INVOKING Article 30 of the Indian Constitution, the Akali Dal led Government of Punjab on 25 March 2001 decided to designate three professional colleges being run by the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) in Punjab as ‘minority institutions’. One of these is an engineering college located in Anandpur Sahib, while the other two, a medical and a dental college, are located in Amritsar. By doing so it reserved 50 per cent of the seats in all three colleges for members of the Sikh community. Until then, the only educational institution that enjoyed such a status in Punjab was the Christian Medical College, Ludhiana.

While the Christians are obviously a small community in the state with around one per cent of its total population, the Sikhs are not. They constitute nearly 60 per cent of the total population in Punjab, though at the national level the Sikhs are indeed a small minority with a population share of little under two per cent. However, according to the SGPC, not only were the Sikhs a minority in India, they were also a numerical minority in Punjab. A large number of those who are officially enumerated as Sikhs, it argued, were in fact not Sikhs at all because they believed in their own living gurus, and not exclusively in the Sikh holy book and the ten Sikh gurus, as is required by official definition of a Sikh given by the SGPC.

The Indian Constitution does not clearly state the geographical context in which a group has to be a numerical minority in order to be considered a minority in law. Using this ambiguity, an aspirant for a seat in one of these colleges went to the High Court against the Punjab government notification. Conceding to the plea of the ‘Hindu’ student, the Punjab and Haryana High Court declared the 2001 notification null and void and withdrew the status of ‘minority institutions’ from the SGPC educational institutions in Punjab. The court also questioned the ground on which the notification was issued by the Punjab government in 2001, viz. the Sikhs being a minority in Punjab. The Bench observed:

‘There is nothing to show from the written statement by the state of Punjab that it had any material or even a grievance that, as a group, the Sikhs apprehended deprivation of their religious, cultural or educational rights in the state of Punjab from any other community, who may be in majority and who may gain political power in the elections. On this short ground, the impugned notification cannot be sustained in law.’¹

The Supreme Court too agreed with the High Court during the initial hearings. Eventually though, the Punjab government managed to get a stay order from the Supreme Court on the High Court ruling.

Observations made by the High Court indeed have many far reaching implications, not merely for the Sikhs but also for other religious minorities. A close reading of the observations made by Bench on the Sikh case not only questions the argument about the Sikhs being a numerical minority in Punjab but also lays down a more basic requirement, i.e., in order to claim the status of a minority, the group has to produce evidence of ‘religious, cultural and educational deprivation’. The Sikhs of Punjab, or for that matter even those living in other places in the country, will find it hard to mobilize credible evidence of their being a socially and culturally deprived religious community.

 

With a total population of a little less than 20 million, the Sikhs are the third largest religious minority (after Muslims and Christians) group of India. The most obvious and interesting aspect of the Sikh demography is the fact that a large majority of them are concentrated in a particular region of the country, in the northwestern state of Punjab, where they are not only numerically preponderant but also socially and politically dominant. Over the years, the Indian Punjab has also come to be identified with the Sikhs, and they with the region.

According to the 2001 Census, nearly 76 per cent of all the Indian Sikhs lived in the state of Punjab. The remaining 24 per cent lived in different parts of the country, with their major concentrations being in the northwestern states of Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi. Though small in numbers, Sikhs have been among the most mobile communities of the subcontinent. A good number of them have migrated out of India, mostly to Europe and North America. Although no exact data is available on the number of Sikhs living outside India, rough estimates put it somewhere around 1.5 to 2 million.

 

Notwithstanding the internal differences of caste, class and region, as a community the Sikhs have done rather well in India. For example, the proportion of Sikh population living in absolute poverty, below the poverty line, is virtually negligible. In 2004-05, only around five per cent of the rural Sikhs and six per cent of the urban Sikhs lived below the officially defined poverty line. The corresponding figure for Hindus and Muslims in rural India was close to 29 per cent. In urban India too a much larger proportion of Hindus (23 per cent) and Muslims (41 per cent) lived below the poverty line. Their active connection with the ‘first world’ through Sikhs migrants also adds to their material prosperity.

With the exception of 1984, when they became victims of large scale violence in the city of Delhi and other parts of the country following the killing of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, they have rarely had to worry about their physical security within or outside Punjab. Despite being small in numbers in most parts of India, the Sikhs do not see themselves as a marginalized or a socially excluded group, and are rarely viewed so by others.

The wide acceptance of Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister of India is hard to ignore in this context. Even the Akali Dal, a party that claims to represent the Sikh communitarian interests, has had long standing electoral and political alliance with the majoritarian right-wing Hindu party, the BJP. Although the two political parties disagree on some of the fundamental issues relating to minority rights and Sikh identity, they have been able to sustain a working relationship without acrimony.

What is it then that makes the Sikhs a religious minority of India and why should the Akalis and SGPC be pleading for designating the colleges being run by them as minority institutions? Why did this become an issue in 2001 and not earlier?

 

The Partition of the subcontinent in 1947 and the emergence of nation states in the region could be seen as a defining moment for religious communities and their political status in South Asia. It is not only the two nation theory and the formation of Pakistan, but also the communal violence that accompanied Partition and the large-scale migration of population on religious lines that shaped this new status of communities. The institutionalization of the idea of nation state in the region also played an important role in rearticulating identities of different communities. It introduced a new language of demographics and enumerated religious communities as majority and minorities.

Historically speaking, the Sikhs have always lacked numbers. Even when Ranjit Singh established the Sikh kingdom, he had no demographic basis for doing so. The Sikhs constituted only around seven per cent of the total population in his kingdom. Their numbers did not go up significantly even when the colonial rulers reorganized the province after conquering it in 1849 and ending Sikh rule. Numerically, the Sikhs with around 13 per cent of the total population of colonial Punjab, remained a much smaller community when compared to the other two major religious communities of the region, the Muslims (around 51 per cent) and the Hindus (around 35 per cent). However, the British did not treat the Sikhs badly. In fact, they gave them a special status by including some of the Sikh caste groups among ‘the martial communities’ and recruiting them into the British Army in big numbers. The Sikh aristocracy was also duly accommodated in the new power structure.

 

As mentioned above, Partition in 1947 and the formation of two nation states generated a new sense of anxiety among the Sikh elite. The Sikhs were directly affected by the communal violence that accompanied Partition, and a large number of them had to migrate out from the districts of western Punjab to the Indian side when the Sikh leadership decided to go along with India.

Though the Sikhs continued to be a minority even in the eastern Punjab after Partition, their numbers increased significantly in some of the districts. It was after this demographic shift that the Sikh political elite began to see the possibility of a Sikh majority Punjabi Suba. Demographically, this could become a possibility if only the Hindi speaking districts of the Haryana region and the hill districts in the North were taken out of the predominantly Punjabi speaking region of the post-Partition Punjab. After a long and bitter conflict with the central government, the Akalis succeeded in getting the Punjab reorganized mostly as per their proposals.²

Living in united Punjab as a numerical minority, the immediate conditions of existence for a large majority of Sikhs were never of being a marginalized community. Most of them lived in rural areas of Punjab, where apart from being in a numerical majority, the Jats among them also enjoyed a nearly exclusive control over agricultural land. The Jat Sikhs participated in the nationalist movement and Congress politics without much hesitation.³ The minority consciousness during the initial years after independence, was confined to the small but articulate sections of urban Sikhs, who were not only far fewer in numbers than the Hindus in urban Punjab but had also suffered much more than the rural Jats during the Partition violence. It was only during the post-green revolution period that rural Sikhs began to participate in communitarian politics with much enthusiasm.

 

One of the interesting aspects of rural-urban differences in Punjab is the imbalance of communities. Sikhs have always been in a minority in urban centres of the Punjab while the proportion of Hindus has been low in rural areas. Notably, urban trade, industries and services have been overwhelmingly dominated by upper caste Hindus. There is no major urban centre in Punjab where Sikhs dominate, economically or numerically.

According to the 2001 Census, only around 21 per cent of all the Punjab Sikhs lived in urban centres, far below the average urban population for the state (34 per cent). Across different districts, this figure varied from a mere 6.93 per cent in Taran Taran, to 36.78 per cent in Amritsar district. In contrast, nearly 55 per cent of Hindus and 44 per cent of Muslims of the Indian Punjab lived in urban areas.

 

Living in villages and being engaged in agriculture was a source of pride in the dominant cultural ethos of northwest India. The Jats, the dominant agrarian caste, have been particularly known for the pride they took in their rural identity. A sociologist working in a village of the ‘doaba’ region during the early 1980s had reported: ‘The Jat might be employed as a school teacher, or serve in military but he saw his primary role as that of an agriculturalist; his connection with land was what he held most dear and what identified him.’⁴ Another anthropologist similarly writes about the contempt that the Jats had for city life. The Jats despised the townsmen for their not being physically brave. They also viewed them as ‘grasping, greedy and lacking in dignity.’⁵

This perception of urban life among Jats no longer holds good. The green revolution produced a powerful class of agrarian rich that eventually came to control the religious as well as political institutions of the Sikh community. Initially, while they used political power to consolidate their position by expanding and investing in agriculture, over the years they also began to look beyond the village. In particular, those who benefited from the new technology and generated considerable surpluses were no longer desirous for their future generations to continue working in agriculture. As argued elsewhere, even when the family remained in the village, its members diversified into different occupations,⁶ making many of the rural households ‘pluri-active’.⁷

 

Apart from getting their children educated in urban schools, the rural rich of Punjab also began investing in urban housing. The children who study in urban schools and colleges rarely want to come back to the village and continue with agrarian employment. Finally, the continuing crisis of the agrarian sector and fragmentation of holdings over generations has also impelled rural Sikh youth to increasingly look for employment outside agriculture. The rich and ambitious no longer see the source of their mobility in agriculture, or at least not in agriculture alone; there is clear evidence of the Sikh farmer moving out of the farming occupation. ‘While marginal and small cultivators seem to be moving out of agriculture, the bigger farmer is moving out of the village. The big farmers of Punjab invariably have a part of their families living in the town.’⁸ This pressure to move out of the village has also been accentuated by a growing ‘pressure from below’, the growing assertion for autonomy by Dalit castes and a loosening of the hold that rich Jat Sikh farmers had over the village.⁹

However, moving out of the village and agriculture is not merely a demographic transition. It is also a process of moving into the modern world, a world of the nation state, its politics and economics in the larger context of globalizing markets. It is this reality of changing social conditions for the erstwhile dominant sections of the Sikh community, and their growing desire to join the ranks of the urban middle classes that pushes them into mobilizing all possible resources at their command. The designation of three professional colleges as minority institutions was one way to ensure that a larger proportion of seats go to members of the Sikh community and a greater proportion of them become qualified for urban employment as engineers and doctors.

 

This, however, is not to suggest that minority identity or minority consciousness is purely instrumental, used by groups or communities to gain special benefit or is merely a matter of designation by the state made on the basis of numbers/ demographics. Nor is this to suggest that it is illegitimate for the Sikhs to claim minority status or benefits. On the contrary, the story narrated above seeks to argue against an essentialist notion of minority-majority. It should be seen as an example of the fact that numbers alone do not make minorities, and that identity such as those of minority or majority are marked by a degree of fluidity and historicity. Such identities are often shaped by what is happening in the larger context in which the communities have to participate and situate themselves. More importantly, perhaps, the Sikh case also shows that this articulation of minority identity is as much shaped or influenced by what is happening within a community, the internal differentiation and mobility or movement of groups and classes within a given social and cultural category.

 

Footnotes:

1. The Tribune, Chandigarh. 18 December 2007.

2. For details see B.R. Nayar, Minority Politics in the Punjab, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1966; S.S. Jodhka, ‘Regions and Communities: Social Identities in Contemporary Punjab’, in Rajendra Vora and Anne Feldhaus (ed.), Region, Culture, and Politics in India, Manohar, Delhi, 2006a, pp. 299-316.

3. B.R. Nayar, ibid.

4. Ravinder Kaur, ‘Jat Sikhs: A Question of Identity’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 20(2), 1986, pp. 221-40.

5. J. Pettigrew, ‘The Jats of Punjab’, in Dipankar Gupta (ed.), Social Stratification, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1992.

6. S.S. Jodhka, ‘Beyond "Crises": Rethinking Contemporary Punjab Agriculture’, Economic and Political Weekly 41(16), 2006b, pp. 1530-7.

7. Steffan Lindberg, ‘Whom and What to Fight? Notes and Queries on Indian Farmers Collective Action under Liberalisation and Globalisation’. Unpublished seminar paper, Punjabi University, Patiala, 2005.

8. S.S. Jodhka, 2006b, op. cit.

9. S.S. Jodhka, ‘Caste and Untouchability in Rural Punjab’, Economic and Political Weekly 37(19), 2002, pp. 1813-23.