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himself in a buoyant atmosphere of expectancy and hope. His grandfather raised the
idea of building a Khalsa school in Khalra village and advised him to donate a part of
his ancestral land for the purpose. A prominent nationalist leader, Attar Singh took up
the idea and built the school. Kartar Singh was appointed as the secretary of the school
committee but was working on honorary basis. Master Tara Singh, a prominent Sikh
leader of the Akali Dal, came to be associated with the school management. Master
Tara Singh helped Kartar Singh to find a job as a clerk at the SGPC headquarters
inside the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar where he worked for two years. Meanwhile,
the school at Khalra had become more organized and invited him to resume his
position on a salary of Rs. 50 a month. This was not big money but was enough to
meet basic needs. By then, Kartar Singh was already married to Mukhtiar Kaur.
Although Master Tara Singh helped Kartar Singh in getting a job with the SGPC,
Kartar Singh did not like the Akali political orientation, particularly Tara Singh’s
anti-Muslim positions. Kartar Singh aligned himself more closely with the Congress
party, became the secretary of its mandal or area committee and began working
with Narain Singh Subhashpuri, a well-known Congress leader of the area. To
Kartar Singh the atmosphere of communal tension in Punjab during that period was
an offshoot of the elective principle becoming the basis for gaining representation
in the government. Various communal leaders appealed to history to claim distinction
over one’s rivals and this was a common technique of their competitive political
strategy that had such disastrous consequences on the future of Punjab. According
to Kartar Singh, popular Hindu and Sikh leaders dwelt endlessly on the suffering
of Hindus and Sikhs under the Muslim conquest and tried to aggravate popular
resentments to consolidate their following. Muslims of Punjab also began to get
irritated with the British administration for usurping their political power and now
distributing it to the Hindus and the Sikhs to their disadvantage.
The expression of these resentments went beyond polemics to outbursts of physical
violence and soon acquired a regular pattern marked by crude techniques of
instigation. Muslims slaughtered cows, regarded by Hindus as holy, and the Hindus
retaliated by putting pork, detested by Muslims as unholy, in mosques to stir up
communal mayhem. Any other trivial provocation would serve the purpose just as
well. Governor’s situation reports from January 1939 to July 1939 show that the
slaughter of cows and swine had triggered a dozen violent incidents within this
period. British officials dealt with these problems by the book, with feelings of
amused complacency, except when they threatened to escalate into big troubles.
These outbursts of violence, known by the infamous name of communal riots, provided
the backdrop for the momentous constitutional developments that led India
to its independence attended with the bloody partition of Punjab in 1947. 39
Kartar Singh felt very disturbed about these developments and blamed the political
immaturity of the Sikh leaders, particularly Tara Singh, for their inability to
see the Congress game plan in getting them to fight the Muslim leadership and for
refusing the British counsel to keep the unity of Punjab through a negotiated settlement
about their rights and privileges in the state. 40 According to Kartar Singh,
Tara Singh’s personal background and his Hindu roots played an important part in
39 Governor’s Situation Reports and Punjab Fortnightly Reports, IOR:L/PJ/5/241-3; Memoir of a District
Officer in the Punjab 1938-47, A.J.V. Arthus, ICS, Mss. Eur. F. 180/63, IOR:L, London.
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