WSN Ed­i­tor writes an Open Let­ter to RSS Chief protest­ing and chal­leng­ing the at­tempts by the RSS and its af­fil­i­ates to in­ter­fere in Sikh af­fairs and smudge Sikh phi­los­o­phy and his­tory through sub­terfuge and mis­in­for­ma­tion. He con­grat­u­lates the Sikh so­cial me­dia cam­paign­ers, call­ing them Sikh So­cial So­ci­ety for work­ing over­time and forc­ing the Sikh lead­ers to de­sist from par­tic­i­pat­ing in the ne­far­i­ous de­signs of the mis­lead­ing cam­paign of the RSS.

Dear Mo­han Bhag­wat Ji.
Wa­he­guru Ji Ka Khalsa Wa­he­guru Ji Ki Fateh!!!
My let­ter is an at­tempt to get the Sikh voice onto you. As re­gards your in­volve­ment and in­ter­fer­ence in Sikh af­fairs, you must be a slightly wor­ried man. Every few years, un­der one pre­text or an­other, the RSS fla­grantly in­ter­feres in Sikh af­fairs, first de­clar­ing Sikhs to be Hin­dus and then beat­ing around the bush to pla­cate the lead­ers, the masses be damned. This time around it has been dif­fer­ent.

Years of sin­is­ter and sur­rep­ti­tious med­dling, huge in­vest­ments, affin­ity with the Badal Dal, the reach of the In­dian state, the might of the Modi gov­ern­ment -all col­lec­tively failed to per­suade Sikhs and the Sikh lead­er­ship to par­tic­i­pate in the pseudo-cel­e­bra­tions of 350 years an­niver­sary of Guru Gob­ind Singh by the Rashtriya Sikh San­gat at the Talk­a­tora sta­dium in New Delhi this week.  I am glad that Jathedar Iqbal Singh of Takht Har­mandir Ji, Patna Sahib was con­spic­u­ous by his ab­sence.

You did have some some­what-Sikh look­ing fig­ures -near-rene­gades, naïve or pur­blind who want to have the best of both the worlds. They too were able to par­tic­i­pate be­cause Sikh ac­tivists failed to fathom that they would ditch the com­mu­nity de­spite a di­rec­tive from the Akal Takht and against the col­lec­tive will of the Sikh peo­ple. There were some di­rectly as­so­ci­ated with your po­lit­i­cal wing -min­is­ters and for­mer min­is­ters, who had no choice but to be there, even though, I bet, their heart was beat­ing oth­er­wise.

“While it may not be time to cel­e­brate but the Sikh So­cial So­ci­ety -the ac­tive arm of the Sikhs that uses so­cial me­dia as a means to protest and chal­lenge not only their own lead­er­ship but also those like the Rashtriya Sikh San­gat de­serves an ap­plause for en­forc­ing the is­sue and twitch­ing the Sikh re­li­gious and po­lit­i­cal lead­er­ship to do a re­think.”

While it may not be time to cel­e­brate but Sikh so­ci­ety, es­pe­cially the Sikh So­cial So­ci­ety -the ac­tive arm of the Sikhs that uses so­cial me­dia as a means to protest and chal­lenge not only their own lead­er­ship but also those like the Rashtriya Sikh San­gat de­serves an ap­plause for en­forc­ing the is­sue and twitch­ing the Sikh re­li­gious and po­lit­i­cal lead­er­ship to do a re­think. The ac­tivists, though small in num­ber, who protested on the streets of Delhi were torch-bear­ers of the spirit of Sikhism.

Not many know but Sukhbir Singh Badal -the pres­i­dent of the Shi­ro­mani Akali Dal and the lead­er­ship of the Sikh re­li­gious body -the Shi­ro­mani Gur­d­wara Par­band­hak Com­mit­tee were en­sconced in the Teja Singh Samundri Hall head­quar­ters in Am­rit­sar for nearly five hours, a day prior to the Delhi meet, reach­ing the con­clu­sion to dis­as­so­ci­ate from the RSS Delhi meet pri­mar­ily un­der pres­sure of this very Sikh So­cial So­ci­ety cam­paign.

Ac­tu­ally, Sikhs re­alised it long back that the Rashtriya Sikh San­gat was noth­ing but a sub­set of the RSS -the Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh, which has been set up to make in­roads into Sikh so­cial, re­li­gious and po­lit­i­cal life.  They are qui­etly mak­ing in­roads into Sikh so­ci­ety out­side Pun­jab, but that too will be un­der the scrutiny of the what I call the Sikh So­cial So­ci­ety. It would not be wrong to say, as the Dal Khalsa has aptly put it, “the Rashtriya Sikh San­gat is an il­le­git­i­mate off­spring of the Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh and the Sikhs can­not own it.”

Your speech at the os­ten­si­ble 350 years of Guru Gob­ind Singh cel­e­bra­tions smacked of the agenda of the RSS. You want to ab­ro­gate re­li­gious lead­ers of all re­li­gions, es­pe­cially Sikhism, as sav­iours of Hin­dus and Hin­duism and all re­li­gious lead­ers as In­dian lead­ers. Let me say this loud and clear: Guru Gob­ind Singh es­tab­lished the Khalsa Panth -The Sikh Com­mon­wealth -fo­cussed God-wards and ded­i­cated to the es­tab­lish­ment of an egal­i­tar­ian and plu­ral­is­tic so­ci­ety, which is miles apart from the In­dian so­cial and po­lit­i­cal set up.

“To­day, the Sikhs are more alert than ever be­fore and tech­nol­ogy is also on our side. I strongly sug­gest that Nag­pur take lessons from Am­rit­sar and Anand­pur Sahib and ac­cept the unique­ness of the Sikh na­tion.”

The acu­men all the RSS and BJP lead­ers, in­clud­ing the Home Min­is­ter Ra­j­nath Singh, will not be able to con­vince the Sikhs about the “In­dian-ness” of Guru Gob­ind Singh, his ideals and his con­tri­bu­tion to hu­mankind.  At the func­tion, the In­dian Home Min­is­ter at­tempts to lure us by say­ing that they are re­mov­ing 100 Sikh names from the black list. Who cre­ated the list? In­dia. Who is re­mov­ing the names? In­dia. Tout­ing sops as gifts is a thing of the past, we can now see through.

Sikhs are not born to save. We be­lieve in Sar­bat da Bhala -wel­fare of all hu­mankind, and we have a clear dis­tinct iden­tity -in to­tal vari­ance to the Brah­man­i­cal so­ci­ety that RSS be­lieves in. We are not the up­hold­ers of In­dian ide­ol­ogy, we have our own.  All at­tempts to un­der­mine our dis­tinc­tive­ness by call­ing us “el­der broth­ers”, “sav­iours” and the like is noth­ing but an at­tempt to as­sim­i­late us into the caul­dron of Brah­man­ism and we sim­ply refuse to be so in­cor­po­rated.

Our Gu­rus un­am­bigu­ously em­pha­sized our iden­tity in Guru Granth Sahib. Guru Ar­jan Sahib, the fifth mas­ter states:

“I am not a Hindu, nor am I a Mus­lim. My body and breath of life be­long to Al­lah-Ram, the God of both.”

Our writ­ers, from time to time have writ­ten books re­it­er­at­ing that we are a dis­tinct peo­ple. In re­sponse to the likes of you, Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha wrote a book, en­ti­tled, “Hum Hindu Nahin.”

We know that a sub-sec­tion of Ar­ti­cle 25 of the In­dian con­sti­tu­tion con­sid­ers Sikhs as Hin­dus, but that will not stop us from fight­ing for our le­git­i­mate po­si­tion as a dis­tinct peo­ple.  We wish you to re­call that this sec­tion was pub­licly burnt by Parkash Singh Badal of your ally party -the Shi­ro­mani Akali Dal, in the early stages of his es­tab­lish­ment as a Sikh leader, in the sev­en­ties and eight­ies of the last cen­tury,

I am sure that you will be do­ing brain­storm­ing -which is a trade­mark RSS ac­tiv­ity when some­thing like this goes ter­ri­bly wrong. You call it man­than. Let me of­fer you a sug­ges­tion. Nag­pur must learn some­thing from Moscow. Through the good of­fices of Mrs. In­dira Gandhi, Rus­sia tried to dis­suade Sikhs from re­li­gion and make Pun­jab so­ci­ety athe­is­tic. They pumped mil­lions of rou­bles, tonnes of lit­er­a­ture and nur­tured hun­dreds of ac­tivists, but they mis­er­ably failed. Ex­cept for the Pun­jab Book Shop in Chandi­garh and some diehard uni­ver­sity teach­ers and jour­nal­ists, Pun­jab is as re­li­gious as it was prior to the Moscow on­slaught in the last cen­tury.

 

The Rashtriya Sikh San­gat has been in ex­is­tence for a long time. Un­doubt­edly, it man­ages to make in­roads into Gur­d­waras, some­times in­flu­ences the Akal Takht lead­er­ship too through its “reach” but over­all, it has failed to es­tab­lish the Brah­man­ised form of Sikhism that it has as its mis­sion.  We have our in­ter­nal prob­lems and chal­lenges and we will sort them out. There are many things that Sikhs do not do or do be­cause of their affin­ity with Hindu so­ci­ety. How­ever, that should not be con­strued as a weak­ness.

To­day, we are more alert than ever be­fore and tech­nol­ogy is also on our side. I strongly sug­gest that Nag­pur take lessons from Am­rit­sar and Anand­pur Sahib and ac­cept the unique­ness of the Sikh na­tion. 

“I am con­vinced based on your acts of omis­sion and com­mis­sion that RSS is noth­ing but a Racial Slurs So­ci­ety, which in its zeal to es­tab­lish a one lan­guage, one re­li­gion, one per­sonal law, one wa­ter source, one na­tion mis­sion is in­sti­tu­tion­ally spread­ing ha­tred and mis­in­for­ma­tion.”

I am con­vinced based on your acts of omis­sion and com­mis­sion that RSS is noth­ing but a Racial Slurs So­ci­ety, which in its zeal to es­tab­lish a one lan­guage, one re­li­gion, one per­sonal law, one wa­ter source, one na­tion mis­sion is in­sti­tu­tion­ally spread­ing ha­tred and mis­in­for­ma­tion.

I want you to fol­low the golden words of the tenth mas­ter Guru Gob­ind Singh. Leg­end has it that when con­fronted about the ques­tion of su­pe­ri­or­ity of one re­li­gion over an­other, Guru Sahib said, “Tumko tumhara khoob, humko hamara.” -You be happy with your means to reach God, let me be happy with mine. 

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So, please don’t mess with Sikhs and Sikhism.

Your truly
Jag­mo­han Singh