Punjab needs a hero, not a leader

Hindustan Times

5 days ago

Exactly 40 years to the day, the country gave itself a chance to revive its dead and putrid moral spirit and give its politics a new ray of hope to flourish beyond petty politicking. Eleven months after the catastrophic Operation Bluestar and anti-Sikh pogrom, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi signed a rather extraordinary Memorandum of Settlement with then president of Punjab's only regional and predominantly Sikh religious party, Shiromani Akali Dal. The Punjab accord, inked on July 24 in 1985, marked a break from the past as this was probably the first time ever since Independence that a constitutionally elected Government of India had entered into a formal accord for the resolution of a conflict in a strife- torn state, not with the government of the province but with just a political party, and that too one which at that time did not have a formal mandate of the people of the state to represent them. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Akali Dal president Harcharan Singh Longowal in New Delhi. (KK Chawla/HT)
A daring political approach
SAD was not in government at that time and even the legislative assembly of the state stood dissolved. This fact was and is extremely significant as it heralded a new daring in political approach to go beyond the constitution in order to find a solution to issues which were far more than political, economic or geographical. They had a strong psychological and emotional dimension which had remained un-addressed for over 37 years since 1947. It also signaled an acknowledgement by the then government that the country was not just a constitutional entity but was an offspring of covenant based on the diverse sentiments and aspirations of people who had little in common except a shared national sentiment – and needed an emotional leaven to bind together a people with a staggering diversity of religions, languages, regional cultures and even the political history of their respective regions. That such a path-breaking effort was made was a tribute to what appeared at that time to be a daring vision of the national and regional leadership. Alas, that was to prove just idealistic day dreaming by the lovers of an emotional togetherness of a potentially great nation.
The accord had two clearly demarcated zones of relevance: its Letter on the one hand and its Spirit on the other. That the accord was fundamentally flawed in letter was proved by strong opposition to its terms by the more popular segment in one of the two signatories, the SAD.
Led by the two stalwarts of Panthic politics, Parkash Singh Badal and Gurcharan Singh Tohra, the opposition to the written clauses on two key aspects of the complex Punjab tangle --- the religious and the riparian aspects --- was entirely understandable as the its clauses seemed to compromise on the very basis on which Punjab's and Alkalis' agitation till then had stood.
Lost opportunity
And yet, tough as it was, this was a hurdle that may still have been transcended if the major signatory to the document, the prime minister, had allowed his nationalistic and democratic instinct to sidestep political considerations of his party in Haryana. His failure to do that was a disastrous blunder which led not only to the non-implementation of the accord but also to a long trail of blood in Punjab and to the tragic dissipation of the constructive nationalistic impulse which the accord had generated.
In retrospect, the country paid a huge price for petty gains of the Congress party in Haryana elections. A great emotional national landmark was erased just to preserve an electoral scribble in a small state. None of the issues that the accord set out to resolve was even seriously addressed. Even that may have been a manageable and retrievable failure. What was lost – and will take a long time to recover, recreate and grasp – was an opportunity for emotional integration of the people of the country along an approach based on consensus and mutual respect.
In other words, the real blow dealt by Rajiv Gandhi's betrayal of Sant Harchand Singh Longowal's sacrifice lay not in political, economic or geographical detail but in that it created a massive trust deficit in the nation's life. What we are witnessing today in the evaporation of an idealistic and unifying national impulse is merely one of the aftershocks of that historic betrayal of innocent faith. It is history's revenge that Rajiv Gandhi's birthday will always fall on the martyrdom day of the man he betrayed (Sant Longowal) – August 20.
The accord and all that it stood for is dead and even the issues it sought to address may have lost some of their practical relevance. But ideological and emotional implications of the approach that the accord symbolised are still intact and will continue to serve as a reminder of the direction our country's politics needs to take in years, decades and centuries to come.
Lessons we must learn
The modern day cynicism that afflicts the country's political and even social life is the result merely of our contemptuous dismissal of elementary idealism about values in our personal as well as public life: the two can barely be separated. You cannot aspire for values in public life and yet conveniently ignore them in personal life.
Yes, the accord is dead and there is no use crying over the milk we have worked so hard to spill. Yet, it is still not too late to go back to the creative and constructive impulse and vision that the accord had come, wittingly or unwittingly, to symbolise. And the centrepiece of that impulse and vision is politics of constructive consensus on vital issues. There is a need to take politics away from its current pathetic plight as an ugly, abusive and utterly personalised street brawl and to create an environment in which political opposition translates into approach to public issues.
Politicians owe it to us to ensure that politics is seen as much more than personal interests or fortunes of leaders. The atmosphere in which political opposition becomes coterminous with poisonous personal enmity must be abandoned. Politicians must stop speaking a language which paints them bloodthirsty beasts of prey, out to slice each other's throat: they must appear not as enemies but as alternatives to resolve people's issues.
Punjab – or the Punjab of which we used to be so proud – must set an example in this before the rest of the country. That was the spirit of which the Punjab Accord had sparked hopes. Even though the accord died much before its two signatories fell to assassins, its spirit still awaits someone to come and claim it. The politics of unseemly confrontation can produce winners and losers for a day but it can never produce heroes immortalised by history. It can give us a Machiavelli or a Hitler but never a Nelson Mandela.
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(The author, a long-time adviser to the late chief minister Parkash
Singh Badal, is a freelance contributor. Views expressed are personal).