National celebration
The Pakistani Sikh community celebrating the 70th Independence Day in Peshawar.
PESHAWAR ( Pakistan): Radesh Singh’s grandfather was just 11 years old when he left his village in India’s Punjab province to move to Peshawar, in the far northwest of the country on the border with Afghanistan.
The year was 1901: The British ruled the Indian subcontinent and Peshawar held the promise of work and adventure.
Radesh’s grandfather would never return to his village, not even in 1947, when the Indian subcontinent was divided into majority Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, generating one of the largest migrations in modern history.
Radesh’s family is neither Hindu nor Muslim but Sikh, a religious minority in both countries.
In the 70 years since Partition they have waged a secessionist uprising in India demanding outright independence for India’s Punjab state where they dominate.
He said poverty kept his grandfather in Peshawar.
“It’s not easy to start over at zero when you have very little,” he said.
The hostility in the immediate aftermath of 1947 was brief in the northwest, said Radesh.
It was followed by decades of peace. The decision to stay in the new country now called Pakistan seemed like a good choice at the time. The Sikhs had lived peacefully for centuries alongside their Pashtun Muslim countrymen.
Today, Sikhs are among Pakistan’s smallest minorities. They are easily identifiable because of their often colourful turbans, and because they share the surname Singh.
Until 1984, Radesh said, Pakistan’s Hindus and Sikhs lived as one in northwest Pakistan.
But then India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards.
“They (Hindus) cut all relations with us. They said Pakistani Sikhs are like all Sikhs everywhere. They said, ‘From now on, we will be separate from you’,” Radesh recalled.
Today, Sikhs are battling with the Pakistan government for ownership of dozens of Sikh temples that they call gurdwaras; while it is slow going they have managed to reclaim some of the buildings. Many were abandoned in 1947 and taken over by Muslims who arrived from India.
Radesh, who heads a council representing the Sikhs in Pakistan, said that since his homeland began to turn towards radical Islam, young Sikhs have been looking to leave.
“They want to go to another country, not to India or Pakistan,” he said, but every country eyes them with suspicion. Even Indians, he said, see his Pakistani passport and question his intentions, suggesting he wants to agitate for Sikh secessionism, the battle that resulted in Indira Gandhi’s death and a dream still held by many Sikhs on both sides of the border.
He said today Pakistan’s intolerant use blasphemy as a weapon against minorities and Muslims alike.
“That is why we have a fear in our hearts, that this law can be used against us,” he said. The mere accusation of blasphemy can incite mobs to violence.
“In the last nearly 40 years we have been facing explosions in every city,” said Radesh.
“In a long time we have not heard any sweet sounds in our Peshawar, but still we love our city.”