REMEMBERING SARDAR NANAK SINGH
Martyrdom
for Human Freedom
First
Shaheed Nanak Singh Memorial Lecture
By
Dr.
H.K.Manmohan Singh
Emeritus Professor of
Economics
And
Former Vice-Chancellor,
Punjabi University
December 24, 2008
REMEMBERING SARDAR NANAK SINGH
Martyrdom for Human Freedom
Some
time ago, I had an occasion to introduce our incumbent Prime
Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh to an audience which had assembled in
the Central State Library to honour him. I thought it would be
enough for me to mention his finest trait –‘an uncommon common man’
– and proceed with the rest of the programme. I was overtaken by a
similar feeling when I sat down to write a few words in honour of
Sardar Nanak Singh – a dedicated and spirited citizen who made a
phenomenal sacrifice to promote religious tolerance and human
freedom. He was done to death in the pre-partition carnage as he was
trying to save some students of a school who had organized a peace
march against the division of the country.
Nanak
Singh who held every important public office in Multan where he was
a practicing lawyer believed in secular polity and a society
‘without caste, without class, and without privilege’. He perceived
the universe as infinite and could foresee that when established
cultures and civilizations undergo a radical change, they generate
debris of conflicts, tensions, and problems which can be gasped,
conceptualized, and overcome only with the help of the teachings of
great masters. He valued ‘values’ bequeathed to the nation by
India’s major religions and thought that without making them an
integral part of everyday living, man can neither fulfil himself nor
make any positive contribution to the economic and social betterment
of society.
II
Beliefs are mere hypotheses until they are tested either on the
plane of reasoning or with reference to actual happenings. There is
a classic case in history: Why is it that the industrial Revolution
began in Europe and not in advanced civilizations of China, Egypt
and India? The enigma was resolved only when Simon Kuznets, a Noble
Laureate in Economics, and other experts disaggregated data on
inputs which contributed to different rates of economic growth in
world’s major economic powers. These studies brought out the fact
that value-based education which raises the quality of human capital
and shapes work ethics was the most important single factor
accounting for nearly half of the net addition to wealth.
III
India
has been the nursery of the world’s major religions. Because of
their emphasis on other-worldliness, they have been generally
regarded as a negative force in her economic development. Lord Peter
Bauer, an authority on development, has noted two exceptions –
Sikhism and Parseeism, and has complimented them on their attitudes
in economic matters. While parsees constitute a tiny proportion of
India’s total population, Sikhs constitute 1.87% of India’s total
population. The percentage decadel growth rate of Sikhs during
1991-2001 was 18.18% as compared to 36.02% of Muslims , 20.35% of
Christians ,24.54% of Buddhists, and 26.02 of Jains – averaging
22.66%. Excluding Punjab where Sikhs constitute 59.91% of our total
population, they have a significant presence only in five States –
Haryana (5.54%), Delhi (4.01%), Jammu & Kashmir (2.04%), Rajasthan
(1.45%), and Himanchal Pradesh (1.19%) – and the Union Territory of
Chandigarh (16.12%). The data for the last two censuses indicate
that there is a perceptible decline in the proportion of Sikhs in
Delhi, from 6.33% in 1981 to 4.01% in 2001. This apparently is due
to 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the effects this cataclysm of events
induced on migration flows.
IV
Economic development
is normally related to a region or a country and not to the people
professing a particular faith. However, historical researches by
scholars like Max Weber and R. H Tawney clearly show that not only
religion influences man’s outlook on society to a degree which today
it would be difficult to appreciate, social and economic changes
also ac powerfully on religion.
Nanak Singh was a
science graduate with a law degree and would have continued his
career as a civil servant with the British police had it not been
due to his upbringing as a devout person which revolted against his
submission to the wrongs being perpetrated, first by the rulers and
then by the fundamentalists who wanted to divide the country on the
basis of religion. He could not reconcile himself to the idea that a
nation bound together by deep cultural, political, and historical
ties could be redefined on the basis of narrow identities. As a
practicing lawyer he became the State’s leading human rights
activist and forgets legal battles of those who were being
prosecuted for raising their voice against the partition of their
motherland. As an ideologue, Nanak Singh stood for multi-religious,
multi-ethnic nation states which alone, he thought, could ensure
peace in the world. As a leading counsel for Azad Hind Fauj
prisoners, he suffered countless reprisals at the hands of
governmental authorities.
Both in his private
and public life Nanak Singh closely followed the teachings of Guru
Nanak who sought to mould the existing social order into a
democratic setup based on justice, liberty, equality, and
brotherhood, later adopted as the building blocks of polity by all
civilized societies. His last speech which he delivered a day before
he was assassinated carries an implicit reference to Guru Nanak’s
repudiation of the doctrine that ‘religion and economic interests
are two separate and coordinate kingdoms ‘and reiteration of his
philosophy that the economic environment within which the
individuals function must have a scale of values derived from
theology which ca moderate the unbounded desire for pecuniary gain
in a materialistic civilization. Nanak Singh was not unaware of the
fact that in societies that were emerging from the medieval
background and modernizing their economic and social systems, such
as India, there could occasionally be conflicts between progress and
religious beliefs but he thought that, given human ingenuity,
resolution of such conflicts should not be difficult provided the
reforms aimed at do not hurt a particular religious group. He
considered fanatics of every religion as an anti-reform people and
wanted them to be kept out of the pale of any arbitration.
V
It is generally
believed that religion plays a central role in social progress.
Economic historians have shown clearly that the rise of capitalism
in Europe from the sixteenth century onwards was due mainly to
Christian ethics which changed people’s attitudes to work, thrift,
and economical management of resources. There are different species
of capitalism as there were Feudalism and Mercantilism which it
superseded but they all focus on ‘capital accumulation’ and ‘free
enterprise’ as the main contributory factors. To the best of my
knowledge, this vastly important area of research in respect of
oriental religions has not attracted much attention. There are a
couple of doctoral studies, one by Vikas Mishra of Hindu religion
and another by Upinder Jit Kaur on Sikh Religion besides a monograph
on Islam by Mohammad Shabbir Khan. They are all scholarly works but
that is all that we have.
Like Nanak Singh, I
am an ardent fan follower of Guru Nanak but my knowledge of the Sikh
scriptures is neither adequate nor deep. I may be forgiven if I am
being presumptuous but my own understanding of the scriptures is
that they do not at all approve of the emerging attitude of life
based on unhindered laissez faire whatever the field of human
endeavor. To that extent, the free enterprise hypothesis does not
hold in the context of Sikh religion. It may be of interest to some
of you if I mention here that its first authoritative repudiation
came from the tallest of British economists, Lord John Maynard
Keynes, whose ideas of post-World war II reconstruction and
rehabilitation programmes met with universal approval. He wrote
against the background of the world’s greatest depression of the
1930’s and has again become topical as the world is heading towards
another great depression. This is how he described the modern
Capitalism: It is ‘absolutely irreligious, without internal union,
without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere
congeries of possessors and pursuers.’
VI
Western societies
have built their economic systems largely believing that man is the
best judge of his own interests and should be left alone. Such an
assessment of human nature was delivered by Jeremy Bentham,
eighteenth century English philosopher and political scientist, in
the form of axiom and has become a popular textbook quote which
reads as follows:
‘My
notion of man is, that successfully or unsuccessfully he aims
at
happiness, and so will continue to aim as long as he continues to
be man,
in everything he does….All men who are actuated by regard
for any
thing but self, are fools: those only whose regard is confined
to
self, are wise. I am of the number of the wise.’
Bentham’s view is
antiethical to the ideal view of life as laid down in the Sikh
Scriptures. When a person reposes his faith in his Gurus, he
surrenders his judgment and sovereignty not to the state but to a
higher authority that is infallible.
VII
There is a saying,
‘man does not live by bread alone.’ But neither does he live without
bread. This is the main direction in which the Sikh thought flows.
In a world of limited resources and too much want, there are always
people whose full development is checked by insufficiency of
material requisites. Naturally, there has to be a systematic effort
to optimize development and utilization of resources. But whatever
the extent of this effort, poverty and destitution cannot be
overcome unless man’s desires go through a process of purification.
In Sikh ethics, economics is a two-dimensional concept. While
optimum utilization and development of resources is its one
dimension, sublimation of wants is its other dimension. This is to
be seen against the dominant world view prevailing in India before
the birth of Sikhism and the one evolved in the West, both of which
are unidirectional. The former encourages austerity and
renunciation, the latter materialism.
VIII
Nanak Singh was born
in a deeply religious family, brought up as per the Sikh tradition,
and named Nanak after the founder of the Sikh Faith whose true
missionary he remained all his life. A major evil with which the
Indian society was afflicted and stood in the way of India’s unity
and progress appeared to Guru Nanak her caste system.
One learns from
India’s history that the caste system was evolved by her law givers
to serve two important purposes. First, it was thought that the
system would provide social stability by eliminating chances of
class conflict. Since each member belonged to a particular caste and
each caste group was assigned a particular function, the system was
supposed to provide the balance of power between different social
and vocational interests. Second, it was thought that the system
would help economic development by encouraging functional
specialization and by promoting division of labour and hereditary
skill-formation. Unfortunately, rather than furthering progress, the
caste system came to be the greatest divisive force in the Indian
society. Eternally promoting social dissensions, it is in direct
conflict with the forces of economic growth. In the first place, it
does not permit vertical, occupational mobility. Further, since in
India land and capital are owned by particular caste groups and each
caste group had specified economic functions to perform, the caste
system implies not only immobility of labour between different
occupations, but also immobility of means of production between
different uses. Secondly, functional specialization by castes can
lead to serious regional imbalances. It has been observed in India
recently that the private sector of the economy has been diverting
resources from all over the country for development of industry in
particular states – Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal –
besides the industrial belt around Delhi. The data relating to the
credit- deposit ratio in the banking sector show that Punjab with a
credit-deposit ratio of about 40-45 per cent has been the major
loser in this process. The numerical strength of different groups
rests on the incidence of birth and may or may not correspond to the
economic need.
With elimination of
caste factor in the sphere of economics, the Sikh society
experienced an unparalled outburst of energy. The Sikhs were the
first to reach foreign lands after the annexation of Punjab by the
British in 1849. They first went to China and Malaysia and then to
North America. The first gurdwaras to be built in foreign countries
were in Bangkok and Singapore. The photographs displayed in an
exhibition on ‘ Early Asian Arrivals in the United States’ held at
the University of California in Los Angeles in 1984 showed that the
first Indian immigrants to that country were all Sikhs. The
population of Sikhs among the settlers in the canal colonies of
Lyallpur and Montgomery (Now in Pakistan) was about 19 per cent but
they were allotted over 70 per cent of agricultural wasteland which
they transformed into a granary within a short time. The population
of Sikhs in the erstwhile British India was less than 1 per cent.
However, their representation in the Armed Forces which required
grit, qualities of hard work and discipline besides ability to work
under pressure and readiness to mix regardless of caste, creed and
ethnicity was until recently almost 20 per cent. An important
demographic feature of population in India is the concentration of
different linguistic groups in specific states. The data show that
76.3 per cent of the population whose mother tongue is Punjabi
resides in Punjab. This is the lowest percentage for any linguistic
group residing in a particular state. Since Punjabi is the sole
mother tongue of Sikhs, this shows the outward-going character of
the community. Mobility of labour, both geographical and
occupational, has been viewed as a powerful engine of economic
growth ever since scientific enquiries into the causes of material
welfare began in the late eighteenth century.
IX
Time does not permit
me to go over all the main causes to which Nanak Singh was faithful
and for which he gave everything that he had – his time, his money,
his energy, his life. He was a very dynamic person endowed with
exceptional powers of persuasion, unswerving faith in Guru Nanak’s
teachings, and will to act under stress.
I am conscious of
the fact that I have written more of an essay than a proper memorial
lecture. But the time constraint apart, there was hardly any readily
available source material. Obituaries and condolence resolutions
make a specific mention of Nanak Singh’s concern for democratic
polity, dignity of labour – particularly of manual work, service of
the people, and gender equality which is currently on international
agenda. When I was taking down notes for my lecture, I came across
an interesting finding that the tribe of penmen, scribes, and
calligraphists came into being just because India’s nobility
abhorred manual work, considering it below its dignity. Nanak
Singh’s respect for Sri Akal Takht and the SGPC was unbounded
because he thought that both these institutions were democratically
constituted and reflected the will of the people. He was a forceful
orator and had deep knowledge of the Classics, particularly of the
Sikh scriptures.
All in all, Nanak
Singh belongs to that rare class of distinguished world citizens who
will long be remembered by his countrymen with deep admiration.
Nanak Singh’s
martyrdom justified its existence.
Many thanks to you
all for your kind patience with my presentation of a bloodlessly
abstract composition. My very special thanks to our worth
Vice-Chancellor for his gracious invitation to me to deliver this
lecture. In the process of searching material for the lecture I made
an important discovery that Sardar Nanak Singh and I belonged to the
same village – Kauntrila – in the district of Rawalpindi in
Pakistan. The village is in the Jurisdiction of Jatli Police Station
and not Gujarkhan as mentioned in the publication Don’t Break Up
India. Gujarkhan was our Tehsil. Two days after Sardar Nanak Singh
was assassinated I too fell a victim to pro-Pakistan elements and
received four dagger wounds and a bullet injury on my body. That was
in Peshawar. I am not a martyr but I believe I have a place in
history as the first victim of pro-Pakistan elements in the
North-West Frontier Province.
God Bless.