There is a rare opportunity for India to embrace the Sikh Diaspora and right the wrongs that have festered for years and alienated the community.
Many Sikhs want to go home, visit their families and rebuild connections, but the troubled history comes in the way, as do some punitive Indian government policies. But this distance from Operations Bluestar and Black Thunder to operation reconciliation can be shortened-with sagacity and outreach.
The Khalistanis and other motivated elements may never come back, but their numbers have steadily shrunk. Their leader, Dr. Paramjit Singh Ajrawat, stands indicted for defrauding the federal health care programmes for the poor and elderly to the tune of USD 2 million.
But Ajrawat’s inheritors such as “Sikhs for Justice” retain the capacity to create minor headaches – the latest is to pressure President Barack Obama to push for a change in the Indian Constitution to treat Sikhs as a separate community when he goes to New Delhi.
These activists, who operate largely on the web and are reportedly funded by Pakistani intelligence, have no support in the US Congress today unlike in the 80s and 90s when pro-Khalistan and pro-Pakistan Congressmen used to regularly join hands to condemn India. Time and India’s economic growth broke that alliance.
It is the larger Sikh community, which deserves serious attention from policy makers in New Delhi. A fresh start could strengthen the bonds, which have frayed over legitimate complaints.
The list of grievances is short but important. The families who suffered in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots are yet to get justice. The diaspora leaders have all seen “The Widow Colony, ” a 2005 documentary on the widows of Trilokpuri, Mongolpuri and other colonies of Delhi that bore the brunt of the violence.
“In the entire world, I think there is only one place called the Widow Colony,” says Sukhpal Singh Dhanoa, in an indictment that is sufficient and chilling. He uses the word “genocide” to describe the horrific killings of Sikhs in the wake of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination by two Sikh bodyguards.
“In Canada and America, when extremist elements talk of Khalistan and ask why there was no justice for the Sikhs after ’84, we don’t have any answer,” Dhanoa explains. “We are Indians first and we can’t respond.” As someone who anchors a Sikh community television programme every week, he has his finger on the pulse.
The other big issue is the denial of Indian visas to Sikhs who left after 1984 and sought political asylum in the west. The Indian government, seeing it as a rejection of India and “the great escape” from Indian law, created a blacklist of sorts. Around 300 names are said to be on the blacklist.
Sikh leaders say that three decades is a long enough denial – of the sights and smells of Punjab, of its lush beauty, its infectious love. And many have pined for Punjab sitting in cold apartments in New York, Chicago and other cities.
It is possible that some may have genuinely feared for their lives when they left India but it is also true that many used the American system to escape to a better life. Nothing new in the idea of an economic escape but because young Sikhs in the 1990s were also sympathetic to the separatist cause, New Delhi has been wary.
Sikh community leaders agree that some may indeed have cases against them in India but most do not. They applied for asylum because the lawyers told them it was the easiest route to a legal status in the US. Why not give visas to those whose records are clean, they ask.
The Indian Embassy has been trying for the past year to break the deadlock and re-establish genuine contact with the Sikh community in an effort to knit together the Indian family abroad. A dissenting diaspora is never healthy either for the mother country or the adopted one.
Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi explicitly wants to link up with the Indians abroad, he met a group of Sikh leaders from the United States and Canada during his official visit in September. The gesture itself filled a few wounds. He listened respectfully and promised to act.
Sikh community leaders say they have faith in Modi – his biggest appeal for the Sikhs is that he is not from the Congress Party-but they want movement and results.
“The Indian government should modify its blacklist from time to time,” says Washington-based Dhanoa. “If there is no case against a person, he should get an Indian visa. But some may be culprits.”
Other Sikh community leaders echo the grievances. Daljit Singh Sawhney, a medical doctor from Maryland who runs a gurudwara, says he only has good memories of India where he grew up and got a free education. “I never felt like a second class citizen. I remember being greeted at every train station in the days of Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan and when both the jawan and the kisan were Sikhs.”
“The whole problem started after ’84. There is distrust of the Congress Party because it had a role in the riots. The present government is very receptive to the Sikhs but the guilty must be punished,” says Sawhney, who is 72 years old.
Maninder Singh, an IT entrepreneur and a successful businessman, has seen it all. He left Kanpur and then India because of the ’84 riots after he was chased by a mob and his house was attacked. But he speaks without anger and goes back every year to visit family. “I love India.”
He is comfortable in both countries – having got his master’s in economics in India and his MBA in the US. He remembers how badly divided the Sikh community in America was when he landed. The anti-Sikh riots were on everyone’s mind. Dinner conversations hovered around how Sikhs were treated in India.
Fights used to break out regularly between the pro- and anti-Khalistan groups at the Fairfax gurudwara in Virginia, one of the oldest in the area. “There was always police outside,” Maninder recalls.
It is different today and most Sikhs are proud of their Indian heritage, he says. “Most have no interest in Khalistan.” He has first-hand experience of the Khalistanis – his brother-in-law died in the bombing of Air India’s Kanishka in 1985.
Maninder says the Sikh community has put its best foot forward for the Modi government. It is now up to New Delhi to consider the broad picture and take appropriate measures. If the larger community is pulled back into the fold, the extremist elements would lose all steam.
The views expressed in the above article are that Ms.Seema Sirohi, a senior journalist based in Washington D.C.
—ANI