If only I were granted for just 10 minutes some divine power to ask to you to repeat after me the following three times:
• There is no such thing as the Khalistan movement, dream, idea. Definitely not in India. What happens in Brampton, Canada, is a problem for Canadians.
• Nobody, or almost nobody, in India’s Punjab wants a return to the murderous 15 years from 1978 to 1993, especially the deadly 1983-93 decade. How do India’s Sikhs feel about their country? Check out the data from a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, which found that 95 percent of Sikhs in India are “very proud” to be Indian. No community in India, however large, has a monopoly over nationalism. No community, however microscopic, can be subjected to any questioning of its national commitment.
• Politics in Punjab is alive, lively and credible. People vote in growing numbers and change their governments, and there is no political or emotional vacuum for the dark new forces that are emerging, mostly in Canada, to wade into. When Punjabis become unhappy with their situation, which will be often, they will vote out their government. They won’t go to some Trudeau or Gurpatwant Singh Pannun to seek help for a regime change.
And then the fourth, and the most important, if I could ask you to repeat after me:
• I shall never question the patriotism and national commitment of India’s Sikhs. Never. Because a few hundred assorted criminals have never made a revolution.
That said, and repeated multiple times, let us also admit that there are problems. That there is widespread anger and frustration in Punjab today, especially among the Sikhs. It manifests in anti-sacrilege protests, rising religiosity and conservatism, a growing defensiveness over the new definitions and tests of patriotism they are subjected to, especially on social media and some TV channels. There’s a dangerous alienation. This alienation, however, is not from their nation, but from what they see as their national politics.
Also Read: Punjab’s in 2-decade stall. Lift the kohrra, or people want out
Anger and frustration at Punjab’s economic decline relative to the more progressive, industrialising and mostly coastal states is easy to understand. We have talked about this in National Interest more than once.
When a state goes from being number one (among states with a population of 1 crore or more) to number 13 in about 20 years, it not only hurts its people economically but also damages their self-esteem. That’s particularly traumatic for a community used to being so dominant.
Punjab is caught in an agrarian trap while many other big ones have broken out with growing industry and services, particularly IT-enabled services.
To understand this better, we need to take a closer look at the Sikh diaspora, especially in Canada. In 2020-21, the last year for which full data is available, India received the equivalent of $80.2 billion in foreign remittances from across the world.
The US topped the list with 23.4 percent of all remittances, followed by the UAE, the UK, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar (only 1.5 percent). Did we forget Canada, you might ask? Don’t we have such a large, prosperous and happy Punjabi (mostly Sikh) community there?
The data gives you an insight into the politics and the deeper crisis, both in our Punjab and Canada’s many little Punjabs. Remittances from Canada from the nearly 10 lakh Punjabis (8 lakh of them Sikh) to their homeland ranked at number 12, behind Hong Kong, Australia and, for heaven’s sake, Malaysia. It was a mere 0.6 percent of the total figure.
What does this tell us? I’d hazard to say two things, one tangible and the other a conjecture. The first is that the Sikhs in Canada are still employed in lower-wage jobs or really small businesses that do not produce enough surpluses to send home. This is unlike the many white-collar employees in the US, the UK and even the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
On the skills and employment value chain, the Punjabis have fallen behind their peers from India’s south and west. Punjab is trapped in a peculiar irony. Its people are not poor. The state has among the lowest poverty scores in the country. However, its economy is mostly agrarian, and while the farms do produce some surplus, the young no longer want to work on them.
That is done by cheap labour imported from the Hindi heartland, mainly Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, the so-called bhaiyyas in Punjab. At the same time, Punjab’s own young people spend years and burn family savings, beg, steal and borrow to somehow get to Canada. Where they are needed for precisely the same kind of jobs that they hire their bhaiyyas for.
This also brings us to the less tangible reason, besides low surpluses, that remittances from the Sikh diaspora in Canada are so tiny. It is that a lot of money is sent back to families through informal channels. It is needed to pay for the emigration (almost entirely to Canada) of other members of the family.
The current going rate in Punjab is upwards of Rs 50 lakh. This isn’t the kind of activity for which you pay by cheque or bank transfer. It is classical, if voluntary, human trafficking.
Punjab achieved its peace by 1993. The peace has been so total that the state is safer than anywhere in the Hindi heartland. If its people haven’t seen a real peace dividend yet, it is a massive failure on the part of its political class.
This fuels anger and frustration. That is, however, topped by something more troublesome: apprehension over our national politics and the Sikhs’ place in it. Not only do the Sikhs see themselves as marginalised, especially after the BJP-Akali breakup, they also fret over the rise of the BJP, Hindutva and the rising clamour for a Hindu state.
Also Read: Four reasons the Sikhs are hurting. And it’s not about the K-word
Come with me for a walk around Punjab and ask a Sikh, young or old, if they want Khalistan. Almost all will say no, unless somebody blessed with a really wicked sense of humour wants to pull your leg. Then ask them why they don’t push back at those who raise the slogan of Khalistan.
If you ask just a few Sikhs on any street, in any village, soon enough somebody will confront you with a counter-question: If people can talk of a Hindu Rashtra, why get so upset if others talk of a Sikh Nation. If you can create a nation on the basis of one religion, why not for another?
The rise of this all-powerful BJP, lack of representation for the Sikhs — especially Punjab’s Sikhs — the isolation of the Akali Dal and what they see as victimisation of the Muslim minority have had a deep influence on the mood in Punjab. You can live in denial if that makes you comfortable, but not for long.
Remember how the Sikhs in Gurgaon offered their gurudwaras to Muslims denied permission for namaaz in the parks? Or the bonhomie at the ‘langars’ Muslim activists organised for the Sikh farmers at protests outside Delhi? The BJP miscalculates gravely when it presumes that the Sikhs still carry their antagonisms for the Muslims, going back to the times of the great Gurus or even Partition.
The Sikhs think they got even, and do not see a threat any longer. Plus, religion is not their only determinant of identity. There’s also language and culture. They have much in common on these counts with the vast majority of Punjabis in Pakistan. Will they not be in the vanguard again if Pakistan goes to war against India again? Of course they will. They have much in common with Hindus, but it’s a grave error to count them as such in a polarised India.
Seventy seven percent of all Indian Sikhs live in Punjab. The same Pew survey that tells us that 93 percent of Sikhs are very proud of living in Punjab and 95 percent are very proud to be Indian, underlines another important data point: that eight out of 10 Sikhs see communal violence as a big problem in the country. That is more than the Hindus and even the Muslims (65 percent). It is the failure of BJP/RSS politics to see and appreciate this nuance that’s adding to frustration and anger in Punjab. This is what the renegades in Canada are playing with.