WORLD PUNJABI CONFERENCE

It May Be Valuable For Indo-Pak Thaw

Harkishan Singh Surjeet

THE first week of this month saw an event that was not only unique but has great potential insofar as a betterment of the Indo-Pak ties is concerned. On December 2, there began in Patiala the first World Punjabi Conference, with the participation of personalities from the Indian as well as Pakistani sides of Punjab. Moreover, the idea was that India and Pakistan would alternatively host such conferences every year and that the next year’s version of this conference would be held in the historic city of Lahore that, as we know, was the capital of united Punjab before the country’s partition.

Indian HRD minister Arjun Singh, Indian Punjab’s chief minister Captain Amrinder Singh and deputy chief minister Mrs Rajinder Kaur Bhattal were among the prominent figures who attended this conference. Chaudhary Pervaiz Ilahi, chief minister of the other side of Punjab, was the chief guest at the conference. Some 120 persons from Pakistani Punjab also attended the event along with Mr Ilahi.

I was one among those who were especially invited to the conference.

EVENT OF GREAT SIGNIFICANCE

A COUPLE of events marked this three-day conference, including the laying of the foundation of a World Punjabi Centre at Punjabi University, Patiala. Then the conference was immediately followed by the first Indo-Pak Punjab Games 2004, which started on December 5 and were inaugurated by Chaudhary Pervaiz Ilahi. By the time we go to press, these games, sponsored jointly by the Indian Olympic Association and Punjab Olympic Association, were still continuing and were to conclude on December 11.

Before the conference process set into motion on December 2, Chaudhary Pervaiz Ilahi and his delegation were accorded a warm reception at Raja Sansi airport in Amritsar. From there, the delegation was taken to the Golden Temple complex at Amritsar where the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) honoured Ilahi with a siropa (robe of religious honour) and a model of the shrine. Later, Guru Nanak Dev University of Amritsar presented both the chief ministers honorary doctorate degrees for their role in strengthening the Indo-Pak friendship. Punjab governor General S F Rodrigues (Retd), in his capacity as the university’s chancellor, conferred these degrees on the two chief ministers.

The Pakistani delegation and Indian delegates also paid tributes to the martyrs of our freedom struggle at the historic Jallianwala Bagh where the British had perpetrated a massacre on the Baisakhi day in April 1919. This had a great symbolic value, as the Jallianwala Bagh is the place where the Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs shed their blood together for the country’s liberation from the foreign imperialist yoke.

WELCOME ASSURANCES

ADDRESSING an assemblage of people at the Information Office of the Golden Temple, Chaudhary Pervaiz Ilahi said the government of his country was prepared to start a special bus service between Amritsar and Lahore that could be further extended to connect the Sikh shrines at Nankana Sahib and Kartarpur. He also assured the Sikh community that their shrines in Pakistan would not only be protected but also repaired to restore their historic glory. He also expressed resolve to develop Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of Guru Nanak Dev, into a model city. These came as welcome announcements in the background of vandalism at the Nankana Sahib shrine a few months ago. 

A further announcement was that Ilahi would try to get relaxed the visa restrictions regarding the Sikh pilgrims’ travel to Pakistan. As a large number of Sikh pilgrims were recently denied visas for Pakistan, the issue has been agitating them no end and the announcement should come to them as a soothing balm. Ilahi also promised to try for release of the Punjabi youth who are languishing in Pakistani prisons.

Delivered in chaste Punjabi at Patiala, Chaudhary Pervaiz Ilahi’s valedictory address at the conference not only reiterated these points but also stressed the importance of the event, and the need to hold similar conferences in future, for the sake of progressive betterment in Indo-Pak relations.

BACKGROUND OF DIVISION

IN order to fully grasp the significance of this first World Punjabi Conference and the Indo-Pak Punjab Games, one has to first situate them in context of the travails which the Punjabi people underwent after independence.

As we know, the partition of the country was accompanied by a ghastly holocaust that directly and indirectly affected the entire North India. In the midst of inhuman communal pogroms that preceded, accompanied and succeeded the country’s independence, lakhs of people had had to leave their hearth and home, and move from one side of the newly carved out border to another. Innumerable people including the aged and children were brutally massacred by communal goons on both sides of the border; their houses, shops and other properties were arsoned, looted and forcibly occupied; and a large number of women were molested and raped.

This was thus one of the biggest and cruellest transfers of population in human history, one whose wounds are still festering --- even after 57 years of the partition. Each of the Punjabi nationality in the North West of India and Bengali nationality in East India artificially got divided into two segments. Moreover, there are instances in which even individual families were divided and their members have been deprived of mutual contact for the most part of these 57 years. The partition thus led to a human tragedy of immense proportions.

But the nationality that bore the brunt of this holocaust most was that of the Punjabis. Not only did whole villages on both sides of the border wear a deserted look in the immediate aftermath of the partition; the whole economy of the region also suffered grievous dislocations and losses. The Punjab had been a distinct province under the Mughals as well as under the British and therefore, before the partition, the economy of the Punjab was so integrally structured that both its eastern and western parts were crucially dependent upon one another for goods and services. Also, lakhs of people used to daily commute from one city to another (e g from Amritsar to Lahore) for jobs and study, for making purchases, for marketing of their produce etc. In the first decade of the 20th century, thousands of families had migrated from the eastern to the western parts in order to inhabit and cultivate the lands that were barren till that time but where irrigation facilities were newly developed. This was indeed the background in which a powerful anti-British movement erupted in the same decade under the leadership of Lala Lajpat Rai and Sardar Ajit Singh, martyr Bhagat Singh’s uncle.

TRADITION THAT WAS JOLTED

BUT the partition snapped all these links and it was therefore no wonder that, in the immediate aftermath of the partition, the large-scale dislocation of the population also brought indescribable misery to the people of both parts of the Punjab. This is true not only for the refugees but also for others who were not uprooted and were not as hapless.

This division of the Punjabi nationality appears all the more tragic in view of the socio-cultural tradition of the Punjabi people. For, here was a nationality whose members were well known not only for their liveliness but also for their organic unity. Before the partition the Punjabis were living together in peaceful coexistence without any distrust on the basis of religion and ethnicity. This was the land where Sikhism, one of the living world religions, was born and its founder, Guru Nanak’s teachings are still regarded by many as a major attempt at synthesising the basic tenets of Hinduism and Islam. When Guru Arjun Dev, the fifth guru, compiled the Granth Sahib, the holy text of the Sikhs, those whose poetry found a place of veneration in it included Baba Farid, a Sufi saint, besides Kabir and several others.

The tradition continued still further and got a concrete shape in the form of numerous folk songs and stories. The latter include the stories written by Sufi poets --- like Heer by Waris Shah (besides the versions written by Damodar and many others), Sohni-Mahiwal by Fazal Shah, Pooran Bhagat by Qadiryar, and the stories of Sassi-Punnu, Mirza-Sahiban and others. And no less eminent were the Sufi poets from Sultan Bahu to Bulle Shah who stand as symbols of what has often been called the Punjabiyat. 

But it was precisely this lively and syncretic tradition that got a severe jolt because of the country’s partition. We take here just one specific instance. Since the days of Guru Nanak, ragis used to sing gurubani and Sufi songs outside gurdwaras throughout Punjab, and these ragis were Muslims who did not think their singing was in any way an obstacle to the observance of their own faith. But the climate of distrust which the communal forces, aided and abetted by British imperialists, created in the 1940s, has done away with this precious tradition forever. 

PEOPLE-TO-PEOPLE TIES NEED A BOOST

IT is thus clear that if the “spirit of Punjab, Punjabi and Punjabiyat” is to be revived, for which the organisers of the first World Punjabi Conference said they would strive, then the said glorious traditions of Punjab will have to be preserved and further strengthened and developed. Preserving these traditions is in itself not much of a problem, as the Punjabi people of both India and Pakistan still cherish these traditions. And this can serve as the basis on which the mutual bonds between the two segments of the nationality can be further cemented.

There is also the need to look at the recent World Punjabi Conference in the context of the ongoing Indo-Pak dialogue. There is no denying that India and Pakistan still have to cross many hurdles in order to improve their relations, but the gratifying fact is that the process of dialogue is on and has also made some headway. And, more important than that, the process is backed by a very big fund of popular goodwill in both the countries. As the Punjabis, like the Bengalis and Muhajirs, have much suffered the trauma of partition, anything that pushes the process of their integration can’t but have a salutary effect on the betterment of Indo-Pak ties.

But this requires, above anything else, that the process of people to people contacts must be made to move ahead as vigorously as possible. If the first World Punjabi Conference was mainly an official affair, this was in a sense and to an extent inevitable. But since the conference process has already begun, it is not necessary that it should remain confined to the official level. Rather it must be made broad-based and intellectuals, journalists, teachers and students, youth, women and other segments of the population of the two countries have to be involved in it. There will of course be irritants in the way, like Chaudhary Pervaiz Ilahi’s remarks on the supposed centrality of the Kashmir issue in forging the Indo-Pak ties. But there is no need to let these minor irritants dominate the whole issue. Moreover, once the process of people to people contacts moves ahead, it can well overcome such irritants in an unimaginably short time. In sum, such contacts are a very real guarantee for the creation of durable peace in South Asia and progressive betterment of Indo-Pak ties that will be in the mutual interest of the two countries and the whole subcontinent. 

The newly started process of World Punjabi Conference can thus be a valuable and integral part of the wider process of Indo-Pak dialogue, and it is in this light that it has to be seen and evaluated.