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WHY KHALISTAN? H \l 1 .El) L'P TO THE POINT at whichJarnail Singh Bhindranwalt " and his companions went down in a hail of gunfire at the Akal Takht, spawning what became the militant movement for Khalistan? The history of the ten Gurus and the development of Sikhism during the Guru period provides the ideological base for Khalistani activism, but a series of events that took place from the death of the last Guru in 1708 until the rise of Bhindranwale in the 1970s pushed a section of the Sikh community to a position of readiness for militancy,to a point at which the rhetorical seeds of members of the Damdami Taksal and the Akhand Kirtni Jatha found fertile soil. The link between religion and politics in Sikh tradition was made firm through the succession of Gurus from Guru Nanak to Guru Gobind Singh. But some of the greatest heroes of the Sikhs lived after this period, when Guru had become enshrined not in individuals but in the dual Guru Granth/Guru Panth formulation . The first was Banda Singh, a hermit who was converted to Sikhism by Guru Gobind Singh (Banda means "slave" [to Guru]). Banda Singh led Khalsa warriors in a raid on Sirhind , whose ruler had killed the Guru's sons, and was titled "Bahadur" (brave) by Guru Gobind Singh. After Guru Gobind Singh's death, Banda Singh Bahadur and his band took over most of southeastern Punjab, where they proclaimed a republic in the name of the Gurus. They fought with Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah and finally were starved into submission by his successor. Banda Singh Bahadur was eventually marched to 5 W CAUSES PROXIMATE AND ULTIMATE Delhi in chains, forced to kill his own infant son, and executed along with other Sikh prisoners. Banda Singh Bahadur isparticularly important in Sikh history because he wasthe first individual who wasnot a Guru but nevertheless assumed a leadership role. His fearlessness in battle and stoicism through his defeat eclipses, in Sikh minds, other aspects of his career like his multiple wives and his regal lifestyle. (It should by now be clear that courage eclipses a lot for militant Sikhs.As one leader commented when news of the Chechen rebellion broke out in 1994, "They are fighting with so much courage, they must be right.") But Banda Singh's band of warriors was certainly the first real guerilla force—led not by a Guru but by an ordinary human being—to which contemporary militants can look for inspiration. By the late 1730s the Khalsa had regrouped under Nawab Kapur Singh, who gathered local chieftains together in a kind of coalition force called the Dal Khalsa, the Khalsa army. (The militant group started by Gajinder Singh in modern times took its name from this group.) The Dal Khalsa's fame stems from its bloody encounters with the Afghans, who were attacking the Mughals from the west at the same time as the British had begun their encroachment from the east. The so-called "lesser" holocaust (Chota Ghallughara) of the Sikhs occurred in 1747 when Sikhs were slaughtered at Kahnuwan by the Mughal forces from Lahore. In 1762 the Dal Khalsa faced a different enemy, the Afghan forces of Ahmed Shah Abdali, at Malerkotla, a battle in which thousands of Sikhs—possibly as many as twenty thousand—were killed in what is now called the "greater" holocaust (Vadda Ghallughara). After the massacre , Ahmed Shah Abdali attacked Amritsar, destroying the Golden Temple Complex. But the Sikhs rose up in response and eventually defeated the Afghans, putting the whole of Punjab under Sikh control for the first time in history. The history of the Dal Khalsa and the Afghan wars is important for understanding what the Khalistani militancyhas become today, not only because it ended up creating the only Sikh state that has ever existed, but because the organization of guerilla forces in the Dal Khalsa was a direct foreshadowing of how Khalistani militants are organized today. The Dal Khalsa wasnot really an "army" (dal) in the conventional sense; it was a loose confederation of independent administrative districts, or mists. At the height of the Dal Khalsa there were twelve such misls with their own militias, varying in size from over ten thousand to just a few hundred members. They would get together when military exigency demanded coordination of action but otherwise acted with relative autonomy . The leaders of the militias that comprised the Dal Khalsa also got together on specific religious occasions and...

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