SIKHS DO NOT DIE

Yes, that was what I used to believe when I was growing up in the town of Ranchi, Jharkhand.

Admiration

Ours was a predominantly Christian neighbourhood with a scattering of families professing other religions. Among them was an amiable and well-respected Sikh family, residing there for decades. They owned a mini department store, which serviced our neighbourhood. The generation next of that family still resides there and struggles to provide the neighbourhood with their daily needs from its mini department store and medicines from its medicine shop.

'Sikhs do not die'. I had arrived at this conclusion because neither had I noticed any coffin or pall being taken out of the home of the Sikh neighbours nor had I observed any pall being taken for funeral or cremation by Sikh pall-bearers accompanied by Sikh mourners.

'Sikhs do not work for others'. My second conclusion about Sikhs! The many Sikhs I knew or encountered were invariably engaged either in commerce or in industries. I never had an encounter with a Sikh guy doing a 'naukri'.

To my parents too Sikhs were an awesome lot. Many years back, my mother and I were witnessing 'Beating the Retreat' at Vijay Chowk. The Navy Band was displaying its musical skills. My mother noticed a smartly attired handsome Sikh drummer officer, and commented, "You cannot beat Sikh guys for smartness. They are a class apart".

Disillusionment

In late seventies I relocated to New Delhi. A place with a large population of Sikhs. There were encounters or dealings with Sikhs everyday. To my disillusionment, I realised that there is nothing special about Sikhs. They can be as good or as bad as any other Indian; they are as casteists as their casteists Hindu neighbours; they can be as bigoted as their Hindu, Muslim or Christian neighbours; they flout rules and regulations as blatantly as any other Indians; they indulge in corrupt practices as do other Indians; they are as brave or as coward as other Indians.

In the year 1984 I was residing in West Delhi when large number of Sikhs were gruesomely and inhumanly massacred. It was reign of terror in that part of Delhi. Being a good neighbour and disgusted by the horror, I actively performed vigilante duties many a nights to protect our Sikh neighbours. The debates about those riots refuse to die down. People from all walks of life and professing different faiths have been contributing to the debate and been equivocal in denouncing the killings of innocents.

However, intriguingly, no one remembers or cares to remember the indiscriminate killings of innocent Hindus in the Punjab countryside by the marauding bands of misguided Sikh youth, that preceded the 1984 riots. Everyday there were news and pictures of those killings; buses with passengers were being stopped; Hindu passengers being segregated and then shot point blank; many hundreds were massacred like this. Surely our collective memory is not so short-lived. Sadly, the Sikh intelligentsia then looked the other way; failed miserably to condemn the killings and; even tried to give it a veneer of legitimacy through spurious arguments.

The 'halo of awesomeness' around Sikhs, imagined by a young me, crumbled. However, I still long to re imagine that "Sikhs do not die".