Introductory - Global Sikh Studies

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to do was to cut off their hair and join the common populace around
them.
The Khalsa guerillas were dispersed into very small bands,
sometimes of twos and fours, and in widely separated areas like those
of the Siwalik hills, Lakhi jungle and the desert wastes bordering
Rajputana. They had no common centre and no common leader.
Contacts among the guerilla bands were rare. They only sentiment
that held them together and made them converge for collective action
was attachment to a common cause and the deepest commitment to
the faith. Arjan Dass Malik writes that sustained guerilla warfare is
not possible without an ideological inspiration. “As early as the very
origin of the term guerilla, Napoleon had observed that “in Spain
moral considerations made up three quarters of the game and the
relative balance of military power accounted only for the remaining
quarter.’ T.E. Lawrence stresses the same point when he says: ‘We
had won a province, when we had taught the civilians in it to die for
our idea of freedom.’ Guerilla warfare thus has been ideological from
the very outset.” 60 Again, ‘a guerilla is not an ill-trained, badly armed
civilian-solder, as he appears to be; he is, rather, an intensely motivated
and highly dedicated soldier who has a keen sense of issues at stake
and understands the nature of war he is fighting. His strength lies
inside, in the moral considerations which ‘make three-fourths of him.’ 61
And, ‘his objective lies not in the field of battle but elsewhere, among
the people… Guerilla warfare is essentially a form of people’s war in
which a revolutionary vanguard, relying upon the support of the people,
initiates limited armed action to gradually weaken the enemy and to
bring about a situation of mass involvement culminating in the final
defeat of the enemy and the attainment of peoples’ political objective.’ 62