reducedtoashes

26
Reduced to Ashes
community throughout Punjab. Within a few years of joining the service, Jaswant
formed a state level union of panchayat secretaries and became its first general
secretary. Even though the senior government officials did not want him to politicize
the department, Jaswant was not to be daunted and went on to launch a strike
on the issues of rampant corruption and lack of accountability within the department.
The big bosses did not take kindly to his agitative approach and began to
harass him in various ways. Sometimes, he did not receive his salary for months at
a stretch. Everyone in the family recognized that politics of struggle was Jaswant’s
way of life.
Politics in Punjab, to which Jaswant began to pay closer attention, remained as
exciting and chaotic as ever. The frustrating experience in the state government
between 1967 and 1971 motivated the radicals in the Akali Dal to take up the tortuous
issue of Center-state relations. In October 1973, the working committee of the
Akali Dal adopted a policy resolution at a conference held at Anandpur and demanded
that the Central government give autonomy to the provincial government
in all areas except defence, foreign relations, currency and communications. The
resolution described the Sikhs as a “nation” or “Qaum” and demanded structural
arrangements that would give them a dominant role in the administration of Punjab. 49
Jaswant talked about the resolution and its originators scathingly. The Akalis
had contributed to the demise of a decentralized India by scuttling the May 1946
British Cabinet Mission’s terms for the transfer of power to representatives of a
united federal India. The Cabinet Mission Plan had placed only three subjects of
defense, foreign relations and currency under the control of India’s Central government,
leaving all other subjects to the jurisdiction of autonomous provincial governments.
Sixteen years later, the Akali Dal wanted to revive that framework of
federalism without admitting its past mistakes and yet claim a ‘dominant role’ for
the Sikhs within the administration of Punjab. This in Jaswant’s opinion was completely
wrong. In his opinion, the Sikhs could not sustain the battle for their religious
and political rights against the tyranny of majority in Indian democracy while
claiming ‘preeminence’ in Punjab on the basis of their domineering demography in
the state.
Jaswant challenged the Akali position by floating the proposal of a confederacy
of India and Pakistan. The proposal suggested that the two countries work jointly to
overcome their people-geography mismatch especially in their peripheral regions,
make their politics purposeful also for their religious and communal minorities. He
also proposed that the two countries move away from their hegemonic nationalism
and repressive centralization towards a framework that could accommodate the
imperatives of self-governance for religious, ethnic minorities and non-dominant
nations. Jaswant was increasingly beginning to feel that unless the downtrodden
and oppressed people from the heartland and the religious and ethnic minorities,
victimized by India in its peripheral regions forged a larger solidarity of purpose to
salvage the vision of freedom for which his grandfather Harnam Singh had dedicated
himself, there could be no end to their miseries and meaningless political strife.
49 Ghani Jafar, The Sikh Volcano, Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, Delhi, 1988, pp. 87-88, 457-460;
G. S. Dhillon, India Commits Suicide, Chandigarh, 1992, pp. 94-112.
punjab_report_chapter1.p65 26
4/27/03, 10:30 PM