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Com Surjeet
& The Sikhs
Subaltern domain not sad
Sach Kanwal
Singh
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In 1984, when Operation Bluestar took place and the massacre of
Sikhs happened, the CPI(M) was virtually lorded over by
Harkishen Singh Surjeet, but his and the party's voice remained
muted. The Sikh community never harboured any hopes of this
turbaned man who suffixed 'Singh' with his name |
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 One
of
India's
best known Sikh faces who had little or nothing to do with Sikhi,
Harkishan Singh Surjeet, is dead. Surjeet (92), who lorded over the
Communist Party of India (Marxist) for decades and was known as a
deal-maker, passed away in Noida, near Delhi, after a prolonged
illness.
CPI (M) General Secretary Prakash Karat said
Surjeet died at 1335 hours.
Surjeet led the pack of communist leaders who
ensured that the Left in India is shorn of its ideals, and was
hailed as a “pragmatic leader” by the brahaminized India,
‘pragmatic’ being a phrase that will be widely used in his
obituaries appearing in various newspapers over the next few days.
His downfall from a wanna be revolutionary to a
pragmatic politician to a king-maker is the stuff of life stories
that the Indian media projects as successes in politics. Fellow
communists in
West
Bengal see him as the man who prevented Jyoti Basu from taking up
the top job as PM, a decision that is often called the historic
blunder.
He prided himself on keeping the right-wing Hindu
nationalist party BJP out of power in 1996 and eight years later
helped Congress in cobbling together a coalition at the Center.
Surjeet and his ilk have been foremost in drawing a totally false
but often much hyped line between the Congress and the BJP – the
secular versus communal – irrespective of the fact that Congress too
followed similarly communal agendas, has the interests of the same
castes at the heart of its agenda, and is a largely brahaminical
party.
Men like Surjeet lent validity to Congress'
claims of secularism. No wonder, Surjeet was described often as a
"pragmatic Marxist leader", the oxymoron being hardly noticed.
Surjeet prided himself on being a kingmaker,
something that has come to mean a sort of wheeler-dealer in Indian
politics. Shorn of the many frills and pretenses, Surjeet and Amar
Singh are seen as men of matchable integrity and highly ideological
flexibility. No wonder, Amar Singh has often called him his
political guru, and has played the role of a king-saver only a few
days back when Manmohan Singh won the vote of confidence.
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Of London
Tod Singh and
other such stuff
There are many ways in which to cloak the real Surjeet. For
example his political profile can always feature how he shared
his birthday with the martyrdom day of Shaheed Bhagat Singh, and
followed the path of the great martyr. (Which communist does not
claim that?) His village is not very far from the martyr's
village. He has always given his religion as 'Sikh'. His
obituary writers can always focus on the fact that he did join
in 1930 the Naujawan Bharat Sabha.
And glowing nostalgia can be poured about how, on the
anniversary of the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh, Surjeet hoisted
the Indian tricolor at the court in Hoshiarpur, something for
which he was punished by the colonial regime. And national album
will look so good if one recalled that he stated his name as
London Tod Singh (one who breaks
London). He
co-founded the Kisan Sabha in Punjab, edited papers like Dukhi
Duniya, Chingari, Lok Lehar etc etc. But once the blah blah is
over, read this profile again, and decide which one is closer to
the truth when one wants to describe the role of Harkishan Singh
Surjeet in Indian politics. |
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In 1984, when Operation Bluestar took place and
the massacre of Sikhs happened, the CPI(M) was virtually lorded over
by Harkishan Singh Surjeet, but his and the party’s voice remained
muted. The Sikh community never harboured any hopes of this turbaned
man who suffixed 'Singh' with his name. Such was his political
abracadabra in
Delhi
that even his own village of Bundala in Punjab's Doaba remained
totally aloof of any subaltern notions of development and progress.
In fact, Punjab's tallest communist leaders who
were contemporaries of Surjeet, openly detested his politics and men
like Jagjit Singh Lyallpuri, Mangat Ram Pasla, Tarsem Jodhan, and
Chandershekhar were one by one thrown out of the party, thanks to
the hold of Surjeet in the Central Committee and the Polit Buro. The
CPI(M)'s standing in Punjab is negligible, its state head Balwant
Singh a lightweight who owed his position to Surjeet, and its
influence limited to just one Punjabi newspaper 'Desh Sewak' owned
by Surjeet and his ilk.
Surjeet was part of a controversial claim
sometime back that at some stage in his life he was a backer of
Khalistan but even the radicals in the Sikh community believed they
would be better served without men like him.
So much had Surjeet mastered the art of backroom
operation and with such aplomb did he play the game that his title
of Machiavellian seemed well earned. If the party later found such
skillsets of much use, it was because Surjeet's disconnect from the
grassroots and his love for wheeling-dealing was to throw up men
like Karat and Sitaram Yechuri as
India's
communist leaders. Rest assured, there are no reports of India's
poor, famished, impoverished teeming millions crying at his death.
Neither would they be at the funeral.
The Diaspora will be interested to know that
Balwant Singh Ramoowalia was definitely seen dropping tears but no
one claimed he was poor.
1 August, 2008
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