Guru Gobind Singh Birth Anniversary
“Dehi Siva bar mohe ihai, shubh karman te kabahun na taron, na daron ari sion jab jaye laron, nishche kar apni jeet karon….”
These lines from Chandi di Vaar, written by Guru Gobind Singh, are among his most celebrated inspirational poetry. Here, he is asking Goddess Shiva (Chandi) to grant him a boon to be fearless in standing up for good actions/righteous causes, to fight valiantly for them and to win the battle. Chandi di Vaar, part of the Dasam Granth, describes the glory of Shakti (the feminine force of divinity), just as Durga chalisa does. The Guru was a poet (adept at Sanskrit and Persian) and saint-soldier, the kind the world has not known since his birth in Patna in 1666. Today, the Guru’s 356th birth anniversary, is, indeed, a day for salutations, but more than that, it is a day for deep reflection.
For Guru Gobind Singh’s light guided India in its darkest hour, when the atrocities committed by the Mughal rulers had reached a climax, during the reign of Aurangzeb. India needs to remember the repository of spiritual power that was the Guru. Such was his divine power that even Aurangzeb was pulled to it: he craved the Guru’s darshan towards the end of his life, although he died without getting the opportunity. The Zafarnama (Epistle of Victory) is a letter with 111 verses, written in Persian by Guru Gobind to Aurangzeb in 1705, after the Battle of Chamkaur. In the letter, Guru Gobind thanks God and reproves Aurangzeb and his soldiers for breaking the oaths they had taken on the holy book to provide safe passage to him. Instead of keeping to the word, in an act of subterfuge, Aurangzeb’s huge army killed 40 soldiers accompanying the Guru, although it failed to kill or capture him. In Zafarnama, Guru Gobind Singh underlines that an act of treachery could not be termed war, and that the moral victory was his–by the will and grace of God. Through the letter, the Guru also warned Aurangzeb that Sikhs would not rest until the evil empire was demolished.
Guru’s Glory
Only a righteous warrior and only an instrument of the divine could have written the Zafarnama. Here is a commander who has lost all four of his sons, two in the battlefield and two young ones executed after attempts at bricking them alive failed. The walls, according to the katha done in the gurudwaras (the Sikh temples) by scholarly Sikhs, exploded with the sheer spiritual force that the Guru’s sons possessed. Despite losing all his four sons (earlier his father Guru Teg Bahadar, who was beheaded by the Mughal rulers) there is no rancour in the Guru’s letter to the ‘enemy’. That was in tune with his super-conscious state, in which there is complete surrender to God’s will and, therefore, complete detachment with friends and foes. Elsewhere, the Guru has said, “main hun param purakh ka dasa, dekhan aayo jagat tamasa” (I am a servant of God who has come to the world only to witness the divine play).
The battles Guru Gobind fought were many, also against the local Hindu kings and traitors who, out of greed for power, were siding with the invaders, and yet he remained a supreme symbol of protection for a Hindu India against the tyranny of the Mughal rulers. Between then and now, millions of people have been inspired by the Guru’s deeds and words. A majority of the Sikhs strive to live by these ideals even today: the sheer generosity and spirit of service in gurudwaras and the contribution of Sikhs to relief work during natural disasters are proof of it.
In recent times, however, the story of Sikh faith and power has been tragically marred. In the 1980s, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwala, who was propped up by the late Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, to divide the Sikh voters and to decimate the Sikh political party, Akali Dal, turned out to be the Frankenstein’s monster: armed and funded by Pakistan, he led a militant movement for a separate Sikh state or Khalistan. He was killed during Operation Bluestar in June 1984. The Operation was done by the Indian army on the orders of the Mrs. Gandhi-led central government, to remove Bhindranwala and his militia from inside Amritsar’s Harmandar Sahib Gurudwara (The Golden Temple). Hundreds of Sikh devotees, who had nothing to do with Bhindranwala, also lost their lives simply because they visited the Temple that day and got trapped. Using them as a human shield, Bhindranwala refused to surrender. He and his followers were killed as were the common people trapped in the Temple. According to independent estimates, five to seven thousand people were killed in the Operation that lasted four days.
The Operation was done after the government’s intelligence reports provided compelling evidence that Punjab was on the verge of breaking from India. The government had already given a very long rope to Bhindranwala, and it was he who was responsible for forcing the government’s hands. He had turned a holy shrine into a fortress with his gun-toting followers all over the place and a very huge arsenal stashed inside. It is he who desecrated it first. With brute power on his side, he naturally commanded fear among the general population, and even the Sikh clergy yielded to Bhindranwala as he turned the Sikhs’ holiest shrine into a sanctuary for terrorists.
Crimes Against Sikhs
Bhindranwala and his armed followers committed unprecedented crimes in the battle for secession: target killings–of political leaders, including Sikhs; cops of all hues from the top to the bottom, including Sikhs and left-wing poets and professors, especially Sikhs. General killings of ordinary people in market places; pulling Hindus out of intra and inter-state buses and trains and gunning them down, and bomb explosions had become routine in the Punjab of those days. Curfew had to be imposed regularly by the state government and terror was in the very air of Punjab. Bhindranwala’s worst crime, however, was what he did to the image of the Sikh community. By equating his bloody war with the Sikh religion, he reduced the community of valiant and righteous warriors to the level of the worst cowards, the terrorists. He was seen as a “curse” upon the community and hated by the ordinary Sikhs—I say this on the basis of interviews done with hundreds of Sikhs during those years. However, with an international lobby of Jatt Sikh ‘ideologues’ working in his favour and a section of the western media glorifying him, his terrorism was termed as “War”.
The military operation that killed Bhindranwala and his ‘army’ also led to the demolition of the Akal Takht, as tanks crashed through the back wall of the Temple premises. The Sikh community felt outraged by the attack on the Sikh shrine. Their common sense logic was that it was Mrs. Indira Gandhi who aligned with Bhindranwala for her political ends to begin with, and it is she who should have contained him before he turned the Golden Temple into a terrorist haven. About three months after Operation Bluestar, in a revenge killing, Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated (on October 31, 1984) by two Sikh security guards.
A Sikh was designed to be a warrior, not a mobster. It is a cruel joke against Sikhism to scare anyone with mob power, and the Khalistanis are doing just that
The carnage of thousands of ordinary Sikhs by the government and Congress Party-guided mobs in the wake of her assassination added another tragic chapter to the Sikh history. Even 36 years later, no criminal (except one) has been brought to justice. The genocide stands almost forgotten except by the families who lost their people, and by the Sikhs as a community.
In retrospect, the Sikhs are confused about the political issues related to them and they are anxious about their own security. It is this that the Khalistani followers of Bhindranwala, especially in Canada and Britain, are once again feeding upon. It perfectly suits their nefarious designs to turn the rest of the country against Sikhs and to thus lure them to their fold.
Power of Faith
The Khalistanis saw a grand opportunity for themselves even in the farmers’ agitation, which was dominated by the Jatt Sikhs of Punjab, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh; and they did their best to turn it into a Sikh religious issue. The Khalistanis’ sole aim in backing and building support for the farmers’ agitation internationally, and in announcing cash prizes for hoisting the Khalistan flag in the Indian parliament, was to get publicity for their cause—and they succeeded in their plan to a large extent when the flag was raised at the Red Fort on January 26 last year. They also managed to malign the farmers’ agitation and to further confuse the Sikhs. Later, by carrying out a barbaric and cowardly hacking and killing of an ordinary, low-caste Sikh, who strayed into their tent where the Guru Granth was kept, accusing him of ‘desecrating’ the holy book, they sought to add yet more religious colour to the agitation, but luckily did not succeed.
The lakhs of ordinary Sikhs, of all castes, who participated in the protest, were, indeed, driven by faith, which has nothing to do with the Khalistanis’ idea of it. The langar (free food) they organised for millions of people at the three protest sites on Delhi’s borders for a year; the fervour with which they served the floating population of ordinary people, labourers and poor communities around the sites, who made beelines to the sites just for the sumptuous and nutritious food of a large variety; the spirit with which they overcame the odds of rain, freezing cold and scorching heat; the peace they maintained in the face of the death of 700 people at these sites, and provocations of government and non-government agents; and the record number of women and old people who camped at the sites—all of it points to the power of piety. On the basis of interviews with scores of common participants in the protest, I can say that they looked upon it as a righteous war. They were fearless in fighting it– with faith and grit as the only weapons– and in the end they won it, bringing to life the lines of Guru Gobind Singh quoted in the beginning of this article.
By carrying out a barbaric and cowardly hacking and killing of an ordinary, low-caste Sikh, who strayed into their tent where the Guru Granth was kept, accusing him of ‘desecrating’ the holy book, they sought to add yet more religious colour to the agitation, but luckily did not succeed
There were many moments throughout the agitation that could take a nasty turn and lead to bloodshed. The Khalistanis were constantly trying to provoke the government. The government could not see their designs and allowed the agitation to drag. Most of us, because of our limited intelligence, petty egos and narrow political considerations, cannot see that an unseen force is always at work in all worldly affairs, and that when we fail to execute righteously the power given to us, it is this force that comes into play. There is no other explanation for the remarkable endurance shown by the farmers and for the abrupt withdrawal of the farm laws by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It is no coincidence that he announced the withdrawal on the day of Guru Nanak’s birth anniversary.
Punjab’s Troubles
The Khalistanis are, of course, claiming it as their victory, but there are no takers for such claims. To a person of faith, especially a Sikh, it is clear as daylight that the Khalistanis will never get away with their cowardly acts of terrorism and violence — those committed in the 1980s, and those being designed and planned now.
Punjab is once again in a state of turmoil. The Khalistanis, backed by Pakistan, are once again active. It is they, who, through their agents in Punjab, are using brute power to silence their political opponents. A Sikh was designed to be a warrior, not a mobster. It is a cruel joke against Sikhism to scare anyone with mob power, and the Khalistanis are doing just that. Gathering outside the homes of elected political opponents and terrorising them, not allowing them their democratic right to hold public meetings, and attacking them physically are crimes, not only as per the laws of the land, but also as per the Sikh religious guidelines.
The Sikh was envisioned and created by Guru Gobind Singh to fight for righteous causes; to stand alone, if needed, to be fearless in a righteous battle and to lay his life for truth. To remember this and to strive towards this goal would be the best tribute the nation, especially the Sikhs, can pay to the Guru. Sikhs of the world, beware the anti-Sikh mobster that is a Khalistani. You are those Sikhs of Guru Gobind Singh who organised the unheard of ‘oxygen langars’, fed lakhs of people and, sometimes, single-handedly carried out cremations of hundreds of corona victims during the second wave of the pandemic last year. Never let the Khalistani redefine you or Sikhism. Equally, the other communities and their leaders would do well to remember all this and to never equate all Sikhs with Khalistanis.
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