Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants

Preface

PREFACE his book is the result of a difficult project that could not have been undertaken without the guidance, generosity, tolerance, and trust of a great many people. First to be mentioned must be the Khalistani Sikh community, whose members put themselves at risk by welcoming an inquisitive stranger. The hospitality of countless Sikh households and gurudwaras made the interviews on which this research is based possible, and manyindividuals spent hours and days away from their homes and their work to answer my endless questions. In particular, I appreciate the grace with which militant Sikhs have greeted my disagreements with them and encouraged me to put these divergent opinions in speeches and writings. This generosity of spirit and sense of respect for difference will be, I hope, the enduring cornerstone of the Sikh community. With regard to the Sikhs,I want to make a few things perfectly clear at the outset, though they will be made clear throughout the book as well. First, the Khalistanimilitants form a very small subset of the Sikh communityas a whole. This book is not about "the Sikhs." It is about the militants. Any attempt to treat what is written here as a generalization about Sikhs in general would be highly misguided, and I would condemn it wholeheartedly. The book is not even about all of those Sikhs who support the idea of an independent homeland; it focuses specifically on those who have taken up arms in order to achieve it and on the communities that support them. Three years of intermittent fieldwork with expatriate Sikhs in ten North American cities forms the basis for this book, which is both an oral history of the militant movement and a dialogical ethnography of a cultural community.Some of the people with whom I worked are permanent residents or citizens of the United States or Canada, others are here as recent refugees, and T still others live outside of North America but met me in various locations for the purpose of recording their narratives. The tapes on which they were recorded have been destroyed, and for the protection of myinterlocutors no record of names, places, or other identifyinginformation has been preserved. The photographs in this book require special comment. Some of them I took myself, and publish here with the full consent of the people portrayed . Others, however, are part of a collection of photos that circulate around the human rights and Khalistani communities. A fewwere taken out of Punjab under difficult conditions and have been reprinted many times, which accounts for their poor quality. The inherent drama of their subject matter, I believe, more than compensates for their technical deficiencies . I chose not to enhance them in anyway. Though I cross-checked most of what was told to me with other sources, I cannot vouch for the veracityor accuracy of every episode reported to me by Sikh militants. There will obviously be divergent accounts of many of these, particularly from their enemies. The portrait of militancy in this book is therefore not an "objective" or "balanced" description of the Punjab conflict. It is a glimpse into the world of Sikh militants as I have experienced it. I will welcome the broader contextualization of this work by other scholars. Finally, let me be entirely forthright about my own political stance here, about which readers maybe rightfully curious. I am not a supporter of Khalistan. I think the Sikh militants have some serious grievanceswith the state of India. I abhor many of the methods militantshave chosen to address them. Since I am not a Sikh, nor a Punjabi, nor an Indian, I don't have a "position" on the question of Khalistan,and I feel that the idea of what Khalistan would be is unclear enough at this point to make taking such a position inadvisable in any case. I don't think the militants are crazy or evil, however; I don't think India has seen the last of Sikh separatism ; and I think that the best wayto understand why militants fight is to talk with them about it. I think that the only wayto prevent outbreaks of violence such as Punjab has witnessed over the past fifteen years or so is to ensure human rights and freedoms, including attention to the principle of self-determination. These are my political views, in short. Not all scholarsare comfortablewith highly sensitivetopics such as this one, and some of them are my close colleagues. I therefore thank members of the...