Dera Sacha Saudha - A movie we have seen before

Punjab is going through a "blossoming memories" phase these days, only that the memories are of dark tragedies that a lot of us wish to forget but a few have a vested interest in reliving. And there in lies the seeds for the tragedy to sprout again in familiar and unfamiliar ways. The soil of the sub-continent is a fertile ground for religious philosophies, sects, sub-sects, interpretations to blossom. Since time immemorial this land is a witness to many different thoughts emerge and submerge, assimilate and separate, solidify and liquefy into its cultural firmament. The pattern is obvious and familiar to us: A tradition starts, it grows, to manage it forms a "high-church" authority, the authority wanes, and a series of "low-churches" form and take its place in the ground level. Some times there is a reverse process of solidification from the ground up to the top and then the cycle repeats. No religious tradition in India is exempt from this including Islam and Christianity. It would be vainglorious to attribute this to any special property of the land or to its people, but it can be averred that it makes it an en excellent experiment lab for the human condition to rejuvenate itself.

One such flower is Sikhism that blossomed in the middle of last millennium. True to our traditions, it was both path breaking as well as assimilative, taking in new adherents with the force of its philosophy and the universal appeal of its simple message. Up until Guru Arjan Dev's reign, it remained strictly spiritual concerning itself with God and the disciple. As a reaction to Guru Arjan's martyrdom, Guru Har Govind Rai took upon the twin swords of piri and miri to protect and preserve the religion in both its temporal and spiritual forms. Faced by the threat of physical annihilation and repeated persecutions the Dasamesh founded the Khalsa order and initiated amrit sanchar to form a special protective force to preserve not just the liberty of Sikhs to practice their religion, but to protect everyone's liberty in the face of tyranny. The Amrit sanchar initiation is not obligatory to follow the Guru Granth Sahib, but it is a passage ritual to become a Khalsa member. The initiation enjoins additional responsibilities, but does not grant spiritual authority over others. The authority remained sacrosanct with the Guru Granth Sahib.
After the martyrdom of Guru Gobind Singh and his four young sons, Sikhism emerged thru a baptism of fire. Faced by targeted genocide [fifty rupees for each Sikh scalp] and innumerable persecutions by Ahmad Shah Abdali, the Khalsa order stood in the forefront of the struggle of all Sikhs and became the visible symbol of the religion. However, true to our land's traditions there were many sects and sub-sects that emerged in the shadow of the big ecclesiastical tradition, such as Udasis, Radhasoamis, Nirankaris, Namdharis which have flourished by establishing "deras" and followers of their own.

1920s was a ripe period for the "solidification" phase. At that time the Gurdwaras, even the very important ones such as Harmandir Sahib and Nankhana Sahib were in the control of Hindu mahants from Udasi sect, who had reduced the temples as their personal fiefdoms and were indulging in typical practices like money for prasad and pujas, idol worship, entry bar for lower castes. A revolutionary movement to cleanse the Gurdwaras and a "back to basics" campaign resulted in the formation of the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabhandhak Committee in 1925. This body was to take care of the management of all Gurudwaras in all lands. The enormity of the task came along with the advantage of a powerful temporal authority to lord over all the Sikhs to its office holders. The very first act of this body was to reduce the definition of who can vote for its office holders. It went to proclaim that " A Sikh is any person who believes in Akal Purakh; in the ten Gurus (Guru Nanak to Guru Gobind Singh); in Sri Guru Granth Sahib, other writings of the ten Gurus, and their teachings; in the Khalsa initiation ceremony instituted by the tenth Guru; and who does not believe in any other system of religious doctrine" In one single stroke it eliminated non-baptized Sikhs and even those with dual sect loyalty among the baptized. Thus the process of reductionism and semitization started, both of which are antithetical to the religious traditions of our land in general, and to the universality of the Panth in particular.

Since the inception of this body, by design or circumstance, the spiritual authority has piggy backed on political ambitions of some of its members who formed the political party Shiromani Akali Dal. Of course parallels were trotted out in defence from the past dating back to Guru Har Govind Rai's piri and miri. Post independence, in a democratic set up this combination was purposely used and abused by all sides in the language agitation, the river water disputes and the Punjabi State agitation. Terrible mistakes of monumental proportions were made in all sides. To counteract the Punjabi Subha agitation there was a bizarre campaign in erstwhile Punjab (Haryana & Himachal included) to ask the Hindus to list their first language as Hindi. This macabre tragedy of people who spoke none other than Punjabi and were not even familiar with devanagari script to proclaim Hindi as their first language sowed the first seeds of communal mistrust.

Pre-independence the population of Sikhs in erstwhile Unified Punjab was 12%. Post independence after the trauma of partition, in East Punjab it was around 33%. Finally the Punjabi Subha agitation secured a Sikh majority province with 61% majority. And then the wheels came off the wagon. Both Akali Dal and the Congress party started to play one up man ship to secure this nectar stored in the Takht. The historical memory of the Sikhs about the martyrdom of heroes fallen in defence of the faith against tyranny was a convenient setting in playing out this drama of real, imagined and imaginary grievances. The more challenges these conditions produced, the inept leadership became. Not only that; to keep the leadership intact from internal competition the Akali leaders themselves developed vested interests by fomenting new fires and keeping old embers smoldering.

This resulted in the vicious cycle of more grievances, more agitations and more heart burns. Out of this cauldron was the episode of 1978. In that year, Nirankaris, a sub-sect pronounced heretical by the "high-church", held a convention. The charge for heresy? He allegedly proclaimed himself a Guru in front of Guru Granth Sahib. The self-appointed protector of faith, Bhindranwale took a couple of hundred of his followers and one of his lieutenant drew his sword and tried to behead the leader Baba Gurbachan on the convention stage. He was shot dead by the Baba's body guard on the spot and in the melee 13 Akali Sikhs and 4 Nirankaris were killed. Then the revenge came in 1980 in Delhi when the Baba was shot dead by Bhindranwale followers .

The cycle of violence and counter-violence quickly reached a crescendo and culminated in the millennial tragedy of Operation Blue Star. If I were to rank the tragedies of human history, this must rank in the top ten, 1984 Anti-Sikh riots and Partition included. Some tragedies are not so virulent in its scale or the number of people killed. But by their symbolic nature they engender greater tragedies in their wake. Operation Blue Star was one such tragedy. On a personal note, I was 9 years old and had just started reading the vernacular newspaper. I can vividly recall the photos of the lanky Gen.A.S.Vaidya inspecting the shattered Akal Takht. That and 1984 riots fed into the narrative of Sikh Persecution which was most vile and duplicitous until then and made them look real and conferred legitimacy on the likes of Bhindranwale. A group of five most geniuses in the world locked up in a room to devise a scheme to grow the militancy could not have come up with a better thing.

Cutting to the chase today, a sub-sect Dera Sacha Saudha formed almost 50 years ago is currently headed by Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh. The Dera has campuses all over Punjab, Haryana. There are lots of other sects and other deras. The reason for their popularity? The "high-church" mentality of the SGPC in running the affairs of the Sikh religion would be the primary. It is not a widely known fact that Punjab has one of the largest dalit population in India , around 33%. They don't feel entirely welcomed and accommodated in the power structures of the Jat/Khatri Sikh centric SGPC. As a result the "low-churches" have mushroomed all over Punjab. It is no secret that the SGPC tekhedars have made no bones about not just "demolishing" these deras but "deravaad" itself. The deras are giving stiff competition to the SGPC in attracting new adherents even among the baptized. The evangelical zeal of SGPC has ebbed because of the compromises it had made to capture political power and to hold it further.

It is in these circumstances, we hear voices to ban the Dera, vacate the campus, close shop and stop preaching. Sadly they are reminiscent of what we find in the auto-bio-graphy of Jehangir, Tuzuk-i-Jehangiri,

At Goindwal, on the bank of the river Beas, lived a Hindu, Arjan by name, in the garb of a Pir or Sheikh. Thus, many innocent Hindus and even foolish and ignorant Musalmans he brought into his fold who beat the drum noisily of his self-appointed prophethood. He was called Guru. From all sides, worshippers came to offer their homage to him and put full trust in his word. For three or four generations, they had warmed up this shop. For a long time I had harboured the wish that I should set aside this shop of falsehood or I should bring him into the fold of Islam