The Roots

Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) is the great ideologue of the modern Hindu nationalism. It is this Hindu nationalism that has come out as supremely triumphant out of the tragic partition of India, in 1947. Nirad C. Chaudhry is a cultural analyst of international repute and is a living reliable interpreter of contemporary Hindu mind. Both of them have something pertinent to say that puts the current tragic predicament of the Sikhs in India into lime-light focus. In his prestigious book, The Foundations of Indian Culture, Aurobirido Ghose points out that emergence of Sikhism in India "is a strikingly original" phenomena in the long cultural history of India, as it is the only 'movement' which is forward-looking and not merely re-interpretative, renascent or retrograde, as all other cultural or religious movements in India during the last two millennia have been.

Thus Sikhism alone has the potency and will to grapple with the future and to come to terms with it, without compromising the enduring values of Hindu Culture. Possibly, basing his intuitive understanding on a study of Sikh history, he says:

"The culture which gives up its living separateness...which neglects its active self-defence will be swallowed up and...(the people) which lived by it will lose its soul and perish."

What options are being left, in free India, to the Sikhs: to agree to spiritual suicide by quietly and submissively relinquishing their living separateness, of exercising no active self-defence and thus to lose their soul and perish? This is the ancient maxim of Hindu politics, outlined in the Arthasastra (1st. century), under the nomenclature of matsyanyaya, the 'Fish Justice', laying down that the obligation and final destiny of a small fish is to submit to being gobbled up by the big fish. It is on record that during early fifties when the Sikh leader, Master Tara Singh reminded Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru of the solemn promises given to the Sikhs before 1947 to establish an autonomous region in free India wherein Sikhs can freely flourish as Indian nationals according to their own genius, Nehru informed Master Tara Singh that, "now the circumstances have changed."

Home Minister Katju, openly told Master Tara Singh during the same period that the true destiny of Sikhs, now, is to give up their separate identity and merge indistinguishably into the inchoate mass of Hinduism. It is believed, on good grounds, that the pseudo-nirankari movement has been boosted and catapulted into power and influence by set policies of the previous rulers at Delhi, to help dissolution of the Sikh identity, paralyse their spiritual potential and deprive them permanently of their control of their own history. Nirad C. Chaudhry, in his book, The Island of Circe is fortnight in indicating as to who might be the architects of this blue-print to achieve, as the modern political euphemism might say, "the final solution of the Sikh problem", which in earlier, less sophisticated times, used to be called, 'genocide'. Nirad Chaudhry tells the world that today, the

"the Hindus are the masters and rulers of India. They have regained political power after many centuries, and are fully aware of it, perhaps, over-aware...As the current jargon describes all the non-Hindus, they are only minorities."