Praveen Swami and Aman Sethi

Unravelling the clerical crusade against heresy, and the politics of the Sacha Sauda controversy.

INSIDE THE Sacha Sauda complex at Bathinda, the bleak south Punjab landscape is transfigured into paradise as a poor peasant might imagine it: a hundred of acres of lush green fields, dotted by woods.

Sikh neoconservatives, though, insist that the complex is the devil's lair and that its leader is Satan. The Khalistan Affairs Centre in Washington D.C, charges Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh with a wide range of crimes. The five high priests of the Sikh faith, who claim Vatican-like authority over their followers' temporal affairs, have threatened an "agitation to uproot the Sacha Sauda sect." Deras hermitages run by the Sacha Sauda and other liminal sects perched between Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism have been vandalised, and blood spilt. Most believe the worst is yet to come.

Just what is the Sacha Sauda sect, and what did it do to attract such controversy? Founded in 1948 by Shyam Mastana, a Partition refugee from Pakistan's Balochistan province, the sect now claims to have 160 branches in 13 States, and an astounding 30 million followers nationwide.

The Sacha Sauda insists that all gods are one, and does not ask its followers to renounce their religious affiliations. Each follower must abstain from alcohol, narcotics, meat, and extra-marital sex. In addition, each Premi, or sect follower, must spend half an hour meditating on a naam, or phrase from the Guru Granth Sahib.

In its simple moralism, the Sacha Sauda is near-identical to dozens of similar sects that have emerged from the Indus Valley's syncretic religious traditions. On both sides of the India-Pakistan border, Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh peasants share both shrines and practices such as the veneration of saints. Indeed, the term Premi literally translates as `lovers,' a traditional metaphor for devotees that peppers Sufi and Bhakti poetry.

Neoconservative Sikhs took offence to a Sacha Sauda advertisement showing Gurmeet Singh engaged in a ceremony called the Jaam-e-Insa. Alongside, the sect called on followers to renounce their caste names, and adopt insa short for insaniyat, or humanity. Gurmeet Singh wore attire of the kind the tenth Sikh guru, Gobind Singh, is often adorned with in calendar art albeit in blue, not Sacha Sauda pink. Moreover, the ceremony involved the designation of seven Insas the first of a larger fellowship of equals who sipped a metaphorical elixir. Again, the image drew on Sikh tradition, for the tenth guru had raised the first five members of the Khalsa Panth in a similar ceremony.

Such uses of Sikh imagery have often provoked the wrath of Sikh clerics. Bridegrooms, who traditionally wore a plume of the kind that features in iconography of the tenth Guru, have stopped doing so in response to religious censure. One preacher, Onkar Singh Kara, dropped both the use of the plume and claims to personal godhood after strictures were passed against him by the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee. However, the religious Right has itself not been averse to using Sikh iconography for its own ends. Posters of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale released after Operation Bluestar used the image of Guru Gobind Singh's falcon to propagate claims that the revanchist preacher was alive.

In any case, the Sacha Sauda was far from exceptional in its use of such imagery to reinforce its claims to represent the true traditions of the Sikh faith. Political circumstances, however, vested the act with inflammatory potential.

No one knows just why the Sacha Sauda chose to throw its weight behind the Congress in the just-concluded Punjab Assembly elections. While the sect had linkages with almost every south Punjab and Haryana politician of consequence both Haryana Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala and his Punjab counterpart, Parkash Singh Badal, had visited the Sacha Sauda's Sirsa headquarters in pursuit of votes it had never formally asked its followers to support a party.

One explanation rests on the fact that Gurmeet Singh's daughter is related by marriage to Bathinda's Congress MLA, Harminder Singh Jassi, and the former Chief Minister, Amarinder Singh's adviser, Bharat Inder Singh Chahal. By some accounts, Gurmeet Singh hoped to leverage a Congress victory to gain protection against an ongoing criminal investigation of murder and rape allegations.

Dalit assertiveness

Another possibility is that the sect had sensed opportunity in the growing assertiveness of Dalits in Punjab. Gurmeet Singh himself is a Jat Sikh, of the Sidhu sub-caste, but the sect's egalitarian principles have proved attractive to both Hindu and Sikh Dalits alienated by the apartheid that pervades rural Punjab. Although no census of the Sacha Sauda's caste composition has been conducted, sources in the Punjab Police said informal estimates indicated over 70 per cent of its membership is Dalit.

What is known for sure is this: the Sacha Sauda's decision led to the Shiromani Akali Dal's decimation in its south Punjab heartlands. After the SAD-BJP victory, Sikh neoconservatives were bent on exacting vengeance. On April 23, almost a month before the Jaam-e-Insa furore broke out, a Sacha Sauda memorial in Mansa was destroyed. It would be facile, though, to attribute recent events to Punjab politics alone.

Sikh neoconservatives believe an existential struggle is under way. Both modernity, which is seen as seducing young Sikhs away from the principles advocated by the tenth Guru, and apostasy, are adversaries. For much of the last century, Sikh reaction has manifested itself in a number of struggles seeking to sharpen the fault lines between the two principal religious identities in Punjab. In 1998, for example, clerics decided to abandon the Bikrami calendar, in which important Hindu and Sikh festivals fell on the same dates.

With their loose syncretistic practices, the Deras pose a formidable challenge to this project. Despite a sustained assault by Khalistan terrorists, Punjab has dozens of godmen of somewhat ambiguous denominational loyalty. Baba Murad Shah of Nakodar, Ashutosh Maharaj's Divya Jyoti Sansthan, the Radha Swami sect, the Sacha Sauda, and other similar groupings are thought to have followings that far exceed that of the Golden Temple-based clerical establishment.

Part of the reason for the success of the Deras lies in the relationship between Dalit resistance and religious rebellion. Among its first expressions in Punjab was the Ad-Dharam movement of the last century, which proclaimed the Dalits were a distinct nation. The movement gained momentum under the leadership of Mangoo Ram, the son of a rich Chamar who was influenced by the revolutionary Gadar movement during his years in the United States. Mangoo Ram's success was the product of the growing caste strains in Punjab. On the one hand, caste groups such as the Chamars prospered because of the British Army's demand for leather goods. At the same time, the Dalits were deemed a non-agricultural caste by law, and denied the right to own the land they toiled on as workers or tenants.

In recent years, neoconservatives have fuelled Dalit alienation. For example, the clerical establishment has disenfranchised Sehajdhari Sikhs those who do not observe some or all of its outward manifestations from participation in elections to the SGPC. Dalit Sikhs understood this as an attack on their religious and community rights. As historian Bhai Harbans Lal pointed out in a 1999 essay, the neoconservative argument flies in the face of Sikh history, in which Sehajdhari Sikhs played a central role from the time of Guru Gobind Singh to the Singh Sabha movement. But SAD-backed clerics, Dalit activists note, refused even to condemn a brutal economic boycott of Dalits who protested against the illegal usurpation of the Shaheed Baba Nihal Singh at Talhan in 2003.

What might lie ahead? Clerics at the Anandpur Sahib Gurudwara at Talwandi Sabo, whose flock was most hit by the Sacha Sauda's influence, have launched an energetic re-conversion initiative. According to the Jathedar of the Gurudwara, Balwant Singh Nandgarh, who is one of the five high priests of the Sikh faith, some 500 families have chosen to be readmitted to the religion. Persecution, sect followers claim, has had a big role in this process.

Even more disturbing possibilities exist. In 2001, Dalit godman Piara Singh Bhaniarawala had set off riots by releasing the Bhavsagar Granth, a 2,704-page religious text suffused with sakhis, or miracle stories extolling his spiritual powers. When Sikh neoconservatives burned copies of the book, his followers retaliated by setting alight Birs, or copies of the Guru Granth Sahib. Punjab's Government prosecuted Bhaniarawala for inciting communal hatred. When it failed, the Babbar Khalsa International the feared terror group responsible for the bombing of Air India jet Kanishka, and the assassination of Chief Minister Beant Singh attempted to kill the godman.

For those familiar with Punjab's recent past, not surprisingly, the future is full of terror. Such fears may be excessive, for there is little sign that the clerics' position has any real mass constituency. But Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, it bears noting, believed precisely the same thing when she first began patronising an obscure preacher named Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.