The altercation between a Pentecostal procession and a group of “Khalistani” supporters in New Zealand brought into sharp focus how the K-Group (a more apt name than “Khalistanis” for the terror group) is damaging the image of the Sikh community worldwide. Overall, the Sikhs are a progressive, prosperous community worldwide, but the small group of K-Group supporters is damaging the name of a noble community. The Sikhs have from the start of their faith sworn to protect the innocents from cruel marauders. In a reversal of basic Sikh tenets, the K-Group instead preys on innocents, especially in India.
The community was sought to be removed from the new country of Pakistan (formed from the division of India in 1947) through murder, loot, rapine and takeover of assets secured through hard work by Sikhs in what became Pakistan. The survivors found sanctuary and safety in India, contributing significantly to the growing wealth in the country. The same was accomplished by them in whichever country they settled in, outside India mainly the English-speaking Western countries. The Sikhs overall contribute much more in taxes than they take away in services, unlike some other groups, whose net contribution to the host economy is negative.
Because of the operations carried out by the K-Group in such countries, the entire Sikh community has come under scrutiny, and calls are undeservedly growing within the populations of such Western countries to quietly keep out more Sikhs from migrating to them. In other words, the small K-Group is doing a substantial amount of damage to the reputation of the entire community.
The reality of the Punjabi-dominated Pakistan army being behind the K-Group depredations becomes clear from the fact that the so-called “Khalistani” supporters never utter a word about the forcible takeover for mating of so many innocent Sikh women. The seizure of land and expulsion of practically the entire Sikh community that took place in Pakistan goes entirely unmentioned by the K-Group. It gets replaced by the fake news of the “genocide of the Sikh community” in India, the country which gave a willing and warm refuge to the Sikhs of what was now Pakistan Punjab.
In 1947, trains used to arrive across the border into India, with compartments crammed with the bodies of Sikhs butchered in a genocidal frenzy by the Pakistani Punjabis. Although the then Government of India sought to downplay and reduce accurate reportage of such atrocities, enough entered the public domain to create a permanent record of the 1947 genocide of the Sikhs in Pakistan.
It was to distract international attention and scrutiny from their own genocide that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of General Headquarters of the Pakistan armed forces launched a blitzkrieg of almost entirely false information about the imaginary genocide of the Sikh community alleged by the ISI to be happening in India. A few provocateurs of the ISI active in India did commit some murders of Sikhs in India during this period, but the numbers killed in such attacks were not even close to a single percentage of the Sikhs killed in Pakistan during that period. Unfortunately for India, such incidents were used by the ISI to divert attention away from the immensity of the numbers of Sikhs killed in Pakistan in just the four months after Pakistan got its freedom, as did the rest of India in August, 1947. The Union Jack had then been replaced by the respective national flags of India and Pakistan.
The widespread perception within the West was that India was a satellite of the Soviet Union as were countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and East Germany. The reality was that India was never a vassal country obedient to the dictates of the Soviet Union in the way these four were. This misperception of India led to overwhelmingly favourable coverage of Pakistan by Western media and newspersons, in contrast to India, where their coverage was largely accusatory, ignoring the reality that India was a democracy and Pakistan a military dictatorship since Field Marshal Ayub Khan overthrew the civilian government in the 1950s. As part of the whitewashing process, the history of genocide in Pakistan scarcely got any international attention, although puffed up reports of the phony Indian “genocide” became widespread.
Infowar is as important a factor in the winning of the perception battle internationally as success in combat, and in this, the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi used to outclass India substantially.
The short-lived Chandra Sekhar government of the 1970s secured commerce and trade concessions for India by permitting the refuelling of US military aircraft, but this was opposed by the Congress Party, which withdrew its support to the Union Government led by Chandra Sekhar and brought about its downfall. Acting on erroneous intelligence inputs that he was widely popular with voters, Chandra Sekhar immediately ordered fresh elections rather than at the close of six months as permitted by the Constitution. Such false inputs may have come from the profusion of Opposition sympathisers within the Intelligence Bureau, for the 1980 elections resulted in a massive victory for the party.
Sanjay Gandhi was the family strategist who masterminded the creation and then collapse of the Charan Singh government which followed, but he met his end just months after the Congress landslide victory following a crash of the Pitts trainer aircraft he was addicted to flying. After Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was killed by one of her own bodyguards, her eldest son Rajiv took over as Prime Minister, and his party won a landslide of 400-plus Lok Sabha seats in the sympathy wave that followed the assassination in 1984. He lost the following general election in 1989 and was assassinated on August 21 during the campaign for the succeeding general election in 1991 in the middle of the polls.
The polls which took place after his death saw a jump in seats won by the Congress Party, which resulted in the Union Government helmed by Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, who enjoyed a full five-year term but lost the subsequent polls because of a split in his party into pro and anti Rao groups. After that, it was only in 2014 that a single party got a majority on its own, which was BJP under the leadership of Narendra Modi, who repeated his 2014 feat in 2019 and who in 2024 took over as PM at head of the NDA after the inclusion of the Telugu Desam (TDP) and the Jantata Dal (United) (JDU).
Given such canny leadership in India, the Pakistan armed forces are witnessing not further vivisection of India but the breakup of Pakistan itself because of disaffection amongst Sindhis, Pashtuns and Baloch with the Punjabi-dominated GHQ. The K-Group is headed for failure this time around as well, for India is united and will never permit another partition, given the travail caused by the 1947 vivisection of one country into two by the then colonial authority, Britain.
