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The militancy of the Sikh separatist movement in India
and the response of the Hindu majority to it must be
understood against a historical background in which
multiple ethnic groups have coexisted in large part by
virtue of their willingness to accede to the Hindu
social order. The absorption of previous religious
heterodoxies such as Buddhism into the Hindu system has
provided a model for modern Hindu expectations of
non-Hindu religions, and has served as a negative
example for those intent on retaining a separate
religious identity, such as the Sikhs.
Sikhism is a religious tradition that began in South
Asia in the fifteenth century and today claims as its
adherents approximately 2% of India's total population.
The historic center of the Sikh faith is the Punjab
region in the northwestern part of the Indian
subcontinent, and over the past five centuries, the
religious identity of the Sikhs has become intertwined
with the ethnic, linguistic, and regional identity of
Punjab. In 1984, the fact that this identity had
acquired a strongly militant cast became known to the
world through the assassination of India's Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards.
The proximate cause of anger for the Sikhs was the
storming of Sikhism's holiest shrine at Amritsar by
Indian troops in the so-called Operation Bluestar. The
desecration of the Golden Temple was an action that
affronted all Sikhs' religious values and served to
incite fundamentalists to religious war. Furthermore,
Operation Bluestar represented to many Sikhs a breach
of India's constitutional guarantee of equal protection
of all religions, and led to a sudden drop in Sikh
confidence in the national government. The Hindu
backlash following the death of Mrs. Gandhi, in which
some 3,000 Sikhs were killed and 50,000 fled their
homes, further polarized Sikh and Hindu communities in
Punjab and across North India.
Though only a minority of Sikhs are actually involved
in political activity, the continuing perception that
the central government is not acting in the Sikhs'
interest is a spur to the community's widespread
discontent.
In the spring of 1988, the Golden Temple was once again
the scene of
confrontation between Sikh extremists and the
government of India (GOI), this time under Prime
Minister Rajiv Gandhi. The question as to why this
conflict continues to simmer and occasionally flare
demands an excursion into history. The roots of the
present crisis extend far deeper than recent events,
and certainly much more than media coverage of them,
would suggest.
Sikhs and Singhs
The Sikhism initiated by the religion's founder, Guru
Nanak, was different from today's stereotypical Sikh
identity. Arising from the sant tradition within
Hinduism that traditionally focused on total devotion
to a formless deity, Nanak emphasized purity of
lifestyle and inner contemplation as the path to truth.
Rejecting the ritualism that had come to permeate
Hinduism, Nanak and the sikhs (disciples) founded the
panth (community), which would persist through various
transformations to the present day. The popular
contention that Nanak's Sikh faith represented a
combination of Hindu and Muslim elements is probably
misplaced.' Certainly, Nanak rejected elements of both
traditions, such as their inappropriate attention to
external behavior. In common with Islam, the Sikhs
rejected the caste divisions of Hinduism, favoring
equality and interdining of all within the Panth. But
the origins of the Sikh rejection of caste need not be
found in Islam alone; it was a feature of many of the
sant movements of Nanak's time, even within an
overarching Hindu framework.
The early Panth, then, can most accurately be seen as a
sect arising from within the Hindu fold: egalitarian in
ideology, mystical in orientation, and guided by a
mediator-the guru-between the divine and the human.
Following Guru Nanak, a succession of ten gurus led the
Sikh Panth, some of them initiating changes that would
firmly establish an independent, non-Hindu religious
identity. Hargobind, the sixth guru in the line, made
the important decision that the Sikh guru must wield
both spiritual and temporal authority. This new
orientation, developed at a time in which Mughal
hostility toward the Sikhs made worldly action
necessary, was expressed in the symbolic donning of two
swords, miri and piri, to represent the two
faces of Sikh power. Escalating tensions between the
Panth and the Muslim Mughal dynasty rulers culminated
in the execution of the ninth guru in Delhi in 1675.
It was the tenth and final guru, Gobind Singh, who left
a lasting stamp on the character of the Sikh community
in the form of a militant Sikh brotherhood called the
khalsa (pure). The story is told that
Guru Gobind Singh, at one point, asked who among his
followers would be willing to die, and taking each
volunteer into a tent, he emerged each time with his
sword dripping blood. After five had so volunteered,
the guru brought out the five beheaded goats that had
actually been the victims. The five brave men, thus
spared, formed the initial core of the Khalsa
brotherhood.
Among those of the Khalsa, all took the surname of
Singh (lion), and all adopted the five symbols of Sikh
identity-the uncut hair, the comb, the shorts, the
dagger, and the steel bangle. These symbols are
themselves indicative of the dual character of the
religion, uncut hair being a longstanding tradition of
Hindu mystics, for example, but binding it into a
turban is associated with the martial behavior required
of the Khalsa. The extent to which violence was
acceptable to the Singh tradition was defined by Gobind
Singh in two ways: first, it was to be used only in
defense of the faith; and second, it was to be used
only when all other means of defense had failed.2
Whether these two preconditions have been met in recent
events is a question that is deeply troubling to many
Sikhs.
The identity of the Khalsa Sikh, the follower of Guru
Gobind Singh, has come to represent in many people's
minds Sikh identity generally. This is a historically
incorrect impression, however. The Nanakpanthis,
followers of the founder, Guru Nanak, continued their
tradition of essentially non-violent mysticism
alongside the development and growth of the Khalsa
brotherhood. Not all Sikhs became Singhs, in other
words. For a long time a schism existed between these
two branches of the faith, with the kesdhari
(those with uncut hair) asserting a more militant
separation of Sikhism from the Hindu tradition and the
sahajdhari Sikhs (those with cut hair)
continuing to view themselves, and to be viewed by
others, as one of many sects within Hinduism. Today,
however, there is a growing acceptance of the militant
Singh identity as the Sikh identity and
an increasing unwillingness among all Sikhs to be
considered as just another sect of Hindu. 3
Why did this coalescence of militant and nonmilitant
identities occur, with the former largely assimilating
the latter? One important factor in the development of
a united and separatist Sikh identity was the British
colonization of India. Based on their own popular
though unscientific ideas about the biology of race,
the British decided early on that the Sikhs were one of
the martial races of India, and they made the Khalsa
symbols part of the official accoutrements for the
valued Sikh solider. This highly visible military
figure, with his bold blue turban, knee-length tunic,
and flashing curved sword, became the model for
contemporary Sikh identity. Up until a recent epidemic
of desertions, approximately 20% of the Indian army
officer corps and 11% of its soldiers were Sikhs,
though the Sikhs consititute under 2% of the total
population. The publicized valor of these military men
was carried over into the civilian identity of all
Sikhs. Hence, an essentially mystical sect of Hindu
origins developed a martial and separatist identity.
This transformation was effected gradually through the
long reign of the ten Sikh gurus and was further
cemented by the British colonial definition of Sikh
martialism. We now turn to the question of why this
potential for militancy has been mobilized in recent
years.
Modern Sikh Protest: Why?
When the British empire lost control of the Indian
subcontinent in 1947, Punjab was split between the
newly formed states of Pakistan and India, with almost
all of the Sikhs ending up on the Indian side. While
many
historically and spiritually important Sikh sites were
essentially cut off from the Sikh population, the Sikhs
in Indian Punjab came to dominate the cultural and
political life of the state. Tensions between Hindu and
Sikh Punjabis under these conditions may have been
predictable, but the escalation of conflict to the
point where the Sikhs confront the entire Indian-Hindu
community demands further consideration.
Explanations of unrest among the Sikh population since
1947 cluster around several different theoretical
viewpoints. The simplest of these, as expressed in the
GOI's White Paper on the Punjab Agitation, considers
that the violence has been primarily instigated by
"external forces, with deeprooted interest in the
disintegration of India."6 The idea of an outside
conspiracy, encompassing overseas Sikh organizations in
the U.S. and Canada but focusing on the idea of illicit
support from Pakistan, has caught the public
imagination with a vengeance. While the possibility of
Pakistani involvement cannot be discounted, the notion
of a “Muslim connection”7 owes its popularity to a
denial that any sector of Indian society could hold a
grievance against the government, and it appeals to
many whose nationalist sentiments are strong. Putting
the blame on outside subversives allows a comfortable
complacency about the domestic situation in India
itself. Thus far, there is minimal evidence for such
subversive involvement from next door.
A second perspective on the Punjab problem comes from
the Marxist camp. Though the relative weight accorded
the factors involved varies, most researchers
interested in the economic background to Sikh rebellion
point to the Green Revolution as the catalyst for
social tension in Punjab 8. One effect of technological
advancements in agriculture was the creation of a class
of what have been called "capitalist farmers," mostly
among the Sikh Jat population. The rise of this newly
wealthy farming class meant increasing competition with
the essentially Hindu merchant sector of the citiesS9
Thus, while Punjab today boasts a per capita income
roughly twice the national average and hence is rarely
perceived as an oppressed region, the ascendant Sikh
farmers there feel their interests to be at odds with
those of the predominately Hindu central government.
Conversely, so the Communist Party of India (Marxist)
claims, the ruling Congress Party has purposely
exploited communal divisions in Punjab so as to thwart
this rising agricultural class. All of these tensions
have been exacerbated by the fact that the demographic
balance in Punjab has been shifting against the Sikhs,
as their economic success has encouraged many Sikhs to
try their hand elsewhere and non-Sikhs to migrate into
the state. 10
A third conception of Sikh rebellion focuses on the
idea of the Sikhs as an ethnic nation, which in its
protest against the Indian government is asserting its
right to self-determination. This conception mirrors
the Sikhs' own rhetoric in which the demands, first for
a Sikh state and now for the independent nation of
Khalistan (Land of the Pure), have been held up as
rallying points. Though only a small minority of Sikhs
actually support the idea of Khalistan, the definition
of Operation Bluestar and later confrontations as part
of a war between two nations rather than an internal
security matter has held great appeal.ll The fact that
the geographic range of the Sikh religion corresponds
generally with the boundaries of the Punjabi language
in India has further enhanced the sense of ethnic unity
among the Sikhs. The state of Punjab was ostensibly
created around the language issue, thus giving rise to
it as a Sikh majority state. There is, furthermore,
some historical evidence that the converts to Sikhism
have come in large extent from the Hindu lower castes,
who themselves may represent ancestrally different
ethnic groups from the high-caste Hindus who came to
dominate modern Indian politics. In this view, though
perhaps stretching the point a bit, the Sikhs share
with the Tamils, the Nagas, and other peoples outside
the Hindi-speaking belt of north central India an
interest in the decentralization of political power.
A
final orientation to Sikh rebellion centers
specifically on the political machinations of the
Congress Party, which has been accused of purposely
orchestrating Sikh agitation with the explicit aim of
reunifying Hindu India around Mrs. Gandhi whose
popularity had been fading at the time of the 1984
operation. l 2 That Sant Jarnail Singh
Bhindranwale, who according to this theory was
Congress's own pawn, got entirely out of hand in
occupying the Golden Temple precinct with a small
private army, only served as an excuse for the
Operation Bluestar rout, which, if it united all Sikhs
against the government, also united most Hindus (a far
greater number) in favor of it. The extent to which the
desired goals of Hindu unity and support of Congress
was achieved was proven in the monolithic support
accorded Rajiv Gandhi after Mrs. Gandhi's death, aided
by election campaign advertising directly inflaming
Hindu sentiment against the Sikhs.
Further evidence of the government's complicity in the
unrest was provided by the "Report of the Citizens'
Commission," which noted that police officers in Delhi
and other centers of Hindu-Sikh rioting did nothing to
quell the Hindu backlash of violence against the Sikhs
and, in fact, may have encouraged it. The Citizens for
Democracy and the People's Union for Civil Liberties
have both stated that the government itself is to be
held responsible for a large part of the violence.13
The agreement reached by Rajiv Gandhi and the Sikh
leader, Longowal, in 1985 in which most of the original
Sikh demands were conceded, causes speculation as to
why the government had reacted so vehemently in the
first place. 14
Of the above perspectives, the outside conspiracy
theory probably has
least to commend it, not only because of the absence of
reliable information about Pakistani or other
involvement but also because such external interference
cannot explain the groundswell of support among the
Sikhs themselves. If an outside "seed" was planted, it
nevertheless must have fallen upon fertile ground for
it to germinate in the manner that it did. The
importance of the economic changes that have
transformed Punjab into the breadbasket of India cannot
be denied and are a more plausible source of current
problems. The economic interests of the landowning Sikh
Jats, however, would not be coincident with
those of the landless laborers, from whose ranks have
come many in the Sikh fundamentalist movement. While
Marxist writers have generally been quick to condemn
interclass communal solidarity as antithetical to real
social change (based, in this paradigm, on class rather
than ethnic awareness),15 it is clear that in this case
economic factors are necessary but not sufficient
factors in the situation. Other recent ethnic
movements, such as that of the Basques in Spain, also
seem to confound the strictly Marxist view in their
blend of economic and cultural grievances. The region
in which the Basques live, like Punjab, is wealthier,
not poorer, than the nation as a whole.
The Sikhs as nation theory, though perhaps a bit
abstract, has a great deal in its favor. Many observers
of Sikh life have noted the sense of unity pervading
this community, the commonality of its traditions and
beliefs, and the definite sense of boundary between
itself and the wider society. In fact, throughout
Indian history non-Hindu religious traditions have many
times been linked to specific ethnic and linguistic
groups, from the early Buddhists and Jains who are
speculated to have sprung from the non-Hindu ethnic
groups indigenous to the subcontinent,16 to the modern
converts to Christianity found especially in the far
southern periphery of India where Aryan penetration was
weakest, and also in the tribal northeast. Ever since
the ancient self-definition of the Aryans as "those who
worship the Vedic gods," religious and ethnic
identities in India have been closely intertwined.
The problem with looking at the current Sikh rebellion
as a type of ethnic separatism is the fact that, as
noted earlier, modern Sikh identity is of relatively
recent origin. Historically, the Sikhs themselves have
been divided as to whether they constituted a separate
religious tradition. Ethnographers have noted that in
the past it was common for Hindus and Sikhs to worship
at one another's shrines, and that some Hindu families
would have one son convert to Sikhism. The separateness
of the Sikh faith as defined by Khalsa Sikhs has only
recently been widely accepted, and any paradigm that
proposes to consider the Sikhs as an ethnic group must
delve into the reasons why this sense of ethnic unity
has come to the fore at the present historical moment.
The rise of Sikh identity and militancy can profitably
draw on all the above perspectives, and can certainly
be linked to the idea that the ruling Congress Party
itself may have played a key role in fanning Sikh
emotions. In the following section, we will trace the
dialectical interaction between the Hindu revivalism
associated with the rise of the Congress Party and the
corresponding Sikh revival that resulted in the
conflict we now see before us. The premise is that the
Sikhs did not acquire the identity of an ethnic nation
in a social vacuum; their own sense of unity and
separateness must be considered in the context of a
growing sense of solidarity on the part of the Hindu
center.
The Rise of Communal Identities
Blaming the British for communal divisions on the
Indian scene is a common pastime these days.
Unfortunately, the popular image of India as a
nonviolent land where all religions were tolerated and
all ethnic groups coexisted until disrupted by
colonization is demonstrably false. While the British
encouraged Sikh-Khalsa identity into a single
stereotype, the attribution of Sikh militarism to
British influences also neglects the key fact that
during the same period the Hindu majority was also
undergoing a condensation and redefinition of its
identity. The movement was called sanghatan, meaning
the consolidation, unification, and organization of the
Hindu community that would be necessary if it were to
effectively resist foreign (that is, British)
domination. The call for Ram Raj, a return to the Hindu
Golden Age, became a rallying cry for anticolonial
organizers in the early decades of this century. It
should be noted that the British themselves probably
had a hand in encouraging this notion during their own
colonizing in which Hindus suffering under Muslim
domination could be won over to a British alliance
under this theme. However strong the pull of the idea
of Ram Raj was, however, and however successful in
unifying Hindus to eventually fight for independent
nationhood, this tactic of mobilization had important
negative repercussions, the full impact of which is
only now becoming evident.
The major problem with the idea of independence as a
return to the reign of Rama was the fact that the
British, while the main target of attack, were not the
only foreign influences contaminating the Hindu nation.
There were the Muslims, who prior to independence
constituted more than one-fourth of the population, as
well as smaller numbers of Christians, Jains, Parsees,
and some lingering Buddhists. As part of the campaign
to unify all the people back into a single ethnic
nation, Hindu organizations started the process of
shuddhi (purification), which was aimed at
readmitting people who had converted to these other
faiths back into Hinduism. There were some strong
demographic reasons for this measure; Max Weber in his
Religion of India reports that from the end of
the nineteenth century to the beginning years of the
twentieth, Hinduism was on the decline in India while
other religious groups were correspondingly
increasing.'' That most of these converts out of
Hinduism came from the lower castes is not surprising,
nor is it illogical that the Hindu revival
organizations rested on the support of the higher
castes (as the main Hindu party today, Bharatiya Janata,
continues to do). In any case, organizations such as
the Arya Samaj, crucial to the education,
modernization, and independence movements of India,
rested on a firmly Hindu foundation, welcoming all if
only they agreed to eradicate the contamination they
had acquired through pursuing non-Hindu ways.
In the case of the Punjabi Sikhs, the insistence on
shuddhi was probably the single most important
factor turning the Sikhs away from the all-Indian Arya
Samaj and toward their own organizations, the Singh
Sabha and later the Akali Da1.18 Though most Hindus
viewed the Sikhs as but a single caste within Hinduism,
and many Sikhs, as noted, continued to consider
themselves Hindus, the fact that Sikh communities
ignored caste barriers through such longstanding
customs as interdining meant that they were irreparably
polluted. They, too, had to be repurified before being
welcomed to the Arya Samaj movement. In addition, the
Arya Samajists in Punjab campaigned for the use of the
Hindi language in the schools and urged Hindus to
discontinue the practice of allowing one son to
practice Sikhism. As a result, most Sikhs decided to
forego the opportunity to be repurified, which would
have meant virtually losing their separate identity,
and instead turned to the all-Sikh political forum,
already dominated by the more militant Khalsa Sikhs. In
time, the Akali Dal became inextricably linked with the
Khalsa itself, and its spokesmen claimed to speak for
the Sikh Panth generally. Today, opponents of the Akali
Dal are portrayed by Akali leaders, and indeed regarded
by most Sikhs, as enemies of the entire Sikh Panth.
The point is that the Sikhs during the early
anticolonial years were receiving a mixed message from
Hindu leaders. On one hand, all were to unite, despite
differences in doctrines, beliefs, and gods that were
in fact not only tolerated but actively welcomed as
part of the identity of the multiethnic Hindu nation.
This diversity of belief is the aspect of Hinduism that
has most strongly come through to the West, which has
typically found it both admirable and puzzling. But
diversity of social rules, particularly with regard to
caste prohibitions, was strictly limited, forcing those
who sought reform to express it in terms of non-Hindu
or heterodox religious systems. The fact that the
Sikhs, who shared much philosophically with most
Hindus, were nevertheless impure because of their
social practices, illustrates this principle well. The
Sikhs response was a campaign on the theme of Ham
Hindu Nahin (We Are Not Hindus) that was carried
through to the 1984 occupation of the Golden Temple
from which Bhindranwale issued his demand that the
central government recognize Sikhism as an independent
religion.
Renascent Hindu communalism has taken its most extreme
form in the development of a paramilitary organization
called the Rashtriya Svayam-sevek Sangh (RSS), complete
with cadres of highly trained troops and an ideology of
the Hindu state involving the complete elimination of
all non Hindu minorities. During World War 11, two RSS
leaders held talks with Hitler with the aim of
establishing an Aryan alliance that would enable Hindu
Aryans to overthrow the British, and prompted Nehru to
call the RSS "the Indian version of fascism." The major
Hindu political parties first the Hindu Mahasabha and
later the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (now liberalized to form
the Bharatiya Janata Party), the Hindu Manch, and the
Shiv Sena-also called for the establishment of a Hindu
state in which the identity of Indian nationalism and
Hindu purity would be made explicit. The link between
the Hindu organizations and the Congress Party in the
fight for independence (in which, for example, Congress
leaders were active in anti-cow slaughter associations)
did much to alienate non-Hindu sectors of the
population. l9
That Hindu chauvinism is by no means dead is shown in
the fact that in 1984 an estimated 200,000 RSS members
worked to elect Rajiv Gandhi, and in 1987 this group
once again endorsed his party. 20 Though Gandhi has
alternately tried to placate the minorities and woo the
Hindu right, his commitment to secular pluralism has to
appear shaky, particularly to those who remember the
Nehru heritage. (The complete transformation of this
party would surely shock Nehru, who tried to limit the
Hindu elements within the Congress and to define it as
a secular, democratic, and universalist organization.)
In the post-assassination elections of December 1984,
Congress showed itself to have consolidated its hold to
a solid belt of
Hindi-speaking Hindus in north central India, while
losing ground everywhere else to regional, communist,
or non-Hindu religious parties 21. The Congress
government in Delhi is now perceived by many of the
minorities as the Hindu heartland bearing down on the
peripheral areas 22 particularly in the south where the
major ethnic party, the DMK, recently swept past
Congress to an overwhelming electoral victory. Coupled
with the disillusionment with Congress based on recent
corruption charges, this regional dissension bodes ill
for Rajiv Gandhi's future as prime minister.
Although one would not want to convey the idea that all
Hindus are religious chauvinists (this would be far
from the truth, as the tolerance many Hindus have held
for other traditions is well known), the point is that
political conditions since the beginning of the century
have prompted certain elements of this faith to express
a markedly intolerant position. Sikh-Hindu violence is,
in other words, a two-way street. This is an aspect of
the situation commonly ignored by the Western press,
which continues to conceive of India as it is portrayed
by moviemakers and others attracted to the "exotic"
Orient. An article in my own local newspaper, the
Des Moines Register, introduced Sikh violence in
the spring of 1988 as follows: "In India, where
peaceful protests gave birth to a nation four decades
ago, the cradle of nonviolence is being rocked by
regional rebellions, terrorist attacks and the taking
of hostages. To some, the land of gurus has become the
land of guns."23 The picture of India as a nation of
all-tolerant mysticism provides the backdrop against
which the entire world sees Sikh rebellion as the work
of religious fanatics, if not madmen. The fact that
such rebellion is occurring in all the peripheral and
non-Hindu areas of the Indian nation implies, however,
that the causes of such rebellion are not to be sought
in the internal attributes of the peripheral groups
themselves. What we are seeing is a concert of
reactions against the center, whose own characteristics
are therefore to be seen as a prime mover. Sikh
rebellion can be understood only in the context of the
order against which it pushes.
The Hindu Order
It is historical and anthropological evidence that best
provide an avenue of approach to the dynamics of the
Hindu center in India. In particular, any inquiry
attempting to look at this civilization in macroscopic
perspective has to consider the incredible persistence
of the Hindu social order, asking how it is that this
order has been maintained over some 3,000 years since
its inception. Like much of academic scholarship, half
the game is won by asking the right questions. Too
often, the question of why a particular order persists
is not asked at all, as if persistence is assumed and
only change need be explained. In this case, the
strategies evolved by Hinduism in coping with pressures
for change are identifiable and point to an answer to
the puzzle of Sikh protest today. Hinduism cannot be
seen as simply continuing out of inertia; rather, it
was made to continue by specific actions that led up to
the state of affairs we see before us today. One
observer in 1983 commented that Hindus carry the Vedas,
their sacred books, "like a flag," and this remark
aptly highlights the fact that the Hindu faith had its
origins in, and continues to carry the potential for
identification with a particular ethnic nation. The
Aryan people who created the Vedas were by most
interpretations also the creators of India's caste
system, in which the upper three (twice-born) levels
are the arya(pure) while the lower level is the
anarya (impure). The elaborate rules of
pollution, avoidance, and servitude that characterize
the caste system all have as their endpoint the
preservation of Aryan purity; that is, by its origins,
caste ideology is an ideology of ethnic domination,
whatever other concomitants it came to have. This is a
simple point, but one that many writers on caste as a
system seem to forget. Anthropologist Gerald Berreman
has been one of the few who consistently points out the
key element of racial prerogative inherent in caste
ideology.24
The symbolic idiom utilized in Hindu belief makes the
identity of ethnic patriotism and spiritual truth
inescapable. Balraj Puri points out that the Hindu gods
are the rivers and mountains of India and even Bharat
Mata or Mother India itself, and a strong feeling
persists that denying these means denying India. He
writes that "Hinduism meets other religions not as
another religion but as a representative of the ancient
heritage of the nation, and has … acquired the de
facto right to set requirements … of Indian
nationalism."25 In 1983 the Indian government made an
attempt to assuage the growing fissiparous tendencies
in India by staging a patriotic pilgrimage in which
water was brought together from all the sacred rivers
around the nation, without explicit concern for the
fact that this tactic by its nature could only unify
Hindus, and not other Indians. Similarly, Hindu temples
are national treasures and are so supported, though
non-Hindu Indians may not enter. The very fact that
traditionally one could not convert to, but had to be
born into Hinduism highlights its exclusive ethnic
character. Even the slightest contact with those
outside the fold demanded elaborate purification
rituals, and intermarriage was among the strongest
taboos. The difficulties of using this religious
tradition as a model for nationalism in what is really
a multiethnic state are obvious. In these terms, the
tensions we now see are not enigmatic but entirely
predictable.
Despite the upper-caste ideology of consensus and
stasis in the caste system, those consigned to the
lower levels and excluded from the circle of the pure
did rebel many times in history. Since the definition
of the dominating group was phrased in religious terms,
opposition to it most often
took the form of religious movements as well. The first
major upheaval came over two millennia ago in the form
of the heterodoxies of Buddhism and Jainism. The fact
that the eventual decline of Buddhism in India has
classically been called an enigma is something like the
puzzle of Sikh rebellion today; it is enigmatic only in
a paradigm that assumes tolerance, coexistence, and
stasis where none exists.
There was, in fact, a great deal of outright
persecution of both Buddhists and Jains in Hindu
history, episodes that are conveniently forgotten in
the schoolbooks Indian children read. It was
transformation within what was then Brahmanism (that
is, the ancestral religion to modern Hinduism) that
eventually took the wind out of the sails of Buddhist
heterodoxy. Most importantly, the Buddha himself came
to be defined as an incarnation of the Hindu god
Vishnu, so that people claiming allegiance to the
Buddha were perceived as only worshipping another
manifestation of Vishnu. Sankara, one of the greatest
Hindu philosophers, took over some of the key features
of Buddhism such as the notion of inner contemplation
as the key to enlightenment, and hence is dubbed a
crypto-Buddhist by several Indian writers today.26 A
key distinction of Sankara's scheme, however, was
the preservation of the caste order that Buddhism
rejected; in Sankara's conception only the "competent"
could hope to achieve enlightenment, while others were
bound to this world of illusion. He was, therefore,
accepting the most radical of Buddhism's philosophical
innovations, while perpetuating in its entirety the
system of inequality that characterized Brahmanic
society. This tolerance and even welcome of all
possible ideas and beliefs, alongside the rejection of
any social innovation, remains characteristic of Hindu
attitudes.
The encounter of Hinduism with Buddhist and Jaina
heterodoxy in ancient times served as a kind of
template for future confrontation, with the tradition
of erasing heterodoxy by embracing it evolving as a
standard pattern. Anthropologist David Mandelbaum wrote
that "it seems almost to be a property of this social
system that such movements well up periodically,
develop through the cycle, and then devolve back into
the system." 27
Missing in this description is the sense that this
welling up and falling back down is not some kind of
inherent characteristic of a system, but is a specific
pattern of recurring rebellion on the part of
dispossessed groups that consistently fall in favor of
a yet more syncretic Hindu philosophy at the center.
One Indian scholar dubs this the Nilakantha syndrome,
Nilakantha being the god who neutralizes poison by
swallowing it, turning blue-throated in the process.28
Hinduism, seen over the long term, is a dynamic pattern
of domination, rebellion, and incorporation, always
transforming itself but maintaining its characteristic
social order. Paradoxically, it is the very complexity
and diversity of Hindu belief that shows its greatest
intolerance. Critics point out that it is a tradition
that cannot respect true otherness but can only
assimilate otherness to Hinduness, which is then
accorded legitimate respect.
Every religious and cultural tradition carries some
potential for mobilization as an ethnopolitical force.
Hinduism's particular burden is its historical heritage
of spiritual imperialism, divided from truly
relativistic tolerance by a very fine line. This line
has been crossed back and forth by various leaders in
recent years, and it must be a matter of explicit
concern for reflective Hindus today to orient their
religion to a truly democratic political position, one
with an attitude of respectful coexistence with other
persuasions. The best among the Hindu community have
always held this attitude; the worst fail to recognize
the existence of the problem.
Many Hindus today cannot understand why religious
minorities continue to reject the place offered them
within the relativistic Hindu framework. 29 The
peculiarly Indian notion of secularism, the idea that
tolerance to all faiths should be encouraged on the
grounds that all represent different paths to the same
universal truth, has come to dominate political
discussion to the exclusion of the kind of secularism
intended in the Western democracies, in which one's
religious beliefs are in no way the concern of the
state. For example, Mahatma Gandhi's statement that "I
am a Hindu, a Sikh, a Muslim, and a Christian" has a
very different meaning than the idea that one is a
citizen, whose religious beliefs are irrelevant to
one's citizenship. As one Muslim observer said of
Gandhi's comment, "Only a Hindu could say that." But
then, Gandhi himself said that "those who say that
religion has nothing to do with politics do not know
what religion means." He was one leader who had learned
the lessons of Indian history well. Many scholars, both
Indian and Western, have questioned the idea of the
Indian secular democracy, pointing out that individual,
social, and political identities in India have
historically been entirely tied up in religious
ideology. Perhaps because of the strong desire on the
part of the West to find at least one true democracy in
developing Asia, these perceptions have been largely
ignored. As a result, when communal violence breaks out
it is seen as an aberration, a social problem rather
than a central feature of this civilization's very
identity.
The various explanations for Sikh protest considered
previously, then, all contribute to the analysis of
recent events. They suffer, however, from a lack of
historical depth. The Sikh rebellion is not an isolated
case; its causes, form, and potential for success are
directly related to movements of the past such as those
of the Buddhists and the Muslims. It may be an
interesting commentary on the Sikh willingness to use
violence to establish an independent Khalistan that the
Buddhists, whose religious ideals demanded nonviolence,
were almost entirely eradicated in India, while the
Muslims, who demanded an independent Pakistan on the
grounds that Muslims could never flourish in a Hindu
state, point to the depressed conditions of the
remaining Indian-Muslim minority as evidence for the
correctness of the prediction. Sikh strategists are not
unaware of the historical circumstances surrounding
Buddhist decline and Muslim separatism and have taken
their lessons from this history well. The meaning of
Sikh rebellion, therefore, must be sought in its
relation to the long-term dynamic of Indian culture.
That this culture has Hinduism at its core means that
Hindu conceptions of the social order are crucial to
the understanding of Sikh motives and tactics in
rejecting it. While this article can serve as only the
sketchiest introduction to this order, it will
hopefully prompt further consideration of the whole
picture of communal tension in India, which often gets
lost in the drama of immediate events.
References:
1. W. H. MacLeod, "The Sikhs: Crisis and Identity in a
Religious Tradition," Harvard Divinity Bulletin
(January/May 1987):7-9.
2. Ibid.
3. Rajiv Kapur, Sikh Separatism: The Politics of Faith
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1986).
4. Richard G. Fox, Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the
Making (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985), pp. 140-159.
5. Alexandra George, Social Ferment in India (London:
Athlone, 1986), p. 310.
6. GOI, White Paper on the Punjab Agitation, Delhi,
1984, p. 3.
7. Balraj Madhok, Punjab Problem: The Muslim Connection
(New Delhi: Hindu World Publications, 1985).
8. Fox, Lions of the Punjab; Robin Jeffrey, What's
Happening to India? Punjab, EthnicConflict, Mrs.
Gandhi's Death, and the Test for Federalism
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986); Gurharpal Singh,
"Understanding the Punjab Problem," Asian Survey 27
(December1987): 1268-77.
9. Pravin J. Patel, "Violent Protest in India: The
Punjab Movement," Journal of International Aflairs 40
(1987):271-85.
10. Robert L.Hardgrave, "The Northeast, the Punjab, and
the Regionalization of Indian Politics," Asian Survey
23 (November 1983):1171-81.
11. M. J. Akbar, India: The Seige Within (New York:
Viking, 1985), p. 209.
12. Ibid., pp. 175-209.
13. George, Social Ferment in India, pp. 301-14.
14. MacLeod, "The Sikhs."
15. Avtar Singh Malhotra, "In the Name of the
Brotherhood of Ordinary People," WorldMarxist Review
(February 1984):44-47.
16. Lalmani Joshi, Studies in the Buddhistic Culture of
India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas,1967); Govind Chandra
Pande, Studies in the Origins of Buddhism (Delhi:
Oriental Publish-ers, 1974).
17. Max Weber, The Religion of India: The Sociology of
Hinduism and Buddhism, trans.H. Gerth and D. Martindale
(New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 5.
18. Patel, "Violent Protest in India," p. 275.
19. Moin Shakir, '3ocial Roots of Communalism,"
Religion and Society 31 (1984):2W.
20. James Manor, "Politics: Ambiguity, Disillusionment,
and Ferment," in India Briefing,1988, M. M . Bouton and
P. Oldenburg, eds. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), p.
7.
21. George, Social Ferment in India, pp. 3 15-16.
22. Rajni Kothari, "The Centre and the Challenge," Far
Eastern Economic Review (January31, 1985):34-35.
23. "India: Boiling Cauldron of Regional Rebellion,"
Des Moines Register, January 10, 1988.
24. Gerald Berreman, "Race, Caste, and Other Invidious
Distinctions in Social Stratification," Race 8 (1972).
25. Balraj Puri, "Anatomy of Communalism," Religion and
Society 31 (1984):6-13.
26. N. Subramanian, "Sankara and the Vedantist
Movement," in Social Contents of Indian Religious
Reform Movements, S. P. Sen, ed. (Calcutta: Institute
for Historical Studies, 1978), pp. 30-42; Arvind
Sharma, Thresholds in Hindu-Buddhist Studies (Calcutta:
Minerva Asso-ciates, 1979).
27. David G. Mandelbaum, Society in India: Change and
Continuity, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1970), p. 525.
28. A. K. Saran, "The Crisis of Hinduism," Studies in
Comparative Religion (Spring 1971).
29. Donald E. Smith, "Gandhi, Hinduism, and Mass
Politics," in Religion and Political Modernization, D.
E. Smith, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963),
pp. 13546. |
