There’s a straight line from Modi govt misreading Punjab farmers’ protests to the Pannun saga

Situation calls for bringing focus back on Punjab. Working with credible political forces, even adversaries, would serve national interest better than fighting in New York courtrooms.

Illustration by Soham Sen | ThePrint

These are early days in the unfolding situation as yet, but other things can safely be said about India-US relations in the wake of the Gurpatwant Singh Pannun issue.

One, that both sides do not want this spinning out of control, or onto an emotional plane. Accordingly, both have made sure that temperatures do not rise, each has kept emotion out of its argument.

Two, each is giving the other political and diplomatic space. India to the US by expressing concern over the charges, not dismissing these outright as fake, and promising a high-level inquiry. The US to India by saying it appreciates this response, that the inquiry is a positive step, and that it awaits the outcome.

And three, both sides now stand reminded and alerted that — behind the ceremony and celebration of their ‘essential strategic partnership’, summits and joint declarations — they have their own compulsions and sometimes contradictory needs in the national interest. This partnership, deep as it is, is a far cry from the Five Eyes kind of equation.

That said, we would like to believe at this point that there is a de-escalation of sorts on the way.

It isn’t fair for me to make any guesses as to why, but there has to be a reason our warrior news TV channels have mostly overlooked the issue, which would be so tempting for their usual prime-time shoutrages.

What this relative quiet does is give both sides the diplomatic space they need to protect their relationship. This space and respite should be even more valuable for us in India, and to the Modi government. Because whatever the challenge of Sikh radicalism and separatism might be, it is India’s problem much more than America or Canada’s.

What the self-styled Khalistanis say or do there does irritate and anger India. But anything substantive any of these can do will be on Indian territory, mostly in Punjab. And within the Sikh community. The war against them is a war of ideas and politics and it will need to be fought here. It would be short-sighted for India to be distracted by any skirmishes in British Columbia or some part of the US or Britain.

Once we calm down, we might find a moment to reflect on the sequence of events that landed the India-US relationship with an indictment in a New York courtroom. We need to hold our horses, such as they might be, take a deep breath, and reassess.

Where did we start, and how did we get here? Can I dare to suggest that this could be described as a journey downhill from the early days of the farmers’ protests on the outskirts of Delhi to the New York courtroom?

It would also be my argument that the Modi government misread the farmers’ protests from the very beginning. That led to a series of missteps that lost it the battle of the day when it was forced to withdraw all the bills.

We still believe that those laws were the reform the Indian farmer, especially the surplus-producing farmer of Punjab, needed, and the Modi government repealing those under pressure was a great national loss. And once again, I submit, it was because of its initial misreading of the protests and the series of errors that followed from it.

The first misreading came from seeing the farmers’ protests as being driven primarily by radical Sikh religious sentiment. This, despite the fact that almost the entire protest leadership in the early stages consisted of Left-oriented farmers’ unions.

Possibly because of the presence of religious symbols and slogans — in Punjab, you can even find them at sporting events — many in the BJP concluded too early that the primary impulse behind the protests was religious — and separatist.

This is in spite of the fact that the activists who the BJP had already become familiar with during the CAA-NRC protests and who landed up at the farmers’ protests, were also inclined to the Left.

The BJP already saw these as subversive adversaries armed with deadly “toolkits”. They were, therefore, not going to negotiate with any leaders of the Left unions. And a religious leadership was never available to talk to, for the simple reason that it did not exist.

The second misreading was that soon enough, the protesters would tire, or be driven away by the cold, the monsoon, or the heat. This was a total lack of understanding of the Punjabi (read Sikh) determination.

The older leaders in the BJP should have known how the Sikhs fought the Emergency, going to jail jatha (group) after jatha. Along with RSS followers, the Sikhs (Akalis) were the largest group in Indira Gandhi’s jails.

The problem in the BJP is probably that the old-timers do not matter and definitely, nobody ever goes to check things out with the Margdarshak Mandal. The Centre let the situation drift, waiting for fatigue to set in, but protester numbers only grew and a mini-city of sorts came up in containers, trolleys and tents — some with air conditioners and many with TVs — along the highways leading to Delhi.

The BJP government’s third failure was in not having any Sikh/Punjabi interlocutors to negotiate on its behalf. It had dumped its oldest partner, the Shiromani Akali Dal in Punjab, and it would never reach out to the Congress government there. It was in this vacuum that motley other forces moved in: the stars of Punjabi pop, Sikh social media influencers overseas, Greta Thunberg, even Mia Khalifa. None of them had any stakes except overnight fame. This is the space where the Nijjars and Pannuns also waded in.

Now draw a line at the bottom of this balance sheet for the Modi government. All you see is red. It lost the battle of perception in global public opinion and, much as it claims it doesn’t care what the western media or activists say, it’s been chafing like hell. It became even more unpopular in Punjab. It drove its old Akali allies further away. It made the Sikhs even angrier with it. And, at the end of the day, it withdrew all the bills unconditionally.

The farmers went back victorious, but Punjab’s political balance had been reset. The disgust with all established parties put the Aam Aadmi Party in power. The BJP’s 24×7 political combatant’s instinct has kept it in a state of war with the party through these years. The BJP is now at constant war with the most credible and popular political force in Punjab.

It isn’t as if the BJP does not realise the severe disadvantage of not having any Sikh — especially ‘Jatt Sikh’ — leaders who hold the key to power in Punjab. That is why they have imported some from the Congress: Captain Amarinder Singh and former finance minister Manpreet Badal among them. But they haven’t been able to find a foothold in the state.

It has shifted the contest, on the other hand, overseas, fighting noisy, headline-hunting near non-entities like Nijjar and Pannun. They might occasionally be able to instigate some trouble — in the case of Nijjar, also orchestrate the odd assassination — but cannot collect 5,000 people to the call of Khalistan in Punjab. Some level of threat in the state was represented by Amritpal Singh. His arrest and the lack of protests or violence in its wake showed him and the Khalistan cause both to be hollow.

This has now internationalised a problem that does not even exist at home.

The need, therefore, is to focus back on the state. As we have pointed out in these earlier articles, the sense of stall, frustration and loss of self-esteem in Punjab is deep and wide. The drug, immigration, gun-running mafias with music culture complicate the situation. Pakistan-backed overseas radicals are taking advantage of it.

This is where the BJP needs to reach out, and never mind that the Punjabis still won’t vote for it. Working with credible political forces there, even if they are your adversaries, would serve the national interest better than landing in foreign courtrooms.