|
Badal finds new
love, it’s Rajiv Gandhi
Kalam Nishan
Singh
| |
Akali Dal patron lays foundation stone of campus named after
Rajiv Gandhi. With what face will he ever face a widow of the
1984 genocide? What next? A project named after Indira? Abdali?
Aurangzeb? |
|
CHANDIGARH:
EERIE is the feeling one gets from such action. Just twenty years
ago, no one, not even Sukhbir Singh Badal, could have believed that
such a thing can happen, will happen. And the perpetrator will be
none other than the supreme of the Akali Dal, a Sikh Chief Minister
of Punjab who has dabbled in panthic politics for nearly five
decades now and whom the community has helped elect a Chief Minister
repeatedly.
Every single
victim of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom has been doubly humiliated. The
trauma and the sense of shame have been re-visited. The souls of
those who were burnt alive, garlanded with burning cycle tyres,
could not have been cursed in a worse manner.
The joint
national agenda of the Hindu ultra-right wing Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP)
and the now-soft-now-hardcore communalism-propagating Congress are
being implemented in
Punjab by Sardar
Parkash Singh Badal. Welcome! Please step in, and meet the new
Indian National Hero: Parkash Singh Badal. God save the Panth.
On June 12,
Parkash Singh Badal thought it fit to lay the foundation stone of
the new campus of the Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law (RGNUL).
There was not a murmur of protest from the Akali Dal-BJP leadership
at the nomenclature of the Institute, and this when the same
government was creating so much of fuss over the nomenclature of the
upcoming international airport at
Chandigarh.
So much so that
Parkash Singh Badal was writing one missive after the other to the
Prime Minister to name the Bathinda refinery after the tenth Guru,
Guru Gobind Singh and the
Chandigarh
airport after Shaheed Bhagat Singh.
At a time when
activists like advocate Harwinder Singh Phoolka and journalists like
Manoj Mitta have done so much to push for the course of justice for
1984 genocide victims and demands for a memorial to the victims has
been raised by Mitta and many others -- Mitta even suggested the
Trilokpuri block in Delhi, the worst site of the massacres -- the
Parkash Singh Badal government, the SGPC, the Akali Dal, and even
our clergy have remained silent on the issue.
Till, of course,
only that moment when they decided to make the silence more
deafening. Not one statement from not one organization, except some
honorable exceptions like the Dal Khalsa and a few radical voices,
have been heard on Badal backing the Institute named after Rajiv
Gandhi.
This is the man
whose "When a big tree falls, the earth shakes" shook the
subcontinent with an extreme form of display of lack of humanity.
Or does Badal
Sahib have a hidden agenda to make the path smoother for the Sikhs
in the Indian nation-state? After all,
India is a
nuclear power nation state with a rising economic clout in the world
and a burgeoning middle class. What good will come out of a
continuing inimical relationship with New Delhi, particularly when
the top two parties with cross-country presence, the Congress and
the BJP, agree on their anti-Sikh stance? So, this is his way of
mending the relationship with the Congress, headed by Rajiv Gandhi's
widow Sonia Gandhi.
After all, Rajiv
Gandhi was a young leader and could have made a mistake. Did he not
sign an accord with the Sikhs and helped factionalized Akalis to
gain power again? Is that Badal Sahib's argument? Then, will it not
be better to go the whole hog and name a few institutions after
Indira Gandhi. After all, why not show magnanimity, the one thing in
abundance that a victim should possess?
Or, better
still, at a time when the world is trembling at the thought of Osama
bin Laden, and the West is fond of talking about Islamic terrorism,
why not iron out the civilisational faults of history and the
bitterness of the historical past, and name a college in Badal
village or the many new upcoming ventures in Sukhbir Badal's current
baby constituency Bathinda after Ahmed Shah Abdali or Nadarshah?
That Badal's
backing and foundation stone laying ceremony with a huge portrait of
Rajiv Gandhi in the background comes at a time when the Akali Dal
and the SGPC seem to have washed of their hands from the issue of
raising a memorial to the 1984 Operation Bluestar martyrs is all the
more sad.
At the same
time, it has filled the average Sikh with rage.
Rage that Badal
has gone a step further after tying up his electoral and family
fortunes with the Indian establishment represented by the hegemonic
forces of Congress, BJP and their many avatars. The silence at the
anniversary of Operation Bluestar has been followed up by paying
floral tributes to Rajiv Gandhi and naming Law Institute campus
after him.
It would have
been a different matter if Badal had protested, or even suggested,
that a wholesome policy for naming of public institutions be
evolved. It is no one's case that we should stop using the airport
at Delhi
because it is named after Indira Gandhi, but we must demand that
airports naming should have a uniform policy.
From attending
havans to visiting temples of Lord Parshuram to wearing Mukats to
performing aarti on the occasion of Ram Navmi to defending BJP's
line on Ram Sethu, Badal is going a step ahead every week. Only a
fortnight back, he actually chanted Hare Krishna Hare Rama and asked
the rest of the sangat to repeat the chant after him.
As we wrote
recently, any quom that disowns its legacy is condemned to live in a
denial mode. Badal is pursuing a dangerous luxury. This is a well
thought out effort to erase collective memory. Assassins of memories
must be pointed out, and it is now up to the Sikh intelligentsia and
the sangat to come out in the open and call a spade a spade, a hero
of the brahamanical forces a Parkash Singh Badal.
11
June,
2008
|
Read Also
