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  1. Following on from the thread about Sikh soldiers of the British Army and the discussion that took place there in which some Sikhs seem to have a view about the British Raj as if they are Hindus from Calcutta or Bombay. I've got some things to say about this subject because most of all I think it is a sad indictment of the way that Hindu India has got inside the minds of Sikhs and sub-consciously made the Sikhs identify with, put themselves in the shoes of and ultimately imagine they and the 'Indians' are one of the same. There's alot I could say in this opening message but time is not on my side at the moment so I really can't afford to give it too much time in terms of structure and quality. Please forgive me for that. Let me start off then by talking briefly about the psyche of we, the Sikhs. It must not be forgotten that we Sikhs were empire builders too. At the time of the British Raj we too had an empire and thus we too had that empire mindset. Just as the Sikhs living in Canada for 150 years for example will surely have different traits in terms of character and outlook than a Sikh newly arrived in Italy, our life experience as rulers and empire builders shaped our psyche to be totally different to that of the Hindu masses of India. So we had that right from the onset. Right from the onset we felt no affiliation for the Indians because right from the onset they were as foreign to us as the British were. It’s also worth noting the importance of perception vs reality when it comes to empire. For example, our Sikh rule in places other than Punjab was seen as harsh by those subjects. Indeed, even to this day the Pashtu word for 'Cruel Rule' is sikha shahi (Sikh rule). But you see the thing is, taking over people's countries is now considered very wrong but that’s only because there have, since then, been so many interrelated academic ideas about the natural rights of people to rule themselves and these natural rights have now been accepted as the norm. But we have to remember that in those days empire was accepted as the norm and 'natural'. Experience too played a part in that initial period. For example there is no doubt why the Indians should see the Raj as evil when one considers how places such the Bengal were decimated to abject poverty once it's cloth trade relocated to places like Lancashire in England but a Sikh from the Punjab should not for one minute see himself as that Indian. So, given that we too, like the British, saw ourselves as men of power and empire, it’s probably worth having a slight amount of relief that it was Britain and not France that colonised us. At that time, of course, the Khalsa Kingdom and Punjab had developed unbelievably close ties with France. So much so that French became the Khalsa army's official language of war. This of course is still evident today in the way that some of our most common names, such as Jarnail and Karnail, were taken from French army ranks. Given the plethora of French generals in the Khalsa army and their regular documented correspondence with King Louis in Paris, I have no doubt that France saw Punjab as the key to winning the 'Great Game' with Russia and Britain and we would have seen the Franco-Sikh War rather than the anglo-sikh ones. I say be thankful for that because history and the present have shown us that France left all its colonies in far worse economic shape than the British did. That of course is demonstrated in the way that so many francophone African countries wish join the British Commonwealth even though they were never previously British colonies. The French habitually left dire institutions, structure and economies wherever they went. So, we're up to the point we're Britain ruled the Punjab. I'm not going to go into detail about how Britain went back on its treaty promises and shouldn't have ruled in the first place etc. because that is well documented and this is about what was, not what should have been. Within 2 years of the British in Punjab they started building roads (such as the GT Road), the magnificent railways and educational institutions such as Punjab's first ever University. The biggest cost was of course the railways and all of that was paid for by British investors because all of this was, ultimately a commercial enterprise that the British government had to reluctantly take over from the east India Company when the whole thing got bigger than they could manage. But when it comes to we Sikhs, there is no doubt that some people use the 'Agricultural land' situation as the example of how the British used 'divide and conquer' and 'caste'. There is no doubt whatsoever that the Jatt Sikhs, like myself, were the biggest winners from the British Raj. Heavily favoured, getting vast tracts of land and positions of power etc. it is of course natural to assume this was a divide and conquer tactic. There's nothing new there as even the Mughals, just before the Khalsa Raj did exactly the same thing. For example, the vast majority of the early jatt Sikh settlers in the UK, Canada and California all belonged to the tiny stretch of land in District Jalandhar from Phillaur to Nakodar. This tiny area, where my own family is also from, is called the 'Manjki Tract' and the inhabitants are called the Manjki Jatts. It was in this area that the Dhaliwal Misl that invaded Delhi and raised the Nishan Sahib over the Red Fort were settled. Rather than go to war with them the Mughals sought to placate them by earmarking the Manjki Tract as a Jagir, i.e a tract where the Sikhs would not be bothered by the Mughals and no taxes would be collected etc. So these types of things are nothing new. But I don't think Sikhs should see this whole thing in the way a Hindu should, and there are 2 reasons for this: Firstly, contrary to popular belief among non-jatt Sikhs, the Punjab Land Acts were actually designed to stop the encroachment of urban Hindu moneylenders into rural Punjab. In British India (outside of Punjab) a common problem was beginning to develop, and that problem was that the agriculturalists were getting themselves into debt and the urban Hindu moneylenders were foreclosing the rural farms. This benefited nobody, especially as the country needed farmers producing goods. It was to prevent this from happening in Punjab that the Land Acts were passed, ensuring only Jatt Sikhs could own land. Secondly, the system of Law the British set up in Punjab might give the non-jatt Sikh the impression that it was designed to be against all non-jatts but we need to have a little understanding of history here. Essentially, after the Anglo-Sikh Wars, the British kept the same system we Sikhs had in place during our Khalsa Raj. It’s well documented how the Iranian language Farsi was the language of the Courts in the Sikh Kingdom but essentially there was no Law as such. Sikhs, throughout our empire, used 2 systems of Law, and we can pretty much conclude that one was specifically for the pathan tribal areas into Afghanistan and the other was for all other parts of our empire. The first was called 'wajib-ul-arz' and this means 'Tribal Custom' and the second is 'riwaj -i-am', i.e aam rawaj, and this of course refers to the local customs and laws of the pends. And this is quite interesting really because it shows how we Sikhs were developing a common customs based law in Punjab at the same time the English were developing their Common Law. This was very different to what there was before the Sikhs because the Mughals pretty much had islamic shariat law in place. So, when the British took Punjab they introduced the 'Customary Laws' specifically for the Punjab and they used as their template the exact same system we Sikhs had in place in our empire. This was then given extra legitimacy with the enaction of the Punjab Law Act of 1872. This system which, as I just stated, was a continuation of our Sikh way of governance during our Sikh raj, basically involved having a Sikh Kardar (The Sikh raj introduced the concept of having a 'Kardar' as well as that of 'Sardar' and the Kardar performed judicial duties based on customary traditions which in the pends of Punjab meant Sikh traditions). This was not a bad thing at all as one of the benefits of this system the British embraced, evil non-sikh 'traditions' such as widow burning and female infanticide became against the Law for the first time). The British embraced this system mostly in order to benefit the Sikhs and disenfranchise the Hindus (because it has to be remembered that Sikhs were mostly rural whereas Hindus were mostly urban). The sad side effect of all of it was that the very few Sikhs that were urban were also disenfranchised along with the Hindu targets and thats one of the reasons many Sikhs have misguidingly embraced the urban Hindu position regarding the Raj. In conclusion then, since the British left in 1947, Hindu India officially denies we even exist, massacres us regularly, stops our children from attending classes with kirpans, sarkar steals the land, Punjab has gone from the richest state to number 11 on the list. This Hindu Raj we're under now is the real enemy of the Sikhs of Punjab. So when it comes to the British Raj do NOT look at it from the eyes of a Hindu Indian. You are neither. If your'e an urban Sikh then no doubt you were in a sense disenfranchised too but understand that you were not the actual target of those British policies. The British position was to ensure Sikhism remains seperate from Hinduism and as the Sikhs were rural and the Hindus were urban in Punjab, this policy manifested itself as a rural friendly policy. Understand the bigger picture.
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