23 May 2004	Sunday	03 Rabi-us-Saani 1425

NEW DELHI: The appointment of Manmohan Singh, a follower of the Sikh faith, as India's prime minister may finally bridge a serious rift between the small but powerful religious minority and the Congress party.

The 1984 assassination of Congress party leader and prime minister Indira Gandhi by her own Sikh bodyguards triggered a Hindu backlash led by several Congress party leaders, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 4,000 Sikhs, most of them in the Indian capital.

Gandhi's assassination itself was carried out in revenge for the raid by the army that Gandhi - called the 'Iron Lady' for her authoritarian ways - ordered on the Sikh holy of holies, the Golden Temple in Amritsar city in Punjab state, earlier that year.

"We are delighted that a Sikh has become prime minister. We can now forget the past, bitter as it was," Kuldip Singh Kalra, a prosperous Delhi businessman, told IPS in an interview.

Kalra was attacked by rampaging Hindu mobs in the days after Gandhi's assassination on Oct 31, 1984 and narrowly escaped lynching, thanks to the intervention of his Hindu neighbours.

Because men of the Sikh faith wear turbans and keep their hair and beards uncut, they were easy targets for the mobs that picked them off buses or stopped them in the streets before lynching them.

For days after the assassination, Sikh homes and businesses in Delhi and other cities were in flames until Gandhi's son and successor in office, Rajiv Gandhi, called in the army to control the rioting, looting and arson.

The attention of new Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was drawn to the plight of Sikh survivors and widows of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom at the first press conference he held on Thursday after his appointment.

He responded by saying: "If we are divided in the name of religion, the country is in danger. We have to create an atmosphere of peace."

Manmohan Singh pledged to ensure that pogroms like the anti- Sikh one in 1984 and the more recent one two years ago against Muslims in western Gujarat state, under the rule of the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), would never occur again in the future.

The Indian army's raid on the Golden Temple was to rid it of the renegade Sikh leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale who, as part of his demand for a separate Sikh state in Punjab, had turned the ancient shrine set in the middle of a lake into a fortress and challenged the army to raid it.

Indira Gandhi never hesitated - just as she did not hesitate to order the Indian army to help liberate Bangladesh from Pakistani rule in 1971, or order the testing of a nuclear device in 1974 in the teeth of international opposition.

The Sikh separatist movement in Punjab petered out in the early nineties when a Congress party prime minister, Narasimha Rao, authorized a Sikh police officer, K P S Gill, to use a 'bullet-for-bullet' policy to seek and eliminate its top leadership.

But Sikh resentment against the Congress party continued and led to the forging of an unlikely political alliance between the fundamentalist Sikh party called Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), which dominates Punjab, and the BJP.

In fact, Akali Dal's support to the BJP contributed greatly to the emergence of the pro-Hindu party as the biggest single party in 1998 and the installation of its leader Atal Behari Vajpayee - who was ousted in the April/May election - as prime minister.

But last year, charges of high corruption resulted in the SAD under chief minister Prakash Singh Badal losing Punjab to the Congress party led by Amarinder Singh, a prominent Sikh leader and scion of the Sikh Patiala royal family.

Now, the appointment of Manmohan Singh as prime minister - a Sikh from a family settled in Amritsar - has taken the wind out of the sails of the Akali Dal party, which benefits from the support and funding of overseas Sikhs such as those in Britain and the United States.

On Thursday, Manjit Singh Calcutta, secretary of the well- endowed Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee, embarrassed Sikh political leaders by heaping praise on Congress party president Sonia Gandhi for selecting Manmohan Singh for the top job after declining her to accept the nomination for prime minister.

The committee controls Sikh shrines and temples around the world - including the Golden Temple itself.

Badal himself was careful to welcome Manmohan Singh's appointment but carefully avoided praise for Gandhi, who leads his party's main political opponents.

"To praise Sonia Gandhi is politically irrational and illogical for us," said a leader of the Akali Dal, who asked not to be named because of the delicateness of the issue. "For six decades the Congress party has systematically denied Sikhs their due and we cannot abandon our goals because of a single gesture, however great," he added.

Long before India's independence from British rule in 1947, the Sikhs - who for centuries dominated the Punjab region, part of which is now in Pakistan - have been demanding an independent homeland of their own called Khalistan or Land of the Pure.

India, upon independence, was partitioned along religious lines into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu-majority but constitutionally secular India.

The Sikhs have always prided themselves as a hard-working, self-sufficient sect that contributes nearly 20 per cent of the manpower in India's army. There have also been prominent individuals from the community in major fields - such as Manmohan Singh, the Oxbridge-trained economist and academic.

Another prominent Sikh in Indian politics is Harkishn Singh Surjeet, general secretary of the Communist Party of India-Marxist that gives crucial support to Manmohan Singh's Congress-led government. -Dawn/The InterPress News Service.