Khalsa giving a talk to students in the Walter Commons last November. Photo credit: Lauren O’Leary
This article was co-written by Aruna Gopalan, Abigail Acheson, Benjamin Murphy, Hannah Noyes, Ibrahim Mohamed, and Jonathan Stanley as part of a History course taught this past Fall semester titled “Contesting India’s Past.” The class explored the contested narratives of South Asian pasts and questioned the political implications for the present that each story of the past advocated.
The town of Norwich, Connecticut – home to a small, active, Sikh community – installed a poignant memorial in the Norwich County Public Library in 2019, bringing attention to the campaign of violence carried out by the Indian state against the Sikh population in India in 1984.
After being up for three months, the memorial was suddenly removed in October.
The attempt to dedicate a space to a marginalized group in the process of healing was seen as a political act by the Consulate General for India in New York. After receiving a call protesting the memorial from the consulate, the library made the decision to remove it, citing their status as a “nonpolitical organization”.
The Indian Consulate was not aware of the memorial until a member of the community alerted them to its presence. This is an example of how powerful institutions rely on the actions of ordinary people to maintain the supremacy of their narratives. Dominant stories of the past are not created or propped up by themselves, but because people buy into them. They rely on the work of ordinary people to perpetuate and continually reproduce those ideas. It is also the common people who organize against these powerful institutions, as in the case of the Sikh community in Norwich, which is still working to have its story told.
In the 1970s and 80s, the Indian government attempted to suppress a secessionist movement in the Sikh majority state of Punjab through campaigns of violence against the community. After the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984, anti-Sikh sentiments perpetuated by a wide array of politicians consolidated in acts of mass violence in the Indian capital of Delhi. The violence resulted in the murder of 8,000-17,000 Sikhs in the city alone, and many more across India, as Sikhs were targeted across the country. Despite conclusive reporting on the state-backed massacre, only a few people have been convicted after more than three decades. This speaks to the painfully slow process of achieving justice.
After 1984, India continued its systematic persecution of Sikh residents in the subcontinent, with a special focus on Punjab. In a series of events eerily similar to those occurring in Kashmir now, the Indian state passed laws allowing suspected separatist militants to be arrested without a warrant and held indefinitely. There was no punishment for Indian Security forces that “disappeared” people who spoke out against the occupation of Punjab and the genocide of the Sikh people, as documented by Ensaaf.
Community leader Swaranjit Singh Khalsa has worked for many years in Connecticut to make this history visible. Khalsa has spoken at length about the importance of education around issues of representation, placing particular emphasis on the politics of language in discussing the events of 1984. Generally, “riots” is a term used by the Indian State and dominant news media to imply unorganized, sudden bursts of violence which obscures the organised campaign orchestrated and supported by political actors in office at the time. Khalsa has worked extensively with the Connecticut state government to recognize the events of 1984 as a state-sponsored genocide of Sikhs. At the moment, California and Pennsylvania have joined Connecticut in recognizing the genocide at the state level.
This recognition was the result of concerted efforts by Khalsa and his allies who continue to appear on college campuses and organize public events to raise further awareness. A primary purpose of the memorial, according to Khalsa during a talk at Connecticut College on November 22, 2019, was to educate the public on the events of 1984 and their continuities into the present. Khalsa also made clear that this is not an isolated instance, and is consistent with the Indian state’s suppression of other groups in the subcontinent such as its systemic targeting of Muslims and its ongoing occupation of Kashmir. An adamant believer in the power of learning, Khalsa views the education of the public as a tool to seek justice for painful histories, and prevent similar atrocities in the future.
Contesting narratives
Educational institutions are a major arena in which the salience of minoritised and mainstream narratives are contested. Over the past two decades there have been multiple debates surrounding representations of India in California’s textbooks. The two major sides in these debates are those led by the alliance of the Vedic Foundation (VF) and the American Hindu Education Foundation (HEF) against a broad-based coalition of academics and other concerned parties.
As recently as 2017, VF and HEF took the matter to court once more demanding that discussions of the discriminatory caste system in Hinduism be removed from the state’s textbooks. The VF and the HEF are heavily backed by Hindu Right organizations such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP). The Hindu Right is an active force in the South Asian diaspora which saw current Prime Minister Narendra Modi be welcomed with open arms by both Obama and Trump. Modi was previously banned from the US by the State Department, on the grounds of overseeing a genocide in the state of Gujarat in 2002.
The explanation given by the Norwich Public Library for the removal of the Sikh Genocide memorial was that as an apolitical organization it could not take a strong stance in such debates.
In siding with the Indian state to obscure and justify the continued Indian occupation of Punjab, can the library continue to claim itself apolitical? The maintenance of dominant histories is bolstered, or challenged, by the actions of regular people. Still, the preservation of mainstream accounts is not solely accomplished by the efforts of individuals. The presence of the Indian state is
required to propagate these influential narratives, both in India and within the borders of its allies to the detriment of minoritized groups in South Asia and its diaspora.
Narratives seeking to subvert the established norm are deemed “political.” This was the case during the civil rights movement where those who challenged dominant narratives were listed as terrorists, and continues to be the case today. •
2020 is the answer