Kairon gave precedence to region over religion

M Rajivlochan

Historian

The demand for Khalistan, recently raised by the fugitive, Amritpal Singh, is based on the faulty presumption that Punjab is the land of the Sikhs only. No, it is not. Punjab is the land of people who live in Punjab. A similar demand was raised by Master Tara Singh in 1946-47 in synchrony with Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s insistence on Pakistan as a country for Muslims.

Unfortunately, such demands can cause much harm. Jinnah’s tantrums led to bloodshed and created a colossal failure in the form of Pakistan.

Also read: Master Tara Singh opposed Punjab’s division

In the 2020 biography of former Punjab CM Partap Singh Kairon, it has been documented that Tara Singh revived his demand for a separate nation for Sikhs after Independence. On that occasion, he was rebuked by Kairon, who was then merely a minister in the Punjab Cabinet. Kairon’s contention was based on the ethical principle that no country can be or should be based on religion. Kairon realised that Tara Singh’s anachronistic demand was being fuelled by the Arya Samajis and Sanatanis in Punjab who had been pushing for the imposition of Hindi as a language in Punjab.

The Hindi agitation in Punjab was getting out of hand and the then Chief Minister, Bhim Sen Sachar, was hesitating in dealing with the agitators firmly. Sachar’s excuse to allow the Hindi agitators a free rein was that India was now a free country and everyone could demand whatever he or she wanted.

At this point, Kairon reached out to the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, returned to Chandigarh and in the next few days convinced his fellow Cabinet ministers that Sachar as Chief Minister was up to no good. The ministers told Sachar that they had lost confidence in him. Sachar, despite having the overt backing of Nehru, resigned. As soon as Kairon succeeded Sachar, he cracked down on the Hindi agitators.

Once the Hindi agitation was taken care of, Kairon turned his attention to the issue of regional aspirations. This meant, among other things, passing orders to make Punjabi the language of official communication, the language of courts till the district level and doing away with religion-centric holidays. Till then, various religious groups used to have their own holidays. Kairon changed that. Holidays were given to all employees, irrespective of their religion. This also meant that many religion-specific holidays were cancelled. Few today remember that the rest of India then followed Kairon’s example to do away with such holidays.

When Master Tara Singh once again raised the matter of a separate state for Sikhs, Kairon dealt with him firmly too. Kairon was of the belief that in India there could be no state based on religion. Anyone who thought otherwise was handled with an iron hand.

We in India often forget that the simplistic belief that a country can be equated with a religion has its roots in the troubled history of Europe. Till some 300 years ago in Europe, people had to compulsorily follow the religion of the ruler. Religion was supposed to ‘come out of a book’ and people were willing to kill those who did not follow the book or followed some variant thereof. Millions were killed in the process. One of the greatest civilising moments in Europe was when some rulers agreed — at the instance of the Pope, who was presumed to be the representative of the son of God — that the ruled did not need to follow the book of the religion which the ruler followed. This process eventually got called ‘secularism’. And killings mostly stopped till Hitler arrived to wipe out six million Jews in Europe.

Coming from that European tradition, the British in India adopted the same criterion for defining a country and its people. In India, there never had been a time when the ruled needed to follow the religion or beliefs of the ruler. Even followers of Islam lived peaceably in India for almost 300 years before Islamist invaders from the North-West started inflicting tremendous horrors on the masses.

There are, however, still people in India who imagine that they can convert India into a region ruled by a book. In the 1980s, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale tried to do it. The shortsightedness of the government of those days allowed him to flourish for a brief while. Then he was sorted out. The Popular Front of India (PFI) recently made such an attempt towards creating an Islamic state in India. In Punjab, Amritpal Singh, allegedly with the help of Pakistan’s military spooks, has tried his hand at creating Khalistan. Both have failed.

What has ‘succeeded’ is the effort of Swami Nithyananda. He has set up an entirely new ‘country’ for himself somewhere far away from India. He calls it the ‘United States of Kailasa’, apparently named after the mountain abode of Shiva, as described in Hindu mythology. The ‘country’ of Kailasa even managed to send a ‘permanent representative’ to a United Nations event earlier this year! Much to the mirth of the people of India, the authorities of several American cities have signed agreements with representatives of this ‘country’. 

Join Whatsapp Channel of The Tribune for latest updates.