Chandigarh: In his reply to the Opposition’s ‘No-Confidence Motion’ last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made references to Operation Blue Star, the Indian Army’s June 1984 operation at the Golden Temple in Amritsar — the holiest shrine in Sikhism — to flush out militants.
In his speech, Modi referred to the operation as an attack on the Akal Takht — the highest temporal body of the Sikhs — and criticised the Congress government led by former prime minister Indira Gandhi for having ordered it.
The PM’s speech, framed against a larger criticism of the Congress, is being viewed as an acknowledgement that the military operation was an unwarranted attack on the shrine. In a social media post, Sukhbir Singh Badal, a former deputy chief minister of Punjab whose Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) was once an ally of Modi’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA), was quick to appreciate the gesture.
“While I welcome Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statement finally acknowledging the guilt of #OperationBluestar as an outrageous attack on the holiest Sikh shrine, Sachkhand Sri Harmandir Sahib and the highest seat of Sikh religious-political authority (Miri-Piri), Sri Akal Takht Sahib, there is no reason whatsoever left now for the Govt of India not to tender an unconditional apology to the Khalsa Panth for this most tragic outrage against the Guru’s abode,” Badal posted on ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) Saturday.
Modi’s remarks and SAD’s response — coming less than a year before next year’s General Elections — sparked rumours of a possible rapprochement between the former allies. But according to political analysts, the speech must be viewed in line with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) attempts to woo Sikhs — a vote bank that has always eluded the party.
Until they broke up over the central government’s controversial farm laws in 2020, the BJP and SAD had been allies for over two decades starting 1997. During this period, while the BJP focused on the urban Hindu voters, the Akalis’ mainstay was the rural Sikh peasantry.
According to Kanwalpreet Kaur, a professor of political science at DAV College in Chandigarh, the schism between the two parties began some years before they actually split and was rooted in the BJP’s strategy to strike out on its own in the state.
“This gradual division had largely to do with the prime minister becoming upset with the Akali leadership on several occasions. At some point, BJP’s central leadership seems to have decided to work towards ending their dependence on the Akalis in Punjab and going solo. That is when the prime minister and the BJP started making several overt gestures to try and get the Sikhs to flock to the BJP” she told ThePrint.
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Kartarpur Corridor, pruning govt blacklist — how BJP tried to woo Sikhs
The last few years have seen the Union BJP government make several overtures to the Sikhs.
In September 2019, the central government decided to drop 312 Sikh foreign nationals from a 35-year-old blacklist. Many of these had been on the blacklist since the 1980s — when Punjab’s militancy was at its peak.
In November the same year, the prime minister inaugurated the Kartarpur Corridor — a 4.2 km highway that connected Punjab’s Dera Baba Nanak to Kartarpur Sahib in Pakistan. The corridor was aimed at facilitating Sikh pilgrims’ visits to Kartarpur Sahib — a gurdwara built at the place where Guru Nanak, the first Sikh Guru and founder of Sikhism, spent the last years of his life.
Both Kartarpur Corridor and the pruning of the blacklist had been long-standing demands of the Sikhs.
Meanwhile, the BJP’s top leadership also takes the credit for reopening the investigation into the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi, with Union Home Minister Amit Shah claiming at rallies that it was Modi who constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) in 2015 to re-investigate several such cases.
In September 2020, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs granted Foreign Contribution Regulation Act registration (FCRA) to the Golden Temple — a move that allowed it to receive foreign donations.
Despite these gestures, though, the relationship between Sikhs and the Modi government hit an all-time low in 2020, when Parliament passed the contentious farm laws despite opposition not only from Punjab but also other agrarian states like Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
The Bills, which caused SAD to quit the alliance in September 2020, were eventually withdrawn in November 2021, with Modi making the announcement on Guru Nanak Jayanti — the birth anniversary of the first Sikh guru.
Then, in January 2022 — a month before the assembly elections in Punjab — the prime minister announced that 26 December of each year will be observed as Veer Bal Diwas. This, he said, was to mark the martyrdom of two sons of Guru Gobind Singh — the 10th and the last Guru of the Sikhs.
In April the same year, Modi addressed a special programme at Delhi’s Red Fort to commemorate the 401st birth anniversary of the ninth Guru — Guru Teg Bahadur. In his speech, the prime minister lauded the dedication of the Sikhs in “pushing for a self-reliant India”.
These efforts, however, don’t seem to have cut much ice in Punjab. The party, which had allied with rebel Congress leader Amarinder Singh’s Punjab Lok Congress, won only two seats — Pathankot and Mukerian. The party’s vote share was 6.6 per cent, according to data from the Election Commission of India.
In contrast, it won two of the three seats it contested in 2019, when it was still in alliance with SAD. Its vote share had then been nearly 10 per cent.
Pramod Kumar, director of Chandigarh’s Institute of Development and Communication, put BJP’s struggles in Punjab to its “failure to appreciate the state and its complicated political scenario”. IDC is a not-for-profit research organisation that works in the fields of governance, economic and social development, among others.
“On its own, BJP has a vote share between 6 per cent and 8 per cent in Punjab and it’s not going to rise. After the drubbing in last year’s assembly election, BJP has brought in a large number of Sikh and Hindu leaders from other parties but that, too, is not going to help the BJP in parliamentary elections,” he said. “If it wants to have a share in power in Punjab it has to go back to its bond with the Akalis, which is where it fits in naturally”.
But the BJP doesn’t agree with this view. According to Subhash Sharma, vice-president of the BJP’s Punjab unit, the party is growing in Punjab. “It has just been two years since our alliance with the Akalis came to an end and in that one sense we are a new party emerging in the state,” he told ThePrint. “We are building our structure, local leadership and the cadre. It takes time for a new party to be able to show political results.”
He also dismisses talk of going back to the Akalis.
“We are geared up for the parliamentary election (next year). But there is no scope of entering into an alliance with the Akalis again. The mind of the party leadership is already made up on that account and the entire strategy and planning for the elections is being done accordingly,” he said.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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