INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

the gurdwaras.
Every individual who considers him- or herself as a Sikh by religion and has
lived in Varanasi for more than two years can be registered as a community member
and has the right to vote in the congregational elections. 172 Normally the elections of
the chairman are conducted on majority: all community members gather in the
gurdwara and cast their vote either by ballot-papers or raising hands. In practice,
however, it is more often adequate to simply ask the congregation during programs if
they object to the nominated committee. Individual Sikhs who want to run for board
membership should preferably be Amritdhari, even if this requirement works more
like a normative instruction rather than a strict rule. 173 Board members and the working
committee do not receive any monetary compensation from the gurdwara but
work on a non-profit basis as a form of selfless service (seva). In one year the chairman
of VGPC and committee members will arrange between 15 and 20 meetings to
discuss matters related to religious programs, court cases, properties, and so on. At
least one quarter of the committee members must attend each meeting to make it
valid. VGPC has been registered in court since the 1980s and is today authorized to
make decisions in most administrative and juridical errands of its own.
From one viewpoint the managing committee can be regarded as a modern
and urbanized extension of the older system of panchayat, the village council with five
or more members responsible for social, political and legal matters. When a Sikh
woman in the time of my fieldwork publicly charged her in-laws with assault and
battery, the suspected male perpetrator was summoned to the gurdwara to make a
declaration of the crime in presence of five selected committee members. In this and
similar cases the rural pattern of supervising social life has been recast to the contemporary
setting of a local Sikh community. The five males have no legal warrant, but
jointly function as an arbitrating urban panchayat that attempts to settle disputes between
community members before reports to the police and legal proceedings.
Two important fields of administration are Guru Nanak Hospital and the two
public schools run by the VGPC. The hospital was founded by donations and constructed
within the gurdwara complex of Gurubagh as a form of selfless service to the
public community and offers medical treatment and medicine at a cheap rate. In the
year of 2000 the hospital had eight medical specialists and surgeons employed, in
addition to nurses and midwives. Apart from medical examinations and vaccinations,
the hospital offers ambulance services and has one operating theatre for surgical
operations.
For the purpose of providing children basic education and teaching in Punjabi
language, VGPC invested land and founded two schools in the mid 1950s: Guru
Nanak Khalsa School in Gurubagh and Guru Nanak English School in Shivpur, located
172
Any Sikh in Varanasi who fulfils these basic requirements may get a certificate from the
gurdwara which attests his or her Sikh identity and is signed by the general secretary of VGPC.
These certificates are sometimes used to improve employment opportunities.
173
Even if a committee member is not Amritdhari they should preferably uphold the Khalsa regulations,
such as vegetarianism and avoid consumption of alcohol and drugs.
72
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008