Other Side Of Silence

by Urvashi Butalia

  She was saved. That girl, she said to us, kill me because I will not survive. I have a child in my womb, how can I survive? She was bleeding. Then my mother and my uncle, they sat by her, her name was Harnam Kaur, and they got some afim (opium) — those days people used to have afim in villages — then they mixed the afim with their spit and heated it up. She began the japji sahib path, and said vahe guru, let me become a martyr, and just as the path came to an end, so did her end come. It was really as if ... you know it is rare that a human being prepares for death in such a way, as she did. She really had death in her control, and when she wanted death to take her away, it did. Nearly half an hour she did the path herself, and as the last sloka came to an end, so did she. She knew, she was dying. The last sloka ... Pan guru pani pita, mata tat mahat ... I can’t remember it well. But her life became complete at the time. The same night, there were two young girls, and it was decided to throw them into a well in the haveli. In the morning we thought they would be dead. It was a very deep well, in Rawalpindi district the wells were very deep and if you looked into them, you could not see into the depths. In the morning we heard voices chanting the path coming out of the well. So we asked the Musalmaans, we told them that two of our girls had gone to fetch water and they have fallen into the well, can you help us to get them out. So they brought ropes, and then we got the girls out, and they were still alive, even the bangles on their wrists were not broken! There was one Hari Singh, he signalled to me to go away. He was trying to speak but could not. He indicated to me through sign language that the Musalmaans had cut his tongue off because he had refused to become a Musalmaan. He had said he did not want to have his head cut off, but he’d be willing to have his tongue cut off. Not even one person agreed to become a Musalmaan. We all left and went to the edge of the river.

  In 1945 we had come to Thoa Khalsa from Saintha. After six months we went there and when we came back we got two camel loads of gifts: kaddu, pethas, mangoes, dal, ghee and nearly sixteen maunds of things as gifts from the Musalmaans there, rations, sixteen maunds of stuff. Just as they gift things to pirs, to saints they gave things to us. From every house, atta, ghee, dal and so many things, they left these things in our house.

  The Musalmaans used to farm, or do service. Sometimes one person in the family would be in the military. They would send money back — that too used to come in our name. They were good people. They would not steal, nor frighten us, or threaten us. Even when they knew that Pakistan was going to be formed, they were keen that we should leave so that we would not come to any harm. We came away from there honourably. And when the trouble started, the people came from there. You know that Ma Hasina whom I mentioned to you, her son, Sajawal Khan, he came to us and said we could stay in his house if we wanted to. He came with his children. But we were doubtful, and today I feel that what he was saying, the expression on his face, his bearing — there was nothing there but sincerity and compassion, and we, we misunderstood him. We had all been through so much trouble, and they came to give us support, to help us, and we refused.

  In Rawalpindi, those who were shopkeepers, they had their own lands, and they also kept property of the Musalmaans as guarantee. Say, they would lend money against the land, so they did this too. And there were Sikhs who used to do zamindari as well. They had majs, cows, and dangars, buffaloes at home, and they needed fodder etc., for them, so they used to use this land which they had kept on guarantee. Apart from that they were mostly shopkeepers, small margins, clean work. They had low overheads. I remember, I was in the fifth class and my father said to me, beta you do a lot of fazool kharchi, unnecessary expenditure. Don’t you know that we need money for our day-to-day expenditure in the house? You must be careful about spending money. People earned enough to keep them, and they were happy. I would open our shop in the morning. My father would come back from the gurudwara around nine and sit in the shop. He’d wake at four, bathe, do his path, go to the gurudwara and then come and sit in the shop. Whatever I know today I have learnt from him, clean, honest business. If a small girl came, he’d call her daughter. If it was an older one, he’d call her sister. He’d treat everyone with respect.

  We used to buy material from Gujjar Khan. The stuff used to come on camels, and the shopkeepers would go and collect it. There were no trucks in those days. There were buses, from Thoa Khalsa to Rawalpindi, and back. About twenty kilometres. The Musalmaans, the Hindus and Sikhs, there was so much to-ing and fro-ing between the communities, that no one bothered about small things. The Musalmaans were more large hearted, production was with them, grain, fruit, everything. And they were generous. Whenever anyone went to their homes, say if a Sikh went, they would give us presents, sukhi ras it was called, uncooked things. In fact if a Musalmaan did not give this to a Sikh, he was not thought well of by Musalmaans from the other villages. They would say, Shahji came and you did not give anything. No one would ask, but on their own two, three people would bring things. And they used to say very calmly, you don’t eat things cooked by us, but sometimes the utensil they would bring ... you see we used to drink milk from their houses, but the milk had to be in an unused utensil, a new one. But we never asked what difference it would have made if we had actually drunk out of the same cup. Just wash it and drink. What would have happened? If we had been willing to drink from the same cups, we would have remained united, we would not have had these differences, thousands of lives would not have been lost, and there would have been no Partition. Are Musalmaans not staying in Hindustan, or Hindus in Pakistan? This is not even so much because of politics as it is because of Brahmanvaad. And these days I fear, I wonder if the Harijans will not do the same thing with us that the Musalmaans did. A time will come when Harijans, whom we call sudras, even today we do not give them our girls, we do not take their boys, we don’t give them any respect. I tell you this is very dangerous, they can rebel. Look at what Kanshi Ram is saying in his meetings — he says he does not need Brahmanvad. You see, the anger is beginning. Our relations, our attitude should be the same towards Harijans, Sikhs, Musalmaans, anyone, we should not treat people differently. A person who has four friends, he should be proud that he has one Musalmaan friend, one Hindu friend, one Sikh friend and so on. I try very hard to make sure that I have friends in every class.

  When the trouble began [in 1984] many of my friends — I have one friend, Guptaji, Manohar Gupta, he came and stood in front of my shop when the attackers came. He said to them this is my shop. They said but it says Bir Bahadur Singh. He said, yes, that is my name. Three days he kept us with him in his home. He gave us a divan, and he made us rehearse what we would do if there was trouble. He said, in case there is danger, if they break down the doors, he gave me some sindoor powder, and he said if this happens, we will all sit downstairs and and we will say that it is our guruji who is visiting. He told me you will have to open your hair, and you sit and we will all sit round you and start praying and we will say our guruji has come. I tell you when a person is willing to pray to you, to make you his guru, to save your life, what greater thing is there? This is true nobility. My Musalmaan friends phoned, Hindu friends, and of course there were the Sikh friends ... what happened with the Sikhs in 1984, we are so sad about this. My whole family was finished in Pakistan, and my two brothers and my mother, we came here. We did not get any land, nor a house, we got no help from the government, and we scraped every penny together, we worked ourselves really hard and made a small farm for ourselves, and then our homes, everything was looted and destroyed. I had bought four thousand ducks from the Government of India — I had taken permission to buy them. I had this dream that I would put them in all the ponds in UP in villages where Harijans live. I wanted to make so much production in UP, of duck eggs, because they are full of vitamins, because they are better than hen eggs, and it costs less also because ducks live off the stuff in ponds. They were destroyed, my tubewell was uprooted and destroyed. This was in district Ghaziabad. And the people who did this were identified, but the
re was no action. What the government should have done is that those people whose blood was spilled to make this country indpendent — if we had not had any love for our country, then it would have been a different thing — if we had become Musalmaans, we could have stayed on. But we said no, our links are with Hindustan. At the time Master Tara Singh had said that Hindus and Sikhs are one. And we are, I believe that we are. My village Thoa Khalsa, behind our shop there there is a temple, and that temple must be some thousand years old. And the gurudwara is some two or three hundred years old. The Sikh religion isn’t older than that. This means that my great-grandfather, or my other ancestors, they must have gone to the temple to pray. After all, they could not have gone to the mosque. They must have gone to the temple. So then, how could we be separate? In the Guru Granth Sahib also there is a reference that we are one. And the Hindu is our root. If the root dies, where will the tree be? For Hindus, the Sikhs are warriors. If you kill the warriors, who will save your home? It’s a separate thing that if everyone rounds on the one warrior in the home, then of course he will retaliate. I don’t approve of what happened in 1984, till today there has been no punishment and I feel really sorry that other people have been implicated with FIRs [First Information Reports] being filed against them. And once a person is hanged, I believe the whole thing is over. But this kind of persecution ... it’s not only a question of Simranjit Singh Mann, but every Sikh has begun to think, to wonder what will happen to us. Even after one person has been hanged, to carry on punishing people. Last year I was caught ... shall I speak this into your tape recorder? I want to. On October 24 Prabodh Chander, a Congress minister in Punjab died. He was a friend of mine. Another friend of mine, Virinder Singh and I had gone to his home and on our way back on Prithvi Raj road there was a car, and some people were lying wounded on the road, and a couple even seemed dead. One of them I recognized, he was Buta Singh’s son and he was crying out, asking people to stop. No one was willing to stop. I stopped, I took Buta Singh’s son, his gun man, his friend, and I took them to hospital, the American hospital and admitted them there. My car was covered in blood, but I did this because of insaniyat, humanity, I couldn’t not. One person was dead, but the wounded one — he was a Hindu — we took him to hospital and admitted him there. Then, it had hardly been fifteen days (and I thought foolishly that I would get some kudos for this — I remember telling Buta Singh about the incident and he even thanked me) when I was lying ill at home they came and caught hold of me. You must have read about this in the papers. The news they carried was that five major terrorists have been caught in Delhi near Gurudwara Bangla Sahib. That they were meeting there at two a.m. at night, and we caught them, they have very strong links with Punjab terrorists and they had planned to blow up Parliament House and to kill Rajiv! Had we been terrorists, Buta Singh’s son was with us, what more did we need? We could have taken him away, got money from Buta singh and from the terrorists, but we acted like human beings, yet Buta Singh kept us in jail for five months, labelling us terrorists. For twenty-four hours we were in a room eight by six feet, there was no light. We wrote letters to the governor, and asked for light. I used to keep doing path, I did four bhogs there. It was like being in the hangman’s cell and the whole time the jailers used to keep telling us Billa was hanged here, such and such was hanged here, and before being hanged they are brought here, into this room. Then we hang them. I also used to think sometimes, those who had died, I used to think I saw them sometimes in the night, it was as if an image of theirs had appeared before me, a sort of sketch. Maqbool Bhat, Billa, Ranga ... whoever is hanged, they would say, we bring them here. All bail applications, even upto the High Court, were rejected. And finally they had to give it in writing that we had arrested Bir Bahadur Singh but he had no direct involvement. This was in 1987 October, and in December the High Court released me, and in 1988 May or June the government gave it in writing in the sessions court that there was no involvement. I am not a terrorist. I am a member of the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee that’s all.

  In jail we were alone, yes alone. All five of us were kept separately, alone. The hanging room has two portions, one where the person to be hanged is kept and the other which is empty. We were kept in those, there was a small bathroom, three by something, full of water and mosquitoes, and that’s what we had. The latrine was also there and our food was also handed to us there. We used to think that we were the children of patriots, we used to see the prisons they spent time in. But I — this experience could have turned me into a terrorist if I had been that way inclined.

  I have a lot of anger, but I don’t have the strength to fight. I have a family, I have daughters, how can I take this on? Had I been twenty- two years old, certainly something would have happened. There must be hundreds of cases like this, like mine, where young people have turned terrorist. After all, this is the State, and they need to see — a seventy-year old man, they’ve turned him into a terrorist. Look at my record. I’ve been chairman of the Municipal Corporation, a member of the SGPC, I have no cases against me, I lead an honest life. Look at my family background, my father ...

  My father was a nationalist, he was in the forefront of the fight for independence. He spent time in jail, that’s why my mother gets a pension. On the one hand they give you a pension, and on the other they label you a terrorist. And this is the sort of stigma that sticks so much that even your own brothers and sisters don’t want to have anything to do with you. I used to see my wife and my children, often I could not even see their faces properly, and we would only talk in gestures. Between them and me there would be police ... what can you say? Where is the justice in this? Is this a democracy? To catch hold of someone like this, and turn him into a terrorist, someone who is a member of the SGPC, this is a major sin, it’s something I shall never forget all my life. How they dealt with us. Even so, India is our land, all Sikhs think like this, no one wants Khalistan. The slogan, raj karega khalsa [truth will prevail], this is something that has been around from the start.

  The thing is, the maximum attack came on the Sikhs because Sikhs are visible. Between Hindus and Musalmaans there isn’t so much visible difference. So I suppose there must have been a fear that in thinking someone to be Hindu they might actually have been attacking a Muslim. The Sikhs are easily recognizable. And they pulled out their kirpans. You know that after killing my sister my father killed seven Musalmaans. Seven. He had no enmity with them. In fact there was a great deal of love. But when it came to the crunch, and this happens with the Sikhs, then the kirpans come out. Guru Gobind Singh has filled the Sikhs with this kind of spirit, it can’t be done away with. Even the English realized this. It’s only this government ... yet despite what has been happening to us these last forty years or so, you can see that Sikhs have been creating history afresh the whole time. In 1984, I called the governor, and I said I am really sad to see what is happening. I’m a member of the SGPC but I can’t even go out to ask people how they are. He said, what do you want? I said, I want to go to the riot-stricken areas. He gave us a car and people, and I think I must have been the first Sikh to go all over the city. I went to Shakarpur, I went everywhere. They sent people with me. I am grateful for this. In Shakarpur, we were helping the wounded, and taking them to a santa da dera, there was a girl lying on the road, and her infant was looking for her breast to drink milk. So we stopped the car, and I said to her, bibi, but she was dead. So we picked up the child, and sent it to the camp. This is the condition in which we found women. The young people who saw this, how can they build up trust in anything? After all, trust begets trust, and distrust creates distrust. I told you we doubted Sajawal Khan at the time, we should have trusted him. Trust is a big thing. Even the enemy deserves trust ... he will not lie and cheat if you show you trust him. Even the dishonest ones will not do so.

  The two girls in the well, their father had been wounded by the Musalmaans. His leg had a bullet in it. He was our leader at the time, Pratap Singh Dheer. One of the girls
was called Mahinder Kaur. We used to pick up his charpai, his cot, and whatever he said we would do. If he had said we should become Musalmaans, we would have done so. But he said, we would rather let ourselves be cut up into small pieces, but we will not convert ... We will not change our religion, to save our lives. He said, I am half dead anyway. You can cut me up into small pieces, and with each piece you can ask me again, but I will not convert. And as he said this, Lajjawanti and the other women jumped into the well. So then the Muslims said, here they are killing themselves. And they decided to go on to Thamali, which was four kilometres from Thoa. Our village was a bit closer, and was surrounded by small hills. It was very beautiful. And many people had come to loot. People who went to the village afterwards said not even bricks were left to take away. From our village the mob went to Thamali where there had been fighting for some days. There was one very brave lady, a relative of mine, Dewan Kaur, she wore a pagri and went to fight. Her body was found some distance away from the village. People kept telling her not to go alone and she said what nonsense, I am Guru Gobind Singh’s daughter, and she fell upon them like a fury.