A mere glance at today’s Indian Express photo of Indian PM Narendra Modi squatting before the photo of  Hindu nationalist leader Veer Savarkar in the once-dreaded Andamans prison, triggered memories of the graphic description of the lives and bravery of Sikh prisoners in the Andamans jail, immortalised in his speech to Sikh students in Vancouver, Canada in 1974. WSN proudly presents the extracts.

Sikhs are a religious community and a political nation, simultaneously, and thus they are a unique society of the world.  The Sikhs are distinguishable from the Hindu society, which is essentially a territorial culture-group.

Sikhism is a social religion, non-ethnical, oecumenical, grounded in a political society, directed and committed to propagation and establishing of a plural world-society, tolerant, open, progressive and free in character.

Sikhism and the Sikhs form a unique religion and a unique society, which and who can be clearly distinguished from the other religious and political societies of the world.

When the initial efforts of establishing a Sikh republic in the heart of northern India failed, in which republic the Sikhs tried to apply the high principles of ethics and politics enunciated by the Sikh Gurus, there comes a period of about half a century of relentless persecution and genocide pogroms against the Sikh people by two contending empires, the mightiest empires of Asia of those days:  the Mughal and the Pathan Empire.

The Pathan empire persecuted and tried to uproot the Sikhs and to destroy them root and branch, under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Abdali, one of the greatest generals, of the stature of Chenghiz Khan, Halagu and Nadir, the greatest generals which Asia has produced.  Under his might and under his generalship, and that of his successors, for almost fifty years, the Pathans as well as the Mughals tried their worst and tried their utmost to cow-down the Sikhs, to finish the Sikhs and to make them submit.

The Sikhs withstood this terrible onslaught.  They neither submitted nor abandoned their harsh cry of “death or liberty”, a sentiment foreign to and unknown in the Eastern societies, ancient or modern.  This is a sentiment which is unique in the history of Asia, though in Europe you do find traces of it.  For fifty years, under the most callous and under the most terrible persecutions where the aim was complete genocide, the Sikhs not only refused to submit but refused to abandon their cry:  “We want death or liberty!  We want death or liberty.”  And in the end they had their liberty.  Sikh supremacy was then established.  And then it slid into the form of the Sikh Empire, which was called the Sarkar Khalsa that is “the people’s Commonwealth” from the middle of the eighteenth-century to the middle of the nineteenth-century.

“We want death or liberty!  We want death or liberty.”  And in the end they had their liberty.  Sikh supremacy was then established. 

………..Now I come to the years before 1947.  Before the First World War, when the ideas of freeing India from the foreign yoke started stirring the minds of the Indian people, Sikhs were the spearhead of this movement.  It was from this place, Vancouver, that as far back as the year 1913, a batch of about two-hundred Sikhs in all–there were two or three non-Sikhs, the rest of them all were Sikhs, simple, manual labourers and peasants but genuine Sikhs, whose faith in the Guru and the teachings of the Guru was firm and unsullied–these Sikhs sailed from Vancouver with a plan to topple-down the British Empire through mutinous activities in the Indian army.  They failed.

Most of them were arrested; they were hanged.  Many of them were sent to the terrible Andaman Islands, and they spent their lives there, twenty years, twenty-five years; died there under conditions of imprisonment which you cannot even imagine these days.  Such hardships and such terrible conditions of existence they bore, and not a case of a single Sikh is known who either wavered or apologized, though many opportunities were offered them to just say one word:  “We are sorry for what we have done”; and they could come back to their villages and to their lands and live a life of comfort and ease as their other compatriots were doing. (Applause).

It is recorded in the official records that whenever these Sikhs were taken to the execution room to be hanged–some of you perhaps know how people are hanged, I know it.  I have supervised some hangings as they used to be done during the British period.

“Are you now prepared to say, ‘I am sorry for what I have done,’ and the noose will be taken off your neck and you will be set free?”  Each one of them, without an exception is recorded as saying, “No, I am not sorry for what I have done, and when I take my next birth I will do the same.  I want the British to leave and free India.”

You put black clothes on the person, previously giving him an opportunity to bathe his body, and then you tie his hands behind him, then you walk him to the gallows or execution room.  You make him stand under the gallows and put the rope around his neck and then a question is put to him: “Is there anything you want to say as a last word?”   First of all, “Answer, are you so-and-so?   He says, “Yes I am so-and-so”.  Well, you are going to be hanged for such-and-such crime; and now we are going to pull the lever and the rope will kill you, suffocate you to death.  Is there anything you want to say before your end comes?”  This is the question that is usually put, and its answer is recorded.

But to these Sikhs another question was frequently put:  “Are you now prepared to say, ‘I am sorry for what I have done,’ and the noose will be taken off your neck and you will be set free?”  Each one of them, without an exception is recorded as saying, “No, I am not sorry for what I have done, and when I take my next birth I will do the same.  I want the British to leave and free India.” (Applause).

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And then the question would be put:  “Now, so-and-so, what are the last words you want to say before your life on this earth comes to an end?”  In each case–I wouldn’t vouchsafe for that but I have seen some of the files–maybe in one or two cases, very few cases, not, but generally, they sang the following song:  Raj karega khalsa, aki rahe na koi, khwar hoe sabh milenge bache saran jo hoe. Dilli takhat par bahegi ap Guru-ki phauj, raj karega khalsa badi hoegi mauj. (Applause).