partition

[JessieKaur]

WJKK WJKF ,

In light of the upcoming partition anniversary has anyone got any story's they would like to share that have been passed down or any knowledge they wish to share? 

 

[Dsinghd]

The old Punjab up to Peshawar split in half. Lahore the capital of Punjab gone to Pakistan. The Sikh holy city Amritsar gone to India. And a stupid Wagah border in between.

[Singhsburys]

The BBC coverage yesterday was heavily biased towards creating a victim of the Muslims at the hands of Sikhs

[jkvlondon]

2 minutes ago, Singhsburys said:

The BBC coverage yesterday was heavily biased towards creating a victim of the Muslims at the hands of Sikhs

any clue what that book was the muslim guy was handed to read because it seemed very dismissive and lacking in detail about the Amritsar atrocities commited, the pictures of that era show whole houses /shops demolished?

[jkvlondon]

factsheet for each programme

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/bbcfactual/partition 

 

[jkvlondon]

This is what our ancestors did for our freedoms recently, we have zero rights to slack now , sikhi has to come out on top

[proactive]

3 hours ago, jkvlondon said:

any clue what that book was the muslim guy was handed to read because it seemed very dismissive and lacking in detail about the Amritsar atrocities commited, the pictures of that era show whole houses /shops demolished?

The book is the highly biased " The Sikhs in action"  published by the Pakistan government in 1948. The page he was reading was page 30. The whole book can be read here-;

https://ia601601.us.archive.org/12/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.71854/2015.71854.The-Sikhs-In-Action.pdf

Page 33 is interesting in that it relates to an attack by a Jatha on Qadian. What the propaganda book fails to mention that between the transfer of power on 15th August and the announcement of the Radcliffe award on 17th August Gurdaspur was widely regarded to have gone to Pakistan and as a result in those two days the Muslims of Gurdaspur district attacked the Sikhs and Hindus but when the Radcliffe award gave Gurdaspur to India the tables were turned and the attack on Qadian is the retaliation for Muslim attacks on Sikhs and Hindus during those two day. 

[jkvlondon]

1 minute ago, proactive said:

The book is the highly biased " The Sikhs in action"  published by the Pakistan government in 1948. The page he was reading was page 30. The whole book can be read here-;

https://ia601601.us.archive.org/12/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.71854/2015.71854.The-Sikhs-In-Action.pdf

Page 33 is interesting in that it relates to an attack by a Jatha on Qadian. What the propaganda book fails to mention that between the transfer of power on 15th August and the announcement of the Radcliffe award on 17th August Gurdaspur was widely regarded to have gone to Pakistan and as a result in those two days the Muslims of Gurdaspur district attacked the Sikhs and Hindus but when the Radcliffe award gave Gurdaspur to India the tables were turned and the attack on Qadian is the retaliation for Muslim attacks on Sikhs and Hindus during those two day. 

 

 

[jkvlondon]

the estimates of muslims deaths in Punjab being greater than a million is laughable since they got the lion's share of Punjab's territory most people didn't have to move unlike the sikhs and Hindus , and the day to day death reports make it hard to justify previously claimed figures since most deaths were non-muslim

[proactive]

10 hours ago, jkvlondon said:

This is what our ancestors did for our freedoms recently, we have zero rights to slack now , sikhi has to come out on top

If we really are serious about wanting our own country we need to get away from the mindset of always trying to prove that we gave the most sacrifices for freeing a country which in turn enslaved us and committed genocide against us. You can only shame people who have morals and a sense of justice. The Indians have none of that. By us trying to prove that we were more nationalist then they are we are just playing their game and in the end we will lose. We need to show the coming generations that just as thousands of Sikhs struggled to free India from the British ten times that number struggled to try and gain freedom for the Sikhs FROM India. If we keep on harking back to Shaheed Bhagat Singh and Shaheed Udham Singh whose sacrifices no doubt were great but then we forget that in the 1980s and 90s there were thousands of Sikhs who did no less these two martyrs. We need to develop and propagate our own narrative free from the narrative of the Indian state. Bhagat Singh and Udham Singh's struggle was a diversion away from the main Sikh struggle for Khalsa Raj. Also the game of one-upmanship is an unnecessary diversion away from our struggle. You will notice that no one in the Indian establishment ever counters these figures which can in fact be easily countered by including the tens of thousands of non-Sikhs who died in the Indian mutiny. That has already been promoted as a  war of independence. This is because it suits the Indian establishment for Sikhs to be diverted into showing how much they gave for India because they are also showing that wanting freedom from India would be a betrayal of all those Sikhs who gave their lives for Indian independence. 

Also in the list there is included the Namdhari movement, it is unclear due to the mass of misinformation that has been written firstly by the British who feared the movement as an attempt to bring down their rule and secondly by the Namdhari writers after 1947 who wanted to show the martyrs as fighters for Indian independence and Baba Ram Singh as a precursor to MK Gandhi. It's unclear whether the Namdharis were only against cow slaughter and wanted religious reform or whether they aspired to resurrect the Khalsa Raj in Punjab. 

The other item on the list - the Akali movement has been included in the so-called battle for independence when it was nothing of the sort. The Akali movement was solely aimed at brining the Gurdwaras under the control of the Sikh community and away from the Mahants. The fact that a solely religious movement was subverted and presented as a political movement owes a lot to the interference of MK Gandhi who tried unsuccessfully to get the Akalis to suspend the agitation for the Gurdwaras and instead join his so-called fight for freedom. Kartar Singh Jabbar who took an active part in the struggle convinced the Akali leadership that if they suspended the agitation until after independence the struggle for the Gurdwaras would be well nigh impossible in a 'free' India ruled by the Hindus.

Instead of putting up and sharing lists trying to show how many Sikhs died for Indian freedom why do we not put up and share lists which show how that number is miniscule to the number of Sikhs throughout history who struggled for Sikh freedom? 

Let's do a quick count. Out of the figure of 3697 take away the Akali movement and the imprisonment for life and you get roughly a figure of 1050 Sikhs who died for Indian independence. Now look at the Sikhs who died for Sikh freedom. First the tens of thousands who died in the 18th century to create the Khalsa Raj. Then the tens of thousands who died fighting to defend the Khalsa Raj from the British in the Anglo-Sikhs wars. Then the main leaders who were exiled for life such as Bhai Maharaj Singh. Then comes Maharaja Duleep Singh and his attempts to get back his kingdom from the British. Then you have the Babbar Akalis who fought a violent campaign in the 1920s against the colonial state. After that the Akali Dal demand for a Sikh state in 1946 and then the Khalistan movement from the 1980s onwards. 

Let's not place great emphasis on 1050 Sikhs who died for Indian independence when over a 100 times that number gave their lives for Sikh freedom. Those 1050 were a blip or a temporary deviation from the main current of Sikh history which is towards the creation of a Sikh state.