Ranjit Singh

High Court Acquits Dera Sacha Sauda Chief in 2002 Murder of Sect Manager

Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh will remain in jail as he has been convicted for raping two women and in another murder case.

New Delhi: The Punjab and Haryana high court has acquitted Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh and four others in the case pertaining to the 2002 murder of former Dera manager Ranjit Singh.

A bench of Justices Sureshwar Thakur and Lalit Batra pronounced the order.

The five men – Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, Krishan Lal, Jasbir Singh, Inder Sain and Sabdil Singh – had been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Haryana’s Panchkula in 2021. They had been found guilty under Sections 302 (murder) and 120 b (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

Ranjit Singh was shot dead in 2002. He was murdered for his suspected role in the circulation of an anonymous letter, which narrated how women followers (Sadvis) were being sexually exploited by the sect head at the Dera headquarters. Subsequently, Sirsa-based journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapati who published the same in a news report was also murdered.

According to the CBI charge sheet, the Dera chief believed that Ranjit Singh was behind the circulation of the anonymous letter and hatched a conspiracy to kill him.

In 2019, the sect head was awarded life imprisonment for the murder of journalist Chhatrapati. The journalist’s son has expressed anger at the repeated parole granted to the chief.

The sect chief will continue to be in jail as he was also convicted in 2017 for raping two disciples. However, the Bharatiya Janata Party has been criticised for the repeated manner in which he is granted parole, with critics saying the Haryana government was trying to gain politically from being close to Gurmeet. In January, while he was out on parole, the BJP Rajya Sabha MP from Haryana Krishan Lal Panwar and the state’s political secretary to the chief minister Krishan Bedi even attended Ram Rahim’s online satsang (religious meeting).

Dera Chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, 4 Others Get Life Term in Sect Manager Murder Case

Former Dera manager Ranjit Singh, who was also a follower of the sect, was shot dead on July 10, 2002 at Khanpur Kolian village in Haryana’s Kurukshetra.

Chandigarh: A special CBI court on Monday sentenced Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh and four others to life imprisonment in the 19-year-old murder case of sect manager Ranjit Singh.

The court in Panchkula had convicted Ram Rahim and four others – Krishan Lal, Jasbir Singh, Avtar Singh and Sabdil – in the murder case on October 8.

The court has sentenced five to life imprisonment, said CBI special prosecutor H.P.S. Verma.

Former Dera manager Ranjit Singh, who was also a follower of the sect, was shot dead on July 10, 2002 at Khanpur Kolian village in Haryana’s Kurukshetra.

He was murdered for his suspected role in the circulation of an anonymous letter, which narrated how women were allegedly being sexually exploited by the sect head at the Dera headquarters.

According to the CBI chargesheet, the Dera chief believed that Ranjit Singh was behind the circulation of the anonymous letter and hatched a conspiracy to kill him. In 2017, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for raping two disciples. He is currently lodged in Rohtak’s Sunaria jail.

Haryana Cop Suspended for Allowing Unauthorised Visitors to Meet Dera Chief at AIIMS

Gurmeet Ram Rahim has already been convicted in one rape and murder case each. The verdict in another murder case is due in a few days.

New Delhi: Just days before a special Central Bureau of Investigation (CB() court in Panchkula is scheduled to pronounce its verdict in a murder case against Dera Sacha Sauda head Gurmeet Ram Rahim, the Haryana government has suspended a deputy superintendent of police (DSP) for allowing four visitors to meet the self-proclaimed godman at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi with permission. The Dera chief is already serving sentences in a rape case and a murder case.

The DSP, Shamsher Singh, had been tasked with overseeing the security of the Dera head, who is lodged at Rohtak’s Sunaria jail and had visited AIIMS on July 13. During Ram Rahim’s visit to the premier medical institute, the DSP is alleged to have allowed some people to meet him despite accusations against the Dera chief of intimidating his victims and their relatives.

Indeed, on several occasions, the court was told that granting parole or visitation rights to the Dera chief could impact the law and order situation. It may be recalled that 36 people were killed in the violence and police firing in Panchkula following Ram Rahim’s conviction in a rape case in August 2017.

Realising the gravity of the lapse, Haryana additional chief secretary Rajeev Arora wrote in the suspension order:

“The Governor of Haryana is pleased to place the services of Sh. Shamsher Singh, HPS, DSP/Meham under suspension with immediate effect. During suspension period he will be entitled to subsistence allowance as admissible under rule-83 of Haryana Civil Services (General) Rules-2016. During suspension his headquarter will be in the office of DGP Haryana, Panchkula and he will not leave the station without the prior permission of the competent authority.”

The Haryana Police has also recommended departmental action against Singh for “deliberate lapses”.

In October 2020, Ram Rahim was granted parole for a day to visit a Gurgaon hospital – where his ailing mother was admitted. At the time, the son of Sirsa-based journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapati, for whose murder Rahim was convicted, had objected to the move. Anshul Chhatrapati said though efforts were being made for his parole, the Rohtak and Sirsa police had opposed the move on the grounds of law and order. However, he had expressed apprehension that the Manohar Lal Khattar-led BJP-JJP government was preparing the ground for his parole in the future too.

Meanwhile, even as a Special CBI court was preparing to pass the verdict in the murder of Ranjeet Singh by Ram Rahim in 2002, the victim’s son, Jagseer Singh, has moved the Punjab and Haryana high court seeking the transfer of the case to another CBI court in Punjab, Haryana or Chandigarh.

In his petition, Jagseer said the CBI chargesheet had stated that Ram Rahim believed that Ranjit Singh, a resident of Kurukshetra, was behind the circulation of an anonymous letter that alleged that female followers of the Dera were sexually exploited. Subsequently, he said, his father was murdered by the Dera head.

However, the victim’s son sought the transfer citing the presence of a specific CBI public prosecutor, not directly linked to the case, during the trial. This was “most suspicious”, he said. He insisted that rather than assist the special public prosecutor appointed particularly for the case, that CBI public prosecutor appeared to be interfering with the trial.

The London Cemetery Which Is the Final Resting Place of a Tagore and a Sikh Maharani

Generals, administrators and many others linked to the Raj are buried in Kensal Green. But this connection does not get enough focus.

Not many of those who found a berth at Kensal Green ever moved on. Maharani Jind Kaur is a rare exception.

She is one of the vanishingly few laid to rest here for whom this corner of west London is not their final abode.

Jind Kaur was one of the wives of Ranjit Singh, who in the first half of the 19th century built a Sikh-ruled empire based in Lahore. After his death in 1839, three successors were assassinated one after another. In 1843, Maharani Jind Kaur herself became regent, ruling in the name of her infant son Duleep Singh.

When two rival empires clashed, she led Punjab in resisting the British. But in 1846, defeat in war marked the eclipse of the Sikh empire. Jind Kaur was imprisoned and separated from her son. In 1861, they were re-united but forced into exile in London, where she died two years later, still in her mid-40s.

Duleep Singh was refused permission to take his mother’s body back to Punjab. Her remains were placed in catacombs under the Dissenters’ Chapel at Kensal Green cemetery – at that time, cremation was illegal in Britain. After some wrangling, the body was taken to India the following spring and the last rites performed near Bombay – though it was another 60 years before her ashes returned to Lahore.

Jind Kaur’s memorial tablet. Photo: Andrew Whitehead

A plaque was installed 12 years ago to mark a resting place of the maharani who, in death, eventually escaped the clutches of the Raj.

Kensal Green once had claim to be the most fashionable of London’s cemeteries. It dates from 1833 – the oldest of the ‘magnificent seven‘ garden cemeteries built in a ring around the city to take pressure off the central London burial grounds.

Also Read: English Girl, Indian Nationalist, Buddhist Monk – the Extraordinary Life of Freda Bedi

As many as a quarter of a million people are interred in more than 65,000 graves amid the 72 acres of burial grounds. It is still in use. A new grave in a prime location will cost you £22,000 (Rs 22 lakh), with charges for the funeral service and the burial fee on top.

Some of the more than 65,000 graves in Kensal Green. Photo: Andrew Whitehead

Jind Kaur is not the only Indian to have found a resting place here. In the same year that she was losing an empire, a pioneering entrepreneur and trader from Calcutta, Dwarkanath Tagore, was interred here. He was Rabindranath Tagore’s grandfather.

Tagore’s commercial interests, which included a very profitable role in the opium trade (not mentioned on the board by his grave), made him extravagantly wealthy. He was well-connected too and a celebrated philanthropist. The Bengali community in London still has occasional gatherings and commemorations at the burial site.

Dwarkanath Tagore’s grave. Photo: Andrew Whitehead

Strolling along the avenues of the older and grander graves, there are quite a few generals who served in India, and administrators and civil servants who ran the Raj. It is striking how large India must have loomed in the lives of the British elite in the 19th century.

The most imposing of these tombs is that of Major-General Sir William Casement, who died in India of cholera in 1844 on the eve of his final return home to Britain. The stone canopy above the grave is borne by four Indian bearers, each wearing a turban and with arms crossed. You can see the design as indicating affection for India, or reflecting the subjugation of India – perhaps both. But the memorial is outlandishly exotic in its London setting.

Sir William Casement’s grave. Photo: Andrew Whitehead

There’s also a memorial to Casement in Calcutta – though Kensal Green is where his remains rest, interred here two years after his death.

Not far away is the mausoleum of Sir William Molesworth – the inscription laments how his death in 1855 meant that he didn’t live to see the completion of his purpose, ‘to regenerate our colonial system’.

The truth, as ever, is more prosaic. Molesworth was a radical politician whose radicalism appeared to ebb away once he achieved office. He was appointed the British government’s colonial secretary just five months before his death.

Sir William Molesworth’s memorial. Photo: Andrew Whitehead

If you recognise that name, Molesworth, it’s not Sir William you may be thinking of, but his young namesake, Nigel – a pupil, though not a very promising one, at St Custard’s prep school. His fictional exploits – set down in his name by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle – feature in such classics as Down with Skool! and How to be Topp (which he wasn’t often, top that is).

The Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery – in normal times – conduct a range of themed tours of the graves. None focus on the India connection of those buried here. That’s a pity – there’s certainly enough interest to justify a tour round the graves and memorials of those who served the Raj … and those who escaped it.

Andrew Whitehead was a BBC journalist and editor for many years and is currently a visiting professor at the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai.

Book Review: The Hidden History of Female Agency in the Sikh Empire

Priya Atwal’s regal history combines academic finesse with lucid prose to examine the role women played in the Sukerchakia dynasty.

Priya Atwal’s new book, Royals and Rebels, turns convention on its head.

In traditional accounts, Maharajah Ranjit Singh – the Sher-e-Punjab – was the “solitary genius” of the Sikh Empire, singularly responsible for its rise and whose death precipitated its inevitable demise. Atwal challenges this proposition by examining the role of ruling women and young princes of the Maharajah’s royal house in his dynastic project.

The Sikh Empire, which was founded in 1799, lasted a brief 50 years until its annexation by the British East India Company in 1849. Proclaiming himself the Maharajah of Punjab in 1801, the empire founded by Ranjit Singh also encompassed swathes of territory up to the Khyber Pass as well as Jammu and Kashmir. Its royal capital was situated in Lahore where the Samadhi of the first Maharajah towers, to this day.

Following Singh’s death in 1839, the empire’s final decade witnessed two disastrous wars against the British and the sporadic reigns of various successors, culminating in that of the boy-king, Duleep Singh, who was exiled to Britain.

Atwal’s scholarship is inspired by the feminist historiography of Ruby Lal, among others, whose exposition of gender relations in the context of the Mughal harem established a novel paradigm for the analysis of royal domestic power.

By dissecting British colonial sources and Punjabi chronicles, Atwal showcases the centrality of female agency to the expansion of Sikh sovereignty and how denial thereof contributed to the empire’s downfall. Her comparative regal history, which combines academic finesse with lucid prose, also enriches our understanding of what it meant to be an Indian king. Royals and Rebels is published by Hurst in the UK, and is forthcoming from HarperCollins in India.

To be a Sikh king

Atwal commences with a discussion of “Sikh kingship” as a moral ideal, providing a framework for comprehending the intellectual foundations of Ranjit Singh’s Sarkar-i-Khalsa (Government of the Khalsa). Biographers of the Maharajah have often questioned the compatibility between his monarchy and the egalitarian principles of Sikh governance in the post-Guru period.

Also read: Shaheed-E-Azam Udham Singh: Remembering an Indian Radical

Atwal suggests these criticisms are misplaced. Instead, she locates the Maharajah’s dynasticism within the tradition of “revisionist royalism” established by Guru Gobind Singh. The Tenth Guru had re-modelled the Mughal ideal of “sacred kingship” by infusing the responsibilities of regal authority with the spiritual equality of the Khalsa.

Priya Atwal
Royals and Rebels – The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire
Harper Collins India (2021)

This argument makes sense of seemingly paradoxical elements of the Maharajah’s rule. For instance, despite establishing his own personal dynastic hierarchy, the Maharajah refused to sit on the Mughal throne upon taking Lahore in 1799. He similarly rejected the minting of coins bearing his name. Instead, they featured images of the Sikh Gurus. In Atwal’s thesis, the Maharajah was embracing the Fifth Guru Arjan’s notion of Halemi Raj (modest and just regime) “on his own terms”.

New dynasty, new empire

Having explained the contours of this hybrid “royal culture”, Atwal segues into a rich analysis of how the Maharajah transformed his family’s misl holdings into the Sukerchakia dynasty. This is an essential element of her book. What has come to be known as the “Sikh Empire” was in fact the territory under the control of the Sukerchakia family, of which Ranjit Singh was a third-generation member.

In illustration of her work’s comparative pedigree, Atwal argues Ranjit Singh and his empire made this transition by engaging in a form of “dynastic colonialism”. This concept describes the processes through which a royal household comes to dominate land and spaces in material and cultural ways, which in turn advances political control by that family.

Marital alliances were “a central mechanism through which the Sukerchakias were able to build social and kinship connections, enabling the power of the misl to be embedded.” For instance, Ranjit Singh’s Mother, Raj Kaur, oversaw his first marriage to Mehtab Kaur of the Kanhaiya misl, and his second marriage to Mai Nakain of the Nakai misl – both of which encircled Lahore.

Elite Sikh women also had “relative independence” in military and administrative affairs. For example, Singh’s Mother-in-Law, Sada Kaur from the Kanhaiyas, was instrumental to his conquest of Lahore. Not only was her alliance militarily indispensable, but as narrated by the Maharajah’s court historian, Sohan Lal Suri, Sada Kaur then secured the peace by ensuring that Khalsa honour codes of territorial distribution were observed among misl competitors.

Overall, Ranjit Singh and his principal heirs – Kharak Singh and Nau Nihal Singh – entered at least 43 marriages between the years 1795 and 1842. These included marriages across class and caste lines, and in this respect, Atwal draws a comparison with the conduct of “protection” marriages by the Mughal Emperor Akbar. Together with the training and deployment of the princes as soldier-administrators (a policy she further compares with the Mughals), these strategic marital alliances enabled Ranjit Singh to break away from the Sikh sardar/misldar class and develop a “newer superior league of royalty”. What emerges from her analysis is a “connective” vision of Indian kingship.

Also read: Book Review: Discovering Nanak Singh, Rediscovering ‘Khooni Vaisakhi’

Another aspect of royal female agency is the role played by the Maharanis in maintaining their own havelis. Mai Nakain, for instance, took control of the Sheikhpura Fort, acting as a political proxy for the Maharajah. Showcasing the Durbar’s cultural power, she adorned her apartments with garden imagery and pious depictions of the Sikh Gurus. These symbolic representations exemplify the “continual balance of power with humility that characterised the Sukerchakia raj.”

Atwal brilliantly combines this cultural analysis with an intricate dissection of Orientalist gender stereotypes. As originally articulated by Rosalind O’Hanlon, these posit a dichotomy between the “martial masculinity” of independent warriorship and the more “feminised” arena of the court, occupied by “dandified men” and zenana-bound women. The Sukerchakia dynasty problematises this binary in several ways.

First, the Maharajah patronised Sikh courtly culture, which encompassed raising his sons as Kanwars (princes). Second, in 1839, Kharak Singh commissioned a Sanskrit astronomy manuscript – the Sarvasiddhantattvacudamani. This “cultural connoisseurship” also challenges the contemporary British depictions of him as an “imbecile” and the characterisation of Punjabi royals as “unrefined”. Third, royal women were involved in princely education and war. In 1816, Kharak Singh’s mother Mai Nakain took over his training for 18 months. Together they conquered Multan.

All the world’s a stage

A sizeable portion of the book dwells on the relationship between the Sikh Empire and the British East India Company. Atwal explores how Ranjit Singh used Anglo-Punjabi relations as an opportunity to advance his dynastic brand. Such insightful evaluation is made possible by her command of the primary source material.

An illustration of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Photo: Colonel James Skinner/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

To this end, Atwal surveys numerous diplomatic interactions between the parties. For instance, at the 1838 Lahore Durbar welcoming Lord Auckland to his kingdom, the Maharajah awarded the Governor-General an official Punjabi decorative order. This intimacy was to symbolise dynastic proximity.

At the same time, she notes that whilst many British sources foreground the Lahore Court’s cocktail-fuelled nautch (dance) parties – fuelling Orientalist narratives of Punjabi “decadence” – politically significant meetings were often held in the Maharajah’s gardens. Ranjit Singh’s fondness for horticultural pursuits is further evidence of his engagement with Indo-Persian artistic culture, an affection he shared in his decision to gift the Company’s Political Agent, Claude Martin Wade, a gardening text from his royal library. This is especially salient considering his illiteracy.

Also read: Time to Rescue South Asia’s Muslims and Sikhs from Divide-and-Rule Historiography

However, it should come as no surprise that it was in the realm of weddings that Ranjit Singh made his boldest efforts to enter a “transnational world of royalty”. We learn that the 1811 and 1837 weddings of his son, Kharak Singh, and grandson, Nau Nihal Singh, were occasions of “spectacular dynastic exhibition”. The use of royal symbolism throughout the lavish festivities, combined with invitations to British officials and local aristocracy, were geared towards cementing a new social hierarchy in the Punjab.

After the Lion

The latter sections of the book may be described as a historiographical rescue operation. The dominant view has been that the post-Ranjit Singh period was one of “weak characters”, “bitter divides” and “chaos”. According to Atwal, this narrative has gone unchallenged because of the greater prevalence of (biased) British sources.

For example, an enduring British motif proffered by the Company’s Ambassador, Alexander Burnes, is the notion that Kharak Singh was “of weak mind”. Atwal probes this claim by contrasting it with Punjabi contemporary accounts. She shows that the opinions of Company officials varied according to their strategic assessments. Essentially, those who favoured a more aggressive Company policy vis-à-vis the Sikh Empire were more inclined to perceive his lesser ability to govern.

Atwal also resurrects from obscurity the gendered tensions underpinning claims to legitimate authority. In November 1840, the senior-most wife of Kharak Singh, Maharani Chand Kaur, was traduced by competitor Sikh princes as a danger to the stability of the Lahore durbar. Her daughters-in-law were even poisoned to terminate their pregnancies, destroying their royal lineage. Court historian, Suri, strongly condemned this treatment as most “improper”. By illuminating the views of Punjabi chroniclers, Atwal adds the necessary context to holistically understand the “bitter divides”.

Maharani Chand Kaur. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Jindan Kaur

Most maligned in the colonial accounts has been the youngest wife of Ranjit Singh, Jindan Kaur, who became the Queen Regent in 1843. The principal allegation against her is that she was a “slave” to her “passions”, whose feminine unsuitability for rule was to blame for the undoing of the Sukerchakia dynasty in 1849.

Atwal’s defence against this libel is heroic. By 1843-44, the Khalsa Army had emerged as an independent power centre, whose relationship with the Lahore Durbar became increasingly fractious. A popular myth relates that following the Army’s assassination of her brother and vazir, Jawahir Singh, Jindan provoked a disastrous war with the Company in 1845-46, in the hope that the Army would be massacred.

It was in fact the Army that was agitating for a war both to rebuff British military provocations and in the hope that victory would create an opportunity to loot British-held territories as contemporary Punjabi sources demonstrate. Atwal strengthens this argument with evidence from the records of British intelligence, which showcase how self-interested Lahore officials also conspired against the Durbar by bribing Khalsa soldiers. Thus, the Maharani had no choice but to sanction the invasion of Company territory.

Also read: In Honouring Ranjit Singh, Pakistan Is Moving Beyond Conceptions of Muslim vs Sikh History

The final chapter further explores the political implications of gendered litanies against the Maharani. British frustrations at the Maharani’s refusal to make political compromises led to the emergence of a de-legitimising discourse about her “debauchery”. What is striking here is the extent to which it was these biases against female authority, as well as British self-interest, which drove the Company to exile the Maharani from Lahore in 1847, and thus led her in 1848 to secretly instigate an insurrection against the British in Multan.

Whilst that rebellion failed, the indefatigability of the ‘Rebel Queen’ reinforces the merits of Atwal’s thesis about the fundamental role played by women in the Sukerchakia dynasty.

Sapan Maini-Thompson is training to become a barrister in the UK. He tweets @SapanMaini.

Time to Rescue South Asia’s Muslims and Sikhs from Divide-and-Rule Historiography

History at the hands of the colonialists was a powerful tool through which ‘historical injustices’ were highlighted and then ‘avenged’.

Lahore: It was, at least till that point, the single most important event in the short history of the Sikhs. Not only did it change the course of Sikhism but also had long lasting impact on the course of events in Punjab. His was no ordinary death. This was the execution of a Guru, the head of this nascent religious community, a peaceful community which at that point could not, even it wanted to, threaten the mighty Mughal Empire – then at its zenith – ruled by Emperor Jahangir, conqueror of the world. This was the execution of Guru Arjan Dev, the fifth Sikh Guru.

What is also significant here is the nature of the execution. For five days, the Guru is said to have been tortured. Burning sand is said to have been poured on his head as he sat in a lit cauldron, bearing all of this peacefully. There are multiple contesting narratives as to why the Guru was executed – narratives that still inspire heated debates and arguments. It’s not my job, neither my interest here, to explore these claims. What I am rather interested in is the long-lasting impact of this execution.

It is in the shadow of his father’s execution that Guru Hargobind emerges, the first Sikh Guru who could truly be called ‘Saint Warrior’. Realising the perilous situation of the community, the sixth Guru continued with passion the process of militarising the Sikh community, for self-protection. It is really the process started by Guru Hargobind that culminated with Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru.

In the popular imagination, it is Guru Gobind Singh, who is thought of as a ‘Saint Warrior’ for his opposition to Emperor Aurangzeb. However, the impact of Guru Hargobind cannot be understated on Guru Gobind Singh, with the latter even keeping the sword of his the Guru as a cherished possession.

Also read: Ranjit Singh’s Statue in Lahore Uproots the Colonial Narrative of Muslim-Sikh Strife

Another interesting parallel that connects the stories of these two Gurus is the nature of their ascension. Guru Gobind Singh too became a Guru in the aftermath of the execution of his father, Guru Tegh Bahadur at the hands of Emperor Aurangzeb. There was, therefore, a similar nature of threat on the Sikh community and its future at the time of his rise.

Between Guru Arjun, Guru Hargobind and Emperor Jahangir, and Guru Tegh Bahadur, Guru Gobind Singh and Emperor Aurangzeb, the entire story of the Mughal-Sikh relationship can be recalled. It is the story of a massive, powerful empire coming down hard on a religious group that through its resilience and leadership managed to survive. However, while these stories do present a good understanding of Mughal-Sikh relationship they do not necessarily explain the Muslim-Sikh relationship, often times assumed to be the same thing.

One way in which Mughal and Muslim became synonymous was through the colonial educational policy. Under the colonial state, when the history of South Asia was studied and written, it was categorised into neat compartments like the Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh periods, with the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals falling under the category of Muslims, with Maharaja Ranjit Singh, on the other hand, highlighting the Sikh period.

These neat compartments provided the impression that these were isolated periods, with a rupture from one period to another. Actual history, of course, is much more complicated, with different ‘periods’ flowing into each other, transcending these imagined ruptures. For example, the court language of Maharaja Ranjit Singh remained Persian, following a tradition that came to him through the Mughals. There is also much historical evidence to suggest that ‘Muslim’ rulers maintained several of the state institutions of rulers preceding them. There is, therefore, much interaction and borrowing between different ‘periods’.

Unfortunately, early Indian nationalists, from secular, to Hindu and Muslim nationalists, educated mostly from colonial educational institutions and reading about the history of India through these colonial historians, failed to challenge this basic framework of periods through which a history of India was imagined. In many ways, this premise continues to inform how different kinds of nationalists continue to not just perceive history but rather also how religious groups interacted with each other. Therefore, using this framework, the Mughal-Sikh interaction between empire and rebel gets transformed into the interaction between Muslims and Sikhs as followers of different religions.

History at the hands of the colonialists was a powerful tool through which ‘historical injustices’ were highlighted and then ‘avenged’. During the War of 1857, particularly, the British used this excuse of ‘avenging’ the past to rile up former Sikh soldiers of the Empire of Ranjit Singh, to support the British against the ‘Mughal-led Muslim dominated-rebellion’.

Also read: Shared Trauma Underpins Sikh-Muslim Solidarity in Kashmir

The British, having only recently taken control of Punjab, realised their tenuous position in the province and also the grave implication to the future of the empire in India if Punjab too were to rise up in arms against the British. It is in this context that propaganda was done by the British to cast the rebellion as Mughal-led. Deliberately, a prophecy was spread into the newly-recruited Sikh soldiers that the ‘White-man’ would ‘avenge’ the injustices committed against the Sikh Gurus.

Unfortunately, even seven decades after decolonisation, the colonial framework of history continues to dominate contemporary political debates and actions in South Asia.

While on the one hand the execution of Guru Arjan at the hands of Emperor Jahangir is used an example to reinforce this framework, the same historical example also provides us with an alternative through which history and particularly relations between different religious groups can be imagined. It is well known that Guru Arjan and the Muslim Sufi Saint Mian Mir were close friends. It is believed that when Guru Arjan laid the foundation of Harminder Sahib in Amritsar he asked Mian Mir to lay the first brick. Similarly, when Guru Arjan was being tortured by the Mughal administration, Mian Mir is believed to have approached Guru Arjan to seek his permission to the destroy the city of Lahore to rescue the Guru. Guru Arjun turned down the offer.

It is these encounters, I believe, which provide us with a better understanding of the interaction between members of different religious groups. It is these relationships which can be used to dismantle the edifice of the antagonist and exclusionary framework through which the history of the subcontinent is understood. It is only through the decolonisation of history that a peaceful future in South Asia can be imagined, where mosques and temples are not brought down, and minority communities targeted to ‘avenge historical injustices’.

Haroon Khalid is the author of several books including Imagining Lahore and Walking with Nanak.

What the Debate Around bin Qasim and Raja Dahir Tells Us About Pakistan and Nationalism

Though the debate here is about two rulers, the actual conversation that needs to happen is between the Singh government and the federal state.

The demand first came last year, when a statue honouring Maharaja Ranjit Singh was unfolded at the Lahore Fort. Despite its political motivations and other contexts, it was an extraordinary moment. An extremely rare moment when the Pakistani state was not just acknowledging but celebrating a non-Muslim ruler. This was after years of propaganda of projecting the Sikh era as being tumultuous for the Muslim population of Punjab. Facing the Lahore Fort, in the alley of Badshahi Masjid, at least till a few years ago, when I last saw them, there were pictures from the colonial era that showed the dilapidated condition of the mosque during the Sikh era, when it was used as a horse stable.

Though unveiling the statue was praiseworthy, it was just that: a symbolic moment without any accompanying structural changes. In school and college history books, the Sikh era continued to be projected as tyrannous for the Muslim population, while Muslim nationalist writers vehemently recalled Ranjit Singh’s ‘atrocities’. It, therefore should not come as a surprise that shortly after its installation, the statue was attacked and damaged. The message had larger reverberations than was acknowledged at that time: Ranjit Singh, or for that matter, no Hindu or Sikh ruler could be celebrated in Pakistan.

Statue of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Photo: Twitter/pid_gov

Pakistan, like every other country in the world, has used history to tell its own national story. The story, of course, is not fixed. It requires constant revisions and modifications. For example, in the early years of the country, it was acceptable to teach the story of Ramayana or Mahabharata to school children. It was acceptable to discuss the Kushan or Gupta dynasties. As relations with India deteriorated, most of these stories began slipping away, while other stories became more prominent.

Also Read: Reclaiming the Nation: Reaching the Destination

These are the stories of Muhammad Bin Qasim, Mahmud Ghazni, Muhammad of Ghor, Babur, Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali. It became the story of Muslim triumph over a pagan land, a chaotic rule replaced by a benevolent empire enlightened by religious exceptionalism. Just as the creation of Pakistan was projected as the triumph of Muslim nationalism in juxtaposition to the defeat of Indian nationalism (read Hindu nationalism), history was recast to tell this story of triumph over and over again.

The significance of bin Qasim

While all these historical characters are significant in this narrative, as can be testified by the names of our missiles, Muhammad bin Qasim acquired particular significance in this pantheon. He was the first Muslim ruler, the one who brought the ‘first light onto this dark land’, the harbinger of glorious things that were to come after him, the Ghaznis, the Baburs, the Abdalis, and of course Pakistan.

If we use the story of Ramayana, they became the Rams of the story. However, every Ram needs a Ravana, the penultimate villain, on the basis of whom his glory is projected. Thus entered the villainous Hindu rulers like Raja Dahir, Anandpala, Prithviraj Chouhan, Shivaji and others. For the true light of their rule to shine, the era preceding them needed to be darker. In order for these Muslim rulers to be just, the ones before them needed to be more atrocious.

Standing in contrast to the glorious Muhammad Bin Qasim, the 17-year-soldier, was the aging Raja Dahir, the ruler of Sindh. If Muhammad Bin Qasim had to be a symbol of Pakistani nationalism, then Raja Dahir had to be its anti-thesis. And that is what he came to represent for a long time, his name itself representing tyranny. It was on his body that the glorious statue of Muhammad bin Qasim was to be erected, holding the flag of Pakistani nationalism.

Muhammad bin Qasim. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Mohammad Adil CC BY-SA 3.0

While the nationalist project, on one hand, had its successes, exemplified by the attack on Ranjit Singh’s statue. It is never completely successful, with constant challenges being thrown at this deterministic narrative. The most recent challenge to this national story comes from Sindhi sub-nationalists, who have over the years tried inverting these symbols, casting Raja Dahir as the real hero – the Ram of the story – and Muhammad bin Qasim, as the bloodthirsty invader, Ravana.

The debate in Sindh

When Ranjit Singh’s statue was erected in Lahore, they demanded a similar tribute to be made to the “son the soil” in Sindh. A few days ago, the debate raged on social media, with Sindhi sub-nationalists calling Dahir a Sindhi hero and in the process, disowning Muhammad bin Qasim. Consequently, the Pakistani nationalists came to the defence of Muhammad bin Qasim and criticised Dahir.

Both these narratives are quite problematic. A critical analysis of history debunks myths on both sides. The point here is not to talk about “true” history. Historians have done that quite convincingly and effectively. For example, Romila Thapar has done a fantastic job in deflating these myths around Mahmud Ghazni, while historian Manan Ahmed Asif has done a brilliant job doing that for Muhammad bin Qasim and Raja Dahir.

The question here is not about Raja Dahir or Muhammad bin Qasim, but rather what the debate tells us about how Pakistani nationalism defines itself, and how Sindhi sub-nationalism actively seeks to define itself in opposition to that. In many ways, the process is quite similar to what happened in pre-Partition India, when Hindu nationalism picked up these symbols of “local” resistance in opposition to “foreign” Muslim invaders, as its hero. This was followed by a reversing of these symbols by Muslim nationalism, as is shown by another impressive historian, Ali Usman Qasmi. These symbols were then inherited by India and Pakistan.

In the Sindhi context, the appropriation of these symbols represents a sense of marginalisation at the hands of the Pakistani State. This defiance to Pakistan’s national historical symbols needs to be seen in the context of a long relationship between the Sindh and the federal state, where a sense of marginalisation was experienced in several ways: with the arrival of muhajir and the “loss” of Karachi to the non-Sindhis, with the purchase of large tracts of lands by Punjabi landlords in Sindh, with the low representation of Sindhis in the bureaucracy, with the drying of Indus as it enters Sindh, with the assassinations of Sindhi prime ministers Z.A. Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto. Most recently, this was experienced during the tussle between the Sindh government, led by the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the federal government, led by the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), over strategies of how to handle the COVID-19 lockdown and the debate around the 18th Amendment, which assures autonomy to the provinces, hailed by Sindh, but has been increasingly criticised by the PTI.

Also Read: After Partition, Trust was the Biggest Loss in Sindh

Raja Dahir. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/INDIAN SCHOOL, Public Domain

Thus, while keyboard warriors engage in a debate on Muhammad bin Qasim and Raja Dahir, the real debate that needs to happen is about the relationship between the Sindh provincial government and the federal state. Unfortunately, when this debate is held through these symbols, the real issues are often forgotten and never addressed.

Haroon Khalid is the author of several books including Imagining Lahore and Walking with Nanak.

Amrita Sher-Gil’s Paintings Are a Reflection of Her Extraordinary Childhood

Amrita’s works, on display at the Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum in Ahmedabad, adumbrate her strong personality, sexuality and sensibility as a young artist.

Credit: Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum

Amrita Sher-Gil: Portraits and Reveries, an exhibition of Amrita Sher-Gil’s (1913-1941) drawings, mostly done in the early 1920s when she was a precocious pre-teen, is open till January 25, 2018, in the unobtrusive sunken gallery of the Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum in Ahmedabad.

Amrita’s 51 works, which have never been exhibited for public viewing before, already adumbrate her strong personality, sexuality and sensibility as a young artist and outspoken critic of Indian art of her times. She died at the age of 28, but not before breaking new ground as a painter who used solid, bright colours of miniature paintings to invoke an India grounded in the everyday reality of her villages. The bulk of her works on display are in pencil, graphite stick, charcoal and watercolour on paper. They culminate in a grey, wintry scene of a church – oil on canvas – in the European tradition that brings to mind the sombre landscapes of Breughel, the most significant artist of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting. This church with a black steeple framed by the black, bare, gaunt branches of a tree was painted in Hungary in 1938 when she had already gained maturity as an artist, only three years before her death. The paintings belong to the family archive that Vivan Sundaram, who also happens to be Amrita’s nephew, has built up and looked after all these years. They were collected by her mother Marie Antoinette Gottesmann-Erdobaktay (1881-1949). Her sister Indira (1914-1975), who was Vivan’s mother, had inherited them.

Amrita’s paintings are displayed in one of the two sunken galleries created by architect Rahul Mehrotra, who had lovingly restored the colonial building on the same plot that houses what used to be the famous Abanindranath Tagore’s collection. He was also responsible for designing the accompanying glass house where contemporary works are exhibited.

Credit: Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum

The exhibition in the second sunken gallery is an extension of the first, for here we see Amrita’s self-portrait in a blue sari (circa 1937) with an incomplete look in oil colours, and a portrait of her father, the scholar ascetic Umrao Singh Sher-Gil (1870-1954). Along with these two oil paintings, the remarkable, often shocking black-and-white photographs taken by Umrao Singh, and a selection of the photo montages by Vivan Sundaram titled Retake on Amrita are displayed. One of Sundaram’s works shows Amrita and her father as indivisible, both body and soul, emerging from one another, as it were. There is also a similarity in the manner in which both the father and the daughter dramatised their own bodies as media for self-expression. A fanatical weight watcher, a young Umrao had photographed himself in Paris after a period of fasting in a loin cloth with his abundant tresses held out with both hands like a veil. With a bearded face and a slim torso, he could be Christ, but there is an unmistakable ambiguity in the abandon with which his hair cascades like a waterfall, unintended though it may have been. So is it surprising that his own daughter’s nude self-portraits are some of her most compelling works, and that she had been so uninhibited from an early age? A film on Amrita’s tumultuous life and work by documentary filmmaker Navina Sundaram, Vivan’s sister, is being screened here.

One only has to look at Amrita’s extraordinary though short life and the environment she was brought up in to seek explanation for those amazing, sexually-charged drawings and paintings of her childhood.

Vivan Sundaram’s two-volume Amrita Sher-Gil: a self-portrait in letters & writings provides all the clues. Umrao, who had nationalist sympathies, belonged to one of the three most prominent clans of the Sikh aristocracy. He belonged to the ancestral village of Majitha near Amritsar in Punjab. His family was closely associated with the Sikh emperor Ranjit Singh. After the death of his first wife, he married Marie Antoinette, an opera singer of middle-class origins from a French-Hungarian family in 1912 in Lahore. Antoinette was accompanying Princess Bamba Sofia Jindan, daughter of Ranjit Singh’s son Duleep Singh.

Credit: Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum

Amrita was conceived in Lahore, which was the cultural capital of pre-Partition north India, and was born in Budapest, Hungary. World War I broke out after Amrita’s younger sister Indira was born and the family had to remain in Hungary till 1921. Antoinette’s youngest brother, Ervin Baktay, was an indologist of some repute. He studied the ideas of Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi and even visited Santiniketan.

The Sher-Gils moved to Antoinette’s family home in the village Dunaharaszti on the outskirts of Budapest, where Amrita joined a local school. Here she began to draw with colour pencils and water colours to illustrate Hungarian folk and fairy tales and Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. Amrita started writing her own stories and poems around this time, and slip of a girl though she was, it was evident that she knew her mind.

In 1921, the Sher-Gils returned to India, stopping by in Paris on the way. Amrita and Indira were home-tutored in English and French and they took music and dance lessons too. Simla became their home, but for her drawings and paintings, Amrita drew inspiration mostly from Hungarian stories, and in a couple of years, cinema – both Hollywood and European – entered her world of fantasies.

Credit: Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum

The women she portrayed in these early works were heroines of operas and of her own stories and silent screen goddesses, who, as the character Norma Desmond said in the musical version of Sunset Boulevard, “No words can tell the stories my eyes tell”. So they have large expressive eyes that reach out to the audience and audaciously show off their taut, bare breasts. With masses of wild hair – blonde, black and auburn – they are in various attitudes of ecstasy and distress. Magnificently bejewelled, they hold their heads high appearing as classical goddesses or flappers with a smart bob and a boa, a look that came back again with the model Twiggy, who personified the zeitgeist of the swinging sixties. In one painting, a distressed damsel in oriental garb is held in thrall probably by an Arab sheikh as a European man looks on. The opera Savitri & Satyavan deeply influenced her paintings. This was the orient as seen through the eyes of the West and manifested itself in the turbans, pajamas, slippers with those ridiculous curly toes and other supposedly exotic garments. One wonders if Amrita was familiar with the highly stylised drawings of the French-Russian artist Erté (1892-1990), who was famous for his sinuous women draped in furs and jewels and soft luxurious material. In another work, a young woman looks out of her window as if in a reverie. The nubile Renoiresque nudes have already made their appearance, but although her ideas are clear, her lines are still unsure. Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cezanne were her favourites and that is obvious from her later works.

In a year or two, her lines would firm up and her drawings of a young woman with an oval face and short hair and the profile of a fashionable Indian woman (à laDevika Rani) done in 1926 show signs of maturity beyond her years. The robust draughtsmanship of some of the later statuesque nudes is evidence of the progress she was making as an artist. The joyous abandon of her nude self-portrait indicates her total disregard for conventional morality.

Little wonder that Amrita was thrown out of school in Simla for declaring herself an atheist. Her art lessons continued and she was a voracious reader. In 1929, she set sail for Paris to seek academic training in art. She was enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts the same year. It was in October 1934 that Amrita, in her characteristically impulsive manner, wrote to her mother in Hungarian from Hungary: “…It seems paradoxical but I know for certain that had we not come away to Europe I should perhaps never have realised that a fresco from Ajanta or a small piece of sculpture in the Musée Guimet (the museum in Paris has a precious and varied collection of Indian art from ancient times) is worth more than the whole Renaissance…”

Being of Indo-Hungarian heritage, Amrita was equally at home in both the cultures. She may have written in 1938 to her friend, the collector, Karl Khandalavala: “Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and many others. India belongs to me.” But her vision as an artist was certainly shaped by both worlds.

Soumitra Das, a Kolkata-based journalist, writes on culture and the city’s built heritage.

Modi’s Ministers Involved in Corruption Cases, Claims Prashant Bhushan in Tell-All Interview

Swaraj Abhiyan founder Prashant Bhushan discusses the Essar tapes and other scams, the role of whistleblowers and his fallout with Arvind Kejriwal.

Swaraj Abhiyan founder Prashant Bhushan. Credit: PTI

Celebrated lawyer-activist Prashant Bhushan has just notched up another victory with the Supreme Court-appointed panel decreeing there was prima facie evidence that former CBI director Ranjit Sinha had attempted to influence the investigation into the coal block allocation scam under the then UPA government. The court’s observation was based on a visitor’s diary submitted by Bhushan that showed Sinha had compromised investigations into the scam by meeting the accused at his residence over 50-60 times, as records reveal.

Over the years, Bhushan has become the point person for whistleblowers from the bureaucracy, police and even the media. He has skilfully and doggedly used the public interest litigation (PIL) route to dig out and pursue cases of corruption, civil liberties and human rights.

Bhushan exploded on the political scene as one of the prominent members of the headline-grabbing India Against Corruption, along with Anna Hazare and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, but the movement went up in smoke after his very public fight with Kejriwal over the future course of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Bhushan has moved on to form the Swaraj Abhiyan, a new political movement that hopes to bring ideology into everyday politics, even as he continues to push the judiciary to hound the corrupt and is at the forefront exposing a string of scandals, such as the Reliance gas scam, the Essar tapes and emails scam, 2G spectrum scandal and the Vyapam scam. Bhushan, however, admits he now needs a larger network of people to help in unearthing, scrutinising and probing scandals, and is all set to launch a new organisation for whistleblowers.

Excerpts from an interview:

Are you satisfied with the court’s indictment of Ranjit Sinha?

I’m glad the courts are taking this forward, because the issue is very serious. Here is a CBI director who seems to be surreptitiously and unofficially meeting a number of high-profile accused persons who are being investigated by the agency, even as he’s dealing with their investigation files. It has to do with the integrity of the main anti-corruption investigating agency and, therefore, it’s essential Sinha be brought to book.

How did the visitor’s book fall into your hands?

It was obviously someone from the organisation which was responsible for putting the guards at Sinha’s residence who gave me the diary…a whistleblower. However, I did not bother to ask him his name or identity.

You have become the point person for whistleblowers from the bureaucracy, police and even the media. Why do they trust you?

I’ve been involved with public interest cases and issues, particularly corruption cases in high places, for years and perhaps people believe here’s a person who is doing something about it, taking them to court and the like. People have been coming to me for a long time…all these public interest cases have been generated by people who have the relevant information. I’ve been dealing with corruption for a long time, the first time may have been the Bofors scam in the early 90s.

How did it play out?

In the Bofors case, the courts unfortunately interfered with the investigations repeatedly, and then when the Congress government came back, it also interfered, like in the Madhavsinh Solanki case, and after some time I also got fatigued with the matter and didn’t bother to pursue it.

What did the case reveal?

It was absolutely clear that bribes had been paid, that Ottavio Quattrocchi was paid, as was established by Swiss bank documents in connection with the deal. If Quattrocchi was not an agent in this deal, why was he paid?

Where was it stalled?

The investigation was completed, it was the prosecution that was stalled. The courts repeatedly interfered and quashed various matters, the CBI didn’t take it forward, nobody else did either.

Even subsequent governments didn’t pick it up?

No, even non-Congress governments did not pick it up. In fact my experience has been that large political parties are interested in using corrupt cases against their opponents for political purposes only but are not serious to pursue the cases to prosecute and punish them in jail because usually the brokers or corporates involved are common, so they are not interested.

You saw this in Bofors, do you see the Modi Government pursuing corruption cases?

No. Take the Essar emails, or Essar tapes, or Reliance gas deal or the 4G scam. For instance, in the Reliance gas deal, it is obvious that Reliance indulged in serious over-invoicing, as the Comptroller and Auditor General has mentioned , but why is the Modi government not investigating it? Reliance funds all political parties.

And the Essar emails?

The Essar emails clearly convey that the company was bribing politicians across the board. This included people like union minister Nitin Gadkari (who was hosted on a yacht along with his family), President Pranab Mukherjee was gratified by way of a job for his granddaughter, Congress’s Sriprakash Jaiswal and Digvijay Singh, among others. We’ve been seeing that large corporate houses have been buying influence and gratifying all major political parties.

Why do you say the Essar tapes are even bigger than the Nira Radia tapes?

The Essar tapes are conversations between actual people involved in those crimes. There are confessions of the crimes by the people themselves, conversations between Mukesh Ambani and various government officials and ministers; or Reliance officials talking amongst themselves, which show them confessing to over-invoicing and bribing. All this was happening between 2002 to 2008. I’ve not heard the tapes myself, but I’ve heard what’s being said and they are very damaging. There are clearly multiple acts of wrong doing and corruption here.

How did you get the damning Essar emails?

Again, it was a whistleblower from Essar company who handed it to us.

Don’t whistleblowers have an independent agency to go to?

There was a whistleblower agency set up on the orders of the Supreme Court when it said the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) must become the nodal agency for whistleblowers. The CVC must investigate the complaints given by whistleblowers, give them protection and the like. But we’ve found that the CVC has failed whistleblowers, partly because the appointees are weak, pliable; and secondly, they don’t have enough staff and wherewithal for investigation.

Are you setting up an agency?

We’ve set up a whistleblower forum, which has eight members, including Justice A.P. Shah, Justice Santosh Hegde, former secretary E.A.S. Sarma and Admiral Laxminarayan Ramdas among others. It was set up four-five months ago but the announcement was low key. We hope whistleblowers will come to this forum, the office is in Delhi, we will launch it again soon with a proper Press conference. Publicity is the oxygen of the anti-corruption movement.

What is the first hurdle for whistleblowers?

First, we have to analyse what the documents and material reveal, how serious is the crime or illegalities; then we have to process what can be done legally, if the courts can order an independent investigation or order the government to probe the evidence. But like in the Radia tapes or Essar emails, there needs to be a public exposure of wrongdoings, as many of these crimes involve corporates, bureaucracy and politicians, and it is important that this nexus is exposed. I do stress on media exposure of crimes.

What do you do when this nexus also investigates its own crimes?

That’s why we’ve to go to court, because it’s an independent body

But you’ve also accused the judiciary of illegality?

By and large they are independent; of course, the integrity of some judges is questionable and there is a problem, but to a fair extent the courts are independent.

Apart from courts and media, what else is needed?

We need a peoples’ movement, which is why we’ve set up the Swaraj Abhiyan, which campaigns against corruption, farmers’ issues, communalism, and lastly, education and employment.

What went wrong in your last effort with Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal?

Anna is a decent man, a simpleminded person, who probably does not have a broad understanding of many issues, but he is clearly a public-spirited person and courageous. But it was Kejriwal’s character that made everything go wrong. I didn’t quite realise that he was so unscrupulous, that he was willing to use any kinds of means to achieve his ends. Of course, political power can be useful, but it can’t be an end in itself, political power is only a means for doing something in public interest.

How is Kejriwal unscrupulous?

For example, after the 2014 Lok Sabha election, a disheartened Kejriwal went into secret negotiations with the Congress party to form a government again in Delhi, even while we were in court saying fresh elections must be ordered soon.

When elections were finally announced, did you not want to be part of it?

I had become very wary of Kejriwal by then, with all his machinations to get back into power. For example, the AAP voluntary manch had felt their voices were not being heard by the party, but Kejriwal wanted to destroy this organisation as he felt it was turning into a revolt by them . So, he sent a fake SMS in their name, calling out to all volunteers to join the BJP. Then he used the fake SMS to accuse them as BJP agents in a Google hangout.

Do you regret the way it played out, after all you were the core members of the India Against Corruption movement?

Yes, there’s a sense of enormous regret , this movement had enormous potential but unfortunately, it has all been squandered and all we’ve been left with is another political party that is like any other conventional political party.

Has AAP not stuck to any of its poll agenda and promises? Free water, electricity, schools?

Well, some of it may have been done, but the main purpose of forming this party was anti-corruption, transparency and accountability. There is zero transparency, zero accountability and rampant corruption in this government. Why is the Delhi government not putting up files and notings on the website for real transparency? Kejriwal’s idea is to only make a show that he has done a lot. Take the mohalla clinics – the agreement is that doctors will be paid Rs 30 for seeing a patient, so some useless doctors have been randomly picked up, those who just have an MBBS, and these doctors prepare a list of a large number of patients seen and not seen to get money, and the government has a list of patients to show. Then, for further medical investigations, the clinics have tied up with private companies where considerable amounts of money are being paid for blood tests, and typically, a lot of useless blood tests are being ordered that are not required. Then, a lot of contract labour are being employed in government hospitals, and other departments, where agencies are hired and given large commissions, and so on.

I’ve not examined schools but professor Krishna Kumar, one of the foremost educationists in the country, and former director of the National Council Of Educational Research And Training, has written a very critical article about the Delhi government and that what AAP is doing is utter nonsense, like sending school principals to Cambridge to learn education, or that just randomly cutting down 20% of the text books will help. They’ve not engaged proper educationists to look into the public schooling.

Are you disappointed the Lok Pal never came?

After the pressure was put up on him, Kejriwal hurriedly drew up a bill after nine months, which was not only totally at variance with the original, but he mischievously put a clause in the bill saying the Delhi Lok Pal will investigate central ministers too. Obviously the Centre was not going to pass it, their assent was required for it to become law. He’s obviously quite happy not to have a Lok Pal, just like Prime Minister Narendra Modi is happy not to have one.

Would you acknowledge his challenge to the Modi government?

Yes, he’s bold in taking on the Modi government and one must grant him that.

Where do you go from here, any political plans ahead?

People all over the country are looking for some honest, credible alternative, but we don’t have that as yet. It’s a very difficult task because in India, we have the first-past-the-post system and to be seen as credible players in the game of power, people have to see you as a large credible player. For this you need to have a large visibility, which requires lots of money, publicity and the like. It happened in the case of AAP because of the huge anti-corruption movement that preceded it and the publicity it got.

The way forward would be to try and put up a coalition of all such peoples’ movements and organisations, which broadly have a common ideology and who also want honest politics. It has been launched in Karnataka, but it will not happen overnight, it’ll take some time.

As for me, there are many PILs on course, from the massive corporate bank loans fraud, Reliance gas case, Air India under Praful Patel, Essar tapes and more.

‘Queen Victoria, the Receiver of Stolen Goods. Stolen Kingdoms, Stolen Jewels’

In this excerpt from The Exile, Navtej Sarna recovers the voice of Maharaja Duleep Singh as he tells the story of his last encounter with the Koh-i-noor – the diamond which once belonged to him and which he insisted till the very end had been stolen by the British.

Navtej Sarna’s The Exile: A Novel Based on the Life of Maharaj Duleep Singh is an extraordinary book, a work of history that uses the narrative structure of fiction to recreate a tragic story of conquest and betrayal out of fragmented, scattered scraps of letters, official records, memoirs and contemporary accounts.

Published in 2008, it tells the story of the youngest son of Maharaja Ranjeet Singh, whose death in 1839 set in motion a chain of events that eventually led to the British conquest of the Punjab.

Duleep Singh ascended the throne in 1843 at the age of five. Four years later, the British annexed Punjab, carting away its riches – including the famed Koh-i-noor diamond – to London. In 1854, Duleep, who was now 16, was exiled to the England, never to return to Punjab though he was allowed two brief and tightly regulated visits to India. He died in 1893 in Paris.

“If one had to reach for the edges of Duleep Singh’s story,” Sarna wrote in his introduction, “then the answer, to my mind, lay in pushing available facts towards the realm of fiction, but pushing them gently, so as not to distort them.”

In the following excerpt, Sarna recovers the voice of the exiled maharaja as he tells the story, just before his death, of the one encounter he was granted with the diamond that once belonged to him and which he insisted till the very end had been stolen by the British Raj.

Mrs Fagin.

That is what I once called Queen Victoria. The biggest pickpocket of them all. The receiver of stolen goods. Stolen kingdoms, stolen jewels.

Smuggled away to her by her loyal viceroys, men like Dalhousie, with immaculate records and long panegyrics. The thousands of pearls and emeralds and rubies and diamonds taken from my toshakhana and presented to her by the East India Company after the Great Exhibition of 1851. To be locked away in the Tower of London, stuck in her tiara, sewn on her dresses.

That’s how she received the Koh-i-noor. Dalhousie tucked it away into a chamois bag especially made by his wife, which was then sewn into his belt by Login.

Today it matters little to me whether I have it or not. If I had it who knows what I might do with it. Perhaps I would trade it for a few sunny days, a few happy conversations, some justice, a fair enquiry into my case, and certainly for a journey to Punjab. Or just throw it into the river for all that it has done for me. But as a child, I used to yearn for it. Especially when the courtiers would set up durbar in Fattehgarh and talk of the lost glory of Lahore.

I did see the near-mythical stone once in my years of exile; I even held it in my hand for a few moments. It happened on an evening in Buckingham Palace, soon after my arrival in England. The Queen was very fond of me those days and I must admit so was I, of her and her family. She was having my portrait painted by that artist Winterhalter. The man did a good job. He made me look tall and handsome, like a real prince. He was used to painting European royalty and I suppose he knew how to massage egos, even the ego of a Maharaja without a throne. He said I would ‘grow into the picture’. I never was to grow that tall but I hope people will remember me like he made me look, and not how I actually have become, bald and fat.

He would make me pose two hours at a time in the White Drawing Room of the palace. The Queen would come in just to watch me, every inch her loyal subject, with her portrait set in diamonds around my neck and her miniature picture in a ring on my finger.

Yes, she had reason to be fond of me those days. I was such a great addition to her banquets; a fine specimen to show off to the
rest of society. A young oriental king who spoke English and, to top it all, was Christian. I also said things that must have eased her conscience. I would tell her that I was glad to be in England, far away from the violent ways of my people. I even told her, on a ferry ride to the Isle of Wight, that I had become a Christian because of my own beliefs, that I had broken caste by having tea with Tommy Scott and by drinking from the same glass as Lady Login in front of Rani Dukhno. I exculpated everybody—Dalhousie, Login, Lady Login, even Bhajan Lal from having anything to do with my change of faith and took it all upon myself.

Is one still a child at sixteen, to be forgiven such complete surrender to manipulation . . .?

But I was talking of the Koh-i-noor and the days of the Winterhalter portrait.

One of those mornings, Lady Login and I were riding in Richmond Park when she turned towards me suddenly. ‘Maharaja, have you ever thought of seeing the Koh-i-noor again?’

A prickly excitement ran through me. For a moment, I thought that everything was turning out all right. The coming to England,becoming a good Christian and everything else had been worth it, that I was being rewarded for my good behaviour. Maybe not just the diamond but all else that it implied would be given back to me. But I kept the excitement out of my voice as I wheeled my horse back at the far end of the park.

‘Yes, Lady Login, I would very much like to see the Koh-i-noor again,’ was all I said.

I was still not prepared for what happened a few evenings after that conversation. I was standing very still for Winterhalter. All of a sudden the curtains parted and four tall beefeaters in full dress down to their sabres entered the room. An official stood timidly between them, holding a large box. From the corner of my eye, I saw Her Majesty walk quickly to the official and open the box. She held it and for a moment both she and the Prince Consort stared quietly at whatever it was inside the box. Then she called me. ‘Maharaja! I have something to show you.’

I stepped off the dais and walked quickly to her.

She held out the open box towards me.

‘The Koh-i-noor, Maharaja. I understand that you had wanted to see it.’

I looked again at the magical diamond that had been mine, that had meant so much to me, my father, my beautiful, fiery mother, my people. It seemed much smaller than I remembered it.

‘I have had it cut, Maharaja, by the best cutters available. It shines better now.’

She picked it out of the box and put it in my palm. I took it between my thumb and forefinger and held it up to the light. I could not look away from the quiet dazzle. I stood staring at it near the open window and a rush of emotions began to drown me. I realized I had lost everything, I was no longer a king. I was only being made to dress up like one and amuse the Queen’s court. I was angry, angry enough to want to fling the diamond in the lawns below. I was sad. I was demeaned. What did Her Majesty want me to do? To kneel down and thank her for showing me what in fact belonged to me?

When the rush in my blood subsided I knew what I wanted to do. I would make it clear that the Koh-i-noor was mine by right. So far, it had been stolen from me. Now I would gift it to her.

I walked back from the window to Her Majesty.

Handing the box with the diamond back to her I said:‘It is to me, Ma’am, the greatest pleasure thus to have the opportunity of myself tendering to my Sovereign the Koh-i-noor.’

I do not think she understood how I had felt. I do not think she cared enough. For her it was only a passing whim, a show of preposterous royal magnanimity, or a fitting show of loyalty.

But how does it matter now, all this business of so long ago?

Extracted from Navtej Sarna, The Exile: A Novel Based on the Life of Maharaj Duleep Singh (Penguin, 2008)