Without Hope Of Reprieve

During the 18th and 19th centuries, the Sikhs were internationally recognised as a sovereign political nation and the Sikh State, Sarkar Khalsa, extended from Jamuna to Jamrud and Aksai Chin to the appulse of Baluchistan. Their State and sovereignty was lost not on the battlefield, but through treachery at the negotiating table. In the Freedom struggle of India, they have made sacrifices out of all proportions to their small numbers despite deliberate erasures of them from all officially prepared records including the time capsule buried in the Old Fort at Delhi.

The outgoing British, in 1947, formally recognised them as the third legitimate heir to the Sovereignty of undivided India, besides Hindus and Muslims, but they remained steadfast in loyalty to the concept and ideal of an undivided India and a single Indian nation, for which temerity they paid a price, the details of which are not directly relevant here.

Since 1947, they have strained their every nerve and staked their entire potential in developing and defending India, on the agricultural farm, and in the industrial factory, for fraternal togetherness and for victory on the field of battle. But they are, so they feel and not without reason that, their destiny has been fixed as expendable, as manure and as a vanishing quantity in the crucible of the Indian political laboratory. Many of our brave and brilliant military Generals have died in mass-accidents or of coronary shocks of super sessions. Many others have been used and thrown into dustbins. Some of our able and capable Civil Servants have been liquidated unceremoniously against law and good conscience, and others have been by the Rulers degraded and demoralised. Psycho-economic offensives have continuously been planned I and mounted against us to reduce our numbers in the country, to obliterate our political significance, to eliminate our natural pre-eminence in the armed forces and to sap our basic spiritual vitality and lower our civic dignity. Public media and law courts have frequently treated us as less than citizens of India, through judicial decisions that hold others more equal in law than Sikhs, the facts being identical and the law applicable being the same.

Our unshaken pride in and loyalty to the integrity of the country and the goal of a united nation has been viewed as unreliable and suspicious and our moves to press and highlight our just demands had often been met with bullets, smear-campaigns, pervert findings of quasi-judicial investigations and hostile policies, and the death sentence pre-determined against us is made to appear as without any hope of reprieve.. It was in this background that the Sikhs entered on a last-ditch, sustained and successful struggle against the Congress rule at Delhi, culminating in the Emergency regime, even when others had surrendered or retreated, hoping that a new dispensation and a chastened political leadership at Delhi might have a second look at the Sikh situation, with a view to reappraising their true 1egiti.mate position in India and to afford them a let-up from the suffocation and strangulation which has been their lot, since 1947. In the massacre of Sikhs at Amritsar, on the 13th of April, 1978 the Sikhs fail to see a silver lining.

The Sikhs, nevertheless, reiterate that their loyalty to the great spiritual heritage of their country, their determination to stand by and defend the ideal of a United India and one Indian nation and their faith that some day, sooner than later, a new and juster understanding of the Sikhs will arise, remain as firm and steadfast as ever.