‘Consciously or unconsciously, a Sikh is all the time trying to avert a situation like this.’ Religious persecution. ‘And this is what made me support this agitation for justice in the Punjab. It was more of an emotional identification with my people – in the days of the Punjabi Suba, 1957 to 1960.’ The agitation then by Sikhs for a Punjabi-speaking state: Gurtej was ten in 1957. ‘The intellectual reason came afterwards. What I recall is that as soon as a Punjabi Suba was formed, Hindus started agitating against it. They burnt a gurdwara’ – a Sikh temple – ‘in Karnal. They attacked a gurdwara in Delhi. Stoning took place. And all over the Punjab towns there was a bit of a commotion.’
So present suffering linked to past suffering. The heroic past ennobled or gave a different quality to the trials of the present.
Gurtej said, ‘The fifth Guru was burnt to death.’ In 1606, by the order of the Emperor Jehangir, Akbar’s son. The fifth Guru, the organizer of the faith, the founder of the Golden Temple. ‘The best human being I can conceive of is the Guru’ – the singular or the collective noun is used by Sikhs for all the 10 Gurus – ‘and I believe them to be motivated sincerely by the good of all the community. Why should they suffer like that?’
‘Did you ask your grandfather? Did you talk to him about this problem of suffering?’
‘I don’t remember having asked him. I think the first time I talked about these things was with Sardar Kapur Singh in 1965–66.’
This man, Kapur Singh, was important to Gurtej. He was born in 1911 to a farming family. A gifted and unusual man, he completed his education at Cambridge, and he gained entrance to the Indian Civil Service, the ICS, the predecessor in British times of the Indian Administrative Service. But then at independence in 1947 there was some trouble about money meant for refugees and also trouble about buying an expatriate’s car, and Kapur Singh was dismissed from the service. Kapur Singh claimed that he had been wrongly dismissed, and it might be said that for the rest of his life Kapur Singh fought and refought his case; mixing this grievance with regional Sikh politics, the writing of poetry, and the writing of difficult books about the Sikh religion. This was the man who became Gurtej’s mentor. He opened Gurtej’s eyes to the position of Sikhs in India.
I wondered whether, before this meeting with Kapur Singh in 1965 (when Gurtej was eighteen), Gurtej had noticed any discrimination against him as a Sikh. He said yes; he remembered that once, when he was queuing up to buy a railway ticket, the booking clerk had been rough with him.
‘When you first talked, what did Kapur Singh tell you about suffering?’
‘He told me it was an eternal fight between good and evil, and by their suffering the Gurus have only shown that people should identify themselves with good causes. He used to say that a measure of man is the sense of commitment he has. It’s the only thing important in man. Otherwise, it’s an animal existence. And he would say it’s the only way to salvation, serving mankind. And Sardar Kapur Singh’s words carried conviction because he had suffered much, and he had no regrets.’
In this way Gurtej had arrived at some idea of the Sikh religion: a special idea of the Gurus, a special idea of the Sikh God.
Of Guru Nanak, the first Guru, who had had the illumination that there was no Hindu and no Muslim, Gurtej said, ‘I see him as a man who’s conscious of the sufferings of his people, and having an intense desire to change the situation.’ He didn’t see Nanak simply as another rebel against Hinduism. ‘He’s not a reformer, he’s not a philosopher, he’s not a poet – though he expressed himself in poetry. He’s a prophet of God.’ This idea of the prophet – a Muslim idea, a Christian idea, a Jewish idea – was not held by every Sikh. But Gurtej was firm. ‘There’s no doubt in the minds of Sikhs. We look upon all the Gurus as one.’ In this account, therefore, over the first 200 years of their history the Sikhs had a line of 10 God-sent prophets.
Why the emphasis on suffering? How could a believer live from day to day with this idea of suffering?
Gurtej said, ‘The stress on suffering is like this. The world is an unhappy place to live in, and unhappiness has to be eliminated. There are only two ways. Either you make somebody else suffer, or you suffer. And I think a man of God must suffer himself, rather than pass it on to somebody else. I regard myself as a man of God. I always have, and always hope to. The very idea of attaining salvation by serving mankind is unusual in this subcontinent. In the other religions here the stress is on monasticism, renunciation, a personal salvation. At crucial times in my life I have found that I would like to decide a thing as the Guru might have decided it.’
This idea of the Sikh prophet went with a particular idea of God. ‘For Sikhs he is the fountainhead of all virtues, a living God manifesting himself through his prophets. Of all the prophets, if you ask me who is the prophet nearest to the Guru, I would say Mohammed. Our idea is different from Islam in only one aspect: the dominant element in our concept of godhead is justice and kindness. The Islamic God appears to me to be a little harsh – if you see the punishment renegades got at the hands of Mohammed himself. And when you see the manifestation of sovereign power in Islamic states, there is an element of cruelty, a bit of oppression. We view God as a liberator. Ranjit Singh ruled the Sikh kingdom for 40 years, and he never sentenced anyone to death. This, I think, is the spirit of Sikhism. This is our concept of God as kindness.’
I said, ‘There is no such conception of God in Hinduism.’
‘Everything is violent in Hinduism. Do you see the Devi strung with skulls around her neck? If you ask me, Hinduism is the most violent of religions.’
Some years before, in England, listening to the radio one day – when Bhindranwale and Sikh fundamentalism and his fortification of the Golden Temple were still far away, and I knew little about them – I had heard an interview with Bhindranwale in the Golden Temple. Sikhism, Bhindranwale had said, was a revealed religion; the Sikhs were people of the Book. I was struck then by the attempt to equate Sikhism with Christianity; to separate it from its speculative Hindu aspects, even from its guiding idea of salvation as union with God and freedom from transmigration. I had thought of Bhindranwale’s statement as an attempt, by a man intellectually very far away, to make his cause more acceptable to his foreign interviewer.
So I pressed Gurtej now about his idea of the prophet.
He said, ‘If we get bogged down in Darwinian ideas of evolution, and see everything as evolving from something else, we cannot see a finished product right at the beginning. And this is what the prophets do: they present you with a finished product.’
I felt then, from his language and imagery (‘Darwinian’, ‘product’), that his ideas had been worked out and studied; and I had the feeling that he might have been put on to this way of thinking by his mentor, Kapur Singh.
One of the pamphets Gurtej gave me was entitled The Trial of a Sikh Civil Servant in Secular India’. It was an English translation of Kapur Singh’s account of his fight for justice after his dismissal from the Indian Civil Service, his ‘30 years of persecution by the state authorities without an income and without an occupation’.
The story as presented in the pamphlet was fragmented and not easy to follow; the translation, besides, was poor and the roughly printed pamphlet was full of printing errors. But it seemed that he had been dismissed on a charge of embezzling government money meant to be given out to refugees from Pakistan at the time of independence. He had been suspended in 1949, and dismissed after a departmental inquiry by the Chief Justice of the Punjab. Kapur Singh’s defence was that he had given out the money in question to refugees, but he had thought it ‘neither possible nor wise’, in the circumstances of partition, to get receipts from refugees who couldn’t be identified and had no addresses. The government itself, he said, had directed that ‘cumbersome formalities’ like the obtaining of receipts should be ignored in dealing with refugees.
One of the points of his pamphlet was that the charge of embezzlement had been brought against him only because
he had been protesting against a directive issued in 1947 to all deputy commissioners in the Punjab that ‘the Sikhs in general … must be treated as a criminal tribe. Harsh treatment must be meted out to them to the extent of shooting them dead so that they wake up to political realities’. Mr Nehru himself had been behind that directive. (Mr Nehru had also been behind a directive Kapur Singh had heard about in 1954, from a Sikh major in the army, that Sikhs in the army were to be ‘constantly threatened, terrorized, insulted and kept in subjugation’.) Mr Nehru’s mind had been poisoned against Kapur Singh by ‘compulsively malignant Hindus and Sikhs with tainted conscience’, who had told exaggerated stories about Kapur Singh’s Sikh-oriented politics. As a result, Mr Nehru and his home minister ‘were on the lookout of an oppportunity for liquidating me’.
The departmental inquiry into the embezzlement charge against Kapur Singh was conducted by the Chief Justice of the Punjab. He was an Englishman – this was in 1950, just three years after independence. He ruled that Kapur Singh was guilty. The British Government was requested to Knight him in recognition of his valuable service to the people of the Punjab during his tenure as Chief Justice. Accordingly he was Knighted by the Queen. Most of his time as Chief Justice was spent in enquiring against me.’
As for Kapur Singh: ‘I was dismissed from service and thrown from pillar to post for 12 long years.’ He took his case to the Public Service Commission, and after that to the Supreme Court. ‘I was driven from pillar to post for another four years … Then in accordance with the Guru’s exalted words “The ultimate test of truth is to die fighting for it,” I started a serious legal battle. I filed a detailed writ against the high-handedness of the government in the High Court at Chandigarh.’
Some months before, in Bangalore in the south, Prakash, the minister, had told me at breakfast about one of his morning petitioners. This man, a village official charged with embezzling a portion of the land revenue he collected, had been suspended from his job; and he had travelled all night on a bus to wait at dawn outside Prakash’s door and to plead for the minister’s help. Prakash had seen the man for seven minutes, had said that the departmental inquiry had to take its course; and the man had then to go back all 200 miles to his village. It seemed hard, all that travel for so little. But Prakash, in his witty way, had described how someone like that suspended official, after a day or two of tears and fright at his situation, might find, as it were, a second wind in the idea of karma, fate, might become quite calm and lucid, and, supported by that idea of fate, might devote the rest of his life to litigation and action for the cause abruptly granted him.
Kapur Singh’s religious support was of another kind. ‘ “Irreligiousness is the root cause of all misery” is our ancient thought,’ he wrote in his pamphlet. And in his long legal fight he was both consoled and encouraged by the example of the Sikh Gurus who had been persecuted by the Moguls. He began to see his own persecution as ‘the destiny of a Sikh in consequence of the power falling into Hindu hands’. When his case was at the Supreme Court, his lawyer told him one day (the account is full of this kind of hearsay), ‘All around me I hear it being said that total demoralization of Kapur Singh is necessary to contain the Sikhs, and he must be liquidated in spite of law and regulations.’ When his writ was at the Chandigarh High Court he happened one day to be in a shop and there he heard one of the judges say to the shopkeeper, ‘He is a dangerous Sikh – a poisonous snake.’
His sufferings linked him to the persecuted warrior Gurus of the Mogul time, and their sufferings had led to his present political predicament. In the 17th and 18th centuries Mogul governors and generals ‘got Guru Arjun imprisoned and executed after unbearable torture, conspired to kill Guru Hargobind, attempted to do away with Guru Harkrishan, got Guru Teg Bahadur beheaded, got the infant sons of Guru Gobind Singh bricked alive in a wall, caused a fatal wound on the person of the Tenth Master, inspired the Imperial edict of the genocide of the Sikhs, were responsible for butchering Banda Singh Bahadur and his companions, became the preceptors of the Great Holocaust, and in the 19th century raised the flag of Jehad against the Sikh political power. Their activities ultimately culminated in the … formation of Pakistan.’ So the litany of religious pain ran together with history and contemporary politics and Kapur Singh’s personal calvary. The identification was complete: ‘The Mogul king Bahadur Shah had ordered, “Followers of Nanak [should] be executed on sight.” I, being a declared Sikh, fell a victim to this Mogul firman.’
It was as though the faith called up this identification with the torments of the Gurus; and as though this identification created in the believer the feeling of injustice and persecution, and perhaps even the wish to be persecuted.
What I would never have guessed from that pamphlet – what I learned from another book of Kapur Singh’s that Gurtej gave me later – was that, with that obsession about his case, Kapur Singh had had a full and fruitful life in independent India. He had done his writing; he had been professor of religion at a Sikh college in Bombay; and he had been active in Punjab politics, being both a member of the state assembly and the central parliament in Delhi.
He and Gurtej met in 1965. Kapur Singh was fifty-four, and quite famous in Chandigarh. Gurtej was eighteen, a student at the university in the town. The two men became close. Kapur Singh would begin his letters to Gurtej, ‘My dear son’. He bequeathed his books and papers to Gurtej.
One of the titles that Kapur Singh claimed was ‘Decorated National Professor of Sikhism’. Gurtej, on his card, described himself as ‘Professor of Sikhism’. There was clearly in Gurtej some wish to honour Kapur Singh; and – after reading the pamphlet of Kapur Singh’s that Gurtej had given me – I wondered whether in his own career in the Indian Administrative Service Gurtej didn’t have before his eyes Kapur Singh’s martyrdom in that role 30 years or so before.
Kapur Singh had been dismissed, but he said he had really fought a point of principle, objecting to an anti-Sikh directive. Gurtej, who had joined the service in 1970, had resigned in 1982, also on a point of principle. He had become worried, he said, about serving the ends of justice. ‘You can only serve as long as the state remains just.’ In the Punjab in 1977, during Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency, his doubts had grown. ‘I see my people running from pillar to post. They are humiliated, though they don’t feel it. They feel it’s the normal way in this country.’
It was about his government service that we began to talk when he came the second time to the hotel, early in the morning again, with the shaved hotel lawn shining in patches from its flooding by the big hose, and with the banks of flowers still in shadow.
In 1969, when he was twenty-two, he had got married. It was an arranged local marriage. The following year he joined the Indian Police Service. It was at school – in Dehra Dun, away from home – that his thoughts had turned to that kind of career: quite a change for someone from a farming background. A friend of his was the son of an Indian Administrative Service officer; that first put the idea in Gurtej’s mind. Then he heard someone say that the only worthwhile services were the Indian Administrative Service and the Indian Police Service. So he had written the examination. ‘I made no special preparation. I just studied hard. After having done my M.A. in history I sat for the Indian Police Service.’ He was successful; only a handful of people got in every year.
He shifted the next year to the sister service, the IAS. And, even after all that had happened, he still thought highly of that service. ‘It was a good service, and if I were inclined to serve in adminstration, this would be the service I would like to join.’
The IAS was an all-India service, and Gurtej’s first posting was in the South, in the state of Andhra. He became disenchanted almost at once.
‘I was able to detect one case of death in police custody due to torture. And instead of the police officer concerned being punished, he was actually rewarded – so that he would avoid the punishment. The man killed was a small peasant; his wife appeared very poor to me. I was an S.D.
M., sub-divisional magistrate. It’s mandatory for an S.D.M. to conduct a divisional inquiry into any death in police custody. I was told to set the matter aside – it had been pending for three years.’
But he couldn’t set the matter aside, and the case still worried him. ‘After 18 years I still remember the names of the people. It was a pathetic case. I felt very bad about it. The wife had been hunted out of the district so that she couldn’t give any evidence against the police. There had been a quarrel between the man – the dead man – and some landlord in the village. The man had probably become a source of irritation to the landlord. People like that don’t feel confident enough to attack a landlord.’
I asked Gurtej why he had stayed on in the service, after that experience.
‘I thought the time would come when I could do more. But that time didn’t come. I started realizing that the corruption has set into the administrative machinery, and that people are really pawns. Whenever politicians are interested in a case, whenever they have a vested interest, it’s impossible to take any action.
‘In the same year, 1971, a whole family had died of starvation in Andhra Pradesh. It was in one of the revenue sub-divisions. A question was asked in Parliament. I was asked to inquire into it. The district magistrate contacted me later to ask what I thought of the case. I said it was a starvation death. The D.M., the revenue collector, said, “No, no, we can’t write that. It will cause a commotion. It will be a bad advertisement in the foreign press.” And again, as often with Gurtej, the thought of suffering brought tears close to his sombre eyes. ‘It was a family of poor people. The old man died first. They had no means of subsistence. No one offered them food. And then the wife died; and then the children died. Harijans, scheduled caste. The case was taken out of my hands.’