Analysis
By Jagdeesh Mann
Special to The Post

In early October, ripped out pages from a Sikh holy book were found strewn over a rubbish heap in the Punjab. Four weeks later, the North Indian state is torn with political strife with the waves of turmoil washing up onto Canada’s shores.
Through this past month, Sikhs in Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto have held public vigils decrying the act and the subsequent police violence perpetrated against protesters across Punjab, a state approximately twice the size of Vancouver Island.
Two are dead from the violence and scores are injured. The conflict has also broken out outside of Punjab, India. In London, Sikh protesters outside of the Indian embassy clashed with police, leading to numerous arrests and injuries, and a subsequent apology from Scotland Yard for the heavy-handed use of police force.
Though the sacrilege of the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book, is threatening to topple the Punjab government, nobody seems to know who did it or why. The mystery has yielded fertile grounds for conspiracy theories: The state government blames the followers of a seditious local holy-man with movie star ambitions; the Indian central government is questioning the role of usual suspect Pakistan; and there are even whispers that the eminence grise is ISIS from Syria — as if they didn’t have greater concerns.
The most troubling theory though for the Punjab government may be that God indeed works in mysterious ways and that a divine hand has sacrificed the holiest of Sikh artifacts in order to reveal the rot festering at the core of Sikh institutions. Given Sikhism’s rich history of martyrdom and fighting for a just cause regardless of the self-sacrifice required, this idea is as dangerous as it is indelible.
And so finding the culprits has become a secondary concern for a Punjab government trying to prevent a meltdown. That containment, however, is proving vexing. Like the seemingly trivial assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that spawned WWI, this provincial incident is pulling on political alliances across India and the globe. Interested parties from India, the U.K., and to Canada and the U.S. are are taking positions either to undermine or reinforce the Punjab government.
In the diaspora, the incident has again awoken dormant conversations about issues like religious identity, values, and even political self-determination among the 2.5 million Sikhs who live in cities like Toronto, New York, London, and Kuala Lumpur. Thirty years ago, these discussions were the kindling that blazed into a violent decade-long uprising for an independent Khalistan homeland after then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the Indian Army to invade the Golden Temple — the holiest of Sikh shrines.
That act, in turn, led to her assassination, which spiralled into retribution attacks against Sikhs in Delhi, orchestrated by high ranking Congress Party politicians in that city. Over 3,000 Sikhs were killed over three days as the police and army were ‘delayed’ from intervening on frenzied Hindu mobs.
Now, those conversations have roared back to life. Last weekend, members of over 100 Sikh temples and organizations from across North America, including B.C., met in Yuba City to discuss the ongoing crisis in Punjab and to deliberate upon the issues relating to Sikhs in Punjab and the diaspora. This was the first time in over 25 years that Sikh jathebandis came together to discuss problems facing the community.
Meanwhile, a new generation of energized Sikh youth have taken to social media and given legs to the hashtag #Sikhlivesmatter, inspired by the events of Ferguson, Missouri from this summer. The narrative has focused on a variety of grievances including the long unresolved Delhi killings of 1984.
At a federal level in India, this proliferation of #Sikhlivesmatter is troubling for the Narendra Modi-led BJP government which is also a coalition partner in the Punjab government. The BJP has a well-deserved bad reputation of picking on minorities to appease its militant Hindu majority power base. Even the party leader, current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was allegedly complicit in his state’s 2002 Gujarat riots when Hindu mobs to burned and killed up to 2,000 Muslims. Now the Sikhs have a reason to join in with the Muslims, and Christians in believing they are a targeted minority of a party that claims the secular belief that all faiths are equal, though in reality practices some being more equal than others.
The BJP and even Prime Minister Narendra Modi have profited from the India’s ugly communal politics. What is clear from these protests is that Sikhs want an end to such politics in Punjab. And in particular, they want a separation of church and state when it comes to Sikh religious appointments being controlled by the Shiromani Akali Dal political party — the BJP’s partner in Punjab’s ruling coalition.
The Akali party is firmly in the grip of the billionaire family of Parkash Singh Badal, whose family’s tentacles have been wrapped around the state for decades. Incredible as it sounds, it is Badal and the Akali party who appoint the highest priests (jathedars) to the Sikh Vatican, thus subjugating the religion to political ends. At nearly 90 years of age, Parkash Badal has no plans on retiring from office — next to Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, he may just be the most unshoehornable politician in the world.
But that is not preventing Sikhs living overseas from trying anyhow to unseat him, creating the scene for a duel between a wealthy diaspora and aged crafty oligarch. In Canada, there are over 500,000 Sikhs who, like their compatriots in the Jewish community, are politically active. This community punches well above its weight class — in the new Liberal government, there are 19 South Asian members of Parliament. And in the new open-air Trudeau government, it is unlikely they will be silenced on raising issues in the House of Commons that rattle the Indian government — such as whether the Delhi Sikh murders of 1984 constituted an act of genocide.
A petition of this nature was previously raised in the House by Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal from Surrey Newton in 2010 and was supported by now Cabinet minister Navdeep Bains from Ontario. Curiously, a few month later in 2011, the Indian consulate in Vancouver denied Dhaliwal a visa to visit India after he was invited by British Columbia premier Christy Clark to join her Team Canada mission to Asia.
For these new MP’s, given their constituents, #Sikhlivesmatter is more important than the sentiments of the Indian government that has never prosecuted the Congress Party ringleaders behind the Delhi murders. The more momentum this hashtag gains, and the longer old unacknowledged human rights violations from 1984 are allowed to fester, the more impact these conditions will negatively bear on Canada — India relations.
It was only six months ago that Indian Prime Minister was received by the Canadian government on an official state visit, ending decades of cool relations stemming from the early ’70s when India used Canadian-made CANDU nuclear technology to detonate an atomic weapon.
That visit ended with the Harper government blessing a $350 million sale of Canadian Cameco Corp uranium to power India’s nuclear power plants and growing cities. India is striving to increase nuclear energy output multiple-fold by 2050 which will translate into billions pouring into the Saskatchewan economy.
There is also the possibility of India joining the new Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade pact for Pacific Rim countries like Canada, U.S., Mexico, Japan, Malaysia, and seven others. Membership would boost the prime ‘Make in India’ mission of the Modi government to transform the country into a manufacturing hub capable of competing with China, a key step to its new manifest destiny of becoming a legitimate superpower. Ironically, this vision becoming reality relies to some degree on winning the favour of Canada’s politically potent Sikh community.
India’s central Modi’s government, coalition partners with the Badal government in Punjab, has now been called on to investigate the Guru Granth Sahib sacrilege incident. If Prime Minister Modi is indeed sincere on transforming India into the next global heavyweight, he will need the help of G7 partners like Canada. And sometimes to make new friends, old ones have to either adapt with the times or be set free — the latter a move he will find welcoming from influential Sikhs in Canada and overseas.

This article first ran in The Vancouver Sun. Jagdeesh Mann is the Executive Editor, Twitter : @JagdeeshMann.