The Sikh Diaspora: The Search for Statehood - Vidhia.com

10 THE SIKHS: SEARCH FOR STATEHOOD
emphasizing “recognition” and incorporation into the state’s legal and
administrative apparatus. Imperial authority was much concerned with
representation of various religious and cultural communities; its
administrators harboured a somewhat natural sympathy for minorities
and indigenous peoples and tribes. Alien rulers tried to balance different
communities’ claims that the imperial polity’s policies led to partition
of the subcontinent and not to its Balkanization; this was an incredible
legacy of imperialism that few Indian nationalists could acknowledge.
Under the postcolonial state
Even with partition into India and Pakistan, the British left behind an
empire consisting of semiautonomous regions, especially in India. The
regions were princely states with a variety of political systems and they
included two Sikh states. Within loose borders they contained many
tribes, religious minorities with distinct cultures and languages, and they
were joined only by railways, roads and rudimentary communications.
In independent India, the Congress leaders, as inheritors of power, had
set themselves a daunting task of moulding an empire into a modern
state. The immediate question of obtaining accession of princely states
was resolved through a judicious dose of coercion and persuasion;
however, in Kashmir and some northeastern states this policy led to
violent confrontation. And another major question remained unaddressed
—the place of Hindu nationalism vis-à-vis many regional nationalities.
While the Congress leaders’ secular rhetoric and well-formulated
distance from Hindu nationalism could not secure Muslims’ consent,
could “Hindu-dominated secular polity” ensure equality of India’s
various nationalities?
India adopted a unitary constitutional structure with a universal
franchise, scrapping the colonial system of weighting representation for
minorities and reservation of seats, except for scheduled tribes and
castes. 10 Three major principles of nation building and governance were
laid: (a) secularism with freedom of worship and state noninterference,
(b) economic welfare providing substantive citizenship rights, and (c)
democratic centralism providing a structure of power sharing between
subnational regions and the union state (Austin 1966; Jalal 1995).
Haunted by the spectre of India’s dissolution, the constitution ruled out
the principle of self-determination for regions and nationalities. Instead,
it provided for the reorganization of linguistic regions and recognized
14 languages as state languages. Hindi was adopted as the official
language of India along with English. However, as the Telgu speakers