Big news! We’ve added a blog.. to our blog. In this space we’re going to periodically post content that is 30% less satirical and 24% more useless in an effort to inform the public and massage our narcissism.
For this first installment we thought we’d talk about a group of people that’s been in the news a lot, lately: Sikh Canadians (Editor: For what it’s worth, “Sikh” is pronounced more-or-less how it’s spelled, the pronunciation “seek” developed to prevent confusion with the word “sick”).
These past several years, you might have noticed a quite a few headlines about farmer protests, cross-border assassinations, something called “Khalistan”, and, of course, our annual discussion about the bombing of Air India Flight 182 that generally devolves into political grand-standing instead of any discussion about the 300+ innocent-lives lost; and found yourself asking “What is that all about?”.
Since some of us know a thing-or-two about all of this nonsense, we thought we’d try our hand at giving you a crash-course in the subject. Just to be clear, we’re not scholars by any stretch of the imagination, but we figure we can’t do any worse than the kind of information-delivery you get from the national media’s typical offering of word-salad spewed by a White guy who can’t find India on a map, and a South Asian guy who you’ve never heard of, but is apparently the Emperor of Brown People (Editor: Shout-out: South Park).
Before we begin, let’s us establish that we fully intend to skip plenty of useful information, and cite absolutely no sources, except to give you this link to Wikipedia. It’s pretty good, we use it a lot. Oh, also, we fully intend to liberally splatter our own opinions throughout, which some people might not like, but it’s our blog, so, if you’re one of them, sorry.
Oh, also, this is going to cover a lot of subjects that are very upsetting for a lot of people, so we’d advise any White folks reading this to avoid talking about it TOO much with your Brown friends (Ed.: But, please forward the link, we could use the clicks).
Now, as we prepare to do our best John Oliver impression, let us throw in one final note: We’re trying to condense hundreds of years of history and political machinations into a few blog posts, so this is going to get long (Ed.: TL;DR – It’s all Britain’s fault).
Okay! Back straight, eyes forward, let’s begin..
Say something in Indian.
No, we’re not sea lions. Also, we can’t, because that’s not a language.
Most of the countries in Asia and Africa are just a bunch of arbitrary lines drawn by European colonists. India’s particularly noteworthy in that it never particularly existed as a singular unit, until the British came along and very-heavily centralised its rule. Actually, the term “India” originally referred to a a small region that is now in Pakistan, but we’re not getting in to that.
From a legal perspective, India’s a country but, from an ethnolinguistic perspective it’s less a country than a continent, with each state being a country. Take Europe, there are definitely cultural similarities across nations that have developed with time, they’ve engaged economically with each other, their languages share words in common, they often practice the same faiths, but there are also some pretty pronounced differences. They speak different tongues, they generally look different, and, boy, did they ever get into disagreements.
Now, imagine if someone came along and made Europe a giant country (Ed.: Message for EU critics – yeah, yeah, we get it), with the central government in Berlin, and pretty much everyone in charge is either German or French. You gotta figure it won’t be long before Italians or Swedes or Czechs start voicing grievances. Grievances about being ignored, being mistreated, and exploited economically, while also noting that government seems to only really care about the French and German people.
Perhaps you can see where this is headed? Hell, it happens here in Canada, all the time. People complain about the government only caring about Ontario, or Quebec, or, under Harper, Alberta. I mean, as Nova Scotians, we’ve been complaining about Canada since Day One. Now imagine if each province was dominated by a completely different ethnic group. Yikes! (Ed.: Bluenose-istan Zindabad!)
What’s this “Punjab” place I keep hearing about?
Punjab is a historic region named after the five tributaries of the Indus River. It’s spread over an area that straddles the Pakistan-India border. It’s a tribal, fertile, region, and also one that was the crossroads of a lot of different empires and kingdoms throughout history. As a result, it was seen as quite valuable strategically, and has a long history of warfare.
In its most recent history, the dominant religions in the region have been Islam, Hinduism, and, starting around 500 years ago, Sikhism (Ed.: Just like most religions, there are different sects of Sikhism, with varying practices/rules, we’re just going to focus on the one with the largest following). While their religions were different, these people could be considered the same ethnically, and spoke the same language. With time, however, as a consequence of the origins of the the tribes that chose to embrace the faith, Sikhs did develop a ethnic and culture identity that was distinct from their counterparts, and have to come to be regarded as more of an ethno-religious group.
Jumping forward a few hundred years from its birth, the Sikhs evolved into a dominant political and military force in Punjab, and, by the mid-1800s, the region was under the control of a single ruler, and a Sikh, the Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Lahore (Ed.: And the Andals and the First Men).
Ranjit Singh’s kingdom was such a formidable force militarily, that, despite having consolidated a huge swath of territory in South Asia over a 200+ year span, and an annexation of Punjab being the most critical portion of their grand plans, the British weren’t going to risk taking him on. Instead, they waited til he died and his kingdom fell into infighting before they made their move. Even then, after numerous allegiance-changes, and schemes, they weren’t able to move in until after two wars in which they outnumbered their opponents’ forces and still almost lost.
After that, the British decided “We do NOT want to do that again!” and allowed the Sikhs quite a bit of a power and autonomy in their “Raj”, in exchange for loyalty. Despite making up barely 1% of the population of the Subcontinent, Sikhs and, by extension, Punjab enjoyed considerable economic prosperity and political power, relative to other peoples and regions. In particular, Sikhs made up a huge chunk of British India’s fighting force, and would serve the wider Empire in many of their conflicts, earning particular praise for their service during both World Wars (Ed.: Seriously, fuck you, Don Cherry).
But the British left, and that made everything better, right? I saw “Gandhi”.
We’re not going to get into the nitty-gritty of it, but, upon Independence, the state of Punjab in British India was in a precarious position. It was a Muslim-majority state with a huge proportion of minorities, that was going to be split into two pieces with one going to Pakistan and the other to India. Given the state’s already-valuable position, and the fact that it was going to be even more strategically-elevated when it became the site of an international border, politically speaking, both states had significant interest in currying (Ed.: Pun-intended. Actually, PunJAB-intended) favour with the Sikhs.
Jinnah, the effective founder of Pakistan, promised Sikhs, and other religious minorities, that they would be safe in Pakistan and would have no need to leave. Nehru, the eventual Prime Minister of India, did likewise. At the same time, many Sikhs even floated the idea of forming their own nation similar to their pre-colonial existence, but failed to gain significant political traction in the Independence-related negotiations. Ultimately, Nehru would win out, largely because of his promise that religious minorities, like Sikhs, would enjoy significant protections and autonomy under the Indian constitution.
As you might expect, Nehru’s promise was about as honest as most those that come from the mouths of wealthy political elites. In fact, his government went so far as to, rather sneakily, declare Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and other South Asian-origin faith practitioners, to be Hindus under the law and thus, they weren’t religious minorities at all and had none of the promised-protections.
This is a pattern you’ll see in a lot of other former European colonies. Ethnic and religious minorities often had significant political capital during the colonial period and upon “independence”, if those former colonies became democracies, they found themselves without little-to-no voice. Sikhs went from being relatively-privileged in British India to a less-than-2%-federally demographic afterthought.
There was one wrinkle, however, after some reorganisation of some of the Indian state boundaries, Sikhs did eventually become the majority of the population of in Indian Punjab.
I need a break.
Okay, stretch your legs, grab an orange-slice, and we’ll pick this up in Part 2.
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