1984
World Peace?
It Ain't Gonna Happen
by T. SHER SINGH
What is happening in Punjab or through the collective Sikh psyche today, I believe, cannot totally be left at the door of our enemies and detractors. While we strategize our game-plan to deal with the latter, we first and foremost need to confront another, greater enemy.
The enemy within.
Let me try to explain, but first I need to bare for you the underpinnings of my thoughts.
I have this deeply entrenched and unshakeable belief that Peace - world peace, that is - is an impossibility, and can never be more than a pipe-dream.
Personal, internal peace ... yes! It is do-able - that's what all spiritual paths, once devoid of egotistical machinations, lead us up to. That's what Sikhi is primed to do.
But why not world peace, you ask?
It's not that we are not capable of achieving it - we certainly have the skills and the mental technology to make it a reality. But what weighs us down - always has, always will! - is our oh-so-human failings and shortcomings.
They are built-in, they are universal, they come with the species. Sadly, the only ones who have less or none of these failings and shortcomings are those who have less or none of the human trait we take so much pride in - intelligence!
Blessed are ... not just the meek, but also those who are less haunted by matters of the brain and the heart.
We like to flatter ourselves by believing that the human species represents the epitome of creation. But it could easily be argued that the simple acorn, to take but one example, is a far greater marvel.
We as human beings come with too much baggage and just don't know how to get rid of it. In fact, as we grow older, it too grows in magnitude until its sheer weight makes us incapable of reaching our full human potential.
I must confess that I have personally latched on to the concept of "poetic justice" - it is the term, I find, best explains to me our mounting impairment as we live our lives.
Both as individuals, and as collectives, such as nations, communities, societies, etc.
This idea of "poetic justice" means - to me - that each one of us has to deal with the consequences of our actions. In this life!
I don't believe that another soul's sacrificial suffering will absolve us of our personal accountability. Neither will any amount of ritual cleansing, or fasting, or chanting, or any form of proxy. Nor can the accounting be postponed or distributed conveniently through the proverbial 8,400,000 lives.
It's here and now. There is no escaping it.
Yes, it is possible to escape public censure or the law, or to hide behind a façade of wealth or some form of cultivated respectability, but sooner or later, we have to deal with it and face the consequences.
It is more serious, I believe, than facing yourself alone standing before a mirror, or grappling with your inner-most thoughts in the dark of night. It is more serious because it chases you and finds you, sooner or later, and then sits on you, claims you, occupies you.
There is no escape, as sure as there is no escape from the self.
And. And, I believe, this applies equally to nations - to take but one form of human grouping as an example - as thoroughly and completely as it does to individuals.
As individuals, we know very little of the inner goings-on of each other. They will only be known to the individual; how she or he grapples with it will never be known Job- or Faust-like to the rest of the world. Each person's inner struggles and triumphs will go to the grave with him and her.
With nations, though, it is different.
They too suffer from the sum of the failings and shortcomings of their collectives, and they too are destined, I believe, to be pursued by poetic justice. Here and now .. . If not today, then certainly in the proverbial tomorrow.
What makes it different, though, for nations is that it is the collective that has to live through the accounting ... through the life of the nation, from generation to generation.
Hence, I feel, there is no peace in the world ... today. Nor was it ever in the past, other than the imagined satjug - the mythical Age of Truth many of us get nostalgic about through the epics of the past. Nor will there be any in the future.
The Jewish/Christian Bible warns us of the continuum of the "sins of the fathers".
In the modern era, Tennessee Williams and Henrik Ibsen, amongst many others, have also tried to fathom the idea of poetic justice as an inter-generational accounting due from families.
But I believe it is not so simple for nations.
The arithmetic gets complicated in that it is the nation that bears the fruits - and the poison - of the actions of its collective membership. The idea of a 'nation' as an entity may be a fiction, but the actions carried out in its name are not ... and neither are the consequences.
I claim no great depth to this belief of mine, no philosophical underpinnings or religious revelations. It is just a personal whim that I share with you. What it does for me is make sense of the world around me ... for me.
I think it is with good reason that all spiritual elders have only spoken about the personal journey that each one of us has to go on ... to find a personal salvation.
Beliefs in en masse salvation or spiritual liberation for, or the inherent 'goodness' of, certain groupings of people is but man-made fiction - an opiate that many of us use to dull our intellect in order to grapple with the elusiveness of the meaning of life.
So when a nation does collective wrongs to achieve a collective good, I believe it has also got to pay a collective price.
And because nations always have ... always will, and wilfully do today ... run roughshod over the rights and needs of others, they are always caught in the cycle of paying the price. Since there has never been relief from such cycles, therefore human history records no period of lasting peace.
There is no relief from such cycles in sight today or in the foreseeable future ... hence my deep-seated belief that there never will be world peace.
How could there be? It would defeat all common sense, all spiritual principles, and everything that all our collective scriptures tell us.
Look at America! With all the wealth in the world, it is forever embroiled in wars, forever clawing for material security to support its hunger for material amenities, and now, on what appears to be a perennial internecine conflict, based on hollow and vacuous principles. It has never had the time to spare to deal with the outrages it committed against its native populations, then the black people ... and then to various peoples around the world. Does it think that by not properly or fully acknowledging it, the history and the baggage will simply dissolve into thin air?
I'll cite only a few more examples.
Pakistan.
Created through manufactured and pre-meditated terror, causing grief that is still raw today in the hearts of millions on the sub-continent. Sure, they created a nation - probably a much-needed nation - but the way it was done is extricating its price to this day. Can anyone in that country stand up today and say that he or she has actually enjoyed even for a day what they had set out to achieve? They can‘t ... they have to pay for their sins. [I'm not absolving the Indians from theirs ... I am only touching one side of the story to merely illustrate my point.]
Israel.
They say it took them thousands of years to finally get their promised land. But I'm afraid it was done through great acts of inhumanity, which continue to this day. True, they've created an oasis smack in the middle of the Middle-east. But I ask, have they enjoyed a single day of peace yet? They complain that they live in a constant state of war! It's their words, not mine. The cycle of suffering continues ...
India.
It took them super-human effort to throw off the yoke of a foreign power after 400 years. Now that they are free, they wallow in the same evil that they used to complain about, except now they victimize their own - women, children, poor, minorities, and so on. As a result, it's a nation of misery - albeit with a few more dollars in its coffers nowadays - and the laughing stock of the world. [If you think I'm exaggerating, remember last October's Commonwealth Games?]
Britain.
True, it once ruled the world, and deftly hid its atrocities under a veneer of Marquess of Queensberry rules. 70 years ago, it took a mad man less than five years to bring the nation to its knees. In quick succession, it lost much of what it had plundered around the world, and has been on its knees ever since. Its biggest industry today? Royal weddings!
France.
Japan.
Germany.
Portugal.
Spain.
Afghanistan.
Holland.
Belgium.
Turkey.
Iran.
Iraq.
Canada ...
Every nation, every people, have their skeletons in the closet, and every new generation, instead of freeing some of them, adds more of its own.
And we expect God to come down, blindly ignore all that we have done and continue to do to each other, and simply hand us World Peace on a platter?
I can only rant and rave, Cassandra-like, that we are the only species that is delusional.
And then, turn to Punjab and the Sikhs ...
I just want to take a single example, to make my point.
1984.
Yes, India and its majority has let us down criminally ... and it pays everyday for its sins grievously. I won't dwell on that aspect of it because much has been said about it elsewhere in these pages.
But Sikhs!
The central pillar of this new Faith was and is the rejection of the evil caste system of the Hindus. And yet, in the last few decades, we have allowed the cancer to creep back into our lives and hearts and minds and souls, and drag us down into the drain where the majority of the nation still wallows.
It has taken us less than a generation or two to squander our inheritance, and to begin demoting ourselves back into primitive Hinduism.
It began with Partition.
The precipitous division of Punjab led to the loss of its western half to Pakistan, requiring the Sikhs living in the region to flee to the East.
The western half was more prosperous, more cultured, more educated ... Lahore, for example, was not only the capital of the province but a major cultural hub on the subcontinent. The eastern half was primarily agricultural.
Instead of Sikhs behaving like Sikhs, they began to behave like Hindus in a Hindu India!
Before someone jumps to conclusions and brands me anti-Hindu, which I'm not, I reiterate that I have nothing against Hinduism. What I want to underline and emphasize, however, is that its ways are not for Sikhs. If I call myself a Sikh because I have chosen the path of Sikhi, it is a path different from what the Hindus take. It's that simple and straight-forward.
Those from West Punjab - the majority being from trading or professional societies (‘khatris‘), gravitated to the larger city centres. So did the artisans ('ramgharias').
East Punjab's indigenous majority was from farming and soldier stock ('jutts').
New invisible lines were drawn, and each community, in the face of newly carved geographical boundaries, withdrew further into their respective ‘biradaris' - social enclaves. Age-old demarcations, which by now were well on their way to being erased by the Sikh renaissance, became reinforced as the new spectre of a tsunami of Hindu influence arose around them.
The peasant stock - a majority in the Punjab hinterland - began to circle its wagons by entrenching itself further into the politics of the land.
Example: suddenly, Master Tara Singh - a leader from the "west" - began to be painted a villain, and the one to blame for the partition of Punjab. Fateh Singh, a local preacher with little political savvy, but from the 'east', gained ascendancy.
Politicians in rural Punjab began to garner vote-banks by blaming all their ills on the "city-dweller" Delhi Sikhs. The latter looked down upon the rural crowd as unsophisticated and uncultured.
As things deteriorated, I heard several good souls during this period, each on a different occasion, offer a gratuitous opinion on Bhai Vir Singh's life-work by dismissing it summarily as over-rated because he was a "khatri"! No, they hadn't read him because they had decided that his writings were not even worth reading for that reason.
Bhindrawale, through some quirk of fate, emerged in the 1980s as one who was able to bring both sides together ... and therefore scared the daylights of the Indira Gandhi-led government which thrived on the "divide-and-rule" policies her father, Jawaharlal, had inherited from the fleeing British.
The rest is history.
1984.
First the assault on the Darbar Sahib and scores of gurdwaras around the country in June.
Then, in November, the government-sponsored anti-Sikh pogroms unleashed against Sikhs across the length and breath of the land.
All segments of the Sikh citizenry suffered - the rich and the poor, the professional and the labourer, the urban and the rural, the Delhi-ite and the Punjabi and those living in the other provinces of the country.
Sikhs are resilient like no other people on earth, and they bounced back with their usual chardi kala.
Except for the thousands of victims in the poorer colonies in India's capital and other urban centres. They had no infra-structures to fall-back on. All their resources had been depleted when their homes, their shops, their vehicles, their worldly possessions - and their income-earning men-folk - had been obliterated by the well-orchestrated mobs.
While India's Sikhs were still reeling from the massacres, those in the diaspora collected funds, clothes, food, etc. to be rushed to their co-religionists.
India's foreign missions - embassies, consular offices, diplomats - immediately stepped in and prohibited anything from entering India, except through their offices. Funds given to them vanished into thin-air; material help received and collected never saw the light of day again.
But what staggers the mind is that local Sikhs in India and other urban centres then did nothing!
True, this is a generalization. Yes, there are some laudable exceptions, but being individual effort, it achieved little more than making a dent in the needs of a very needy community of victims.
The question that haunts us today is ... WHY? Why this total failure of a community whose very raison d'etre is to help others? Not just in 1984 or the years that followed, but even today, 27 years later!
I spoke to a couple of intellectuals in New Delhi and Punjab - people I trust and respect for their insight and objectivity. Here's their take on why the ball was dropped so tragically and miserably:
Thousands continue to suffer from the terror unleashed against their families in 1984 for the sole reason that they were Sikhs ... because they belong neither to the 'khatris', or the 'jutts' or the 'ramgharias', but are, instead, from the "working" classes. Siqligars, for example. Full-fledged Sikhs like you and me, but from the ‘Siqligar' community!
My heart bleeds everytime the words reverberate in my head:
"They were mostly people who are not accepted within the mainstream idea of who constitutes "Sikhs". The Sikh community on the whole did NOTHING. Absolutely nothing! Yet, the other day, it took a Siqligar Sikhni to have the dignity to turn down Rs. 3 crore [US $750,000.00] from Sajjan the Thug! Right to the face of a "sikh" who proclaims his piety by wearing a white bana and rosary and calls himself a leader ...!"
My head hangs in shame for my community.
It provides an ironic twist to the legendary quote by Martin Neimoller who had famously lamented the way German Christians had dropped the ball as they stood by and watched an evil Hitler wage his terror against the Jews of Europe. In Punjab and India of today, it is no different:
"When they first came for the Sikhs, I didn't do anything because the victims weren't ‘khatris'.
"Then they came again for the Sikhs, and I didn't do anything because the victims weren't ‘jutts'.
"Then they came again for the Sikhs, and I didn't do anything because the victims weren't ‘rangharias‘ ...
"Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me."
We have got caught in a vortex of Hindu-style casteism that has been spinning since Partition and the evil it unleashes is getting bigger and bigger. And yet we cannot see for ourselves why the most prosperous state in India is in the doldrums and we ... all of us ... are in trouble!
Poetic justice is what I call it.
Sadly, we deserve it. For letting our Gurus, our Sikhi, our humanity ... and ourselves ... down.
There is no escaping the consequences.
Unless we turn around, acknowledge our failings, work at correcting the suffering we have caused, and make amends.
Or else, the cycle will continue.
This is my take on the state of the union. If you have a better one, I'm all ears.
One final thing.
No, I haven't lost my chardi kala. I never will, because I do not build castles in the air. My chardi kala is constantly infused through Sikhi which teaches me that I need to do my best to serve others ... and, to keep working on my self, correcting my own faults and shortcomings, not the world's. The latter task, in itself, is a lot of work and keeps me busy ... and forever in chardi kala!
April 20, 2011
Conversation about this article
1: Harbhajan (New Jersey, U.S.A.), April 20, 2011, 6:01 AM.
Wow! I'm breathless trying to keep pace with you. You've said nothing new, but still, we haven't given serious thought to date to what you have laid out here. And we need to. I need to digest all you've said. But I already know I desperately want to do ... SOMETHING ... to help!
2: M.S. Bhatti (United Kingdom), April 20, 2011, 7:01 AM.
Accepted, we can't change the world. But no reason why we can't change ourselves. We have no choice ... otherwise, we might as well throw up our hands and join the giant blob of Hindudom. It's a choice between turning back to solid ground, or carrying on and jumping over the cliff.
3: Nirmal Kaur (Patiala, Punjab), April 20, 2011, 11:57 AM.
Your referring to the caste problem as a cancer is right on the dot. In fact, it's more of an epidemic. I hope your article triggers a process of introspection, at least amongst our educated ones and intellectuals. I don't expect too many to line up here to comment, because you've described reality and there will first be denial, then obfuscation, then excuses, then justifications ... but if we keep at it, common sense/ Sikhi will ultimately prevail!
4: Sangat Singh (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), April 20, 2011, 1:49 PM.
This perennial question came with the human race. To quote Sheik Farid's bani: "Aap savaareh mai mileh mai mili-aa sukh ho-ay/ Fareeda jay too mayraa hoay raheh sabh jag tayraa ho-ay" [GGS:1382.1] - 'If you reform yourself, you shall meet me, and meeting me, you shall be at peace.' Yet most turmoil arises from the devil citing scripture to his own purpose, and keep killing more people in the name of religion. T. Sher Singh has covered all the wickets. The question "Is World Peace Possible?" remains intact without any lasting solution. Are we talking of political peace or inner peace? Peace, if any, is an inner state that reflects outwardly. Can this be achieved collectively by the whole human race? I don't know if there was ever a 'Satyug'. At best one's inner peace adds to world peace. Meeting like-minded people, it becomes a 'satsang', the centre-piece of Sikhism, combined with seva. "Vich dunee-aa sayv kamai-ee taa dargeh baisan paa-ee-ai" [GGS:26.1] - 'In midst of the world, do seva and you shall be given a place of honour in the Court of Waheguru'. Sikhs have been in the forefront and rise to the occasion without regard to caste, colour or creed. Peace in the world is the outer manifestation of inner peace. I think it was Will Rogers who formulated a simple policy. During the World War, he suggested that the Atlantic Ocean be boiled, then the German submarines would pop up so that we could pick them off and destroy them. Now the question: How do we boil the Atlantic Ocean? Will Rogers said, "I have formulated the policy, implementation is your problem!".
5: Kirpal Singh (DaytonaBeach, Florida, U.S.A.), April 20, 2011, 8:13 PM.
Excellent article. Gurbani says: "As you sow, so shall you reap." Call it karma or whatever, we cannot blame others about our ills on a continuing basis. We must acknowledge our share of the problem before we can correct the bad plight of our individual or community existence. Indulgence in caste, female foeticide, dowry and bride burning, domestic violence, drug abuse, is brought upon us by ourselves and not by others. Let us stop blind rituals and follow gurbani to liberate ourselves instead of being drowned in purchasing akhand paatths and gorging our bellies with extravagant langars when we should be using this money to help our poor Sikh brethern and their families. Puratan Sikhs never asked for help from governments or other communities, but took care of their own willingly, in accordance with the Sikh doctrines of seva and wund chhakna.
6: Harbans Singh (San Francisco, California, U.S.A.), April 21, 2011, 2:33 PM.
I have spoken to a number of people who have also read this piece, and I feel compelled to share this with you. For many of us, reading this article has been like seeing ourselves in the mirror, and what we see has not been nice. Some lashed out, without being able to pinpoint what they disagreed with; others just grumbled. Most of us went quiet. You seem to have touched on some truth, and it scares people ... I hope, into action!
7: Mohan Singh (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), April 21, 2011, 4:31 PM.
T. Sher Singh ji, very excellent, thanks. I am happy to read it, it's all really true, some of the points even reflect my thinking. For now, I will quote the following: "Satjug rath santokh kaa dharam agai rath vaahu/ kaljug rath agan kaa koorh agai rathvaahu" [GGS:470] - 'The chariot of contentment, with righteousness (dharma) as your charioteer, is as good as heaven (satjug). On the chariot of fire (ego-anger), with falsehood as the charioteer, you are in hell (Kalyug).' Falsehood is varied allurements of an illusionary nature, and leads a creature to varied sensual indulgences and sins. Pain and pleasure are in the mind, and are the mental states within the stream of consciousness and there is the intimate relationship between the mind and the body. There are strong minds, weak minds, dirty minds and clear minds. Peace prevails where there is a clear mind (sehaj). Rest of all - depressed minds - keep struggling, ignorantly, knowingly or even willingly. The depressed mind is full of emotional turmoil, frustration, conflict, unhappiness, lack of achievement, sense of failure, and so on. The negative traits lead one downhill and toward a total wreck. The clear mind is always cherishing the positive values of life in contemplation of the Creator; and brings about a well-contented, happy life by His Grace. According to Guru Nanak, there was no satyug, and there is no kalyug, all depends on the chariot you are riding on.
8: H.Singh (United States), April 21, 2011, 5:19 PM.
I used to resent your writings for what I perceived to be an anti-India agenda. But after reading the following: "India's foreign missions - embassies, consular offices, diplomats - immediately stepped in and prohibited anything from entering India, except through their offices. Funds given to them vanished into thin-air; material help received and collected never saw the light of day again ...", I can understand your pain and anger.
9: N. Singh (Canada), April 22, 2011, 12:22 AM.
Thank you! Another great article! Is it true that Dr. Ambedkar considered conversion to Sikhi for the Dalits but finding it riddled with casteism, he rejected it? If so, how ironic that it was he who then went on help write the Indian Constitution in which the Sikhs are labelled as Hindus ... and what a price we are paying today. Another example of 'sins of the fathers'. All of India could have been ours if we had embraced the Dalits when given the opportunity and now our very existence in India is threatened.
10: Manjeet Shergill (Singapore), April 22, 2011, 6:08 AM.
Yup, I agree - world peace just ain't gonna happen. Gurbani will comfort - when there is no peace within or in the world.
11: Devinder Singh (India), April 22, 2011, 6:21 AM.
The greatest of man's illusions cluster around the hope of a perfected society, a perfected race, a millennium of peace. Science was to bring war to an end by making it physically impossible. So long as war does not become psychologically impossible, it will remain or, if banished for a while, return. A long peace, even a certain organization of peace, may conceivably result, but so long as the heart of Man remains what it is, peace will remain elusive. The organization will break down under the stress of human passions. War is no longer, perhaps, a biological necessity, but it is still a psychological necessity; what is within us, must manifest itself outside. These are the views expressed by an extraordinary political leader of India's freedom movement of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. It is the 'within' that must be changed. That is the message of Sikhi as T. Sher Singh points out, but the message, alas, remains a message. Human failings are built-in and universal, but I contest his claim that that they rise in proportion to 'intelligence'. The solution he suggests is to revert to the sub-human, the simple in heart and mind. This would reverse the march of evolution. The baggage we carry is not so much the mind as the ego. It is the ego we must deal with. The enemy lurks within, and the heart of man cannot be changed without shedding the ego. True, there is little or no ego in the animal, and ego was necessary to make the Man. The next step entails stepping out of it if we must eliminate the need for war.
12: Gurjender Singh (Maryland, U.S.A.), April 23, 2011, 7:31 AM.
As Sikhs (who have a lot of wealth), we failed to help the widows of 1984 by following the basic principle of Sikhi and Guru Nanak to share and help. That is the reason even today after 27 years, they are asking money from the government helplessly.
13: Kirpal Singh (Daytona Beach, Florida, U.S.A.), April 23, 2011, 12:04 PM.
Dr. Ambedkar was concerned that Sikhs may have not liberated themselves completely from the Hindu caste-consciouness and practice in their own community. We need to rejuvenate real Sikhism by self-policing our community.
14: Devinder Singh (India), April 23, 2011, 10:07 PM.
But what is the ego? We must recognize it first before we can eliminate it. In the sub-human world of the ants and the bees, the individual workers know themselves as a part of the whole. They do not see themselves as separate from the group. The ego is what makes one conscious of being separate from others. If there were no ego, we would not perceive that we are a person separate from others. we would have the impression, like the bees, that we are a small part of a whole, a very small part of a very great whole. On the other hand, every one of us is most certainly quite conscious of being a separate person. Well, it is the ego that gives us this impression. As long as we are conscious in this way, it means that we have an ego. We do not share our wealth because it is "ours". We do not see ourselves as a small part of Sikhi. Remember, when we had less wealth, we were more dependent on the group. The solution then is not to go back to being bees, but to step up. When we begin to be aware that everything is ourself, and that this is only a very small point in the midst of thousands and thousands of other points of the same person that we are everywhere, when you feel that you are yourself in everything and that there is no separation, then one knows that one is on the way towards having no more ego. But this requires the practice of Sikhi as rigorously as the Gurus. Then there comes a time, according to the Gurus, when it is the All that thinks, it is the All that knows, it is the All that feels, it is the All that lives, just like the bees. But this is a realization of the individualized human, more intelligent, unlike the unindividualized bees, and it comes by a shedding of the ego. The ego is not just our mental makeup. It is a composite of our mental, emotional and physical being that is deeply embedded in us. It is not got rid of by mental understanding like we are trying to do, but by identification with the ONE by spiritual effort.
15: Angela (India), May 12, 2011, 7:25 PM.
Hukamnaame di katha comes everyday on "PTC Punjabi". Other channels also show Sikh satsangs. Why don't gyanis speak against the infiltration of the Hindu caste system amongst Sikhs. Why doesn't the jathedar in the gurdwars say anything. Politicians divide and rule. We must address this issue first. Time has come not to feel satisfied merely by singing praises of the past shahids but to really follow on the very basic teaching of Guru Nanak on the Oneness of mankind. "Ek noor te sab jag upjiya ko bhale ko mande". Then only will the blood shed by our brave ancestors not go in vain.