India's new premier and old
wounds By Ranjit Devraj
NEW
DELHI - The appointment of Manmohan Singh, a follower of
the Sikh faith, as India's prime minister may finally
bridge a serious rift between the small but powerful
religious minority and the Congress Party.
The
1984 assassination of Congress party leader and prime
minister Indira Gandhi by her own Sikh bodyguards
triggered a Hindu backlash led by several Congress
leaders, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 4,000
Sikhs, most of them in the Indian capital. Gandhi's
assassination itself was carried out in revenge for the
raid by the army that Gandhi - called the "Iron Lady"
for her authoritarian ways - ordered on the Sikh holy of
holies, the Golden Temple in Amritsar city in Punjab
state, earlier that year.
But the tensions felt
over the tainted Hindu-Sikh relationship appear to be
easing with Singh sworn in as prime minister on
Saturday, making him India's first ever Sikh prime
minister. He now heads a Congress-led coalition
government that has 28 cabinet ministers, including 18
from Congress, as well as 40 ministers of state, 10 of
which are independent.
On late Sunday night,
71-year-old Singh awarded Congress Party veterans with
key cabinet posts, nearly 30 hours after the coalition
ministry's swearing in, with the delay being attributed
to jostling among allies for key ministries.
Contrary to all expectations, Singh did not
retain the key finance ministry, and instead chose to
bring back Palaniappan Chidambaram to the portfolio.
Chidambaram held the post in the 1990s and was widely
praised for lowering tariffs and taxes.
Natwar
Singh, a close aide to Congress leader Sonia Gandhi, has
been appointed foreign minister. The 73-year-old will
have an incredibly busy - and sensitive - agenda ahead
of him, which includes taking the India-Pakistan peace
process forward. The new government has promised to
fashion a stable, working and cooperative relationship
under the framework of the 1972 Simla Agreement and
subsequent agreements and confidence-building measures.
Talks on nuclear confidence building measures between
the two countries scheduled to take place next week have
been postponed following a request from New Delhi. It is
now expected to take place before foreign
secretary-level talks in May-June, which will be
followed by a meeting of the two foreign ministers.
As India's ambassador to Pakistan from 1980 to
1982, Natwar Singh is well aware of the complexities
involved in dealing with Islamabad. He sees no
difficulty in the coalition government talking to
President General Pervez Musharraf or Prime Minister
Zafarullah Khan Jamali. "We deal with the government
that is in power in any country," he said.
Congress veteran Pranab Mukherjee was appointed
defense minister. Mukherjee, a 68-year-old writer and
journalist who had been billed as a potential prime
minister, signed India's treaty to enter the World Trade
Organization in 1994.
Only one woman is among
the 28 full cabinet ministers, Meira Kumar, with the
social justice and empowerment ministry portfolio.
Former private-sector industrialist Kamal Nath was made
commerce minister and Dayanidhi Maran, son of former
commerce minister Murasoli Maran, was given the
communications and information technology ministry.
Manmohan Singh says the group reflects India's
"diversity and richness". A presidential communique
issued Sunday said all unallocated portfolios will be
looked after by the prime minister.
Sikh
support Much of the country's Sikh community is
voicing happiness over the appointment of Manmohan
Singh. "We are delighted that a Sikh has become prime
minister. We can now forget the past, bitter as it was,"
Kuldip Singh Kalra, a prosperous Delhi businessman, told
IPS in an interview in his Delhi home.
Kalra was
attacked by rampaging Hindu mobs in the days after
Gandhi's assassination and narrowly escaped lynching,
thanks to the intervention of his Hindu neighbors.
Because men of the Sikh faith wear turbans and keep
their hair and beards uncut, they were easy targets for
the mobs that picked them off buses or stopped them in
the streets before lynching them.
For days after
the assassination, Sikh homes and businesses in Delhi
and other cities were in flames until Gandhi's son and
successor in office, Rajiv Gandhi, called in the army to
control the rioting, looting and arson.
Manmohan
Singh's attention was drawn to the plight of Sikh
survivors and widows of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom at the
first press conference he held on Thursday after his
appointment. He responded by saying: "If we are divided
in the name of religion, the country is in danger. We
have to create an atmosphere of peace."
Manmohan
Singh pledged to ensure that pogroms like in 1984 and
the more recent one two years ago against Muslims in
western Gujarat state, under the rule of the pro-Hindu
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), would never occur again in
the future.
The Indian army's raid on the Golden
Temple was to get rid of the renegade Sikh leader
Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale who, as part of his demand
for a separate Sikh state in Punjab, had turned the
ancient shrine in the middle of a lake into a fortress
and challenged the army to raid it. Indira Gandhi never
hesitated - just as she did not hesitate to order the
Indian army to help separate Bangladesh from Pakistani
rule in 1971, or order the testing of a nuclear device
in 1974 in the teeth of international opposition.
The Sikh separatist movement in Punjab petered
out in the early 1990s when a Congress prime minister,
Narasimha Rao, authorized a Sikh police officer, K P S
Gill, to use a "bullet-for-bullet" policy to seek and
eliminate its top leadership.
But Sikh
resentment against the Congress continued and led to the
forging of an unlikely political alliance between the
fundamentalist Sikh party Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD),
which dominates Punjab, and the BJP. In fact, SAD's
support of the BJP contributed greatly to the emergence
of the pro-Hindu party as the biggest single party in
1998 and the installation of its leader Atal Bihari
Vajpayee - who was ousted in the earlier April/May
election - as prime minister.
But last year,
charges of high corruption resulted in the SAD under
chief minister Prakash Singh Badal losing Punjab to the
Congress led by Amarinder Singh, a prominent Sikh leader
and scion of the Sikh Patiala royal family.
Now,
the appointment of Manmohan Singh as prime minister - a
Sikh from a family settled in Amritsar, as important to
Sikhs as the Vatican is to Roman Catholics - has taken
the wind out of the sails of the SAD party, which
benefits from the support and funding of overseas Sikhs,
such as those in Britain and the United States. On
Thursday, Manjit Singh Calcutta, secretary of the
well-endowed Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee,
embarrassed Sikh political leaders by heaping praise on
Congress president Sonia Gandhi for selecting Manmohan
Singh for the top job after declining to accept the
nomination for prime minister.
The committee
controls Sikh shrines and temples around the world -
including the Golden Temple itself. Badal himself was
careful to welcome Manmohan Singh's appointment, but
carefully avoided praise for Gandhi, who leads his
party's main political opponents.
"To praise
Sonia Gandhi is politically irrational and illogical for
us," said a leader of SAD, who asked not to be named
because of the delicateness of the issue. "For six
decades the Congress Party has systematically denied
Sikhs their due and we cannot abandon our goals because
of a single gesture, however great," he added.
Long before India's independence from British
rule in 1947, the Sikhs - who for centuries dominated
the Punjab region, part of which is now in Pakistan -
have been demanding an independent homeland of their own
called Khalistan or Land of the Pure.
India, on
independence, was partitioned along religious lines into
Muslim Pakistan and Hindu-majority but constitutionally
secular India. The border that was drawn up went right
through Sikh-dominated Punjab on the western side and
through Bengal in the east to delineate East Pakistan,
which later became Bangladesh.
The Sikhs have
always prided themselves as a hard-working,
self-sufficient sect that contributes nearly 20 percent
of the manpower in India's army. There have also been
prominent individuals from the community in major fields
- such as Manmohan Singh, the Oxbridge-trained economist
and academic.
Another prominent Sikh in Indian
politics is Harkishn Singh Surjeet, general secretary of
the Communist Party of India-Marxist, a prominent figure
in the Left Front that gives crucial support to Manmohan
Singh's Congress-led minority government.
And in
an unusual coincidence, India's new prime minister and
Musharraf were born in each other's country. While the
birthplace of Manmohan Singh is the village Gah in
Pakistan's Punjab province (his family later migrated to
Amritsar), Musharraf was born in the Indian capital,
Delhi.
Singh has said he will continue the peace
process with Pakistan begun last year by his predecessor
Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Media reports claim that Musharraf
called Singh on Sunday to congratulate him on his
election. It was the first direct contact between the
leaders since India's new government was sworn in.
The two leaders expressed their desire to
resolve "all outstanding issues including the Kashmir
dispute through dialogue". Singh said last week he would
seek "the most friendly relations" between the two
countries on all issues.
