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A turning point?
Gurharpal Singh
In this provocative
article, the author has talked about the growing dissonance within
the Sikhs between the young and the old, the British- and the
India-born, the educated and the poorly educated. He also deduces
that the "neo-orthodoxy" is increasingly becoming disengaged from
the younger generation of Sikhs. We would welcome any considered
rejoinders on these pages.
At the beginning of the twenty-first
century, Britain is faced with the renewed challenge of managing
religious and ethnic diversity: a challenge ever present in the
settlement of ethnic minorities from the new Commonwealth after
1945, which assumed a new importance with the onset of globalisation
and the aftermath of the tragic events of 9/11 and 7/7. The current
backlash against Muslims has called into question the gradual
evolution of ideological multiculturalism within the public domain,
a debate that is generally framed as being about a ‘clash of
civilisations’ within the nation, or the question of national
identity, of ‘who we are’. The various policy initiatives planned by
the Labour government in response to these events seem destined to
undermine the multicultural settlement precisely at a juncture when,
arguably, it stands in need of further consolidation.
In such an environment, it is important to reflect on the lessons
that can be learnt from the development of non-Muslim groups, such
as the Sikhs. According to the 2001 census there are 336,000 Sikhs
in Britain, a figure that has increased from approximately 7,000 in
1951. At the height of domestic opposition to coloured immigration
in the 1960s, there were two typical responses to the settlement of
Sikhs in large numbers. The first, using language not too dissimilar
from that currently being used in reference to British Muslims,
questioned the possibility of Sikhs ever being able to integrate
into British society. Writing about the initial Sikh settlement in
Gravesend, John Gummer concluded that they were ‘strangers in a
strange land and ... intellectually and educationally ill-equipped
to deal with the complexities of a modern civilisation’. Gummer
subsequently became a cabinet minister and chairman of the
Conservative Party.
The second response reflected the concerns of the seriously engaged
policy analysts commissioned to identify the degree of racial
discrimination that ethnic minorities were suffering, as well as
policies to combat it. In their pioneering study of 1969, Colour and
Citizenship: a Report on British Race Relations, Rose et al were
more optimistic. For them, the trajectory of the Sikh community’s
future development in Britain depended largely on ‘efforts by
government and by local authorities ... to help adolescents to
remain within their own culture while feeling at home in the culture
of their adopted country’.
This analysis eventually informed the
policy formation process on ‘race relations’ of the then Labour
government, and one of its leading figures, Home Secretary Roy
Jenkins, is credited with formulating the credo of British
multiculturalism, not as ‘a flattening process of uniformity, but
cultural diversity coupled with equality of opportunity in an
atmosphere of mutual tolerance’. In retrospect, Jenkins’ view became
the axiomatic statement of the British state’s intention of
accommodating cultural diversity by promoting political integration
in the public sphere, while encouraging mutual tolerance as a
necessary condition of coexistence, thus enabling minority cultures
to flourish in the private sphere.
In the 50 years since Jenkins outlined his vision, British Sikhs
have tested, if not expanded, the limits of this framework. Since
the 1960s, successive campaigns over the right to wear turbans,
beards and kirpans (small daggers carried by orthodox Sikhs) in
public places and at work and schools have generated intense debates
about the limits of public accommodation of Sikh demands. While
conservative opinion has generally been reluctant to make any
concessions to such demands, a combination of persistent campaigns
and appeals to the long history of British-Sikh cooperation since
the annexation of Punjab in 1849 has secured a form of ‘negative
accommodation’: what some have called an ‘opt out’ from general
rule-making. For example, in the famous Mandla v Dowell Lee judgment
(1983), following intense lobbying, Sikhs secured a House of Lords
ruling that they were an ‘ethnic group’, and entitled to protection
under the Race Relations Act 1976 from direct and indirect
discrimination. Sikhs have also won exemptions for wearing turbans
in the building industry, and the right to carry kirpans in public
spaces, notwithstanding the security backlash since 9/11.
While historically British Sikhs are certainly a bridgehead
community that has ‘pioneered’ British multiculturalism, the furoré
which erupted over the closure of the play Behzti, following
protests by Sikhs, brought to the surface underlying tensions within
the community itself, and highlighted the rise of some groups that
are no longer satisfied with negotiating ‘opt outs’ where crucial
Sikh interests are concerned. Indeed, in the 1990s, the decline of
the Khalistani movement for a separate Sikh state within the Sikh
diaspora (which began after the storming of the Golden Temple in
India in 1984) created a vacuum in which the politics of Sikh
identity led to the formation of a separate Sikh political party in
Britain, a parliamentary Punjabi group and a sustained campaign for
a separate (non-Indian) Sikh identification in the census. Beyond
Britain, British Sikh leaders increasingly saw themselves as
spearheading a global Sikh diaspora in refashioning the fortunes of
the world Sikh community, of which the major component in Punjab
remained in a high degree of distress.
Whether it was the turban
campaign in France or hate crime elsewhere, British Sikhs were at
the forefront. This aggressive mobilisation around Sikh identity
issues has also been accompanied by demands for ‘deep
multiculturalism’. As many British Sikh leaders at the time of the
Behzti episode made clear, they had little time for the abstract
principles of free speech or free expression. Jasdev Singh Rai,
director of the Sikh Human Rights Group, declared: ‘we don’t need
lectures on freedom’. According to him, the libertarian defence of
Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, the author of Behzti, amounted to
‘neo-colonial sermonising disguised as free speech’.
Behzti brought to light a fundamental schism that is now emerging in
British Sikh society: between those born in Britain and those born
elsewhere. In 2001, 56.1 per cent of all Sikhs in Britain were
British-born, with the proportion of those born in India at 35 per
cent. British-born Sikhs are on the whole better educated than
non-British-born Sikhs, perform much better in the labour markets,
show a higher degree of association with British identity, and have
been at the forefront of mainstream Sikh representation within
political and social institutions. As a rule, they are far more
comfortable with contemporary social values that embrace equality on
the grounds of sex and sexual orientation, as well as the need to be
more self-reflective about one’s own traditions. More than any other
group, they appear to have fulfilled the distinguished writer
Khushwant Singh’s hope, expressed in the late 1970s, that the time
has come when a Sikh can say with pride, ‘I’m a Sikh; I am an
Englishman’.
In contrast to British-born Sikhs, there is a large group of Sikhs
that does not share in these achievements. This group struggles to
perform in the education and labour markets, is concentrated in the
‘Little Punjabs’, and suffers from the kind of socio-economic
disadvantage identified with sections of the Muslim community. Made
up of residual members of the working class and new migrants from
Punjab, its political outlook combines Sikh nationalism, industrial
militancy (one example of which was the recent Gate Gourmet strike)
and opposition to immigration policies that restrict exchanges with
Punjab. Intimately interwoven into the Sikh religious and cultural
economy of the inner cities, this group of Sikhs has traditionally
provided the community’s leadership, and remains extremely sensitive
to developments in Punjab.
Its institutional control of gurdwaras,
moreover, gives it access to exceptional resources to continually
replenish these values, while perpetuating ‘backward integration’
with South Asia. The anthropologist Brian Axel has described this
group as being like ‘“primitive peoples” positioned within
modernity’, whose ideals and values have changed little – if at all
– from the mid-twentieth century village, thereby placing it at odds
both with the rapidly changing Punjabi Sikh society in India, and
the emerging culture of young British Sikhs.
It is the ongoing dominance of the first generation of Punjabi
settlers in the leadership of Sikhs in Britain that is generally
seen as the cause of the serious failure to establish enduring
institutions that could have articulated their interests better, if
not replicated the trajectories of other ethnic minorities. Apart
from setting up gurdwaras, British Sikhs have created few
institutions that command legitimacy, and most of these have been
undermined regularly by factionalism, internecine conflicts and
leadership struggles. Recent efforts to establish a British
Consultative Forum illustrate the difficulties of cooperation among
Sikh organisations like the Network of Sikh Organisations, Sikh
Human Rights Group, Sikh Federation (UK), and the Guru Nanak Nishkam
Sewak Jatha. These organisations have some degree of support beyond
their immediate local base, but they cannot command broader
legitimacy. Intense rivalry between them for ‘who represents the
Sikhs’ makes it harder to establish a representative communal voice,
and enables the British state to work towards only those policy
outcomes which it views as most desirable.
In our recent book, Sikhs in Britain: The Making of a Community,
Darshan S Tatla and I argued that contemporary Sikhs were not only
having to face the serious challenges of social fragmentation, but
were also confronted with three competing futures: a reassertion of
traditional Sikh identity, with (like Islam) shades of globalised
Sikhism; a weak variant of Anglo-Sikhism; and a ‘deconstructionist’
Sikhism that addresses the contemporary concerns – the development
of biotechnologies, which poses serious problems for the traditional
pro-life Sikh stance, the equal opportunities legislation that has
highlighted Sikhs’ strong anti-gay and lesbian sentiments, and the
rapid vaporisation of the Sikh national ideal of Khalistan – for
which traditional Sikhism is unable to provide meaningful answers.
Which option will be followed will be determined mainly by the
outcome of the struggle between the British-born and the
non-British-born generations.
The former have long-term trends on
their side, and are more able and at ease with British institutions.
For them, Punjab increasingly resembles a ‘distant holy land’ (of
religious places), ‘pleasure’ (holidays, marriage and bhangra) and
‘pain’ (of extended family obligations), but not a ‘homeland’ that
can command their futures. In the main, their vision of future
society has been nurtured on cultural and religious diversity in
contemporary Britain, where they, like many other ethnic minority
groups, have come to embrace the cosmopolitan ideal that while they
may appear to belong nowhere, they actually belong everywhere. Yet
this vision is in direct opposition to the stubborn and unyielding
outlook of the Indian-born Sikhs who still control the political and
religious economy of the Sikh community in Britain, and show little
signs of divesting themselves of these powers or moving away from
neo-orthodoxy.
The growing dissonance between the young and the old,
the British- and the Indian-born, the educated and the poorly
educated, might well give birth to a new reform movement to realign
British Sikh institutions to the needs of new generations. There are
some strong indications that this is already in motion.
Neo-orthodoxy may well be in power, but it is increasingly
disengaged from the daily lives of most young Sikhs.
In one sense, however, this struggle is unlikely to be simply an
inter-generational one. It will be structured against the broader
background of Sikhs as a global community with global concerns. As a
small religious group, Sikhs in Britain and elsewhere are always
prone to the effects of ‘critical events’ like 1984, which
restructure the political and social outlook of the group. At the
same time, British Sikhs are now better able to deal with such
potential challenges than ever before. They have, through their own
upheavals, educated the British state to be far more sensitive than
hitherto to their transitional needs. To what extent this
sensitivity will survive the current retreat from multiculturalism
remains to be seen.
(Gurharpal Singh is the Nadir Dinshaw Chair in inter-religious
relations at the University of Birmingham.)
18 April 2007
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