Congress won back Sikhs by reaching out

Time bridges most divides. Some more so than others. It’s no secret that the Congress was reviled and despised in almost every Sikh home following the gruesome targeting of the community in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Twenty-five years after the bloodletting, the seemingly unbridgeable divide between the party and the Sikh community appears to have been largely bridged.

This is not to say the grief and the pain of those who lost relatives have diminished. Neither for that matter have the individuals responsible for instigating the violence been forgiven. The Jagdish Tytlers and Sajjan Kumars face an outcry from the Sikh community every time they seek to contest an election.

Politically, the Congress has rebuilt its bridges with the Sikhs, whether in Punjab or Delhi. From an object of hate in the late 1980s, the party appears to have gradually clawed its way back into the hearts and minds of the community. In Punjab, since the end of militancy, Sikhs have voted two Congress governments to power, one led by Beant Singh and the other by Amrinder Singh. In Delhi, a city with a substantial Sikh presence, the majority of community members have voted for the Congress in the last three elections.
The rapprochement began in the early 1990s under PV Narasimha Rao who realised the need to revive the political process. But it received a tremendous fillip after Sonia Gandhi took over as president of the party. The first serious gesture of remorse and reconciliation came from Gandhi in 1998 during her visit to the Bangla Sahib Gurdwara in New Delhi. She apologised for the 1984 riots, saying: “I feel your pain.”

Coming from a woman who had lost her husband to terrorist violence, it struck a chord. Another apology followed during her visit to the Golden Temple of Amritsar in December 2000. Once again reaching out to the Sikhs, she said the events of 1984 should never happen again and urged the community to “forgive and forget, and begin the new millennium on a spirit of reconciliation”.

Prime minister Manmohan Singh too apologised to the nation on behalf of his party on the floor of Parliament in 2005, but it was Gandhi’s consistent effort to heal the wounds that paid off. “An apology coming from Indira Gandhi’s daughter-in-law and Rajiv Gandhi’s wife had a significance of its own,” says HS Hanspal, a former Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee chief.

Among the measures that have contributed to the Congress’s success in building bridges with the Sikhs are the elevation of Manmohan Singh as prime minister and — to an extent — the appointment of General JJ Singh as army chief — the first Sikh to occupy that position; his tenure was from January 2005 to September 2007.

Union minority affairs minister Salman Khursheed says, “It has not gone unnoticed that despite not being the number one choice of the party, he (Manmohan Singh) was made prime minister by Sonia Gandhi.”

Contrasted with the Congress leadership’s conscious effort to heal 1984’s wounds and win back the support of liberal elements within Indian society, the Bharatiya Janata Party has made no efforts to reach out to the minorities (over Babri Masjid or the post-Godhra carnage) or win back the support of liberal Hindus — a base it has lost on account of its communal politics.