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In a statement published on their website, the American Sikh Council (ASC) has expressed extreme concerns about the illegal detention of innocent Sikh youth across the state of Punjab in the past two weeks.
ASC mentioned that since late June 2020, over dozen Sikhs have been randomly and illegally arrested around Punjab including Lovepreet Singh of village Kaithal and Iqbalpreet Singh of Fatehgarh Sahib who are from poor working-class families who are not only trying to live honestly but volunteering for the welfare of others. They have been arrested on trumped up charges under the UAPA law and have little chance of ever getting out of jail, while trying to prove their innocence of a crime they do not even understand. What chance do minorities have in an inherently racist system which enjoys trampling on the defenseless simply to appease the emasculated majority by using the anti-national/terrorist label repeatedly.
ASC said that the Sikhs of Punjab have protested for their inalienable rights as citizens of India innumerable times. Sikhs have complained starting right after 1947 for the right to their natural resources (water), complete autonomy to control their agriculture, freedom to operate any kind of business without restrictive central control, freedom from the restrictive land ceiling act, freedom to control their own religious institutions, freedom to maximize the usage of their language (Punjabi), the right to be constitutionally accepted as a independent and distinct world religion, etc.
These peaceful protests were conducted by hundreds of thousands from 1947 to 1984. Except for getting a piece of trifurcated Punjab, with no state Capitol the Indian state through its long-term stratagem made sure that the landlocked agrarian state is abused to the hilt, till one day the it turns into a waterless desert and all the farmers who happen to Sikhs either end up penniless or move away to other countries, making way for Hindu-Bihari labor to become the majority in the near future, permanently sealing the fate of the Sikhs in Punjab.
Starting in early 1980s till 1998 over one million innocent Sikhs were murdered by the Indian regime, all under the pretext of curbing terrorism. The largest pogrom committed in South Asia in recent memory by a so-called democratic country right under the noses of the modern world, yet mostly everyone turned a blind eye to the “Third Sikh Genocide – 1984-1998” www.thirdsikhgenocide.org because Hindu-India did such a fantastic job of making sure that the brute repression with the help of the constitution and the judiciary made everything disappear, while the liberty loving voices of those Sikhs were snuffed out!
Today the powerbrokers and the puppeteers who run India want to make sure that either everyone toes the line of Hindutva or else they will be subjugated as second-class citizens or better still as anti-nationals, otherized and ostracized by the multiheaded governmental machinery. Dissention of any sort is not tolerated by Hindu-India because the masters behind the curtain are the Brahmin-Bania caste-capitalist coterie which wants to corner the private economy but keep the lowered oppressed (non)Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Tribals, Dalits, Sikhs and many other marginalized, powerless, so that they cannot envision true freedom and liberty of a real democracy.
The Sikhs have always been the canary in the coal mine and have had to bear the brunt of the Brahminical ire for the last 73 years of modern India, but there are many others also, such as, Mizo, Naga, Manipuri, Assamese, Kashmiri, Bodo, etc., struggling to get out of the shackles of Hindu-India.
A true democratic structure can only work when the system is based on the full consent of and by the people it represents. In a country which is probably the most diverse on Earth, the only way it can function is to have federally independent states with each having a large degree of autonomy while joined together as whole but with the full consent of the states – like the United States of America.
Using age old Hindu statecraft of ‘Chankyaniti’ the right-wing Hindu majority is enacting archaic (illegal) laws all under the guise of stopping terrorism or any kind of anti-national activity to intimidate all minorities (religious and non-religious) so that they never ask for their legitimate rights.
In the last twelve months, first the brute Hindu majority enacted the Article 370, overnight to first split the state of Kashmir in two, second clamping down and shutting down the entire (new mini-Kashmir) state, including all communication internally and to the outside world since August of 2019.
In December 2019 a new CAA, NPR, NRC laws were enacted again overnight to target 200 million Muslims who are citizens of India. These arcane and obtuse laws put the onus of responsibility on the common citizen to prove whether or not they are legitimate citizens of the country, where many of the rural poor did not register births till the late 70s and early 80s.
Moving forward, today the ‘Unlawful Activities Prevention Act 1967’ (UAPA) law which is an undemocratic and an extremely dangerous law to begin with, is being used to terrorize and demonize common Sikhs across Punjab.
Why now? The Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) enacted and enforced on May 23, 1985 particularly for the Sikh uprising in Punjab, and later the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), 2002 all meant to arrest, detain, torture Sikhs with impunity under the pretext of suppressing terrorism.
There are approximately 2.5 million Sikhs in the diaspora who are living mostly in countries with sound democratic institutions and understand the farce and façade of the much-touted Indian democracy. A small group of educated freedom loving Sikhs have had the guts to stand up, pick up the cudgel using all legitimate means to peacefully try and implement a referendum in Punjab.
Since the Indian regime is constantly afraid of its own shadow, the Brahminical power brokers lash out at anyone who threatens their illegal hegemonic control. The Indian government has always been a right-wing Hindu one, except today it is overt and brazen, while looking for the flimsiest of excuses to target innocent Sikhs and quell all possible dissent. The fantastic Indian intelligence called the RAW always finds the Pakistani Muslim intelligence, the ISI as a perfect ruse to malign Sikhs as antinational or terrorists. There is an over 1,000-mile electrified fence from Punjab to Rajasthan with little chance of even a mouse getting through, yet at the drop of a hat somehow poor working-class Sikh men get trained by top ISI agents, whenever the Punjab Police decides it is time to spill Sikh blood! Proof is never provided, since weapons and material are always mysteriously planted on the detainee and who either accepts their fate, or are murdered through the fashionable ‘encounter killing’ under the use of the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA)!
The Hindu-Indian government wants to bring the age-old caste system, based upon the Manu smriti (Brahminical Hindu Religious Code), where human beings are classified into four major classes so that the small brahmin-bania clique can continue to rule over all other classes and religious minorities. It is surprising that all the large mature democracies such as, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, and the US are still calling India the largest democracy in the world, and no country is willing to help the minorities being crushed under their draconian laws. It is shameful that the even current Chief Minister of Punjab Amrinder Singh has not objected to the UAPA laws being enacted.
Its rather strange that not a single upper-caste, especially a Brahmin-Hindu has ever been detained under all these nefarious laws, but there are always Sikhs, Muslims, and others who are expendable and treated as sub-humans because they will not fit into or accept the Brahminical caste straightjacket.
According to Sukhpal Singh Khaira a senior legislator of Punjab who states, “The Punjab Police in all the police districts are making lists of youngsters (Sikh girls and boys), even if they have liked a post of ‘Referendum 2020’ on social media.” The cooked up ‘Khalistan modules’ by the Indian government are ideal to garner the Hindu vote bank not only in Punjab but all across India. Hindu-India is making sure that an extreme fear psychosis must be propagated continuously in order to subjugate the freedom and liberty loving Sikhs, so that they never question their permanent second-class status in India. The shameless majority declared a ‘moral bankruptcy’ on the Sikhs immediately upon the ‘transfer of power’ from the British to the Brahmin-Banias duopoly, conveniently forgetting the fact that the Sikhs sacrificed the most lives to attain its freedom.
ASC has appealed to the great leaders of that nation to rise to the likes of ‘Mandela’, and save it from itself, otherwise the current cadre of ‘Hitlers and Napoleons’ who are ruling, can ruin a great country. We hope better wisdom will prevail and the sensible, right thinking people of every religion and others join together in order to make change based on highest standards of humanistic and universal values for a better tomorrow for everyone, and not just for the ruling majority.