Faith, Gender and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper by Mallika Kaur (review)

This excellent book examining the human rights dimension of the conflict in the Indian Punjab should be of interest to scholars, policy makers, journalists, diplomats, and practitioners. Mallika Kaur crafts an inspiring book that greatly contributes to the human rights literature by offering an innovative portrait of the forgotten and poorly understood plight of the Sikh minority. A lawyer by training, Kaur presents a poignant account of the Sikh's minority predicament. Her study unearths the nature of their struggle for human rights during the most consequential period of violence of Punjabi history, stretching from the eruption of communal violence in 1984 to the end to armed conflict in 1995.

The book documents this period by chronicling the lives of three remarkable individuals, Inderjit Singh Jaijee, a human rights defender, Justice Ajit Sing Bains, former appellate court judge, and Baljit Kaur, a homemaker, who creatively and courageously documented atrocities and fought against injustice. Their deeply personal stories deftly narrated by Kaur transport the reader into in the intricate world of Indian Punjab revealing this society's divisions, tensions, and agonizing questions about national identity. The book also provides a window to gender relations of the time, underscoring the role women played in the struggle for memory and human rights. In addition, it explains the influence of the powerful Sikh diaspora in Europe and North America. Kaur furnishes a profoundly human story full of wit, poetry, and meaning that opens a fascinating window into the Sikh community, both in India and abroad. The interdisciplinary nature of the book is one of its main strengths. While eloquent and written in a powerful literary prose, the book is methodologically rigorous and draws on diverse qualitative techniques including oral history and archival research. Kaur's apt use of these techniques, coupled with her deep familiarity with the case, end up creating a robust account not only elucidating the pattern of abuse against the Sikh people, but also shedding light on this community's repertoires of resistance.

Kaur devotes significant time to explore the root sources and mechanics behind the persecution of Sikhs in Punjab. She details at length how abuses against this religious minority have been widespread and systematic and orchestrated by the Indian central government controlled by the Congress Party. The author makes clear that while violence in Punjab dates back to India's independence in 1947 and the subsequent partition of the province between the two nascent states—India and Pakistan,—a critical juncture for the conflict was the storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the most sacred Sikh shrine, by Indian Security forces in 1984. The attack, which killed thousands of people, presided over a cycle of vengeance and retaliation including the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Ghandi at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards and the explosion of communal violence against the Sikh to avenge the slaying of the charismatic politician.¹ Thousands upon thousands of Sikh were killed, injured, and displaced in what is seen as one of the most severe episodes of communal violence in the history of the country.²

Kaur shows how at the heart of the persecution of the Sikh lies a deep-seated animosity and mistrust on the part of the Indian Hindu majority, amplified by the government's resentment towards the Sikh for their open calls for autonomy, which led to unfounded accusations of their covert support of Pakistan, India's arch enemy. Through the personal stories of three protagonists who witnessed firsthand the harassment of authorities and documented abuses, Kaur conveys the complexity of human rights abuses in the Indian setting. She shows a bleak context where state-orchestrated and ethnoreligious informed communal violence feed upon one another, against the backdrop of a democratic system characterized by generalized impunity and a weak rule of law. Kaur's insights are particularly important as a contribution to the understanding of human rights deficiencies...