Heed the cry from Khadoor Sahib

YOU don’t need to travel to Khadoor Sahib to get a sense of why independent candidate Amritpal Singh, currently lodged in a jail in faraway Dibrugarh on charges under the National Security Act, may have the hawa, or the electoral wind, in his favour and could even swing the election. Just beyond the Sector 51 traffic lights, on the border between Chandigarh and Mohali, a group of elderly Sikhs has set up camp for the last year and a half, seeking to draw attention to the fact that 22 Sikh prisoners have been in jail for decades.

For all of Punjab’s rebellious spirit that chafes at authority, the citizenry is willing to protest peacefully at a significant cost to itself.

One of the men, Angrez Singh, is doling out cups of sweetened, hot milk to those who have ventured this far this hot afternoon. A group of Sikh farmers has ventured this far from Karnal. It doesn’t take long for the conversation to travel from the Centre’s — read BJP’s — discrimination with Punjab as manifesting in the ‘bandi Singhs’ (or Sikh prisoners) episode to the ‘unfairness’ of Amritpal’s incarceration. Across the road, posters of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, Shabeg Singh, Deep Sidhu, Amritpal and Beant Singh (Indira Gandhi’s assassin) are plastered across empty tents and on standalone hoardings. One poster has Bhindranwale flanked by Hardeep Singh Nijjar and Jaswant Singh Khalra on one half, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his wife and a couple of children on the other. “Dhanyavaad, Canada,” it says in Gurmukhi. Thank you, Canada.

For one, strange second, as your iPhone crashes in the heat and time stands still, you wonder if you are in 1984 (when Operation Blue Star took place), 1988 (Operation Black Thunder) or 2024. This is Punjab’s rogues’ gallery and according to some reports, one of them may even be in your next Parliament.

But hold on to that hot iPhone and steady yourself. Not only is the camp mostly empty, the few elderly but hugely eloquent men whiling away the afternoon have old age on their side. We are here because we just want our rights, they say. Let the ‘bandi Singhs’ go home, they have been in jail far too long. Even Kumbhakarna woke up after a few months, but this government refuses to wake up. Amritpal is a much misunderstood man, all he wanted was to improve Sikh society — he got the boys off drugs and wiped the tears from the eyes of their mothers. He doesn’t want Khalistan. In any case, there are those in India who want Hindu Rashtra.

The cry in the afternoon heat dissipates quickly. Even these ageing men understand the unspoken truth that Khadoor Sahib, Faridkot and Sangrur — from where Amritpal, Indira Gandhi assassin’s son Sarabjit Singh Khalsa and SAD (Amritsar) chief Simranjit Singh Mann, respectively, are contesting — cannot take on the contours of a new Republic of Khalistan, simply because all three candidates agreed to protect the Constitution when they decided to stand for elections. The lesson of the terrible Eighties is that all three men today — especially Mann, who has fought several elections since he first won in 1989 — understand that they can use the rights of free speech, expression and protest that the Constitution guarantees them to persuade their audiences. The beauty of the democratic process allows them to push the limits of that process and begin their journey back towards the centre, when they can push no more. Clearly, all three are far smarter than their mentor and role model Bhindranwale, who preferred to break rather than bend.

Mann, in any case, barely won the Sangrur seat in a bypoll after it fell vacant in 2022 — when Bhagwant Mann became chief minister of Punjab — by a margin of 5,000-odd votes.

That’s why mainstream politics is alive and well in Punjab. Even if Khadoor Sahib is wrested by a would-be secessionist called Amritpal — and all the world’s press will flock to the constituency to paint Punjab with an indiscriminate, insensitive and unintelligent brush — the fact remains that Punjab’s 2.14 crore voters have already chosen moderation. The fight between AAP, Congress, BJP and the Shiromani Akali Dal is real because the issues are real. An agricultural crisis that won’t go away. The comatose industrial climate. A deepening environmental emergency. Ageing populations and emptying villages.

The melodrama around Khadoor Sahib has actually hidden in plain sight a civil disobedience movement-in-the-making. For all of Punjab’s rebellious spirit that chafes at authority, the citizenry is willing to protest peacefully at a significant cost to itself. The farmers’ blockade of Delhi in 2020-21 is a classic case in point — as many as 750 farmers are believed to have died in that one year before the Modi government agreed to take the farm laws back. In recent weeks, as the election campaign has taken giddy turns, Punjab’s farmers have shown black flags to BJP candidates over their unhappiness at the Centre’s refusal to bend on issues like MSP, and stubbornly refused to let them enter their villages. Punjabis have persisted with the demand that the borders at Attari-Wagah and Hussainiwala be reopened for trade and better relations with Pakistan.

And yet, it may be time to heed the cry from Khadoor Sahib. Talk to us. Let’s do things differently, Punjab seems to be saying, to the man who will soon sit on the throne in Delhi. Don’t push us to the brink, we don’t like it here.