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Central Jail,
Ludhiana,
24th June 2007.
A prisoner’s thoughts
The Tribune
The Tribune is one of the oldest newspapers of the Panjab. It was founded in the late 19th Century by a Sikh philanthropist Sardar Dyal Singh Majithia. It was established in Lahore to compete with the already printed newspaper in English- the Civil and Military Gazette. The Tribune began giving the natives views, while the Gazette saw thing’s though the Imperial Englishman’s eyes. The famous Rudyard Kipling began his career in journalism and writing as an apprentice to the Gazette.
After the death of Dyal Singh Majithia The Tribune passed into the Arya Samaji clique a rejuvenated Hindu cult, which saw all other faiths as inferior to Hinduism. It’s founder, went to the extent of calling the founder of the Sikh faith, Guru Nanak a ‘dhammi’ or pretender. And so in keeping faith in its superiority, The Tribune misses no opportunity in spewing venom and hatred against all religions, other them Hinduism, whether it be Islam, Sikhism, Christianity or the Dalits.
After 1984, the Sikhs went through a bad patch in their history. The Indian state under Indira Gandhi, with the full force of her army, militarily occupied all of Panjab, reduced our holiest shrine the Darbar Sahib complex and thirty six other shrines to rubble and let loose a reign of terror. Instead of good, unbiased and balanced journalism, The Tribune whole heartedly, under the editorship of Prem Bhatia, throwing all ethics of journalism to the wind, supported the Indian state’s uncalled for and ruthless action and aggression against the Sikhs. It wrote several editorials against the Sikhs which matched and even out did at times what Arun Shorie of the Indian Express editor, or Girilal Jain the Times of India editor wrote. For any educated Sikh it was hell going through any paper of the time, specially the Tribune.
In 1984, Rajiv Gandhi, successor son of Indira Gandhi committed the genocide of the Sikh’s, when he unleashed thousands of Hindus to kill, rape, loot Sikhs all over India. The police was asked by the Indian state to help the Hindus in their lust for Sikh blood, the Indian army was confined to the barracks while Hindu mobs went about spilling Sikh blood. No Hindu was killed much less injured. To this day the Tribune, after twenty three years of those gory days, calls this massacre or genocide of the Sikhs as riots. Riots as any English speaking person knows is a clash between two communities or two groups. If the Arya Samajists, who like the Nazi’s have Swistika as their symbol, both believing in their superior Aryan heritage, had edited a paper in Germany during the rise of the Nazi party they would have called Hitler’s genocide of the Jews, Gypsies, mentally retarded-a riot.
When a Hindu asks for a free press and no shackles to control irresponsible journalism, what does he mean? The editor who is usually a Hindu or if we have a non-Hindu, they would invariably be working for a paper whose proprietorship is Hindu. Therefore, the Hindu editor enjoys full freedom of press and the view of the minority peoples is strictly shut out. In the Tribune it is assured that the editorial page and the following page is reserved for the articles of writers who are invariably Hindus. The letter to the editor column is more or less left for a response from Hindus. Others from Sikhs and minorities are tightly edited, if printed. These two pages glorify the Indian Hindu state, its greatness in governance, history, culture, technology, engineering and military dominance against Pakistan and China.
Currently The Tribune is glorifying Sunita Williams, an American’s exploits in space. Previously it was Chawla another American of Hindu origin. Since the founding of the present Hindu Indian state from the times of Jawahar Lal Nehru, through Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi The Tribune has reviled the American’s and upped the Soviets. So have the other Hindu newspapers. If a Hindu can’t perform any feat-so let it be one who is an American.
For the last month and a half the Sikhs have been at the receiving end of the Tribune’s editorial page. It has written four scathing and acerbic editorial’s calling us extremists, hard-liners, conspirators, saboteurs and terrorists, over an incident over which the Sikhs have had no control or made a provocation. It’s the Hindu cult dera of Sirsa, whose leader has committed a grave act of blasphemy against the Sikh religion and continues to do so. The Sikh’s have been at the receiving end once again, because of the false alarm bells raised by The Tribune. India’s feared and anti-Sikh para-military forces have been called out all over the Panjab. The Indian army has been put on stand to alert. The Sirsa Dera Godman has had one Sikh killed in cold blood, but no arrest has been effected though it’s nearly a month that this cold blooded murder took place. The whole of Bhatinda city was vandalized, the police force beaten up and government property destroyed by the Sirsa seminary mobs. No arrests have been made and not a word against this unruly and murderous behaviour of the Sirsa cult by the Tribune.
The Tribune and other papers of the Indian state preach that India is one, though there is unity in diversity. For the last two months The Tribune has been running articles by die hard Hindus on its editorial page that the Indian Mutiny of 1857 was an Indian (national-read Hindu) uprising and the Sikhs were a part of this national spirit. Nothing could falsify history than these frightful lies. The Sikhs are a separate race, a religion and a people. The cause of the Indian mutiny was to change the British regime and to bring in a decrepit Mughal dynasty. The Sikhs in history had enough tyranny practiced upon them by the Mughals. Secondly the sepoys of the British army who had revolted were Purbia’s or Hindus or Muslims of the Hindu heartland, who composed the fighting force or the auxiliary troops of the British army that annexed the Panjab to British India. So why would the Sikh’s rise against the British to see the reinstitution of the Mughal dynasty in coalition with the hated Hindu Purbia ? The fact is that to stop this stupid repetition of the brutal past they rode with the British to crush the mutineers. The Sikhs rightly thought that to be ruled by an alien power was better than to suffer the humiliation under Hindu or Muslim rule. Under the British all three, Hindu, Sikhs and Muslims received an equal and bitter dose of humiliation.
In 1947, when the British split the sub-continent into Muslim and Hindu quarters, the Sikhs were given no choice of a referendum, plebiscite or the must trumpeted UN right to self determination. From the frying pan, in a quirk of history, we have landed into the pot-to be ruled by the Hindus, and a daily litany of abuse by the present editor Mr. H.K. Dua of the Tribune whose motto is- my country-right or wrong and hell with pluralism, diversity and intellectual honesty.
He and his paper deride the Dalits for their demand of affirmative action. India’s Dalits lead horrible and degrading lives. They still carry and pick night soil (polite Hindu word for human excreta) with their bare hands. Apartheid is practiced against them as a race. They have very few avenues for education and employment. They still lead lives which are inhuman. The police subjects their women to rape. Their extra-judicial murders at the hands of the police are never enquired into. The Tribune whose views are verkrampte towards them hides the truth and is apathetic towards their amelioration.
Twenty one of us Sikhs, one is a lady have been in prison since 14th, May this year. May and June are the hottest months and the temperatures in our barracks have been going up to 47°C and when the electricity goes off, it is virtually like being in the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta. We are charged with sedition. What is our crime? We held a peaceful and democratic demonstration in front of the statue of the Butcher of the Panjab, Beant Singh who killed thousands of Sikhs in extra-judicial murders. Apart from the Hindu’s who is the Judas who seeks our blood?-The Tribune. It wrote a nasty editorial and sought the most stringent punishment for protesting against Beant Singh. We have been charged with sedition and could collect the death penalty. Sedition can be against the state. But no says Mr. Dua, the editor of the Tribune and his Hindu countrymen. For them Beant Singh the killer of the Sikhs is the state. Topsy Tervy logic. But then might is right. We Sikh’s are a subjugated race, the result of his dishonest British cartography in 1947.
For the last month and a half Mr. Dua has been doing some heavy, full page advertisements, blowing his trumpet, calling his paper the Tribune the biggest and No.1 English daily of our region. Factually it is correct but biggest doesn’t necessarily mean the best. India calls itself the biggest democracy in the world. So it may be. But it is lacking in the basic ingredients of a democracy. It has no independent judiciary or press or the rule of law and has signed no UN protocol on Human Rights. Doesn’t allow Amnesty International, Asia Watch, International Society of the Red Cross, the UN Rapporteur on Torture and other bodies access into Panjab and Kashmir to monitor human right excesses by the Indian state.
In the same sense the Tribune may call itself the biggest and No.1 paper of the region. Goliath too thought he was the strongest man on earth till David proved him wrong. In our own Sikh scriptures Harnakish thought he could kill his son Pralad, but God willed it otherwise and the meek Pralad triumphed. In World War II the German’s thought they had the biggest battleship, the Bismarck that ever sailed the seas but the British sunk it off the shore of Argentina. Similarly Mr. Dua could pride his Tribune to be the No. 1 paper but without pluralism, allowing dissent and democratic disagreement it is just a monolith of lies, bulk and incredibility. Self praise is a mental delusion. The best judges are the minorities. Until he opens up his hard-line Hindutva paper to divergent views, which may not necessarily be to the liking of the Hindu state, his paper is as destructible as Goliath, Harnakish and the Bismarck.
Ever since Mr. Dua has taken charge of The Tribune, though he maintains his paper’s quantity has increased, this paper is suffering from poor quality editing. Grammatical errors, spelling mistakes and gender identification howlers have increased. The Tribune has many times referred to Ms. Benazir Bhutto and Britians Foreign Secretary as males. However, we are thankful to Mr. Dua that he has never confused the gender of Ms. Rice, America’s Secretary of State!
The full page advertisements in the Tribune tell us that the paper is the people’s voice. It may one day well become what Mr. Dua says, only if he makes it more accessible to the Sikhs, the Dalits and other minorities. At the moment it remains the Hindu people’s voice. Mr. Dua has had a brilliant inning’s as India’s Ambassador to Denmark. I am sure he’ll remember Denmark’s most famous writer Hans Christian Anderson and his story-“The Emperor’s new Clothes”.
Mr. Dua, apart from glorifying India as the biggest democracy is also a great one for touting that India is a secular country. A secular state clearly demarcates itself from any religious activity. However, the Indian state runs all important Hindu temples like Tirupati, Vashno Devi, Puri Temples etc by appointing trustees through the government and IAS officers administer them. The Supreme Court which should have negated the state’s control over religious Hindu temples as quietly sat aside, agreeing with the states intervention into controlling Hindu temples. Thus when the state does this primarily for Hindu institutions “it leaves itself open to the charge of being a Hindu state”, writes Mr. Ranojoy Sen. Thus the Tribune will have to come out of its pretence of not being a Hindu paper. About 95% of its employees are orthodox Hindu’s. Dalits and minorities get meager employment opportunities in this “voice of the people” paper. Open up Mr. Dua and The Tribune’s trustees must know the truth.
Simranjit Singh Mann,
President, Shiromani Akali Dal(Amritsar)
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