A Window To Perceptive Journalism

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 

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