All politicians have a weakspot for a photo-op, but Punjab
Chief Minister Amarinder Singh displayed the worst of the
choices in the summer of 2005 when he landed up at a
Gurdwara in Toronto with a Khalstan Zindabad screamer in the
background. Soon the photograph was doing the rounds of
media organizations and one day a newspaper published it.
Irony is often the subtext of politics when it is divorced
from people’s concerns. We suddenly had Prakash Singh Badal
turning national and accusing Amarinder Singh of being a
Khalistani. This is a column I wrote on the frontpage of The
Times of India. It has a reference to famous Spelling Bee
contests in the US. On June 2, 2005, 13-year-old Anurag
Kashyap had beaten 272 others to clinch the 2005 National
Spelling Bee Championship and one of the words that figured
in the contest was Trouvaille.
Badal Takes Trouvaille Route
To Politics,
Lessons For Amarinder To Learn
S P Singh
Irony
is intrinsic to sub-continental politics, from Jinnah talking
about a
secular Pakistan in the backdrop of a bloody balkanization to
Advani hailing
Jinnah's secularism in Karachi. But nearer home, ironical
stances have
remained almost pivotal to Akali Dal's and Congress' polity for
half-a-century now.
Khalistan is back in the news, thanks to the row over Chief
Minister
Amarinder Singh's visit to a gurdwara in Dixie,
Toronto but what is more
important than the row itself are once again the juxtaposed
ironies of the
stances taken by dramatis personae of Punjab politics.
For decades, even before the Partition happened, nay, even
before it was a
near certainty, Akali leaders of hues varying from ultra radical
to the
softest of moderates courted the shadow damsel called Khalistan,
sometimes
even doing away with its maiden name and calling it Sikh
homeland, or as
Master Tara Singh once did, Azad Punjab.
During the years of militancy, Akalis of various persuasions
either had a brief
fling or a torrid affair with this poisonous damsel. If the late
Gurcharan
Singh Tohra cavorted with this filly whose vital social stats
were
poorly-defined and never-understood, then the politics of
current Akali
supremo Parkash Singh Badal also did a tango with it. Maverick
Simranjeet
Singh Mann or the rag-tag bunch of Akali politicians, which
panthic curdling
brought to the surface after Operation Bluestar, als o tried to
have liaisons
unholy with the concept whenever convenient.
The behind-the-scenes role of that paragon of all that is
gentlemanly in
politics, Surjit Singh Barnala, in the scheme of things which
led to the
explosive Amritsar Declaration, is known to too many politicians
on both
sides of Punjab polity's Mason-Dixon line.
But today, it takes Badal, the same gentleman who kept
radicalising the
polity for sheer survival in the early eighties to keep up with
a `Sant' who
could invariably afford to be several steps ahead on that
slippery track, to
hog the secularism podium.
Amarinder was the first politician off the block to call a spade
a bloody
shovel when he attacked the Panthic Committee. Emotional jolt
apart,
sobriety had not ditched him when he resigned his Parliament
seat in 1984 to
emerge as the community's hero, but one thing he never did was
to play a
seditious tune even though the Akali Dal (Panthic) he
orchestrated in early
'90s fell by the wayside.
Of course, Badal and his ilk would rush to pull out Amarinder's
signatures
on the Amritsar Declaration to disprove the point, but in the
people's
collective consciousness, minus that of some distraught
Congressmen,
Amarinder could go visiting every single gurdwara with a
Khalistan banner or
a Bhindranwale poster but the seditious tag would still not
stick.
Many Sikhs in the Congress have done more harm, and shenanigans
of Darbara
Singh and Giani Zail Singh are worst-kept secret of regional
politics. Buta
Singh's best gift to the community was Nihang Santa Singh. Top
Congress
leaders did no better. Hours before armymen marched into Golden
Temple,
Bhindranwale was termed a spiritual leader by a man Congressmen,
and Sonia
Gandhi, swear by.
Instead, Amarinder's Dixie visit has
pushed mainstream Akalis to a clear and
public anti-Khalistan stand, of course clearly by default.
In the cesspool of politics, there are rewards even in a
worst-case
scenario. Akali Dal president taking a nationalist stand on the
issue of
Khalistan and raising concerns about national integrity would
only do good
for the image of an average Sikh in the pan-Indian consciousness
where a
Sikh's mind is seen through the Akali prism. But would that not
be again
ironical? Spelling Bee contests classify trouvaille as a
difficult word, but
though Badal may not spell it, he is demonstrating the quality.
Ironically.
June 25, 2005