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Punjab da Batwara te
Sikh Neta Dr. Kirpal Singh bears all the hallmarks of a true historian. He has the guts to call a spade a spade and to present the unpalatable facts without wrapping them in gold foil. Ripping into the exercise of partition of the Punjab from the Sikh viewpoint and evaluating role of contemporary Sikh leaders, he marks his book, Punjab da Batwara te Sikh Neta, off from the corpus of the partition holocaust. His forceful articulation of authentically proved arguments turns dry history into an absorbing, reading. His elucidated thesis is that the partition plan of June 3, 1947, was fundamentally flawed. "A job that required three months’ preparation was finished in three days." The orgy of violence that followed the hasty plan would not have happened had the outcomes been seriously envisaged. The central question posed by him: Why did the interests of the Sikh pass unnoticed in the negotiations for the transfer of power? The bottom line is: they, unlike the Hindu or the Muslim, lacked a leader of considerable stature, who could represent their interests to the British government. He decries the Sikh representative Sardar Baldev Singh for the latter’s erroneous decisions—enumerated in the book—which got the Sikh into hot water. He castigates the formation of the boundary commission—the chairman was an outsider completely ignorant of the people, their language and geography of the area. He comes down heavily on Jinnah, "a patent force behind the formation of Pakistan", for the latter's harsh demands. That the proclaimed imperialist ambitions of Jinnah blocked the much-negotiated Sikh-Muslim alignment, he shows clearly. He is scathing about the indifference of Jawaharlal Nehru and other Congress leaders to the Sikhs. However, the efforts, though delayed, made by Gyani Kartar Singh and other Sikh leaders to mitigate the plight of the Sikhs, are hailed by the writer. They are credited for saving the tehsils of Zeera and Faridkot for East Punjab. The critique of disastrous division of Punjab, enriched with cogent interviews with the principal architects of partition plan, offers insights of retrospective importance. Dargahe Parvan
Darvesh Guru Granth Sahib says: "The world is burning, O Lord! Save it by Thy Grace—save it through the gate by which it can be saved." However, the gate by which the contemporary spiritually famished world—blazing with hatred and violence—can be saved is by assimilating and understanding the teachings of Guru Granth Sahib. Harsimran Kaur’s effort is a compilation of the biographical sketches of contributors to the holy book. Punctuated with verses, the biographical sketches bring out the essence of the percepts and practices of the galaxy of Sikh Gurus and saint poets who, hailing from diverse background and social milieu, with divergent faiths, contributed hymns to the scripture. She rightly interprets that it is a misconception that Guru Granth Sahib is the scripture of the Sikhs only. On the contrary, it is a compilation of the mystic poems and teachings not only of Sikh Gurus but also of Hindu and Muslim saints who wrote from the 12th to 17th centuries. Shunning all hypocrisy and formalism, repudiating the barriers of caste, birth and sex, the pioneer reformers promulgated the message of love, fatherhood of God, brotherhood of man and equality of man and woman in their purely monotheistic poetry. Hence the universal and practical religion of Guru Granth Sahib may be the panacea for the present fragmented age. The book is particularly suitable for the beginners in the study of the holy book.
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