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The last to lay arms and
foremost to raise them against the British, the Sikhs of
Punjab may not figure prominently in the galaxy of freedom
fighters led by Mahatma Gandhi barring Shaheed Bhagat Singh,
who, too, was consistently disowned by Bapu, but the
contribution of the Sikh people to the freedom struggle is no
mean.
It is believed in all quarters
that but for the intrigues in the post-Ranjit Singh’s Sikh
hierarchy and the malicious strategy of the White man, the
Sikhs could not have been defeated in 1849 the way they were.
Despite this undeserved ignominy, there were ever so many
incidents of defiance of the foreign rule by the Sikh soldiers
and political activists. However, an organised peaceful
crusade was launched by Baba Ram Singh Nandhari (he is
addressed as Satguru Ram Singh by his followers) in 1869. It
was essentially a socio-religious movement which became “a
dynamic political force” in due course. They protested against
cow slaughter, advocated widow re-marriage, would have nothing
to do with the British educational institutions, even the mail
and tap water. They wore spotless khadi and were devoted to
meditation with woollen rosary.
Amritsar being the holy city,
cow-slaughter was forbidden in it. But later not only was it
permitted, the ban lifted, an abattoir was established next to
the Golden Temple. This infuriated the Nandharis who butchered
many a butcher in the town. At this the British without due
enquiry had 65 Nandharis tied with the barrels of cannons and
blown to bits. Baba Ram Singh had no hand in it, but the
British availed of this opportunity and deported him to
Rangoon on January 18, 1872. The technique of non-co-operation
adopted by Mahatma Gandhi is preceded by the Nandhari crusade
by boycotting British institutions and trying to be
self-sufficient with the native ways and means.
Again the Gurdwara Movement of
the Sikhs (1921-24) was the beginning of the national struggle
for freedom. This has been accepted by more than one Indian
national political leader.
Pandit Moti Lal Nehru:
I salute the Akalis who have
started the struggle for freedom and are fighting for it.
Pandi Madan Mohan Malaviya:
Guru Ka Bagh Morcha has given
birth to the freedom movement which must lead us to Swaraj.
Lala Lajpat Rai:
Freedom is our birthright. The
Akalis are the legitimate sons of Mother India who are
fighting for her.
Dadabhai Naoroji:
The Sikh brothers have shown us
the way to freedom; no one can keep us slaves any more.
Master Tara Singh:
I would not mind if you,
instead of standing with the Congress, boycott it and stand in
front of it in the fight for India’s freedom. But if you
boycott the Congress and stand in the back lane, it will be a
shame for our community.
According to the eminent
historian, Dr Ganda Singh, 500 Sikhs were killed in the
Gurdwara Movement and 30,000 courted arrest, the fines paid
amounted to Rs 10,00,000.
It was Master Tara Singh’s
intervention, when he pulled down the Muslim League flag atop
the Punjab Assembly at Lahore and tore it which saved half of
the Punjab for India; otherwise the entire Punjab would have
gone to Pakistan with River Yamuna as the dividing line
between India and Pakistan.
The total contribution of Sikhs
in India’s struggle for freedom is revealing:
Out of 121 patriots hanged 93
were Sikhs. Of the 2626 awarded life-imprisonment 2147 were
Sikhs. Of the 1300 martyred in Jallianwala Bagh 799 were
Sikhs.
Considering that the Sikhs were
hardly 1.5 per cent of the total population of India at the
time, their sacrifices amounted to 90 per cent. No wonder that
Sardar Baldev Singh, a representative of the Akalis, was
invited to greet the country on the national network along
with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah when
freedom came. And then started the slow but sure process of
ignoring the Sikh people, forgetting their valiant
contribution in bringing about the freedom. They are just one
of the minority communities today.
♦
THE next landmark in the Sikh
struggle for freedom was the agitation launched against the
Punjab Colonisation Act, 1907, under which the government
sought to enhance land revenue and water charges in the canal
irrigated areas. There was widespread agrarian unrest with
bloodshed in all important towns like Lahore and Rawalpindi.
It was during this agitation that one Banke Dyal wrote the
famous song—Pagdi sambhal jatta, pagdi sambhal oye! (Mind your
turban, O tiller of the land, mind your turban!) It became a
popular patriotic song with the freedom fighters and continues
to be sung even today. Sardar Ajit Singh and Lala Lajpat Rai
were prominent among the leaders of this movement. They were
expelled from the country and imprisoned in Mandalay in Burma.
After their release Ajit Singh went to Canada and joined the
Ghadar Party of which he became and outstanding leader in due
course.
The Ghadar Party was started by
Sohan Singh Bhakna under the inspiration of Lala Hardyal. They
pledged to end British rule in India through an armed
revolution and set up a Republic of India guaranteeing liberty
and equality to all its citizens. They set up their
headquarters in San Francisco. They had their own weekly
journal called Ghadar. With a view to retaining the secular
character of their organisation, they made it a point not to
discuss religion in their meetings; it was considered strictly
a personal affair. They would also not observe any
restrictions in the matter of diet. Soon they were to be
joined by Kartar Singh ‘Sarabha’, Dr Mathura Singh and Jawand
Singh who were later hanged in India. The party established
its branches in a number of towns in America and Canada and
also in Shanghai, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand and
Panama. They also gave a select band of its members training
in arms.
The activities of the Ghadar
Party received a great fillip by what has come to be known as
the Kamagata Maru episode. It inspired the Ghadarites and
steeled their hearts against the Ferringhi. They were
determined to throw away the foreign yoke and prepared
themselves to make any sacrifice for this cause.
The Kamagata Maru was the name
of a Japanese ship engaged by Baba Gurdit Singh for
transporting Indian emigrants to Canada. There being
widespread unemployment at home, more and more enterprising
Punjabis sought to go abroad. Canada being a member of the
Commonwealth, Indians were entitled to have free access to the
country. However, at the instance of the British Government,
Canada passed an Act preventing entry of the Asians. This was
primarily directed against the Indians since they continued to
allow Chinese and Japanese to immigrate in large numbers. The
Sikhs would not have it. Accordingly, the Kamagata Maru with
376 passengers on board arrived at Vancouver on May 22, 1914.
They were not permitted to land on the Canadian soil. The ship
was stranded in the high seas. The passengers had no
medicines. They even fell short of water. But the Canadian
authorities would not relent. There was a skirmish with the
local police when, it is alleged, fire was exchanged. The
Government of Canada was not willing even to allow them
provisions for the return journey. The Kamagata Maru sailed
back after two months. The returning passengers were provided
arms enroute at Yokohama and the leadership of Baba Sohan
Singh Bhakna and Baba Gurdit Singh turned each one of the
passengers into a hard core revolutionary. World War I having
broken out in the meanwhile, the Kamagata Maru had a hostile
reception when it touched Kolkata (Calcutta). There was a
train waiting to carry the passengers to the Punjab. This was
not acceptable to the self-respecting Punjabis, who wished to
stay back at least in Kolkata and earn something, so that they
didn’t have to go back home empty-handed. There was a
confrontation in which eighteen passengers were slaughtered.
However, twentyeight of them, including Baba Gurdit Singh,
managed to escape. Baba Gurdit Singh remained underground for
seven years until he surrendered himself to the police at
Nankana Saheb, the birthplace of Guru Nanak.
The Ghadar Party continued to
inject revolutionaries into Indian politics. It is said, out
of 8000 returnees during 1914-18, the Government of India
interned 5000 and restricted the movements of another 2500.
The party had its sympathisers in the defence forces though
due to lack of discipline and leadership it could not take any
precipitate action. Nevertheless, the government was on their
track.
The suspects were arrested.
Among the 194 men taken into custody 180 were Punjabis. Most
of them were Sikhs. They were charged with treason. As many as
twelve were hanged. Some of the were imprisoned for life.
Others were transported. And the rest were given various terms
of imprisonment.
Considering that the Indian
National Congress session at Madras in 1914 had its main hall
decorated with the portrait of the British King and the
Governor of the province was invited to grace the occasion
with his presence, it was no mean achievement of the Ghadar
Party to do all that it did. Its most significant contribution
is that it made the Britishers realise that they could no
longer take India for granted. They must negotiate with the
Indian people and hand over power to them, maybe gradually.
♦
THE Great October Revolution of
1917 which overthrew the Czarist regime and brought the people
to power in the USSR also had its salutary effect on the
arrogant White rulers on whose empire, it was said, the sun
never set.
The War was over but Punjab was
in ferment. The forces being demobilised had 80,000 Sikh
soldiers. Mahatma Gandhi had in the meanwhile assumed charge
of the national leadership. A great believer in the good faith
of the White man, he was dismayed to find that the British
Government had no desire to part with power. He, therefore,
gave a call for satyagraha.
On April 13, 1919, the holy
Baisakhi day, consecrated by Guru Gobind Singh with the
baptism of the Sikhs, large crowds assembled at Jallianwala
Bagh in Amritsar. They included men, women and children.
Brigadier General Edward Harry Dyer who had arrived in the
town two days earlier with his force came to the scene,
blocked the only exit and started firing on the unarmed
innocent people with machine-guns ‘till his ammunition was
exhausted’. The record says that 309 people were shot dead on
the spot and many times that number were wounded. The Sikhs
were again the largest in number to suffer casualties.
The people of Punjab went wild
with anger. They set post offices and other government
buildings on fire, massacred the White men who came their way,
removed fish plates from the railway lines, cut telephone and
telegraph wires. The entire Punjab was aflame. The government
declared martial law and retaliatory measures were in evidence
all over the province.
Punjab became the vortex of the
political struggle. The Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore,
relinquished his knighthood as a protest against the
Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The Indian National Congress held
its annual session at Amritsar in December the same year. It
was attended among others by Mahatma Gandhi, Motilal Nehru,
Madan Mohan Malaviya, Jawaharlal Nehru, C. F. Andrews, C. R.
Das, Dr M. A. Ansari, the Ali Brothers and Hakim Ajmal Khan.
Among the eminent Punjabi leaders who participated in it were
Baba Kharak Singh, Lala Lajpat Rai and Sardar Sardul Singh ‘Caveeshar’.
The Sikhs now came to look upon
Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru as their national leaders
and started seeking inspiration from them. They were in the
vanguard of the movement. The Sikh League held a meeting
presided over by Sardar Kharak Singh in 1920. It was attended
by Mahatma Gandhi.
It was about this time that the
Sikhs launched what came to be known as the Akali Movement.
Essentially aimed at taking charge of the Sikh shrines from
the mahants—the hereditary custodians—and bringing about
reforms in the rituals and elaborate ceremonials, the movement
went a long way in politicising the Sikh masses and
inculcating in them passion for independence.
The Gurudwara Reform Movement
was a gruelling struggle. The vested interests would not like
to part with the charge of the Sikh shrines, some of which had
considerable landed property attached to them, apart from the
income from the offerings which was no less substantial. The
Sikhs had to launch morcha (agitation) after morcha. At times
the fight was headlong with the government, while at others
the government appeared to protect the hereditary custodians
who were its protégés. In Delhi the government had demolished
a wall of the historical Gurudwara Rakab Ganj where the Ninth
Sikh Guru had been cremated. The Sikhs went wild. An agitation
was launched. A shahidi jatha comprising Sikhs, Muslims and
Hindus, who were prepared to be martyred, left for Delhi under
Sardul Singh ‘Caveeshar’. The government came to its senses
and restored the wall of the holy shrine.
After the Jallianwala Bagh
tragedy, the hereditary custodians of the Golden Temple
invited Sir Michael O’Dwyer and honoured him with a saropa.
How could the community allow the charge of the Gurudwara to
remain in the hands of such inveterate toadies? Accordingly
another agitation was launched to take over the Golden Temple.
Mahant Narain Das of Nankana
Saheb, the birthplace of Guru Nanak, was a debauch and a
drunkard. He was pampered by the Britishers no less. A jatha
of over 130 Sikhs who were visiting the Gurudwara were
attacked with swords and spears by the goondas of the Mahant
and massacred. Their dead bodies were sprinkled with kerosene
and burnt on the premises. The leader of the jatha, Sardar
Lachhman Singh, was tied to the trunk of a tree and lynched.
The tragic happening sent a
wave of horror throughout the country. Mahatma Gandhi and the
Ali Brothers visited Nankana Saheb. The government was
alarmed. The charge of the Gurudwara was promptly handed over
to a committee of the Sikhs.
The government, however,
decided to appoint its own custodian for the Golden Temple.
This was not acceptable to the Sikhs and the agitation
continued. The agitators were sentenced to frightfully long
terms of imprisonment. But there was no sign of the agitation
abating anywhere. The Sikhs continued to protest and court
arrests in hundreds and thousands.
At last the government was
brought to its knees and the keys of the Golden temple were
handed over to the Sikhs by the Deputy Commissioner of
Amritsar at a huge congregation held in the town. This was
described by Mahatma Gandhi ‘as the first victory in a
decisive battle for independence’.
♦
BUT what brought unique glory
to the Sikhs was the Guru Ka Bagh (The Guru’s Garden) which
was no more than a barren tract with a wild growth of Kikar
trees had been handed over to the Sikhs along with other
shrines. However, Mahant Sunder Das changed his mind and would
not allow the Sikhs to enter the premises. The Sikhs used to
fell trees in the arid tract for fuel for the community
kitchen. The Mahant sought police assistance and the Sikhs
entering the so-called Bagh were arrested for trespass. The
first arrest took place on August 8, 1922. This was followed
by a chain of Sikh jathas visiting Guru Ka Bagh one after
another and offering satyagraha. The jathas came from all over
the Punjab. There was an endless stream of them. It was
decided to be a non-violent agitation. The Sikhs would go
unarmed; singing hymns, with hands folded and tried to enter
the land which belonged to their Guru. The police, who were
tired of arresting them, adopted new tactics under a British
Superintendent of Police, named S.G.N. Beaty. They would beat
the Sikhs mercilessly, pulling them by their hair, making
indiscriminate lathi charges, breaking their bones and
inflicting grievous wounds on them. With the name of God on
their lips, the satyagrahis would fall down unconscious but
they would neither defend themselves nor retaliate. Many died,
a large number of them had to be hospitalised but there was no
stopping the stream of jathas. Though propagated by Mahtma
Gandhi, the Sikhs have non-violence in their blood. Two of
their Gurus— Guru Arjan and Guru Tegh Bahadur—had given their
lives as non-violent crusaders. The way the Sikhs conducted
this satyagraha, and the barbarities perpetrated on them,
roused the anger of the entire nation. The Punjab was a
flaming cauldron. Every district tried to outdo the other. A
jatha came from far-off Dhan Pothoar with Giani Gurmukh Singh
‘Musafir’ (who became the Chief Minister of Punjab in
independent India) as one of the volunteers. A lot of
literature came to be produced about the unprecedented
persecution and valour of the non-violent satyagrahis.
It surprised Mahatma Gandhi,
the apostle of non-violence, the most. He was amazed to find
vindication of his technique of political warfare coming from
the most unexpected quarters, the brave people of Punjab.
Several national leaders, both Hindus and Muslims, came to
Punjab to see with their own eyes the way the satyagraha was
being conducted. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, a staunch Hindu
who was at one time President of the Indian National Congress,
witnessed the manner in which the disciplined soldiers of the
Sikh community suffered barbarities for the cause dear to
their heart and was moved to say:
I cannot resist asking every
Hindu home to have at least one male child initiated into the
fold of the Khalsa. What I see here before my eyes is nothing
short of a miracle in our whole history.
C.F. Andrews, a Christian
missionary and an associate of Mahatma Gandhi, also visited
Punjab during the satyagraha. This is what he reported:
There were four Akali Sikhs
with black turbans facing a band of about a dozen policemen,
including two English officers. Their hands were placed
together in prayer. Then an Englishman without provocation
lunged forward the head of his lathi, bound with brass, and
struck the Sikh at the collarbone with great force. He fell to
the ground, rolled over and slowly got up once more to face
the same punishment till he was laid prostrate by repeated
blows. Others were knocked out more quickly. It was brutal in
the extreme. I saw with my own eyes one of those policemen
kick in the stomach a Sikh who stood helplessly before him. I
wanted to cry and rush forward. But then I saw a police sepoy
stamping with his foot an Akali Sikh hurled to the ground and
lying prostrate … The brutality and the inhumanity of the
whole scene was indescribably increased by the fact that the
men who were hit were praying to God and had taken a vow (at
the Golden Temple) to remain silent and peaceful in word and
deed. I saw no act or look of defiance. It was a true
martyrdom, a true act of faith. It reminded me of the shadow
of the cross.
There were ever so many similar
morchas. Guru Ka Bagh was followed by what has come to be
known as the Jaito Morcha. Jawaharlal Nehru also joined hands
with the agitating Sikhs here and courted arrest along with a
number of prominent national leaders. Nehru made the following
observation on the occasion on September 25, 1923:
I rejoice that I am being tried
for a cause which the Sikhs have made their own. I was in jail
when Guru Ka Bagh struggle was gallantly fought and won by the
Sikhs. I marvelled at the courage and sacrifice of the Akalis
and wished that I could be given an opportunity of showing my
deep admiration of them by some form of service. That
opportunity has now been given to me and I earnestly hope that
I shall prove worthy of their high tradition and fine courage.
Sat Sri Akal.
The Sikhs of Punjab never
allowed the White rulers any respite. They kept them engaged
with one morcha after another. And these agitations produced a
galaxy of eminent freedom fighters who earned a great name in
the national struggle for India’s Independence. Some of them
are: Baba Kharak Singh, Master Tara Singh, Sardar Pratap Singh
Kairon, Giani Gurmukh Singh ‘Musafir’, Sohan Singh ‘Josh’,
Sardar Sardul Singh ‘Caveeshar’, Giani Zail Singh, Sardar
Hukam Singh, Sardar Gurdial Singh Dhillon and Darshan Singh
Pheruman.
While the Shiromani Gurudwara
Prabandhak Committee set up to take charge and look after the
Sikh Gurudwara accepted the cult of non-violence, at the same
time there were certain elements amongst the Sikhs who
organised themselves as underground terrorists. Among them the
Babar Akalis were perhaps the most virulent. Their members
were drawn from the Ghadar Party and soldiers on leave. They
issued a cyclostyled bulletin called Babbar Akali Doaba. They
became a terror for the administration in Jullundur Doab for a
while. They were led by Havildar Major Kishan Singh Bedang and
Master Mota Singh. But sooner than later they were rounded up,
six of them including Kishan Singh Bedang were condemned to
death and the rest were sentenced to various terms of
imprisonment.
The Sikhs make fine soldiers.
They are as loyal as they are valiant. They got themselves
enlisted in large numbers both at the time of World War I and
World War II. But after the Wars were over when they found
that the Britishers had no desire to part with power, they
fought them tooth and nail. They were scandalised to find that
the Britishers would deny them the freedom for which he made
them fight in far-off lands. They fought the war of India’s
independence shoulder to shoulder with the rest of their
countrymen, whether they were Hindus or Muslims, Biharis or
Bengalis. n
The author, a distinguished
writer, is a former Member of the Rajya Sabha; he is also the
President of the Punjabi Writers Meet.
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