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Sikh-Baiting
The Chief of these pseudo-nirankaris strictly observes the outward garb and forms of a saintly Sikh and so do his aides and lieutenants. And not without malice aforethought. Till only recently, their public gatherings were invariably centred around the ceremonious installations of the Sikh scripture, Guru Granth Sahib, that the Sikhs revere as the visible symbol and form of the Light and the Vehicle of the Grace of God, accessible to man in the form of the Guru's Word and Testament. This Sikh doctrine and faith fore taught by five centuries, the latest modern development in European religious thought and theological dogmatics (Karl Barth, 1886-1968) that recognises distinction between the Word and a religion by accepting that while the former is God's self-revelation to man, the latter is the product of human culture and aspirations and is not to be identified with saving revelation, for, salvation can come only from God and not from man. Almost all these pseudo-nirankaris are ignorant, unlettered commonality, familiar with nothing about religion and sophisticated thought except the portmanteau jargon of Sikhism, in Lewis Carroll's sense of a word, packed with sense and sound of many words, capable of being employed successfully for ridiculing and creating confusion about Sikhism. In their writings and preachings their main and primary concern and pre-occupation is to misinterpret and to corrupt Sikh doctrines and Sikh beliefs and thus to confound and insult the Sikh scripture publicly. This nefarious and criminal game has been going on, unchecked, for the last twenty or so years and has given rise to many near-riot scenes between the Sikhs and these Sikh-baiters. In their gatherings, they display the Sikh scripture .( Holy Guru Granth Sahib) in traditional ceremonial robes as Sikhs do, but degrade it by placing it on a lower-level platform than the one on which their Chief or main preacher seats himself. No graver provocation can be offered to Sikh religious sentiments when these antics are publicly and maliciously indulged in. A parallel would be, if a non-Hindu placed a Hindu icon or sacred idol under his feet in public and then unfavourably commented upon the religious concept implicit in this icon or idol. The grave provocation involved is equal in magnitude to the insult to Hindus and Hinduism that Mahmud of Ghazna offered, by carrying the sacred lingam of Somanath to the Jami 'mosque of his capital to place it on its footsteps for being treaded over by Muslim worshippers, in the 12th century. The point is not that the Sikhs demand or expect everybody to accept the Sikh scripture the way the Sikhs regard it, the point is that they resent and rightly so, its profanation and calculated insult to it by others. (2) In their writings and in their preachings they pretend to pick up a sacred text out of the Sikh scripture to explain and comment upon it as Sikhs do in their congregations and then ridicule, twist and misinterpret it by design. The exegesis of the sacred text is invariably prefaced by the remark: "This fellow here says" : kahinda hai, a gross form of disrespect and insult to the Sikh Prophets and Sages through whom the Sikh revelations are indicated in their scripture as having been manifested. This gross insult is repeated publicly, on every occasion, in word and in writing. In the June, 1964 issue of their official publication, the Sant Nirankari, this kahinda hai insult is reproduced as having come out of the mouth of 'God Almighty', Avtar Singh, himself. (3) Such commentaries, when reproduced in the Sant Nirankari and their other publications always bear the caption: "Testament by the True King": vichar sri sache patshah. The Sikhs have traditionally referred to their Gurus and Prophets, as sacha patshah, the Spiritual Master, and these pseudo-nirankaris have appropriated this title for their Chief deliberately, to substitute him for the Sikh Gurus and to outrage maliciously the Sikh religious beliefs. (4) In their gatherings and concourses they frequently refer to the Sikh scripture as "a big bulky, useless volume of miscellaneous writings", potha "a didactic miscellany" in contradistinction to a compendium of sacred texts, just to outrage the religious beliefs and feelling of the Sikhs. In June, 1973, at Nagpur, the wife of Gurbachan Singh, who is pompously styled as Raj-mata, 'the Queen Mother', made a public speech in which she said that, "My husband alone is the Deliverer of Mankind in this Age; he alone can emancipate you. No useless and pointless big bulky volume of so-called Divine Testaments (here, she pointed towards the Sikh scripture) can do you any good." In the August 1964 issue of the Sant Nirankari, the Sikh scripture, Guru Granth Sahib, is described as a "book containing writings of 70-72 (sic. actually, 35) educated persons who believed in no religion or dharma." In this issue, the President of the Nirankari Mission, the Delhi-based Supreme Organisation of these pseudo-nirankari, further asserts that all writings in the Sant Nirankari are "divinely revealed", anubhavi gyan, of the identical order as is claimed for the Sikh sacred texts of the Guru Granth Sahib. (5) In the June, 1964 issue of the Sane Nirankari in an essay, "What is true Revelation", gurbani ki hai, it is said about Guru Granth Sahib as follows:
In the April, 1964 issue of this Journal (p. 31) a follower of the 'Sustainer of the entire Universe', Gurbachan Singh, records his confession of conversion to this new religion thus:
These instances of anti - Sikh dynamism and stances of this new religion are just illustrative and by no means exhaustive. |
