAGRANCE OF JASMINE

In this chapter I look at the basic history and doctrines of the Sikh faith, as seen through the eyes of the orthodox. Their vision of Sikhism and their understanding of what it means to be a Sikh is somewhat at odds with the perspective of Western academia, which is at the moment a source of considerable controversy. This controversy, and what it can tell us about the value of “inside” and “outside” scholarship, is considered further in Chapter 10. Here, the aim is to get a feel for what the pious Sikh understands of his or her faith that serves as motivation, justification, or explanation for current political actions.

FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH

Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith, was born in C.E. 1469 in what is now Pakistani Punjab. His birthplace, called Nankana Sahib, attracts thousands of pilgrims every year from all over the world (though the closed border between India, where most Sikhs live, and Pakistan, its sometime enemy, makes this pilgrimage problematic for many). Guru Nanak was probably influenced by both of the major faiths of his time and place, Hinduism and Islam, though Sikhs are upset when scholars emphasize these historical influences over the revealed quality of Guru Nanak’s pronouncements.’ It is certainly clear that the first Guru rejected much of both Hinduism and Islam, at least in terms of how they were practiced. One of the verses in the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy book of the Sikhs, narrates Guru Nanak’s rejection of the Brahmin habit of wearing a sacred thread over the shoulder. In this verse Guru Nanak heaps scorn on those who believe that one can use a thread to reach spiritual truth:

Though people commit countless thefts, countless adulteries, utter countless falsehoods and countless words of abuse,

Though they commit countless robberies and villainies night and day against their fellow creatures;

Yet the cotton thread is spun, and the Brahmin conies to twist it.

Guru Nanak then proposes, characteristically, a thread not of cotton, but of truth:

Out of the cotton of compassion

Spin the thread of contentment

Tie knots of continence,

Give it the twist of truth.

That would make a garland for the soul..

Such a thread once worn will never break

Nor get soiled, burnt or lost,

The person who wears a thread like this is blessed.

Not only did Guru Nanak reject what he saw as the empty ritualism of the Hindu tradition, but he also famously renounced its most characteristic social organization, the caste system. People from all castes became his sikhs or disciples, and they ate together in the

25

community kitchen or langar which today remains characteristic of Sikh life. All the gurudwaras contain these kitchens, which are not only important symbols of egalitarianism but serve a charitable function as well. (After the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, local Sikhs went out into the streets with pots of food to help those displaced from their homes.) The most famous gurudwara, the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar (popularly, “the Golden Temple”), also has four doors facing the four directions, to signify welcome to anybody who chooses to enter. Although caste continues to play a role in Sikh society (expressed, for example, in marriage patterns) despite the clear ideology against it, the egalitarian strain in Sikh culture has been noted by observers from British times to the present.2

Islam, the faith of the rulers of the region at the time of Guru Nanak, also rejected caste hierarchy, including its ban on interdining. But Guru Nanak felt that many Muslims, like many Hindus, were going about their worship devoid of the true spirit behind the prayers. He says in the Gum Granth Sahib:

Five prayers you say five times a day, With five diferent names;

But f truth isyourfirst1brayer,

The second to honestly earn you’ living, The third to give generously in Gods name, 1fpuriy of mind is your fourth prayer, And praise of God your fifth;

If you practice these Jive virtues

Then you can call yourself a Muslim.

Sikhs today typically express a close solidarity with Muslims, primarily because both minorities in India claim to suffer the same discrimination at the hands of the Indian government, but also because they both share a monotheistic tradition. (The fact that the greatest persecution of the Sikhs occurred at the hands of Mughal rulers, who were Muslim, is a historical fact that does not seem to hamper the current Sikh-Muslim alliance.) Because of the egalitarian thrust of both Sikhism and Islam, many of the converts to both faiths historically have come from the Hindu lower castes, a process still going on today. Nevertheless, despite the general affinity of the two faiths, Guru Nanak saw the need for a different kind of spirituality from that practiced by the Muslims. Although it is not clear just how socially separate Guru Nanak’s followers were from adherents to the Hindu and Muslim faiths, it is a matter of great importance to contemporary Sikhs that the originality of his teachings be recognized. It is also obviously important to presumed nation builders that the separate identity of the “people” be recognized from the out.set.4

There were, of course, other traditions in Indian history that also focused on getting behind the reutilization of popular religion. Buddhism and Jainism were two movements whose rhetoric against the empty adherence to tradition sounds very similar to that of Guru Nanak. Both were ancient rebellions against Brahmanism, at least partly protesting the materialism that turns people away from recognition of truth. The following verse from the Guru Granth Sahib is quite reminiscent of the Buddhist sutras:

Religion doesn’t consist of a patched coat, or a yogi’s staf, or in ashes smeared over the body;

Religion doesn’t consist of earrings worn, or a shaven head, or in the blowing of horns.

Stay pure amid the impurities of the world; that is the way to find religion.

26

Religion doesn’t consist in mere words;

One who looks upon everybody as equal is religious.

Religion doesn’t consist in wandering to tombs or places of cremation, or in sitting in attitudes of contemplation;

Religion doesn’t consist in traveling to foreign countries, or in bathing at places of pilgrimage.

Stay pure amid the impurities of the world, that is the way to find religion.

Whereas both Buddhism and Jainism developed traditions of renunciation based on this kind of philosophy mainstream Sikhism remained only committed to pragmatism, to living in the real world. Though a few sects developed that did focus on meditative withdrawal (the Udasis, for example, a sect founded by the son of Guru Nanak), the point in mainstream Sikhism was to maintain a state of spiritual bliss while doing the usual things that humans do: marrying, having children, working, lighting wars. Sikhs are proud to claim that their tradition is one in which practice, the way one lives, is the true test of faith. One is sincere, one is charitable, one is devoted to truth, one is courageous-these are things that make one a Sikh. (T. N. Madan notes that it is a tradition that is orthoprax rather than orthodox.4) But it is very hard to live this way without lie strength that comes from prayer, and that is why even the most worldly Sikhs ideally spend hours each day in the recitation of the Guru Granth Sahib or in listening to gurubani (“the Guru’s songs”). Guru Nanak instructed as much when he advised,

As the lotus floats in water, but remains unafected by its waves;

As the swan swims in it and is not drenched by water;

So by meditating on the Word and repeating God’s Name, You will be able to safely cross the ocean of the world.

Virtually all Sikhs involved in the militant struggle for Khalistan report the central role of prayer in their lives. In my wanderings among North American Sikhs I stayed in their own homes, and I was able to see for myself just what this kind of devotion means. Mornings, long before I was awake, household members would be up, bathed, and dressed, sitting in poses of silent meditation or quietly chanting verses from the Guru Granth Sahib. The time just before dawn, called “the ambrosial hours” in Sikh tradition, is thought to be especially conducive to communion with the divine. When I would get up, usually long after dawn, Sikh members of the household would already be refreshed and calmed by their prayer session. They would pray again at night, or at any spare moments during the day. (One time I was sitting in the car with one Sikh while waiting for another to make some copies of a document at a commercial Xerox machine; I fumed at the delay while the Sikh assumed the lotus posture in the back seat and chanted. He emerged from the delay energized; I, irritated.)

One militant told me that even while he was hiding underground ml Punjab, living in fields, and roaming from place to place, he used to Once a week to the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar, entering in the evening after most of the pilgrims had departed and staying there through the night until the worshipers started straggling in again at dawn. A sacred pool of water surrounds the Harmandir Sahib, and he used to sit there1 and listen to the sound of gurubani being recited within. Now, in the rush of his political activities among expatriate European Sikhs, he has to find1 those moments of quiet within.

“It sounds crazy, but I have to say that the time I spent in jail [eighteen months] was the best time of my life,” another Sikh told me.

27

“Why?” I asked.

“Because we were able to pray there sixteen, eighteen, sometimes twenty hours a day. I will never forget that place where I recited so much gurubani. I felt so happy there.”

I came to recognize the phrase “he prayed twenty hours a day” as a recognition of devotion, often applied to fighters who in realistic terms could not have been literally sitting there reciting gurubani for twenty hours. Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the leader of the Sikhs who defended the Harmandir Sahib against the 1984 army assault, called “Sant” (saint) by his followers, “prayed twenty hours a day.” Granted the hyperbole in ii this phrase, to which Punjabis are generally prone in any case, I witnessed personally the long hours of meditation of which Sikhs are in fact capable, when the opportunity presents itself. Some explain the phrase “praying twenty hours a day” as meaning that even while one is engaged in everyday activities, somewhere in the back of one’s mind one is continuously in prayer.

The Sikh conception of the divine, translated very inadequately as ‘God,” is one that recognizes with awe the incapability of puny human-kind to effectively apprehend it. (“At the taste of sweetness, the mute person can only smile.”) This sentiment is described in a beautiful verse of the Guru Granth Sahib:

Were Ito live for millions of years and drink the air far my nourishment; Were Ito dwell in a cave where I beheld not sun or moon, and could not even dream of sleeping,

I should still not be able to express Thy worth; how great shall I call Thy Name? Were Ito be felled and cut in pieces, we’re Ito be ground in a mill;

Were Ito be burned in afire, and blended with its ashes, I still should not be able to express Thy worth; how great shall I call Thy Name?

Were Ito become a bird and fly to a hundred heavens;

Were Ito vanish from human gaze and neither eat nor drink,

I should still not be able to express Thy worth; how great shall I call Thy Name?

Had I hundreds of thousands of tons of paper and a desire to write on it after all the deepest research,

Were ink never to fail me, and could I move my pen like the wind,

I should still not be able to express Thy worth; how great shall I call Thy Name?

The mystical impulse in Sikhism is surely part of what leads some observers to class it with Hinduism, while the explicit monotheism of the tradition resembles that of Islam. But the community of disciples gathered around Guru Nanak quickly established an independent identity, over the centuries elaborated into an entire culture quite different in tone from any other group on the subcontinent. Gum Nanak is believed to have traveled far and wide as he shared his religious insights, expeditions recorded in the janamsakhis (biographies) Sikhs rely on for knowledge of the life of the first Guru. They are full of instructive stories illustrating the Guru’s wisdom that complement the abstractions, however beautiful, of the Guru Granth Sahib.

One day while visiting the Muslim holy city of Mecca, for example, Guru Nanak happened to be sleeping with his feet facing in the direction of the Kaaba, a sacrilege in Islam. “Who is the infidel sleeping with feet toward the House of God?” a cleric challenged. Guru Nanak replied, “Turn my feet in the direction in which God is not,” cleverly showing both the omnipresence of God and the limitations of Muslim understanding.

28

There are equal numbers of anecdotes putting the Hindus in their place. One day Guru Nanak was at Haridwar, the important Hindu pilgrimage center on the Ganges, during a major festival. At dawn the Hindu pilgrims started splashing water toward the sun. “What are you doing?” asked Guru Nanak. “We are offering water to our ancestors to quench their thirst,” someone replied. Whereupon Guru Nanak started throwing water toward the west. “What are you doing?” the pilgrims inquired. “I am watering the fields in my village in Punjab,” he replied. The pilgrims laughed, saying “How can-the water reach such a distance?” Guru Nanak retorted, “If the water cannot reach my fields which are about four hundred miles from here, how can it reach your ancestors who are not even in this world?”

In most of the places where these episodes are believed to have occurred, gurudwaras (literally, “gateways to the Guru”) were constructed in honor of Guru Nanak. They form a chain across the dusty plains of north India and beyond (as far as Baghdad and Kathmandu) but cluster most closely in Punjab, “the land of five rivers,” now split between enemy states. On the Indian side today there are some fourteen million Sikhs, complemented by two or three million in other parts of India and possibly another three million flung out in diaspora around the world. There arc now elegant gurudwaras in London, Nairobi, Chicago. The gurudwaras dotting the Punjab landscape, however, have a special historical significance that makes them high points in the spiritual geography of Sikhism. This historicity, obviously, plays into the rhetoric of the Khalistan movement, allying it vaguely with Zionism and other religious-cum-nationalist identities Zionism, having been successful in creating its own slate, is drawn on more frequently than others, but it differs from Sikh nationalism in that it involved a return to the religious homeland. The Sikhs are already there; as Robin Jeffrey notes, “Unlike most Christians, Muslims or Buddhists, most Sikhs practice their religion in its own holy land.”5

Guru, Nanak was under no illusions as to the real difficulty of following the pith of religious truth. As the community of Sikhs, the panth, grew, he tested his disciples to show how firm one’s resolve must be “to stay pure amid the impurities of the world.” In a significant episode toward the end of his life, Guru Nanak set off on a road leading into a forest, enjoining his disciples to accompany him. As the group proceeded they found copper coins scattered across the path. Some of the Sikhs greedily picked them up and left for home. As the remaining disciples advanced, they found the road littered with silver coins. At this point more in the group departed. Finally, gold coins were piled on the path. After this only a few loyal followers pushed on with Guru Nanak.

When they entered the forest the party found a funeral pyre lighted by four lamps, emitting a ghastly smell. The Gum asked, “Is there anyone who will eat this corpse?” The Sikhs turned away in disgust, but one, Bhai Lehna (bhai means “brother” and commonly precedes male Sikh names), stood firm. “Where shall I begin, with the head or the feet?” he asked. At this gesture of loyalty and love, Gum Nanak embraced Bhai Lehna and gave him the name Angad, “touch of the Guru.”

Guru Nanak composed the most important prayer in Sikhism, the Japji or morning prayer:

There is but One God,

Eternal Truth,

Almighty Creator,

Unfearful, Without Hate and Enmity, Immortal Entity

Unborn, Self-Existent;

29

By His Grace, you shall worship

The One Who was True before creation, The One Who was True in the beginning, The One Who is True now,

The One Who shall be True forever.

The first phrase of this prayer is especially significant. Gum Nanak put the integer one (eh) in front of the sign indicating formlessness (oankar) to indicate the oneness and amorphousness of the divine spirit. The phrase “One God” (ek oankar) is found in Sikh homes cast in metal, sculpted in wood, and embroidered in cloth. It is considered to be the single most important expression of Sikh belief. That the one god is also expressed through the ten historical Gurus (of which Guru Nanak was the first) is no more problematic to Sikhs than is the humanity-divinity of Jesus Christ for Christians. They use the term “Gum” to refer to any of the ten historical Gurus as well as to Waheguru (“Great Guru”), or God.

The element of sacrifice in Sikh theology is best expressed in the lives of the Gurus, who understood that one had to totally relinquish one’s own egoistic desires to apprehend truth. Although some were also heralded as great military leaders, they are conceived as sell-effacing, gentle, and humble. “If you want to play this game of love,” said Guru Nanak, Come to my street with your head in your palms.” The portrait of Guru Nanak that adorns most Sikh homes is evocative of this spirit. Interestingly, the classic portrait of the last Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, unabashedly militaristic, is understood as equally representative of the selflessness that characterizes the spiritually enlightened. Though scholars write about the “evolution” of Sikh consciousness from Guru Nanak to Guru Gobind Singh, orthodox Sikhs, at least, view one as only the historical fulfillment of the other.

When Guru Nanak died in 1539, he passed the guruship on to the loyal Bhai Lehna, who knew that being a Sikh meant making any sacrifice, in preference Co his own sons. Saying “The Divine Light is the same, the Way is the same; the Master has merely changed the body,” he recognized Bhai Lehna as Guru (Angad), and started the tradition of passing the guruship along from one person to another. This tradition ended when the tenth and last Gum finally turned the spiritual authority of the guruship over to the holy book, the Adi Granth (Guru Granth Sahib) itself.

The biographies emphasize the catholicity of the Sikh community, relating that Guru Nanak was so universally esteemed that Hindus wanted the honor of cremating his body, while Muslims wanted to claim it for burial. (This general high regard is also demonstrated in the eulogy, “Guru Nanak, for Hindus a Sage, for Muslims a Saint.”) Sikhs believe, however, that Guru Nanak’s body turned to pure light and merged with the Divine Light. The shroud was then cut in two, the Hindus burning one half and the Muslims burying the other half. The apocryphal quality of this narrative should not detract from its clear meaning for Sikhs; Nanak was neither Hindu nor Muslim, but the new spirituality he represented was respected (respectable) by both.

30

MARTYRDOM AND MILITANCY

As the line of Gurus continued and the Sikh panth expanded, persecution and the need to defend the faith against it took an increasingly central role. The Mughals, of course, persecuted not only Sikhs but also Sufis, who were linked to their own Islamic tradition, and the majority Hindu community. (The hatred of Hindus for Aurangzeb extends to this day, hen the name itself evokes a response similar to that generated by mentioning Sherman in Georgia.) But the Sikh religious tradition, still young and evolving, incorporated the fact of persecution and resistance to it in a special way.

In a political situation in which Sikhs were being killed by the thousands, the self-sacrifice insisted on by Guru Nanak as prerequisite to spiritual enlightenment came to be interpreted as including physical martyrdom-not just “losing one’s head” in the symbolic sense but literally dying for the faith. Sikhs use the Muslim term shaheed to describe their martyrs (also used as a title, as in “Shaheed Amrik Singh,” the martyred Amrik Singh), hut martyrdom in Islam is actually somewhat different from martyrdom in Sikhism. Centrally, Sikhs do not conceive of martyrdom as a ticket to paradise, but focus instead on the willingness to give one’s head, the readiness at any moment to sacrifice, as key to the “grace” of the Guru-oriented Sikh. (It is not the outcome, but the process, as in the difference in Buddhism between nibbana as a kind of place and the nibutta-person, walking around in this world in a state of non- attachment.) A theological appreciation for martyrdom has led both Muslims and Sikhs to astounding battlefield bravado (witness all those Iranian boys rushing off joyously to meet their deaths in the Iran-Iraq war), but too hasty a gloss over differences here would be unwarranted.

The first of the Sikh Gums who was martyred for the faith was Guru Arjun, the fifth in the line, who is also remembered as the compiler of and major contributor to the holy scriptures. Guru Arjun’s verses in the Guru Granth Sahib make very clear the idea that Sikhism is a third faith entirely separate from Hinduism and Islam and are hence critical to current debates about the separateness, or lack of it, of the Sikh community. In one verse he writes:

I do not keep the Hindu fast, nor the Muslim Ramadan;

I serve Him alone who is my refuge.

I serve the One Master, who is also Allah.

I have broken with the Hindu and the Muslim,

I will not worship with the Hindu, nor like the Muslim go to Mecca; I shall serve Him and no other.

I will not pray to idols nor say the Muslim prayer.

I shall put my heart at the feet of the One Supreme Being, For we are neither Hindus nor Muslims.

Guru Arjun also composed some of the most eloquent and touching prayers in the Sikh collection. Surely the following would move the spiritually inclined of any tradition:

O Lord of Mighty Arms,

Creator of all things,

O Ocean of Peace!

Take me by the hand and raise me Who am fallen in a pit.

31

My ears hear not;

My eyes have lost their light;

I am crippled, aflicted,

Like a leper I come stumbling to your door And cry for help.

You are the Lord of the fallen;

Above you there is no Lord.

O Compassionate One!

You are my Companion, Friend, Father and Mother; Let Nanak bear the imprint of your feet in his heart.

Guru Arjun was born in 1563 and was martyred in 1606 at the hands of the Mughal emperor Jehangir, who seems to have used the accusation that the holy book of the Sikhs was antithetical to Islam as part of a broader attempt to consolidate his power. The tortures borne by Guru Arjun have become legendary: he was forced to sit on a red-hot pan and have burning sand poured over him; he was boiled in a cauldron of water. Guru Arjun is celebrated in Sikh tradition a-s bearing all these tortures in silence, refusing to bow before tyranny or to renounce the Holy Scriptures.

There is another interesting part to this story. Guru Arjun had a Sufi saint named Mian Mir as a close companion, who also laid the foundation stone for the Harmandir Sahib (again, pointed to by Sikhs as evidence of the inherent ecumenicism of the tradition). This Mian Mir had been questioning Guru Arjun about the true meaning of enlightenment and what impact it could have on practical matters. When he witnessed Guru Arjun’s composure and serenity under torture, he then, it is thought, understood just what impact spirituality could have. Guru Arjun told Mian Mir not to worry, not to fear, because what he was suffering was the sweet will of the Lord.

Bhai Gurdas, one of the major contributors to Sikh scripture, wrote the following lines with regard to Guru Arjun’s torture:

The Guru, bore all this torture proudly and never uttered a sigh or a groan.

The Guru was unrufled!

The Guru stayed calm and unperturbed like the sea! The Guru was in absolute bliss!

This was the wonder of the Lord.

Guru Arjun said, in a famous line, “The true test of faith is the hour of misery.” He was eventually thrown into the river Ravi, and Sikhs believe that as everyone watched he turned to light and blended with the Divine Light. The concept of sacrifice for God took on a highly concrete form, then, in the martyrdom of Guru Arjun, pictured wading into the river (that is, fearlessly and calmly embracing death) on wall calendars in many Sikh homes.

Guru Arjun was able to put into effect Guru Nanak’s earlier injunction to live “as the lotus floats in water but remains unaffected by waves.” Even in extreme pain he retained his state of ecstasy, serving as a model for Sikhs up to the present faced with similar tortures. Another common piece of religious art features Bhai Mani Singh, another victim of Mughal torture, who was supposed to be cut limb from limb but whose torturer, in an attempt to spare

32

him, starting slicing at his wrist. “You were told to cut me limb from limb,” Bhai Mani Singh said, “so start with the joint of my little finger and work your way up.” Not stoic but calm, unattached to his body in his pure communion with Guru, he is pictured with his fingers dripping blood and his eyes shining with religious bliss. Such a martyrdom is itself a weapon; “I will break this potsherd [my body] on the heads of the rulers in Delhi,” another martyr declared.

One Khalistani militant drew directly on this history, which minimizes individual bodily pain in favor of what the victory over that pain can accomplish, as he suffered excruciating tortures at the hands of Punjab police. In the hot, still back room of a gurudwara he showed me the scars of this torture permanently inscribed on the flesh of his torso (the scars of the mind exhibited only by a certain hardness around the mouth):

In our daily prayers we remember all our Sikh martyrs during the Mughal period, those who went through terrible hardships. They were cut to pieces, made to survive on a small loaf of bread, and they withstood all those tortures. I used to think, “What type of people were they?” and while I was in the movement there was sometimes a little thought in the back of my’ mind that if the time came, would I be able to behave as those brave Sikhs, my ancestors, did? But finally when I went through it, it was not me but those other Sikhs who were sustaining that. It seemed they were taking the pain with me. I felt then the satisfaction of knowing that with Guru’s grace I was able to pass the test of being a Sikh.

This is required of a Sikh, that a Sikh should withstand everything. What is of the body is anyway just elements and with death everything goes back. But the spirit is something immortal and if this spirit is filled with the love of Guru then that gives all the courage and strength. Me and my friends, we used to sit together and laugh a lot at how the Guru has made us mortals to be in the spirit of those immortal saints and martyrs, at how we lived up to this and passed the test of our generation courageously.

The interpretation of Sikhs like this one of the torture experience subverts the overriding aim of torture, which is the total degradation of the victim. The Sikh understanding of physical suffering, almost welcomed as a test of their spiritual commitment, turns every act of torture into a kind of victory.

A younger interlocutor described his awakening to the power of Guru through the model of a fellow Sikh sufferer. I record his story in some detail here, as it instructively points to the role of state persecution in the nurturing of militancy as well as in itself prompting a religious awakening:

“When the attack on the Golden Temple occurred in 1984, I was just a student in school, only fifteen years old. But we got together at school, about five hundred of us, and started protesting.”

There was at that time a Sikh Students Federation, and one member of that Federation, Kuldip Singh Telham, got arrested. (He was later killed by the government.) We protested against that arrest. Police came to our protest and started shooting at everybody, and a few people got wounded. Later the Federation members who were in hiding came to our school and convened a meeting. We started a school branch of the Sikh Students Federation and we decided to hold a program called ‘In Memory of the Martyrs of Khalistan.’

33

“It was actually very dangerous but I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t know then how they tortured, how they killed people. But let me tell you the truth. I actually wanted to go jail to see if it was really as bad as people said.

“Anyway, I eventually got arrested along with other Federation members. I was arrested many times in the next four years. Finally in 1988 they arrested me once again and said, ‘We’ll kill you if you don’t stop your activities.’ I said, ‘I’m not doing anything wrong, not killing anybody. I don’t have anything to do with violence. But they said, ‘We will kill you anyway.’

“Then I went into hiding at my cousin’s house. I knew that if they caught me they would torture me and kill me. My friend got arrested at his college Khalsa College in Jallandhar, and they tortured and killed him, Another friend was in custody at an interrogation center and I knew lie was being tortured. I wondered whether he would tell about me under interrogation.

“My whole family got arrested, my sister, sister’s husband, my father, my mother, and my brother. They arrested all of them because I wasn’t at home. ‘Where is he?’ they asked my mom. ‘We don’t know,’ she said. ‘He went off to college and he didn’t come back.’ She was afraid that if they found me they would kill me. She said, ‘You can do with us whatever you want, but we don’t know where he is.’ The officer told her, ‘We will kill all of you because your son is a terrorist.’ They searched the house for weapons, but we never kept anything like that. All they found were Federation receipts.

“Then they went to my mother’s sister’s house. They held the whole family at gunpoint. They prodded my brother with the gun and then he said, ‘Yes, I know where he is.’ He told my mother, ‘They will kill us all. Just tell them where he is.

“So they caught me, where I was sleeping with my cousins. My mom, my sister, and my dad were released. But they kept me, my brother, my sister’s husband, my brother-in-law, and my two cousins. They kept all of us because we were young. They want to finish off the 14 to 35 age group. But they took me to one side of the police station and said to the others, ‘He’s a killer. We’ll deal with him separately.’

“Then they took my clothes off and I was without anything. ‘Where are your senior party members, where is your president?’ they asked. At that time it was Gurjit Singh. There were two other members in hiding, Nirmaljit Singh Nimma and Kanwaljit Singh Sultanwind, who were later killed in a fake encounter. The police were asking me about them. They also asked about a police officer who was killed in our area. ‘Who did that? You did that, didn’t you?’ they said. But I said, ‘No, I didn’t.’

They bound my arms behind my back, handcuffed, and hung me upside down from the ceiling. It’s called the ‘airplane.’ Then they were hitting me and hitting me. It was very hard for me. I was just crying and crying. They were saying, ‘Just tell us, we will release you.’ But I couldn’t do that. If I didn’t know about that how could I say anything?

Then they put me down on the floor. They have a big heavy roller and they put it on my thighs. One police officer stood on one side and the other on the other side and they rolled it across my thighs over and over. It was very painful. I was afraid. I thought they would kill me. But I thought if I say other Federation members’ names they would kill me anyway. If they wanted to kill me, they would. That was all there was to it.

34

Then the senior superintendent of police came over and asked how come the police were doing so much violence to me. They said “We arrested him, but he’s not saying anything.” ‘Bring him to the main interrogation center, then,’ the superintendent said.

On the way over the police kept saying to me, ‘We will kill you over here. We will say that somebody tried to help you escape, and that we had to shoot and kill you.’ They were trying to make me afraid, but I was no longer afraid. I thought, well, if they want to kill me there is nothing I can do. I knew I was not a criminal.

As I was getting out of the van at the Criminal Investigation Agency center, they beat me up. Many of them were drunk. Then the superintendent of that center came out and when I saw who it was I thought I would surely be killed. That guy has killed so many people. We called him ‘The Butcher.’

When I got inside they caught me by my arms and legs and put me down on the floor. I was feeling really bad at that time. They were joking around. ‘Just tell us. How do you want to be tortured?’ They thought they were having fun.

Then they caught me on my right leg and my left leg and spread them wide, wide like this. And they were hitting me at the same time. ‘We killed your friends and they told us about you,’ they were saying. Then they got electric shocks and gave me shocks on the private parts of my body. They shocked me and shocked me. They said, ‘We will finish you. Now you can’t be married, you can’t produce any more terrorists.’

A few of them seemed to be getting tired, so they said, ‘Well, he doesn’t want to say anything so let’s just kill him.’ But the inspector said, ‘No, we’ll do it tomorrow. I still have something to ask him.’

There was another guy who had gotten killed at that interrogation center and he had had his flesh torn out with a long spear. They showed me that spear and I got really afraid. But then I thought again, ‘There is nothing I can do. If they want to kill me they will.’ So I forgot everything and everybody. I just got ready to die.

Beating me and beating me this continued on and on. I couldn’t feel anything on most of my body anymore. But they tried to find out where I still felt pain and then they would hit me there.

Then the president of our whole Federation was dragged out. He was at the same interrogation center! They started to beat him up and said, ‘Here is our partner in this, we will beat him up too.’ He was a doctor.

They were beating him up very badly, just like you beat paddy in the fields. They were saying things to him but I didn’t listen. I was just preparing myself to die. Then they told me that he would be killed that night.

He heard that, too, but as I watched him I saw that he wasn’t saying anything to them. He was just saying ‘Waheguru’ again and again. ‘Waheguru,’ he would say, ‘you take care of me. Waheguru, Waheguru.’

35

When I saw this I thought, if he doesn’t say anything how can I say anything? I got strength from him. He knew he was going to die and he just turned to Guru. I said, ‘Waheguru, Waheguru,’ and I got calm.

They were taking him out and he turned and said, ‘God will take care of you. There’s a place in heaven for us because we are dying for truth. Don’t be afraid.’

“By God’s grace I got released. From then on I relied on the Guru.”

The concretization of the ideal of selflessness in the self-sacrifice of martyrdom was most effectively demonstrated by a historical hero named Baba Deep Singh, whose head was severed from his body in battle with the Afghans. Sikhs believe that he carried his head in his left palm, following Guru Nanak’s injunction quite literally, and advanced toward Amritsar with a raised sword in his right. Not only is Baba Deep Singh’s martyrdom a common theme of Sikh religious art, but it was brought to life once again in the 1984 attack on the Golden Temple. Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, urged to escape by a back route as the Indian army bore down, is believed to have remarked, “Baba Deep Singh came so far to give his head at this place, and I am privileged to be able to give mine right here.” Thus another accretion to the powerful generative myth of Sikh martyrdom-Shaheed Bhindranwale now stares down from his own portrait on the walls of Sikh homes, next to those of Gurus and historical martyrs. “Physical death I do not fear,” said Bhindranwale. “Death of conscience is the real death.” This aphorism has become a favorite in the militant community.

Bhindranwale was, of course, not only a martyr but a fighter as well (at least, an inspirer of fighters; it is unknown whether he ever actually killed anyone himself). It was the sixth Guru, Guru Hargobind (1595-1644), who first took up arms in defense of the faith, calling on the Divine Spirit not only to endure suffering but to vanquish enemies as well. Following the martyrdom of Guru Arjun, his father, Guru Hargobind took up two swords and said they would be called miri and piri, representing both temporal and spiritual authority (in Indian terms, the combination of shakti and bhakti). These two swords became emblematic of the Sikh community, and flutter on the saffron or blue banners that hang outside every gurudwara. The emblem of the double swords is now a particularly prominent symbol of nationhood for Khalistani Sikhs.

Guru Hargobind enrolled loyal followers as his bodyguards and eventually developed an entire army, enjoining Sikhs to be “saint-soldiers” (sant-sipahi) who combine spirituality with valor. As noted previously, militant Sikhs today firmly reject the idea that the Sikh community was somehow transformed from a pacifist sect to a military force during the period from Guru Nanak to Guru Hargobind, believing that what Guru Hargobind did was bring to fruition an idea inherent in Sikhism from the beginning. This conception of the inherent militancy of the tradition is tied, interestingly, to the habit some Sikhs have of wearing a steel emblem of the double swords on their turbans. At one gurudwara where these were being sold I heard someone snort, “They don’t need to add that frippery; the fact of wearing the turban [i.e., of being a Sikh] implies militancy in itself. Adding that thing can be taken to mean that Sikhism alone doesn’t make you a militant. “Militants today believe that being a Sikh means being a “saint-soldier,” and that those who condemn the current militancy are not “true Sikhs.” A great deal of venom is expended in these debates, which are not only about Khalistan and the most viable strategy for obtaining it but for die nature of Sikhism itself. Those who tie Sikhism to militancy in a more primordial than strategic sense might agree with the card who, commenting that Indians generally wear their religions on their sleeves, said of Sikhs, “We wear ours on our hips” (a reference to the carrying of swords).

36

It was Guru Hargobind who was responsible for the construction of the Akal Takht, the “eternal throne” of the Sikhs, to complement the spiritual center of the faith at the Harmandir Sahib. Eventually, other buildings were constructed around these two critical edifices-one representing temporal power, the other spiritual strength-to form what is colloquially called “the Golden Temple Complex.” It was this sacred complex that was attacked in 1984, sparking what became the militant movement for Khalistan.

Guru Hargobind is honored by Sikhs as a particularly valiant fighter. He severed enemy heads with a single blow of the sword, never showed his hack to a foe, and so on. An important point in all this battle glory, however, is that the four major battles fought by Guru Hargobind are perceived by Sikhs as solely defensive in nature: “not an inch of territory was gained” The sword Inn became the symbol of Sikhism was intended to defend the weak and smite the oppressor, not to be used for personal gain. The fact that this sword is complemented by the symbol of the kettle, to feed the hungry is less known outside the Sikh community but forms part of their own consciousness of themselves as protectors of the weak. Militant Sikhs today, however aggressive their behavior seems from outside, see themselves as soldiers for justice in this tradition. One of their central mottos, “Deg Tegh Fateh” (Kettle Sword Victory), expresses this sense that it is through defense of the oppressed that victory will be achieved.

One militant affiliated with the Khalistan Liberation Force took a typically universalist view of the Sikh struggle for justice when he pointed to a portrait of Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Guru, who was said to have been martyred for the right of Hindus to worship freely:

That’s Guru Tegh Bahadur. His story is so beautiful, because he sacrificed his life for the sake of another religion, for Hindus. At that time they were being persecuted by the Mughals. That’s really an inspiration to rue. That’s why I think Sikhs are in the world, not just for Sikhs alone but for anybody who needs a Sikh.

Honestly, deep in my heart I feel like our work in this world has to be much bigger than just for ourselves. Some of my friends say that when Khalistan is established then we’ll be able to kick back and relax. But I say no, the work is just getting started. You have your country but then you need to work on achieving justice in it and then in the rest of the world.

All these wars that are going on today, people are demanding justice at all costs. Bosnia is a clear-cut case- We have to not only be more peaceful in spirit, but we have to be willing to sacrifice our lives. The United Nations doesn’t really have any power because there aren’t enough parents willing to sacrifice their sons. It’s all just a big hoopla. If there is injustice and somebody in Somalia isn’t getting food, the United Nations should he able to take care of it.

When Khalistan is established if I have any say I will send 500, 1,000, 5,000 Sikhs right away. You don’t get peace and justice without sacrifice and our Gurus taught us all about that.

It was the tenth and last Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, who took the final step of establishing the military brotherhood of Sikhs, the Khalsa, or “pure.” Gobind Singh lived from 1666 to 1708, during a period of great tyranny under the reign of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. He stated from the first that he was born to save the Sikh faith:

37

The Divine Guru has sent me for the religion sake. For this reason I have come into the world: Extend the faith everywhere,

Seize and destroy the evil and sinful.

Understand this, holy people, in your minds-

I assumed birth for the purpose of spreading the faith, saving the saints and extirpating all tyrants.

The most important event in the militarization of the faith conducted by Guru Gobind Singh was the foundation of the Khalsa in 1699. Sending hukmnamas (letters of authority) to followers throughout the region, Guru Gobind Singh requested all Sikhs to congregate at Anandpur during the annual harvest festival of Vaisakhi. (The city of Anandpur was to become famous in twentieth-century history as the site of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, which demanded greater autonomy for the Sikhs.) A small tent was pitched, and Guru Gobind Singh addressed the congregation from its entryway. He drew his sword and demanded, “I need one head. Is there anyone who will volunteer to give his head?” No one answered on this first call, nor on the second, but on the third invitation one Sikh rose and said, “My head is at your service.” Guru Gobind Singh took this volunteer inside the tent and emerged shortly with his sword dripping blood. “Now I require another head,” he said. “Who can oblige me?” Again one Sikh volunteered, entered the tent, and Guru Gobind Singh emerged with bloodied sword. This happened five times. Then the five heroic volunteers came out of the tent, unharmed. These five, who were willing to sacrifice their lives for their Guru, were called panj piaras or “five beloved ones.” Guru Gobind Singh took an iron bowl and poured some water in it, then his wife, Mata Sahib Kaur, came and added sugar crystals. Guru Gobind Singh stirred this mixture with a double- edged sword while ‘reciting gurubani. This procedure created a sacred nectar called amrit, a word that forms the etymological root of the name of Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikhs. Baptism by the sword’s nectar, an image both martial and spiritual, replaced the more traditional picture of the devoted Sikh lovingly drinking the water in which a Guru’s foot had rested.

Each of the five beloved ones of Guru Gobind Singh drank five palmfuls of the amrit and had amrit sprinkled in their eyes five times. Each time they repeated the phrase, “Waheguru ji ka Khalsa, Waheguru ji ki Faith” (Khalsa belongs to God, Victory belongs to God). Then they received five sprinkles in their hair and sipped from the bowl of amrit. Guru Gobind Singh gave them all the name Singh, meaning “lion,” and designated them collectively as the Khalsa. For members of the Khalsa, Guru Gobind Singh would be their father, and his wife would be their mother. They would claim Anandpur, the City where the Khalsa was created, as their home, and would celebrate Vaisakhi as the birthday of the Khalsa.

Women were also initiated into the Khalsa, and initiates were then called kaur or princess.” The admission of both men and women, and the veneration of both Guru Gobind Singh and Mata Sahib Kaur as founding pal-cots are points of pride for members today, freshly aware of gender issues. In the current militancy, the claim of Anandpur as a birthplace and the naming of Guru Gobind Singh and Man Sahib Kaur as parents has also on occasion been useful for militants refusing to give information about themselves to police interrogators.

Every member of the Khalsa was enjoined by Guru Gobind Singh to wear five symbols of the Sikh faith, called “the five K’s.” These were kesh, unshorn hair; kanga, comb;

38

kachera, breeches; kara, steel bangle; and kirpan, sword. The point of the five K’s was to ensure that Sikhs would not be able to shirk their duty to defend their faith by blending unnoticed in a crowd. The characteristic turban, used to bind up the uncut hair of the Khalsa Sikh, was and is a conspicuous and undeniable marker of religious identity. Today, the turbans are often saffron, the color of martyrdom.

Khalsa Sikhs today, who sometimes refer to themselves as “baptized” or ‘confirmed” but are more appropriately described as simply amritdhari, those who have taken amrit, also carry the surname Singh, or, if female, Kaur, though sometimes these designations may be followed by mother family or regional name. They continue to wear the five K’ s scrupulously and have fought major legal battles over the right to wear them various settings in India and abroad. Two Sikhs who were elected to the Indian Parliament in 1989 (Simranjit Singh Mann and Dhyan Singh Mand) refused to take up their offices since they were not allowed to enter the parliamentary chamber wearing their swords. Recently, Sikhs it Canada won the right to wear the turban while serving in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The 511± prisoners I spoke with at San Pedro, who were not allowed turbans for fear they might use them to hang themselves, won the right to wear scraps of saffron-colored cloth on their heads for purposes of prayer.

Portraits painted by Sobha Singh of Guru Nanak (left) and Guru Gobind Singh, as commonly seen in Sikh

households and gurudwaras.

Just how important it is to keep the five articles of faith is illustrated by the famous story about Kartar Singh, the former head of a key Sikh seminary, who is believed to have died because he refused to allow surgeons to shave his hair for a necessary operation. Another example is provided by the following brief narrative, told by a guerilla fighter from the Babbar Khalsa force:

One time on a hot summer day I was sleeping in only my underwear, and as it is mandatory for a Sikh that he should always keep five articles of faith on him all the time, I had my sword and sword band on the left arm. As I slept, I was in such a deep slumber that somehow the sword slipped and fell on the floor and I was without it. Then some freedom fighter friends came to my house and they asked my mother, “Where is he?” My mother said I was sleeping in the back room. They came and saw that I was in deep sleep and my sword was on the floor. They went back and told my mother. “Come on,” they said, “let us show you something. Look at this boy, he has been baptized and he has taken a vow to keep the five articles of faith and now he has parted himself from his sword.” My mother said, “OK, I’ll bring a stick. You beat him with this and teach him that he should be loyal to his faith.”

39

For this unconscious misconduct I was then produced before five Sikhs, a sort of court in our tradition, and I was given religious punishment for that.

The use of panj piaras, five beloved ones, as a kind of court, was beg by Guru Gobind Singh. After initiating the original five volunteers in the Khalsa, he requested that they in turn initiate him. This is taken as significant indicator of the democratic nature of the Khalsa; authority is vested in any group of five Sikhs who come together to take a decision The Panthic Committee, which declared the independence of Khalistan in 1986, was likewise a five-member body.

Gum Gobind Singh carried a falcon as a symbol of martial and spiritual strength, and he is often pictured with a falcon on his wrist in Sikh religious art. The falcon remains a powerful mystic symbol, and claims were made that falcons had appeared in various locations around Punjab following the Indian Army assault on the Golden Temple Complex in June 1984. A falcon was said to have appeared at Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s home just before her assassination by two Sikh bodyguards in October of that year.6 Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale carried a silver arrow,) also reminiscent of the quiver of arrows on Guru Gobind Singh’s back, at all times.

Though the Khalsa siblinghood is respected by the entire Sikh community (as reflected in the motto Raj Karega Khalsa, “The Khalsa Shall Rule”), not all Sikhs took amrit in Gobind Singh’s time, and today, despite a push for more and more “baptisms” by Bhindranwale and other leaders, it is not known what percentage the amritdhari Sikhs form of the total Sikh population. Because of their explicit link to militancy as a philosophical stance, amritdhari Sikhs have been particular targets of surveillance and harassment in the current conflict. Many are in fact involved in the Khalistan movement, but others are not, for various reasons. Certainly not all have taken up arms (other than the mandatory kir1ban), though Bhindranwale advised, “To kill is bad, but to have weapons and not to fight for Justice is worse.” The taking of amrit is said to turn sparrows into hawks; they may not fight, but the talons are there.

The sacred taking of amrit as initiation into the Khalsa was mocked in recent years by a notorious Indian police officer called Gobind Ram. Among other atrocities, he became famous for urinating into a pot and saying to a Sikh woman prisoner, “You have drunk the amrit of Gobind Singh, now drink the amrit of Gobind Ram.” Several attempts were made by various militant groups to “deliver justice” to this Gobind Ram, and he was finally blown to smithereens by a bomb hidden under his chair. “They had to sweep him off the floor with a broom,” said one informant grimly.

Guru Gobind Singh was also responsible for the code of discipline that still regulates Khalsa Sikh life. The saint-soldier of the Khalsa is to rise before dawn to bathe and to pray. The use of tobacco is strictly forbidden along with other intoxicants, chastity is mandated, and Sikhs are enjoined to be always ready to help the defenseless. Furthermore, and importantly, a Sikh should never show his back to a foe in battle.

Fearlessness under fire has become something of a trademark of the Sikhs. The British colonizers of India recognized the Sikhs as “a martial ace,” and Sikhs served in the Indian arms’ out of all proportion to their numbers until the recent disaffection. “He who is fearful is not a Sikh and he who is fearless is a Sikh,” said Bhindranwale at the Golden Temple entrenchment. One of the venerated martyrs of the Khalistan movement, Bhai Avtar Singh Brahma of the Khalistan Liberation Force, is known and admired for his habit of firing

40

at his targets from a full frontal standing position. He used to use village loudspeakers to challenge the police to come out and get him. This kind of utter disregard for personal risk is what makes the Sikhs great fighters, fearsome enemies, and often, of course, martyrs. Guerilla fighters today all have portraits made of themselves in full regalia, bandolier across the shoulder, to be released to the public after their martyrdoms.

Just what being a saint-soldier means is expressed in the following two comments about Khalistanis:

I can tell you this not only about myself and my companions. but about all the militants I know, We are very devout people. We wake up at three or four in the morning, bathe, and pray for hours and hours. We pray before we go on a mission, that the mission should be successful. When we come back and it has been accomplished we thank the Guru for that. Our only mission in life is to uphold the value of dharm, righteousness. People who are fighting for that, upholding the loftiest ideals, how can they do wrong?

When they go off to a mission they are not excited or nervous at all. They are totally at peace. They say their prayers, standing before Guru Granth Sahib and asking strength for what they want to do. The way they take out their weapons and ready their weapons, it is close to worship. Then when they come back the first thing they do is lie prostrate before Guru Granth Sahib. They thank Guru if the action was successful. If not, then they pray and say, “Guru, thanks you for keeping us alive today, and please give us the strength so that next time our mission will be successful.” They are very devout, full of noble spirit.

A major prayer of Guru Gobind Singh, now part of the “National Anthem of Khalistan,” expresses the militant ethos clearly:

Lord, these boons of Thee I ask, Let me never shun a righteous task, Let me be fearless when I go to battle, Give one faith that victors will be mine, And when turtles the to end ray lift, Let me fall in mighty strife

Guru Gobind Singh suffered the martyrdom of his four Sons, the elder two when he sent them into battle, and the younger two when they were bricked up alive inside a wall by a Mughal functionary. Despite this terrible loss, Guru Gobind Singh wrote a zafarnama or “letter of victory” to Aurangzeb. “These are just a few candles that you have snuffed out,” he wrote. “But the whole blazing furnace of the Khalsa is all around me, and it will make Punjab so hot that your horses won’t be able to gallop across the burning plains.”

Since Guru Gobind Singh, to make sense of suffering in terms of the larger community, whose momentum is exhilarating and whose ultimate victory is sure, has become commonplace. It accounts for the strange sense of optimism, even joy that pervades the militant Sikh community. Though I was ready to try to be open-minded about why people decide to take up arms when I started my study of Sikh militancy, I found myself taken aback by the mood of exaltation in Sikh homes and gurudwaras. It seemed that the worse things got, the happier they were.7 I later realized that the cause for celebration was simply knowing a truth worth dying for, having a cause worth living for, perceived by Sikhs as existentially meaningful utterly independent of rational strategies. One young Sikh girl in Canada had to design a T-shirt as part of a school project; the teacher found her subject matter (a bloody

41

martyrdom) too morbid and she suggested, “Why don’t you make Tina Turner?” Her father, a militant, said of this, “How sad, unhealthy really, that the only thing Canadian kids have to worry about is rock-and-roll.”

On Guru Gobind Singh’s death the spiritual authority of the guruship passed on to the holy scriptures and the temporal authority passed to the entire Sikh panth. Granth (Guru Granth Sahib) and Panth are therefore the twin repositories of Guru, making veneration of the Word and defense of the Nation dual modes of worship for the orthodox Sikh. The Sikh militant who listens to gurubani on his Walkman while going on missions, so that he aces death not to the sound of bullets but to the sound of prayer, is the embodiment of this philosophy. While the niceties of philosophy may not matter to potential victims of militant violence, for whom the image of an armed Sikh with hymns on his headset is particularly horrifying, there is certainly more behind this figure than simple glosses like “fanaticism” would indicate. Getting behind this superficial fear is crucial to figuring out what to do about religious violence, which differs from other kinds of violence and also differs from one context to another. In this search, the particularism of ethnography he most helpful, bringing us beyond labels like “terrorism” and “fundamentalism”, that often seem to hide more than they illuminate.

When Guru Nanak approached the city of Multan during his travels around the subcontinent, he was met at the gates by a holy man with a (ill) of milk, who told him that there were already enough holy men in the city, that there was no room for one more. Gum Nanak took the milk 11d floated a jasmine petal on its fragile surface. “Just as the delicate fragrance of jasmine will add flavor to this milk,” he said, “so my teachings will impart beauty and truth to the people of your city.”

The landscape of Punjab, saturated with so much blood, is also in Sikh minds fragrant with the scent of jasmine. To understand the blood and he jasmine both is the challenge facing the intruding anthropologist.

42

3

A SAINT SOLDIER

MARK JUERGENSMEYER suggests the term “religious nationalism” the many politicized religious revival movements across the globe. Militant Islam is prominent, in its myriad forms from North Africa to the Middle East to Central Asia to the Pacific, but other movements include the Hindu revitalization now being expressed in India, the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, the right-wing Jewish militancy in Israel and the West, and more. Though not all the movements) that entangle religion and politics aim at the creation of a state (e.g., the U.S. Christian variety), enough of them seek to either establish or transform one that the term “religious nationalism” is a fortunate one. It has the crucial advantage of being more affectively neutral than “fundamentalism,” with its connotations of backwardness, intolerance, and zealotry.

Juergensmeyer notes in The New Cold War: Religious Nationalism’ Confronts the Secular State that the religious activists with whom he speaks in various parts of the world are “politically astute and t deeply concerned about the society in which they live.”1 Devout they may be, but they are not necessarily anti-modern, intolerant of others, or bent on converting everybody else to their particular brand of belief. “The West is scared to death of religion,” one Sikh commented at a recent seminar. This refrain echoes through out Juergensmeyer’s work, in which the West’s determination to keep church and state separate is silhouetted against a global backdrop of buoyant movements of religious nationalism. Though he may carry this theme too far in calling the global confrontation between religious nationalism and the secular state “the new cold war,” it is clear that there is a deep rift between the world views of most Westerners and that of religious nationalists like Khomeini or Kahane. This rift is exacerbated by the fact that very few people in the West have occasion to sit down and talk with the likes of Khomeini or Kahane and are dependent the media coverage that naturally emphasizes dramatic acts of violence over conciliatory dialogue. There is in fact a large common ground between secular and religious kinds of nationalism, though differences cannot be swept aside.

I found in my long talks with Sikhs that some of the most interesting ad enlightened of them were also the most religious. One granthi (scripture-reader) in particular, was an archetypical “fundamentalist” in hat his education was primarily religious in nature, he was a strict puritan in terms of day-to-day ethics, and he brooked no challenges to orthodox readings of the Sikh scriptures. But he also had quite a universalist and pragmatic understanding of what Sikhism was and what a Sikh state could be. His story is interesting not only because of his intelligence and eloquence (which he expressed in fluent English) but because he had grown up with Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, essentially the founder of the Khalistani militancy. I met him early in my research, and I remember the conversation that took place between us vividly It shows both he potential for real interaction with “religious nationalists” as well as some of the problematic differences between this way of thinking and our Own.

A SAINT SOLDIER

“My name is Iqbal Singh,” he began our interview session, “from Amritsar. I was born in December 1962. My family background was not very religious. My father and mother were Sikhs but they would go to the gurudwara only about once a month. But my elder brother decided to go and learn more about Sikhism. We have a school of Sikh theology called Damdami Taksal, which is in Bhatinda district. He went and studied there.”

“How did you feel when he made the decision to go?” I asked.

“I was too young to feel anything. I was only six years old when he went here. But we were very comfortable financially so I couldn’t understand why he decided to go on that path. Anyway, after spending six or seven years there, he moved to Bombay to start his career as a granthi in a gurudwara. I was then in seventh grade. He called up my parents and said hat I should learn gin-mat [Sikh religious teachings]. He was not making any money, but he said he felt mentally satisfied, and he wanted me to feel the same.

“I still have the letter that he wrote to me at that time. ‘Iqbal,’ he said, ‘I meet so many doctors, engineers, and other rich people, but I don’t see any peace of mind anywhere. I see myself with my four hundred rupees a month, and I feel very comfortable because at least J have peace of mind. I don’t want vial to become a doctor or an engineer. If you really want a happy life lien go in to this profession.’

‘Well, my parents resisted. They were not happy. But they eventually listened to my brother and they sent me to Damdami Taksal. I was only eleven years old.”

“Just listening to your parents, really,” I commented.

“Right When you are living in a village and your parents are deciding to send you to a city, you are excited no matter what that is. I was excited to go. Especially to avoid housework!” The young granthi laughed when lie said this.

“Tell me what it was like there,” I requested. “What were your first few days like?”

“It was not really that good. After spending one month I called my parents up and I said, ‘I don’t want to stay’.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because it was a totally different atmosphere. At my home we used to get up around eight or nine, according to our school time. But at the Damdami Taksal there is a discipline that you have to get up early in the morning for meditation, nam simran [the repetition of the Divine Name]. That discipline was painful. I was not used to it. I called my parents up and my brother came and got me.”

“What about the other boys there with you? What were they like?’

“They were OK. But I was only eleven years old and I had no friends there. I had never been away from my parents, my five brothers, and two sisters. So after that first month I gave up and went home. But after two weeks I decided to go back again.”

44

“After you were waking up at eight instead of four, you decided wasn’t really so bad?” The granthi was smiling as he recounted his story: so I warmed up to him naturally. He laughed easily and beautifully.

Amarjit, sitting off to one side, told me that at that time, 1974, the leader of the Damdami Taksal was Sant Kartar Singh Bhindranwale. Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who was later to die in the attack on the Golden Temple Complex, was a student there then.

“Yes, Sant Kartar Singh ji Khalsa was the head of Damdami Taksal,” my interlocutor continued. (“Ji” is used in the name as an indicator of respect.) “Sant Jarnail Singh ji was a student. He was studying there, like me.”

“At that time, did you know Sant Jarnail Singh?”

“We were just friends. We did not then have any picture in our minds that he was going to be the next head of Damdami Taksal and a great leader. It was very enjoyable, our friendship. We lived like brothers.”

“Did you all sleep in a dormitory?”

“Actually there are two sections of Damdami Taksal. One is in the district headquarters in Mehta, district Amritsar. Those people who specifically cam harmonium, baja, and tabla [musical instruments used in hi kirtan, hymn singing], they would stay in that headquarters. Those who wanted mo learn speech and interpretation of Guru Granth Sahib ji, they would travel with Santji [at this point he is referring to Sant Kartar Singh] wherever he would go. I was with that group. The whole year long we would stay two weeks here, two weeks there, two weeks in the next town, and so on. We were always on the road.”

Amarjit interrupted. “That’s why they call it the ‘moving university’ of lie Sikhs.”

“Yes, the moving university,’ the granthi assented. “We had two buses and one truck and we always went around in those.”

“Were they all boys?” I queried, always on the look out for gender

“All boys. I was the youngest, at the time, of all those in the moving university.” “Did you study other subjects, too? Or just religion?”

‘just religion. Well, we also covered things like Sanskrit, some history like the rule of Chanakya, and soon. But strictly speaking it all had to do with religion.”

He continued his narrative. “I spent seven years there at Damdami Taksal. In 1977, Sant Kartar Singhj ji, the head of the institution, unfortunately died in a car accident. So after that Sant Jarnail Singh ji was chosen as head of Damdami Taksal.”

“How old was he then?”

“Sant Jarnail Singh ji was then 31 years old.”

“When you say he was chosen, what do you mean? What is the process of being chosen?”

45

“Actually that was during the Emergency in India-you know about the history of that, imposed by Indira Gandhi. Well, Sant Kartar Singh ji opposed that. He was so against it. So he knew that he could be arrested at any time and that the Indian government might kill him. One time he was in front of the congregation at Gurudwara Birh Baba Budhaji, district Amritsar. I know because I was on the stage with him at the time- he announced that if somehow he died, Baba Thakur Singh should be the next head of the Taksal. But after the car accident he did not have time to say anything more. Baba Thakur Singh had the right though to choose to appoint somebody else who could lead.”

Amarjit added, “That Baba Thakur Singh is the acting head of Damdami Taksal now.”

“That was because Sant Kartar Singh had given him the authority,” the granthi contributed.

I was curious. “Are they still functioning in the same way, around Punjab?”

The granthi and Amarjit both nodded. I decided to try to pursue more theoretical concerns.

“Let me just hack up a minute. In that time, before Sant Jarnail Singh became head, was there talk about politics among the students at Damdami Taksal?”

The granthi thought carefully, then spoke slowly. “I don’t differentia what politics is and what religion is. It is a way of life for us. When some. one disrupts your way of life and you try to stop him, for that person it becomes politics. For me it is not politics, it is just a way of life. When ii someone disturbs the way I want to live, and the Indian government wants me to do it another way, then it becomes politics for them. But not for me. I just have my way of life. I may have to fight for the right to live 4 it that way, but I don’t call it politics.”

“Anyway, already during the Emergency years, Damdami Taksal was like a thorn in the side of the Indian government, because its head protested Emergency measures?”

“Yes, they were really after us all because of that.”

“And everybody agreed, not just the head of Damdami Taksal but all the people within, they all felt the same about it?”

“Exactly, There were many protests conducted by Damdami Taksal during the Emergency.”

Amarjit added that there were in fact dozens of protest demonstrations led by Sant Kartar Singh. When I asked whether these were all peaceful demonstrations, both asserted that they were.

“Was anybody talking about Khalistan at that time?” I asked. “No, there was no talk of anything called Khalistan back then. The question was why the civil liberties of the people were being taken away. But of course that is the real foundation for Khalistan-when it becomes clear that you are not being allowed to live the way you want in India.”

“And Sant Kartar Singh was a very charismatic person,” Amarjit chimed in.

46

“Yes, he was,” agreed Iqbal Singh. “He was a great man. I feel proud of those three years I spent with him. He used to wash our hair like we were his sons. I can still remember the feeling of his hands in my hair, though I was only eleven years old.”

I reaffirmed, “He was like a father to you.” In this kind of reaffirmation of what somebody said, which I found myself doing often, I felt like a psychotherapist.

“What did you call him?” I asked.

“I called him Babaji [father] and he used to call me Betaji [child] or various other terms of endearment.”

“Was he married, did he have a family?”

Yes. In fact his son, Bhai Amrik Singh was a prominent figure in the movement.’’

I felt the little internal click that comes when you realize you have made all important connection. Bhai Amrik Singh was the head of the Sikh Students Federation and Bhindranwale’s right-hand man during lit occupation of the Golden Temple Complex. He was martyred in the 1984 assault.

‘Oh, that was his son?” was in the event all I thought to ask. “Yes, and I knew his wife and younger son, too.”

“How old were you then, when Sant Jarnail Singh became head? “I was eighteen years old.”

‘When he became head, did things change?”

“Not in political terms. It was just the same way. The Indian govern- Dent thought that maybe although they could not stop Sant Kartar Singh ji, maybe Sant Jarnail Singh ji would be weaker. That was not he case.”

Amarjit then interrupted with a significant point. “Cynthia,” he said, I ct me tell you that Sant Kartar Singh’s death in an accident was not a natural one. There was something behind it.’

“Do you believe that?” I asked the granthi.

He thought a moment, then said quietly, “Yes, it is a known fact that there was a conspiracy.”

“It was never officially investigated?” I tried to prompt. “It’s unfortunate, but no one took care of that,” he said.

Amarjit took over this line of thought. “Sant Kartar Singh had been giving indications that he thought something was going wrong. He kept telling Sant Jarnail Singh that.

lqbal Singh interrupted to continue the story himself. “As a mystic person Sant Kartar Singh ji was really a saint- I think he knew. One time we were sitting in a village, Mulsehan,

47

in district Jallandhar, and Jarnail Singh ji was not a regular student at that time like we were. He had responsibilities by that time, two sons and a wife, and he had to take care of them. He would come, stay a month, go back, and soon like that. That day when we were ready to leave for our next-destination, Sant Jarnail Singh ji came to Sant Kartar Singh ji and said, ‘Allow me to go now. I have to go.’ Sant Kartar Singh ji said, ‘Why are you going? You will be wining back.’ No one understood what he meant. But Sant Jarnail Singh ji must have thought something. He did so much nam simran [prayer], so much meditation, twenty hours out of twenty-four he was in meditation. He really worked hard, and he had great spiritual powers. Anyway, he went back to his village and the rest of us went on to Solan in the hills. When Sant Jarnail Singh ji heard then what happened to Sant Kartar Singh ji in his absence, he felt so bad. He spent all his time then in the hospital [with the injured Kartar Singh].

“For thirteen days Santji [Kartar Singh] was in the hospital. When the accident happened, I mean- He kept asking for a pen and a paper, but no one gave him any.”

“He couldn’t speak?” I inquired.

“No, he couldn’t speak because he had severe damage to his chest and his ear was cut off totally. The first question he asked was about the five articles of faith. I was in that bus, that same bus in which Santji [Kartar Singh] was taken to the hospital, so I was standing by when this happened. He made sure about his kachera, kirpan, and all. Then he touched his head sod discovered his comb was missing Somebody realized that Santji had no comb and gave him one, and he was reassured by that.”

He continued. “After some minutes Sant Kartar Singh ji wanted to write something down, but he couldn’t speak. He kept making a movement with his hand, like this.” Iqbal Singh demonstrated a pantomime of writing. “If I could understand that he was asking for a pen and paper, why not the others standing by?”

“No one gave him a pen and paper?”

“No one gave him any. After a while he asked again in the same way, but again no one gave him a pen or paper.”

“And you think that people didn’t give him pen and paper on purpose?”

“I think so. It was a big topic of discussion after his death. He wanted to tell something, but was not provided the means to do so.”

“Then later on he was cremated?” I asked.

“Yes. He was cremated at Mehta Sahib [headquarters of Damdami Taksal]. He had died in Ludhiana but was brought to Mehta Sahib for the saskar [cremation ceremony of the Sikhs]. At that time the doctor who had treated Sant Kartar Singh ji said something really interesting. That doctor was a Christian, and told how he had explained to Santji that he had to remove the hair of his head and chest for surgery. Santji said, ‘You can cut my head off, but don’t touch thy hair.’ That’s how devout he was. And he never complained that he had any pain. The doctor said, ‘What kind of person is this?’ And he said, ‘If I can make Santji survive I will see that Jesus has survived.’ He thought Santji was so spiritually strong, he was like Jesus.

48

“After his death the body was cremated and Sant Jarnail Singh ji started as master of Damdami Taksal. We started our journeying again, going around to villages in Punjab, to Bombay, to Calcutta, and so on. We continued with the moving university.”

JARNAIL SINGH BHINDBANWALE

‘‘As it odd for you that you used to have Sant Jarnail Singh as just your friend, and then he was suddenly in a high position like that?”

“No. We understood that he was now the head. And friendship is.. well, the friendship was of course still there. But we now showed greater respect to him because of his position.”

He went on. “Sant Jarnail Singh ji was not really very different as head Damdami Taksal. He was just like he always was. He had a great peace of mind before he attained this position and after, He used to come to our rooms in the dormitory and we would laugh and laugh. He would ask about our troubles and problems and help us with them. He was so strict, too. If we would do anything wrong, he would not spare us!”

The granthi laughed as he remembered, fondly, being disciplined by Bhindranwale. “Did he call you by your first names?” I asked.

“Yes. But we called him Santji, or Babaji. Not by his first name, to show respect.” “Would you say he was growing in his spiritual power during that time?”

“He had always made a strong impression on people, even before he was Santji. He was the only person that virtually everybody respected. Even Sant Kartar Singh ji, he would not treat Sant Jarnail Singh ji as a student or a disciple, but as an equal, a real gursikh [true or orthodox Sikh]. He felt his power.

“Sant Jarnail Singh ji had so much respect for gurubani and Guru. Once I know we were sleeping in the same room, and we used to just lie on the floor rather than using beds. There were some prayer books up in the rafters and one time one somehow got loose and fell down at Sant Jarnail Singh ji’s feet. He was sleeping and didn’t realize what had happened. When he got up and saw the book lying by his feet he cried, ‘This is an insult to gurubani, how could I do that?” He was very disturbed about this and wouldn’t eat or sleep. Sant Kartar Singh ji went to him and said, ‘Jarnail Singh, this is not your mistake. You didn’t do anything wrong.’ But Sant Jarnail Singh ji was in such pain that he read the whole of the Guru Granth Sahib as an apology.

“You only love gurubani like that when you know it has provided you so much. There are some people who respect it for nothing, it’s just a gesture. Just because of tradition they bow before it. Sant Jarnail Singh ji was not tradition, He was the living image of gurubani. If you wanted to see some Sikh out of the Gum Granth Sahib, Sant Jarnail Singh ji was the one.”

Amarjit added, in a mood of nostaligia, “Sant Jarnail Singh was such a gentle man, very loving and spiritual person. Everybody felt this from him. You would have really liked to know him.”

49

lqbal Singh continued, “On April 13, 1978, I was part of the jatha [brigade] who went to stop the Nirankaris. [The Sant Nirankaris are a sect who believe in a living Guru and are rejected by Khalsa Sikhs as blasphemous.] That was really the beginning of the movement, so I’ll tell you about this incident. I was there, I was an eyewitness.

We were staying in Gurudwara Gurdashan Prakash, which had become Santji’s headquarters in Amritsar. A group of Sikhs came and told Santji that there was a Nirankari, Gurbachan Singh, who was going to lead a procession in Amritsar and who was saying that on this day, April 13, Guru Gobind Singh created the panj piaras [five beloved ones] and that he would now create the sat sitaras [seven stars]. Santji got really upset listening to that, it being Vaisakhi day and in the city which is the heart of Sikhism and all.

“Let me say this very clearly: if anybody wants to have his own religion, I don’t think Sikhs have any problem with that. But when he is challenging the basic philosophy of the Sikhs, when he is actually naming Guru Gobind Singh and suggesting that he is the equivalent of that Guru, that is a direct challenge to our deepest beliefs. If he were saying something else, anything else, that was not directly against the Sikh religion, Santji would be pleased that he should do whatever he wants. Santji used to tell a Hindu to be a better Hindu, a Muslim to be a better Muslim, and so 4 on. But this person challenged the very basis of Sikhism, and Santji got really upset.

“I know about this because I followed Santji when he went over to Manji Sahib Diwan Hall, a huge auditorium that can fit several thousand people. He spoke to the Sikhs for fifteen minutes and very clearly laid out the situation.”

I interrupted. “How many followers did they have, the Nirankaris?” “There were thousands of them, all over India.”

“How can you account for the attraction? Why did so many people join the Nirankaris?”

“Since the Sikh religion came into existence, the Hindu, the Brahmin that is {the highest caste of the Hindu system], always tried to divide us into sections. Divide and destroy. Let me tell you one incident which related to me personally. One of my brothers came to me at one point and said that he wanted to cut his hair. I asked why. He said that there were some actors coming to do a play in our village and they wanted to give him a role. I told him that he could cut it if he wanted to but that he could not come back in the house afterward. See, it was the policy of those people that they wanted to convert those boys who were amritdhari Sikhs. They would attract them to quit living like an amritdhari by giving them roles in plays which would require them to cut their hair and that sort of thing. They had other attractions, coo, like giving small businesses to heir followers.”

You think these were purposeful manipulations?”

It was clearly a matter of purposeful manipulation. There was free sex and liquor involved, too. They tried to lure people away from.

Amarjit cut in. “You have to look at the make-up of the people who 1oined the Nirankaris, too. Either they were class one gazetted officers, deputy commissioners could allot land plots and all, or they were the poorest of the poor. The rich went there like they

50

would go to a country club. They used their power to attract greater numbers from among the poor, luring them with money and other things. And the central government, which was the Janata Government of Morarji Desai, started manipulating them as a way to undercut the power of Sikhism in Punjab. The sad part was that some members of this government were brought to power by Sant Kartar Singh himself, in leading all those demonstrations and so on. It was very painful to see this happening in a state where Damdami Taksal had itself made such a direct contribution.”

“Your brother finally didn’t go with them?” I asked Iqbal Singh. “No. In fact I went myself and I told them that if they tried to come into our village there would be a fight. They did try to come and in fact there was a fight. But then they did not dare come to our village for the next four or five years.

“Anyway, when Santji was told about the Nirankari procession on Vaisakhi day he tried to get a minister in the government to intervene. But he said there was nothing he could do about it. So we vowed to go there and protest openly. There was no intention of fighting. If there had been lighting on our minds we would have prepared ourselves better.”

“You didn’t have any weapons?” I asked. I later learned that this question doesn’t make sense to an amritdhari Sikh, because he or she always has the kirpan (dagger or sword).

“We were praying to God the whole time as we marched. It was not because of some kind of fear but to show that we were intent on peacefully protesting. When we reached the Nirankaris, they started throwing cola bottles at us, Then some of them started throwing bricks and stones. Some from our group threw them back. Then the Nirankaris started firing. The police came and they also started firing at our group. Even though we were intent on having a peaceful march, thirteen Sikhs got killed in that confrontation.”2

“How did you feel when you heard the shots, when you realized they were firing?”

“We were all pushing each other back, because we had nothing [no firearms]. It is not good to die without a fight. If you are in the battlefield it is all right, but not to die without standing up for yourself. We all pushed each other to go back, and some of us hid under a truck for about half all hour- Then we went back to Darbar Sahib [Golden Temple Complex].”

“Were some of your friends killed?”

“Bhai Ranbir Singh ji he was my first teacher at Damdami Taksal, he, was killed there. Baba Darshan Singh ji was killed, too, and there were others. I knew them personally.”

Amarjit added, ‘Those who went to protest the Nirankaris were not only from Damdami Taksal but some members of the Akhand Kirtani Jatha went as well [a group devoted to hymn singing]. Bhai Fauja Singh was leading that group. Among those who got killed, some were from:

Damdami Taksal and some were from Akhand Kirtani Jatha.”

lqbal Singh continued. “Santji wanted to join us to march against the’ Nirankaris on that day. But five Sikhs got together, including Bhai Fauja Singh, and they said, ‘No, we are ordering you to stay here.’ He had to obey that [because of the panjpiaras tradition].”

51

“They were concerned for his safety?” I asked.3

“Yes, they were worried about his safety. They ordered him not to go.”

Amarjit continued, “The whole of the Indian press came out in sup- port of the Nirankaris after that episode. Prime Minister Morarji Desai put the entire blame on the Sikhs. Not only that, but the Nirankari head was escorted safely out of Punjab. When the First Information Report was lodged he was the first accused of violence, but he never got arrested. In fact the court was moved out of Amritsar because most of the judges would be Sikhs. Instead the case was brought to Haryana where the judge was a Hindu. The whole thing was heard in camera, so who knows what j went on? Finally, the court acquitted all the Nirankaris, and it even passed strictures against the Punjab government for registering the case. As for the Sikhs, they waited patiently while the Nirankari case was being g1 heard. But when the verdict came in and they were all declared innocent, Santji said, ‘OK, their justice system has failed, so now our justice system will prevail.’ That was why he felt we had to take matters into our own hands-the Indian courts had not lived up the promise of justice.”

The granthi said, “My parents got really scared when the news came that the thirteen Sikhs had gotten killed. There was one person on that list who had the same name as me, and my parents thought I had been killed. They came the next day to cremate my body.

“The sad part was that the Akali government [Akai Dal was and is the main political party of the Sikhs] was elected because of Damdami Taksal’s role in the Emergency, as Dr. Amarjit Singh just said. People thought it was kind of Santji’s government. When people were elected they would ask for Santji’s blessing and they would ask him to tell people to support them. But after this episode there was not much support for Santji. People felt he had let them down because the Akali government let them down. He didn’t appear publicly for a few weeks, but he started quietly preparing himself for a fight ell, not exactly for a fight in the literal sense, but you could say. . . he was just thinking for some time.”

“He was thinking about what to do next?” I prompted.

“Yes, he was just thinking. He was shocked. He could have expected such a thing from a Congress government but he was stunned that an Akali government a Sikh Government, should be so weak-kneed. Then he came to the conclusion that even the Akali government was no friend Sikhi [Sikhdom, the Sikh way]. He decided that he would have to do something for the Sikhs, because no one else would.”

“When did you first realize, yourself that some plan of action was in the works?” I asked.

“It was never actually a ‘plan of action,’ so to speak. What Santji started doing was baptizing people. He felt that the main task was to make people aware of Sikhi. He would not talk against the Akalis, though, he just said clearly in his words and actions, we are Sikh, we should know how to live as Sikhs. But then the Akalis started verbally abusing Santji and these insults started going back and forth.”

“This was how the rumor got started that Sant Bhindranwale was really a plant of the Congress government,” said Amarjit. “The Akalis were scared. They had had control over the whole gurudwara system for sixty or seventy years, and then a man of charisma rose up and

52

people started following him. They were not any match for him, so they started Pushing this story that he had been bought by the Congress government to defame the Akalis.”

“Anyway,” Iqbal Singh continued, “this was the background to the real rise of Sant Bhindranwale. Let me tell you about the key episode at Chando Kalan, a village in Haryana state where we were staying when some police officers came looking for Santji. They wanted to arrest him.

“Why did they want to arrest him?” I asked, trying to follow the story. “That was for the murder of Lala jagat Narain, the owner of Hind Samachar [a chain of newspapers]. He had written some very nasty things about Guru Gobind Singh ji, and used to challenge Sikh traditions at every step. Santji had spoken against this man many times, so when he got murdered a conspiracy case was filed against him.

“Anyway, when the police reached the village of Chando Kalan they could not find Santji. They beat up one of my friends pretty badly. And they literally looted that whole village. They tortured the women. When they were ready to leave, they burnt our two buses. Those buses were like a library for us students. Everything we had we kept in those buses, including prayer books and all. And the same Santji, who could not tolerate one book falling at his feet while he slept, how could he tolerate the fact that Guru Granth Sahib was burnt by the Indian government for nothing? Santji said in interviews, ‘If the government thought that Jarnail Singh was at fault, if they wanted to arrest me, why did they go and b the buses? Why did they burn my Guru?’ He used to cry, literally weep when he described that situation.

“On September 20 he surrendered to the police at Mehta Sahib was taken into Ludhiana jail. They established a court in the rest house there, and Santji was called to appear. And there was one interesting incident that took place there.”

“What was it?’’

“There is a tradition in India that they would give you a holy book sometimes the Gita (Bhagavad Gita, a holy book of the Hindus], and yet would say that you wouldn’t tell a lie in court. When Santji was there he was asked to put his hand on Gurubani Gutka [a Sikh prayer book] in stead.4 He said to the court officers, ‘What is this?’ They said, ‘It’s Gurubani Gutka.’ Then Santji said, ‘In the constitution you call us Hindus [referring to the controversial Article 25]. But you are asking me to swear an oath on Gurubani Gutka. Why not make me swear on the Gita?’ They said, ‘Well, you might tell a lie then.’ ‘Look,’ said Santji, ‘you change the constitution then. Recognize me as a Sikh, and I’ll happily say the oath on Gurubani Gutka.’ The officers kept pushing him for two days, but he kept saying, ‘Either change the constitution or change the book!’ Finally they decided to skip the oath taking on a book completely. That’s how strong Santji was.”

“What finally happened in court, then? What was the verdict?” “Santji was cleared. They never found any evidence against him.”

“Who in fact killed Lala jagat Narain?” This question slipped out before I could think about it. This was, actually, the sort of thing I did not want to know. Luckily (and predictably), my interlocutors were more careful than I was.

53

Amarjit said, “Two others were tried for that murder. But we don’t know who really killed him.”

Iqbal Singh added, “The point was that after the Nirankari episode this incident at Chando Kalan really alienated Santji. He became crystal clear on the point that justice could not be expected as far as the Sikhs were concerned.”

Iqbal Singh continued. “After that Santji came out of jail and he never went anywhere after that. He stopped his roaming around and stayed at his headquarters at the Darbar Sahib [tile Golden Temple Complex at Amritsar]. Then the real fight began.

“By 1979 I had finished my study at Damdami Taksal and I asked Santji , whether I should go on to the Sikh Missionary College. He said that if I wanted to do it, I should. The Missionary College is in Amritsar, the same place where Santji was staying. He and I stayed together in a hostel, just like old times. My friends were there, too, so it was really just like a family. Ill needed new clothes, for example, I wouldn’t go to my own parents. I could go to Santji, and I would say, ‘Santji, I need new clothes.’”

“Were your parents happy with your decision to stay with Bhindranwale?”

“Not at first, When I first left Damdami Taksal they told me they didn’t want me to go on with this business. In fact they sent me to Orissa to become a car mechanic!”

We all laughed at the thought of this granthi, in immaculate white turban, working on cars,

“I spent three or four months there but my heart wasn’t in it. So I went in Sikh Missionary College and spent three years there. I used to teach students at Damdami Taksal, too-there were no real teachers there, it was a system in which the seniors taught the juniors, each generation bringing up the next.

“To tell you the truth, I got the feeling that the government actually wanted to eliminate every single individual associated with the Damdami Taksal. At one point I was at my college studying for an examination, when a friend of mine suggested that we go to his village for a vacation. It was a Saturday. I agreed and we went to get the forms we had to fill out stating that we wouldn’t be staying in the dormitory that night. I had just left the clerk when a police party arrived in three jeeps, all carrying Sten guns. They started asking around for me and that clerk told them that I had already left. He knew I was there but he covered for me, and he showed them my application for leave from the dormitory. Then that clerk sent somebody to tell me to get out of there fast. I was shocked when I got this message, as I had never done anything wrong.

“I took the bicycle of my friend, and headed toward the gate. There was one gunman standing at one side and one gunman at the other. They seemed to be stopping everybody as they left through the gate. When I saw that I would be stopped, I suddenly got an idea. I faced toward the offices of the hostel and I shouted, ‘How many cups?’ as if I were asking whether they wanted tea. I pretended to be just a tea-boy. ‘How many cups?’ I yelled toward the offices.”

He laughed, remembering this escapade. “I got through the police check this way. I outsmarted them. However, the police had seen the forms on which I had written my home

54

address, and eventually they showed up at my parents’ place. They arrested my mother and father and took them to Patiala jail. They were in there for two days, and they got beaten. When I heard about this, decided to surrender. Though I hadn’t done anything, I didn’t want my parents to be punished on my account. So they were released, and I was taken into custody.”

“So what was it like in jail?”

“Well, it was not too bad because my father had connections with some officials. In fact his best friend was a deputy inspector general of police, who told the others, ‘You can ask him anything you like, but don’t touch him.’

“There were two brothers, Jasdev Singh and Sukhdev Singh, and both were from Damdami Taksal. We three spent two days in jail together. I had been preparing myself for the entrance examination for Guru Nanak Dev University, and the exam was to take place the next day. I explained that I had to be released to take the exam. There was some argument among the officers about whether I should be allowed to take this test or not. On the evening before the test a police guard told us, ‘This is your last day, all of you.’ We got worried, and did not know what they would do.

‘That night the three of us exchanged our hares [wrist bands]. Then 4] I was released to go and take my exam in Amritsar. I took the exam, and afterward went with some of my friends to a tea stall. I picked up a paper there and was shocked to see that the two boys I had just left the night before had been killed in an ‘encounter’ with the police. Jasdev Singh and Sukhdev Singh were both dead.”

He held up his arm, so that I could see the steel ham on his wrist. “This is the kara I got from one of them. I have never taken it off.”

“Is that a usual thing to do, exchanging karas like that?” I asked. “No, it was unusual. It was a sign of love between us …”

All three of us were quite emotional by this point in the story. The granthi had a tear splashed onto his glasses, and Amarjit swiped at the corners of his eyes, as he does. I restrained myself from reaching out to offer comfort. I was never sure how such displays would be taken.

“I couldn’t drink the tea I had in front me,” Iqbal Singh continued. “They had taken me off to Amritsar, and they took them outside of that jail and killed them.”

“Were those two actually charged with any crime?”

“A bank robbery,” he said. “The first bank robbery in Punjab was in Jandiala, district Amritsar, and we were all accused of being involved in that. Eight hundred thousand rupees had been taken out.”

“They were not really involved in it, they were just charged,” noted Amarjit.

“Right,” said Iqbal Singh. “Those two were good friends of mine. They used to come to Sikh Missionary College and sleep there, and I used to visit them. In our childhood we spent seven or eight years together at Damdami Taksal. They were like my family, and I

55

know that they were no more involved in a bank robbery than I was. When Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale heard about this he just said, ‘They are after the Damdami Taksal. They want to kill everybody in Damdami Taksal.’ I started agreeing with this because I saw it with my own eyes.”

“The bank robbery was just a sweet crime? It didn’t have anything to do with Bhindranwale?” I asked, again, not very wisely.

“Yes,” answered Amarjit “While Santji was around there was always enough money just from donations. After 1984 [his martyrdom] there came a time when militants had to go to the banks to get money for the struggle, but as long as Santji was there was never a need for that sort of thing.”

“Yes, Santji always had enough money,” said Iqbal Singh. He wouldn’t have risked any of us over a few rupees to begotten from robbing a bank. He used to say that his Singh’s were more precious than rupees.”

Amarjit continued on this theme. “A Singh is more valuable than money,’ he used to say. He was crystal clear on the point that nobody should lose his life because of money. This was made clear to everybody. This was just a fake case that was made.”

After tea, the very sweet and milky chai that is ubiquitous on the subcontinent, Iqbal Singh continued his narrative.

“Then in November of 1982 a friend of mine and I decided to go to Delhi to launch a protest at the Asian games. We were picked up by police from the train, and we were carrying protest papers on our bodies, signs and all.”

“What did the papers say?”

“That Sikhs want justice. That’s all.”

“You weren’t thinking about a separate state or anything at that time?”

“No, there was no talk of Khalistan, nothing like that. But we were pulled off the train, and beaten up at a railway station in Haryana.”

“Were you resisting, were you fighting back?”

“No. At that time we were not fighting back. Anyway, we were released after two days, in only our underwear.-We went to a local gurudwara, where we were given clothes, and we came back. My point is that this was a constant struggle, something we ran into every day.”

“These sorts of things were happening to a lot of people?”

‘Yes, a lot of people were being harassed. But it wasn’t until later, maybe 1983, that the name of Khalistan came into existence. Well, it may have been in existence before that, but finally people started talking about it, saying that we needed our own nation.

56

FIGHTING FOB KHALISTAN

‘By the time 1 was enrolled at Khalsa College, doing divinity studies, I came around to the conclusion that we cannot live any longer with India. But my family was not with me on this; they said that Khalistan was all trash and nonsense and that I should stay away from it. I told them that they could have their opinion, but mine was different.”

“What about your brother?” I asked, thinking about the elder brother who had encouraged Iqbal Singh to join Damdami Taksal in the first place.

“Some of my brothers were not into this Khalistan movement. But my elder brother, he is a Khalistani to the core. Because when you are really involved in religion, not just the forms but real spirituality, you can see the problem very clearly. The government was interfering in our practice of our religion, killing off the most devout practitioners of our religion.

“In 1984 came the army’s attack on the Golden Temple Complex. This changed a lot of people’s minds. I was with Bhindranwale in the weeks before that attack. On May 31, the Central Reserve Police attacked the Golden Temple and eight Sikhs were killed. Some CRP were killed, too, in the exchange of gunfire. On June 1 the curfew was announced anti we could smell it, that there would be

“At that time, you were clear on the point that armed struggle was necessary?” “Yes, definitely. We were resolved to it and prepared for it by that point.

“Listen,” he stopped and thought carefully. “It was not for offensive purposes, it was for the defense of Sikhi. We needed to defend ourselves. In the courts there was no justice, in the police there was only corruption, in the government there was no friend anywhere. You cannot offend against the sixth biggest power in the world, after all! But defend you can, and you have to.”

“And when you were talking among yourselves about Khalistan, were there some who said, ‘OK, we need Khalistan but taking up arms is not a good idea?’”

“You have to understand that arms did not come because of Khalistan. Arms came because of self-defense. Even now, we know that we cannot win in an armed struggle against India, an armed struggle for Khalistan. What we have to do is defend ourselves as best we can, and in that defense we ask for Khalistan. Khalistan is our birthright, the right of the Sikh nation to live as Sikhs.

“And I have to tell you that Sant Jarnail Singh ji did not so much have a ‘plan of action.’ Rather, he was helping Khalistan emerge, letting the nation emerge, helping people become aware of themselves as Sikhs. Let me give you an example of the way Sant Jarnail Singh ji operated.

One time Mr. Harminder Singh of Ludhiana had some business with Hindu guy. Santji had been telling us that we should have our own businesses, have our own identity, and Harminder Singh understood this in mean that Santji was saying we should get rid of the Hindus. He canted to split up his business with the Hindu, but he would owe that Hindu two hundred thousand rupees for his share. He had four girls, and he was not a rich man. So he

57

came to Santji and said, ‘Santji, what should I do?’ Santji asked him how long it would take him to gather the two hundred thousand rupees. ‘Six months,’ replied Harminder Singh. Then Santji called his secretary and told him to give that Hindu guy two hundred thousand rupees. ‘OK, now the Hindu is out of this,’ Santji told Harminder Singh. Now you pay me back the two hundred thousand rupees in six months.’

“Well, Harminder Singh came to Santji the very next day with two bun- died thousand rupees. That was the way that Sant Jarnail Singh ji was trying to create Khalistan. It was a mini-government, a parallel government which he set up for the people. Justice was being done and people were happy.”

“How did Bhindranwale react when he would read what the Indian press was saying about him? That he was a terrorist, a criminal, and so on? Did he feel pained by that?” I asked.

“That was an interesting part of his personality. He never got irritated by the press people. He would say, ‘I know what you are going to print, that you are working for rupees only.’ He would laugh at them, but he knew they were helpless. In a way he felt sorry for them. He only used to grant interviews and so on in case he might reach other Sikhs through those.”

“Were there times when you witnessed him getting angry about anything?”

“Well, he had some vengeful feelings toward Akalis particularly. He could expect anything from the others-the Indian government, journalists, foreigners-but it was really painful to him to listen to the Akalis, so-called Sikhs, talking as they were. When they accused him of being an agent of the Indian government, after all he was doing . . . Well, he understood that they were living within the system and its corruption had eaten into them, too. But the youth supported him and his ideas, as they were not corrupted.”

“Did any of the Akalis ever go to Sant Bhindranwale and say, ‘I was wrong to say these things, Jam sorry?’’ I slipped into the usage of “Sant” before Bhindranwale’s name without thinking.

“A few of them did, at election time. When they needed something from him the’ would go, like people who go to church only when they are in trouble,’

“They’re called ‘Sunday Christians,” I said.

“Sunday Christians! Sunday Sikhs!” echoed the granthi. “They have t nothing to do with real religion. A truly religious life is the most difficult life there is.”

Amarjit broke in with his own comments. “Whenever Santji gave somebody some responsibility, whenever they went on some mission, he used to dismiss all the people around him and go inside and pray for hours and hours. God was never far from his mind. Then sometimes people would notice that when they got endangered in some way, suddenly help would come from nowhere to save them. Singh’s became quite-confident that Santji’s mystic mind and his strong prayers were always with them. That is an important part of all this.”

“Yes,” -lqbal Singh agreed. “One of those who was martyred early in the struggle, Surinder Singh Sodhi, was a good friend of mine. We were like brothers. Wherever he would

58

go he would have a tape of kirtan [Sikh hymns] with him. He used to listen to kirtan, nothing else. Once I asked-him, ‘Sodhi, why are you driving your motorcycle listening to hymns on your Walkman?’ He said, ‘No one knows what may happen, when death will come. I want a peaceful death. If I get killed, at least my ears will be filled with the sound of kirtan, not the sound of bullets.’ These people were really saints and soldiers. Not only soldiers. In fact saints first, then soldiers. They never wasted a bullet on innocent people.”

Amarjit added, “Santji said many times that Surinder Singh Sodhi was his right hand, his right arm. On the day that he was killed, Santji said that his right hand had been cut off. That Sodhi could handle anything-car, truck, airplaine-and if he had a rocket he could handle that, too! And let me tell you one thing about Sodhi-he was an excellent marksman. One time Bhajan Lal, the chief minister when the Asian games took place, was within his firing range. Now this was a person that Santji had warned against, saying that wherever he might hide, Sikhs would chop off his head. When Bhajan Lal came within Sodhi’s range, he could have killed him. But he said, ‘Santji told us to chop off his head and I couldn’t do that, so I spared him.’

Iqbal Singh then continued his narrative.

“During the actual assault on the Golden Temple Complex, Operation Blue Star, I was about four miles away at Khalsa College in Amritsar, I knew that the first tank had fired on the Akal Takht [the building in the complex where the militants were headquartered] around 2 o’clock, June 5. Before that they had been fighting with machine guns and other small arms. But on June 5 they entered with the tanks.”

He started drawing a map on the back of an envelope. “Here is Harmandir Sahib. Here is the Akal Takht. Here is the sacred tank of water. Thu can see that the Akal Takht is right behind the Harmandir Sahib. They sent troops in from here, and here [showing two positions]. When the tanks in front were ready to fire on the Akal Takht, they had to send a message to the troops in the back to get out of the way, otherwise they in might get hit.

‘Santji had a wireless set inside, and somehow he intercepted that message. He knew that the area would be open to him and his group for a short time as the rear troops vacated their positions. So some of this group got away through the back. They ran into nearby houses, changed their clothes and went out as regular citizens. Only thirty-five of Santji’s close followers died in the assault. The rest, two hundred or so, got out.”

“And those who left at the last moment, they later played large roles in the struggle?” I asked.

“Exactly.”

“And thirty-five decided they would rather stay and be martyred?”

“It was not really like that. It was just part of the overall strategy, just a plan. When the Indian army arrived on June 2, it became clear to everybody that whether we lost or won just then, eventually we would all have to fight for Khalistan. The Khalistan struggle was not just a matter of everybody dying during that first week of June. Santji said, ‘01-C, we are here so we will protect this Golden Temple. We will hold the army while the others get away.’ It was not at all that those who left were cowards, or not also committed to die, or

59

anything like that. Everybody was prepared to give his life for Khalistan. But as part of the whole plan some left, some stayed.”

“Were many of those who left killed later?”

“Almost all of them, I think. Every one, as far as I know. Well, one or two may have surrendered later, but overall the strategy of having some leave was a good one, a successful one.”

“And is it true that some of those inside tried to persuade Sant Bhindranwale to leave, but that he refused to go?” I asked.

“Yes. And I agree with his decision to die there. It is my personal feeling that though it is a loss for the Sikh community that he died, it is a proud loss. He used to always say, ‘I will protect this place, I will die in this place.’ If he were to leave . . . Let me put it this way. In the past century and a half at least Sikhs had no experience of the kind of leader who would not say one thing and do another. They had no experience of a Sikh leader with courage. But Santji had courage, he died there and made his point. He was an example of a real Sikh, a real saint-soldier. Why should a saint have to obey the laws of a secular government? He lived on a higher plane.

“I lived with Sant Jarnail Singh ji for seven or eight years. He was brother, a father to me. I had no doubt that he would die when he said he would die. It was he in fact who sent those other Sikhs out.”

Iqbal Singh continued Sant Jarnail Singh ji was both a strategist and a saint. I think it’s a misconception people have, that a saintly person can’t be a politician. Santji was both, and being both he knew the consequences of that kind of combination. Saint-soldiers get martyred.

“Anyway, he sent the others out to continue the fight. They foughd3ji afterwards, they died afterwards. They told people what had really happened in the Golden Temple. Eventually they went into hiding and 1 spread out all across the world to continue the struggle. Now I believe that if any Sikh says he is not a Khalistani, he only means he is not strong enough to fight.

“After the army action against the Golden Temple, I was on a wanted list. The police came to my house and arrested my father and mother again. ‘We have nothing to do with him,’ they said. ‘If he has done something wrong, he should be punished.’ But my father had connections and he was not badly treated. When I went to see him the police gave me a paper to sign, saying that if I signed nothing more would happen to me or my family. The paper said that whatever I had done before 1984 was a mistake, that I had been brainwashed by Santji. But I said, ‘No, I can’t sign this. I am not sorry, Jam proud of what we did. And I am thankful to Santji for the awakening he gave us.’

“A few of my friends, they did sign papers like this. That was the whole idea behind it, so that the government could show on TV that the militants were repentant. In my case, the police gave me half an hour to get-away. They did not arrest me. They only wanted to publicize those cases of people who accepted this brainwashing idea. So it was a mutual thing. I ran away. My parents then told me they had no more home for me, so I said I would leave.”

60

“That must have been difficult.”

“Yes, it was. But I could see my parents’ side, too. They did not want to take a risk, and they had been getting all the wrong information about Santji from here and there. That he was a womanizer, that there were drugs at his headquarters and that sort of thing. They didn’t have a clear picture of what he was really doing. So even though every Sikh was against the Indian government for attacking the Golden Temple, that didn’t mean that they were for Santji. These are two different things.

“Then I left home, October 1984. I drove a truck for two years, staying here and there with my friends. I remained on a wanted list because I had been a senior student at Damdami Taksal. I had been involved in some of the decisions made in the period before the 1984 assault.

so finally I bribed an official, got travel papers, and left the country.” Did your parents eventually come around to seeing your position?” I asked.

“Yes, they did. Because after the attack on the Golden Temple Complex. Indira Gandhi was murdered, and in the riots after her assassination my sister became a victim. My parents got their eyes opened, that it was not because of Santji but because of our turbans, because we are Sikhs, that these problems exist. Then they came to understand the idea of separation.

“The concept of Sikhi is in fact universal. Khalistan is a need, not a destiny It is just a matter of needing some place to enjoy religious freedom. It is a mistake to talk about Khalistan as if it were somehow preordained, an inherent part of Sikhism. Sikhs can live wherever they can live as true Sikhs. They can sit in London and wear blue jeans or listen to rock and roll if they want to-these are cultural things, not matters of Faith. But if we have no place to be Sikhs, that is a problem.

“So I can actually accept the idea that somebody is not for Khalistan, if he can find another way to live as a true Sikh. But I cannot allow him to say that those who are asking for Khalistan are wrong. If he is not Khalistani, fine. But he should not get in the way of other Sikhs’ demand for Khalistan. The people of Punjab are suffering, and that is why they are demanding Khalistan. Nobody should stand in their way.”

I questioned, “You don’t feel, then, that anybody who is not with you is against you, as somebody told me yesterday-that those who are silent are in fact complicit?”

“Dr. Cynthia,” he said, “It is clear in my mind that throughout Sikh history there has been a lot of fighting and not everybody was involved in every fight. Each played his own role. The role of every Sikh is to be a true Sikh as best he can. Not everyone feels comfortable with the role of fighting. It should be the policy of fighters not to condemn anybody who is being a Sikh in another way. People are afraid. If you come to me in India and you ask me, ‘Are you a Khalistani?’ I will say no. Maybe you are Indian intelligence or something. But in my mind I may be sympathetic, and when the time comes I may show it.

“I am just a reader of scriptures, I am not a politician. But it seems to me that it is a problem that there is no concrete plan for Khalistan, like a constitution or something, to show people what we are really fighting for. What we are fighting against, that is clear, but what are we fighting for? This is the difference between a resistance movement and a real

61

independence movement. We are tired of being with India, fine. But if we ask people to become Khalistani, on what grounds are we asking? We have to be clear on this.”

lqbal Singh then became deferential, nodding toward Amarjit, who had left the room to make some of the endless phone calls in which he is constantly engaged.

“I’m just a priest,” he said. “You’d better ask the Panthic Committee if you want to know more about consultations. But there are things rights of women, educational system, rights of minorities, the place of the Hindus, and so on. There is the declaration of independence of Khalistan, but that’s not enough.” He again deferred to Amarjit. “He knows more about it,” he said. “I’m just a priest.”

But I didn’t want to let this precious strand of conversation drop. “It’s a characteristic flaw of insurgent movements that they are so busy fighting the war that they don’t think about what will happen afterwards,” I said. That’s why it’s important to learn from history and plan ahead.”

‘The Indian government is the sixth biggest power in the world,” lqbal Singh responded. “Don’t think they are stupid. They plan ahead, all right, and on the Sikh side we have to do the same.”

Then he cut off the conversation as Amarjit re-entered the room. “I came out of India, at Dr. Amarjit Singh’s hands,” he said. “Now here I am, just reading scriptures.”

BLUE STAR

“The Khalsa is like a finely tuned instrument,” it is said. “All it take is someone hold his finger on the right note.” In recent times, that someone was Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. The episode he provoked, the Indian army attack on the Golden Temple in June 1984, forms the raison d’etre for the continuing insurgency, populated largely though not wholly by Khalsa Sikhs. In this chapter, I examine the events directly leading up to that confrontation, the battle itself, and the immediate aftermath. Whether or not the current insurgency continues or peters out, this “holocaust” of 1984 is bound to reverberate through Sikh history for a long time to come.

THE PEOPLE

Before 1984, as the conversation recorded in the previous chapter shows, those involved in militant activities were mainly individuals from the Damdami Taksal, the “moving university” of the Sikhs, and the Akhand Kirtani Jatha, a hymn-singing organization. For these people, the confrontation with the Nirankaris in 1978 forms the keystone of their commitment; that was the moment when many of them came to the conclusion that justice within an Indian framework was unattainable. For the great bulk of the Sikh population, however, this event took place somewhat on- the margins of mainstream society, among highly religious people. By contrast, all Sikhs were brought up short by the 1984 debacle, which reached even those who had become avowedly secular. The attack on the Golden Temple has been compared to an attack on the Vatican or Mecca. How would Catholics, however lapsed, or Muslims, however disenchanted, feel?

The assault on the Golden Temple Complex was taken by the Sikh community not only in immediate but in deeply historical terms. It resonated with other events in the past in which enemies attacked, laid seige to, and destroyed the sanctum sanctorum. That Operation Blue Star would be perceived in these terms, that analogies would quickly be drawn with Afghan and Mughal times, was recognized by those with personal knowledge of the Sikhs; this community has always had a pervasive awareness of history and the role of the Sikhs in it. Sikhism is after all a very young religion, and the lives of the major figures in it are not shadowy legends hut matters of historical record. The buildings they constructed are still around, the clothes they wore for the most part still the everyday dress of the Sikhs, as instructed by their Gurus. And though there is no recognized tradition of genealogically linking oneself to Curtis within the Khalsa, as there is in Muslim societies with regard to the Prophet and caliphs, the strong sense of siblinghood leads orthodox Sikhs to feel a strong emotive tie to members of their ‘family” who fought and died for Sikhism in the past.

Certainly, this deep sense of historicity helped Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale wale acquire the following that he had prior to his death during Operation Blue Star. Jarnail Singh was born of a rural family of modest means in Rode village in 1947. He was of Jat background, the caste group that provided the backbone of Sikh militancy from historical times to the present. (Various authors have in fact attempted to interpret Sikh violence as an aspect of Jat culture,1 an attempt that has antagonized militants today who feel their stance is prompted by religious principle, not cultural tradition.) In any case, Bhindranwale’s background was no different from that of thousands of other Sikh boys who grew up in rural

63

areas with minimal but adequate schooling and a strong family commitment to orthodox Sikhism. As the last of seven sons, he was relatively free from family or agricultural responsibilities and from an early age spent much of his time with the Sikh scriptures.

Joginder Singh, Jarnail Singh’s father, sent the boy to study at Damdami Taksal after his primary schooling, the seminary described as a “moving university” by Jarnail Singh’s boyhood companion and later follower, Iqbal Singh. Taksal means “mint” in Punjabi, and the institution of the Damdami Taksal, believed to have been established by none other than Baba Deep Singh, can be appropriately understood as a place where spiritual individuals are shaped, like coins from a mint. As the presumed founder of Damdami Taksal, Baba Deep Singh’s commitment to avenge the destruction of the Golden Temple by the Afghans stands as a continuing model for Damdami Taksal activism in defense of the-faith.

Though the Taksal education is purely religious in nature and is hence dismissed by many commentators, Jam not the only one to have noticed lilt its products can be remarkably sophisticated. Mark Tully, the BBC correspondent who closely followed the rise of Bhindranwale and the subsequent debacle at Amritsar, wrote with surprise that a young teacher here “as able to engage in a complex argument involving the Bible and he Quran as well as the Sikh scriptures.2 Certainly the tendency of those with secular educations to dismiss the Damdami Taksal as nurturant solely of fanaticism is both misplaced and arrogant. To be sure, its members (a more appropriate term than “graduates”) did form the core of lie original militancy, and in that sense it could perhaps be compared with the religious schools at Qom, which nurtured the Ayatollah Khomeini and other key figures of the Iranian revolution. But the articulate quality of Iqbal Singh, among others, belies the accusation of narrowness directed at the Taksal. Its headquarters at Chowk Mehta, about twenty- live miles from Amritsar, still serves as a fountainhead of orthodox Sikh learning.

Under the stewardship of Kartar Singh, the Damdami Taksal’s alienation from the central government of India grew. Of course, during the abuses of the Emergency years (1975-1977), many Indians’ alienation from the central government grew, but the Akali Dal, the major Sikh political party, was notably outspoken about its discontent with Indira Gandhi’s censorship of the press, arrest of opposition leaders, and dramatic enhancement of police powers. The “Save Democracy Protest” launched by the Sikh party resulted in the detainment of some forty-five thousand activists, and gurudwaras across Punjab were centers of anti Emergency sentiment. (The opposition party under the leadership of socialist Jayaprakash Narayan called the Akali Dal “the last bastion of democracy.”3 Jarnail Singh, like Iqbal Singh, grew to maturity in an atmosphere in which political activities against the central government went hand in hand at Damdami Taksal with the chanting of scripture and theological debate. These were all of a piece, as Iqbal Singh said in the interview when he claimed that it was not “politics” but a way of life, a seamless whole, that engaged the Taksal students in the 1970s.

Kartar Singh, Bhindranwale’s predecessor as head of the “moving university,” was killed in a car crash in 1977, as Iqbal Singh noted.4 Jarnail Singh was appointed head at the young age of thirty-one and immediately rose to the challenge of continuing Kartar Singh’s political activism. He had been married at the age of nineteen and had two sons, but when he was recognized as “sant” Bhindranwale he relinquished most of his family responsibilities to devote full time to the Taksal. In this he followed a long tradition of sants, who were historically an important part of rural Sikh life, bringing news and a quality of entertainment from vii- age to village with their dramatic public sermons and readings of scripture. The

64

British, it seems, recognized the political potential of the sant role, devoting attention to tracking these wandering holy men.5

Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, founding figure of the Khalistan movement. This is one of the many photos and portraits of Bhindranwale that appear regularly in Khalistani posters and movement publications.

By all accounts, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was a charismatic personality. Tall and lean, with deep-set eyes, a prominent nose, and a ready grin his blue turban tied in characteristic tiers, he was as photogenic as he was personally impressive. Though he never learned English, his command of Punjabi was superb, and soon his speeches were making the rounds of Punjabi villages on cassette tapes, radically increasing the range of his influence. He eventually became adept at radio, press, and television interviews as well.

Since Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was largely responsible for launching the current Sikh militancy, he is now valorized by militants and demonized by their enemies, and accounts from these divergent sources seem often to be referring to two completely different people. Though the Indian press at various times compared him with Rasputin and Hitler, those who knew him personally uniformly report his general like ability and ready humor as well as his total dedication to Sikhism. Joyce Pettigrew, a Scottish anthropologist who has studied the Sikh militancy closely, witnessed the close relationship between Bhindranwale and his followers.6 A Sikh reared in the West, clean-shaven (that is, not orthodox), told of his first acquaintance with Bhindranwale:

The first thing I noticed about Bhindranwale was that he made everybody feel welcome. Nobody was an outsider with him, no matter what their appearance, clean-shaven or bearded. He was very human, very soft. He was firm on his views, of course, but he had a sense of humor, too. He asked me, “When are you going to become my brother [when are you going to become orthodox, grow a beard]?” I answered, “Well; I’ll try.” But he laughed and said,- “If you just stop trying, you’ll become my brother quicker. From the facial aspect, I mean!” What he meant was that if I just let nature take its course, if I didn’t shave, I would look like a Sikh more quickly. This was the way he would gently remind people to live as Sikhs. He was

65

clear in his example, but he didn’t put pressure on me or anything. Everyone would feel comfortable in his presence.

Bhindranwale’s appeal was such that the frequency of initiations into the Khalsa rose dramatically across Punjab, as did the level of rhetoric regarding the perceived “assault” on Sikh values from the Hindu community. Bhindranwale and his closest companions, including Amrik Singh, the son of Sant Kartar Singh and head of the All India Sikh Student Federation, started carrying firearms with them reilar1y. This action was defended as within the bounds of the Sikh tradition, whose primary symbol, the double-edged sword, was itself a weapon.

One man reports:

After met Sant Bhindranwale, my son asked me, “How many weapons did Santji have, what kind of weapons did he have?” I said that 4 the weapons of Sant Bhindranwale, nobody has weapons like those in all the world. The way the devotion and commitment to Sant Bhindranwale came, that was some kind of mystery, some kind of mystic inspiration.