Within the advanced of the Gurdwara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur, probably the most sacred Sikh locations of worship on the earth, an unexploded bomb is displayed in a glass case. Beside it, an indication states that the Indian air pressure dropped the bomb throughout the 1971 India-Pakistan battle “with the aim to destroy” the gurdwara.
Situated within the city of Kartarpur, Pakistan, simply 4km (2.5 miles) from the border with India, the gurdwara, the place Guru Nanak, the founding father of Sikhism, spent his final years, was unhurt within the assault. This, the signal explains, was as a result of the bomb landed in a sacred effectively.
Nearly 4 a long time later, in 2019, the 2 international locations opened the Kartarpur hall, a border crossing with visa-free entry to Indian pilgrims wanting to go to the gurdwara, the place Guru Nanak, died in 1539. Guru Nanak’s beginning shall be celebrated on the November full moon on Monday, November 27 this 12 months.
The Sikh religion was based within the Punjab area of the Indian subcontinent in the direction of the tip of the fifteenth century. Its followers discovered themselves divided between India and Pakistan throughout the 1947 Partition of India. The overwhelming majority of Sikhs ended up in India, however a lot of Sikhism’s non secular websites and a small Sikh minority remained in Pakistan, the place throughout Sikh non secular festivals attended by hundreds of Indian pilgrims and Sikhs from different components of the world, India-Pakistan antagonism continues to play out.
In lots of circumstances, this takes the type of help for a political motion that calls for a separate Sikh homeland.
The Khalistan motion, which took maintain within the Nineteen Seventies, was potent within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s. Whereas it has misplaced a lot of its momentum since, it has not too long ago come underneath the highlight once more because the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian Sikh chief and proponent of the motion, in Canada in June. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau mentioned three months later that Canadian safety companies had “credible allegations of a potential link” between Indian authorities brokers and Nijjar’s capturing loss of life.
Throughout Sikh festivals in Pakistan, shirts with the message, “Never Forget 1984,” or photographs of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, a number one determine within the Khalistan motion, are sometimes offered.
Bhindranwale turned the face of Sikh revolutionary politics within the early Nineteen Eighties. He was assassinated in June 1984 throughout Operation Blue Star, through which the Indian military entered the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, throughout a significant non secular occasion.
The operation broken one of many holiest Sikh shrines and resulted within the deaths of lots of of harmless civilians, who had been on the gurdwara to commemorate the martyrdom of Sikhism’s fifth guru. It brought on widespread anger within the Sikh neighborhood.
Later that 12 months, Indira Gandhi, the prime minister of India, who had overseen the operation, was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards in retaliation. Instantly, anti-Sikh riots started in Delhi. Hundreds of Sikhs had been killed in only a few days.
Operation Blue Star and the anti-Sikh violence ushered in a brand new and far more violent section of Sikh separatism and the demand for the institution of Khalistan, a separate Sikh state.
Searching for revenge for India’s function within the 1971 battle that led to the creation of Bangladesh, the Pakistani state got here out in help of the Khalistan motion and was accused by India of offering a haven to its fighters – coaching them, offering them with weapons and supporting them financially. A byproduct of this help was a softening of Pakistan’s perspective in the direction of its personal Sikh neighborhood and its heritage.
From ‘long live Khalistan’ to preserving the gurdwaras
“In those days [the mid- and late 1980s], you would see banners [saying] ‘Khalistan Zindabad’ (‘Long Live Khalistan’) and pictures of Bhindranwale all over the gurdwara,” mentioned Madan Singh*, a resident of Nankana Sahib, a metropolis in Punjab, Pakistan.
Madan witnessed how the motion remodeled the gurdwaras in Pakistan. Many expat proponents of it – Sikhs residing in the UK, United States and Canada who couldn’t journey to India due to their political beliefs – would come to Pakistan as an alternative and converse to Indian pilgrims throughout non secular gatherings.
He recalled a pageant that befell in 1985 when the injuries of Operation Blue Star and the anti-Sikh riots of the 12 months earlier than had been nonetheless contemporary. Many highly effective speeches had been made in favour of Khalistan that 12 months, together with one by Sardar Ganga Singh Dhillon, a US-based supporter of a separate Sikh state who spoke vehemently towards the Indian authorities, rousing the fervour of many younger Sikh males on the gathering and maybe additionally conscious that representatives of the Indian Excessive Fee in Pakistan had been in attendance.
Madan described how the group turned in the direction of these two diplomats, who barely managed to flee the gurdwara. “The Pakistan state intervened,” he instructed me once I interviewed him for my e book on Pakistan’s non secular minorities, A White Path, in 2011. “I was arrested along with 25 other people and was kept in jail for 10 days.”
Whereas the Khalistan motion was remodeling these gurdwaras into political areas, it was additionally having one other affect.
With virtually the whole Sikh inhabitants of West Punjab (the realm of Punjab that turned a part of Pakistan) having migrated to India on the time of partition in 1947, lots of of Sikh gurdwaras had been deserted.
These had been among the holiest shrines related to the faith, however with out the presence of the neighborhood – and with the indifference of the Pakistani state in the direction of its non-Muslim heritage – most of those gurdwaras fell into disrepair. Some had been transformed into residences, faculties or authorities buildings whereas others had been fully misplaced. A couple of outstanding ones, equivalent to Gurdwara Janam Asthan at Nankana Sahib and Gurdwara Panja Sahib at Hassan Abdal, had been taken care of by one or two Sikh households who had both remained in what turned Pakistan or come over from India simply to take care of these locations of worship.
Locations of worship – as soon as once more
Through the heyday of the Khalistan motion, as outstanding expat leaders from world wide got here to Pakistan, leaders like Ganga Singh additionally took up the reason for renovation of those sacred areas with the Pakistani state. Throughout non secular festivals, they’d exhort the Sikh neighborhood residing in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh provinces to return to Punjab and take care of these shrines.
Many responded to their calls, together with the household of Rajbir Singh* who moved to Nankana Sahib from Parachinar in 1978 after listening to a fiery speech there by Jagjit Singh Chauhan, one other expat supporter of Khalistan.
Step by step throughout the late Nineteen Seventies and ’80s, Sikh households from northwestern Pakistan started transferring to Nankana Sahib and, through the years, a neighborhood started to develop within the metropolis. This migration grew exponentially within the first decade of the 2000s because the Pakistani Taliban started to take over components of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and started demanding jizya, a tax for non-Muslims residing in Muslim-controlled areas. Hundreds moved to Nankana Sahib and different cities like Peshawar, the place there have been already Sikh communities.
At the moment, there’s a thriving Sikh neighborhood of about 1,500 at Nankana Sahib, in keeping with the most recent census, guaranteeing that not simply Gurdwara Janam Asthan however all the opposite gurdwaras of the town are being taken care of and have turn out to be locations of worship as soon as once more.
With Nankana Sahib being an essential base for the neighborhood in Punjab, many Sikhs have additionally now moved to different cities within the province, guaranteeing that extra gurdwaras are being reconverted into sacred areas.
This course of, via which the Sikh neighborhood is guaranteeing its presence round completely different gurdwaras in Pakistan, started with the Khalistan motion.
What was additionally pivotal within the redevelopment of those deserted Sikh gurdwaras was the altering perspective of the Pakistani state in the direction of Sikh heritage within the aftermath of the motion. Whereas beforehand sceptical of “foreign money” coming into the nation for the renovation of the gurdwaras, the state now facilitated transfers by the expat Sikh neighborhood to fund the renovation of those gurdwaras.
Native authorities officers had been appointed to take care of the safety of those buildings whereas Sikh pilgrimages had been organized to those newly renovated gurdwaras, making it simpler for the expat Sikhs to get visas to go to Pakistan. By means of this course of, a number of gurdwaras that had till then been deserted and had been mendacity in ruins had been renovated, and the native Sikh neighborhood was inspired to return and keep at these locations.
Gurdwara Sacha Sauda at Farooqabad, Gurdwara Bhai Biba Singh in Peshawar, Gurdwara Bairi Sahib in Sialkot, Gurdwara Shaheed Gunj in Lahore and Gurdwara Dera Sahib at Kartarpur are only a few examples of the gurdwaras which have been renovated and opened for Sikh pilgrims over the previous 4 a long time.
“There was a fundamental shift in 1999,” mentioned Kalyan Singh, assistant professor at Authorities Faculty College in Lahore. Initially from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Kalyan’s household moved to Nankana Sahib within the Nineteen Seventies. He was the primary Pakistani Sikh to be awarded a doctorate.
“The Pakistani state realised that millions of rupees were being presented to these gurdwaras in the form of donations from pilgrims. All of this money was being taken back to India by the Sikh Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee [SGPC].”
The SGPC is an Amritsar-based organisation answerable for the administration of Sikh gurdwaras within the Indian states of Punjab and Himachal Pradesh and the union territory of Chandigarh. “The Pakistan Sikh Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee was formed in 1999 to ensure that the offerings presented to the gurdwaras were kept within Pakistan,” Kalyan mentioned.
Gurdwaras – ‘low-hanging fruit’
The preliminary renovation of those gurdwaras – facilitated by the Pakistani state, generally via direct help and at different occasions by making it simpler for the expat Sikh neighborhood and organisations to ship cash into the nation – could have taken place to appease the expat Sikh neighborhood, which supported the Khalistan motion through the years.
But it surely additionally turned more and more clear to the state that there was an actual vacationer alternative related to these gurdwaras. This turned significantly obvious after the opening of the Kartarpur hall in 2019, from which a brand new native economic system has emerged round Sikh non secular tourism in Pakistan with a number of vacationer firms specialising on this type of journey.
“The policymakers in Pakistan see Sikh tourism as a low-hanging fruit,” mentioned Jahandad Khan, founding father of the Indus Heritage Membership, a tour-operating firm that specialises in Sikh excursions in Pakistan. “There exists a global Sikh diaspora that doesn’t require a lot of marketing relative to other communities to visit Pakistan. The government of Pakistan recognises the tourism opportunity in that.”
With the Khalistan motion in some ways irrelevant in the present day, it’s this financial crucial that now shapes the federal government’s relationship with these gurdwaras, particularly as its financial struggles worsen.
Whereas the Kartarpur hall has nonetheless not achieved its anticipated financial potential on account of COVID-19 and the strained India-Pakistan relationship, Pakistan estimated it generates $36.5m per 12 months simply from tourism to this one gurdwara. “The volume of Sikh tourism in Pakistan is too tiny [at this point] to make any meaningful transformation in this country,” Jahandad mentioned. Nevertheless, given the main focus of the state, Pakistan hopes to increase Sikh tourism exponentially within the coming years, bringing in much-needed {dollars} to a struggling economic system.
Greater than three a long time because the heyday of the Khalistan motion, its ripple results are nonetheless being felt within the nation. The motion helped to make clear the Sikh neighborhood and gurdwaras of Pakistan and compelled the nation to re-examine its relationship with this heritage. Lastly, it additionally made Pakistan realise that there’s a lot extra the nation can acquire economically from renovating and opening up these gurdwaras than it beforehand imagined.
*Some names have been modified to guard identities.