Spectator's Journal/The Sikhness of India
Anant, Victor
action. The reason is that most quota programs are in a technical legal sense the result not of Title VII litigation, but of voluntary agreements entered into in order to avert Title...
...This will require time, but the decisive political and intellectual groundwork has been laid...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL THE SIKHNESS OF INDIA by Victor Anant The pun is of course vulgar, but apt...
...The Congress party, an opposition created by liberal Britons, should have been dismantled once its purpose was served, namely, to ensure some kind of orderly transition from Imperial rule to educated natives...
...Will Pakistan recognize, and/or give shelter, to a government of Khalistan...
...If government officials under Title VII are prohibited from requiring quotas, it stands to reason that private parties seeking to fulfill the goals of antidiscrimination law are similarly restricted...
...a strategic area...
...Although the Indian armed forces follow the British tradition it is certain that Mrs...
...As seen in Justice Blackmun's dissent, however, defenders of quotas argue that consent decrees are private contracts that can contain whatever the negotiating parties want, and can be enforced without regard to the stated policy and requirements of Title VII...
...He answered: "Partition...
...it could be "internationalized...
...If it is a carefully planned foreign plot why was it allowed to run its course to such a gruesome end...
...If the Supreme Court upholds the individual rights purpose of Title VII against the Weber doctrine of preferential treatment, it will have gone far toward restoring civil rights policy to the foundation intended by Congress in the historic statute of 1964...
...Indeed it has been Indira's interference in congregational matters of the Sikh community that transformed a rather more than boorish peasant's son into a holy apostle...
...It is not the legality of Indira's decision to hack the Sikh community to size which will be questioned but the historical implications: Has she, unwittingly, created a Sikh nation...
...the start internal fissiparous tendencies could be contained by invoking Kashmir...
...Phew...
...The British thought it a good idea to have Sikhs in the Punjab as a buffer between themselves and Afghanistan in the event of a Russo-Afghan invasion...
...If the Golden Temple was a transit point in the heroin chain why didn't the Indian army go in to smash the mafia and not in the name of secularism...
...What, in the name of all the Hindu gods of internal security, was the Indian counterinsurrection network doing...
...For example, they have put it out that it is a carefully orchestrated "foreign plot" to destabilize India...
...Pratap Singh Kairon, a former chief minister of the Punjab (who was murdered by his son, patricide being more than normally prevalent among them), told me in 1964 when I was chaperoning a group of Indian trainee journalists to the State capital, Le Corbusier's Chandigarh, "We Sikhs are really Hindus with more hair on us...
...E] Sarkes Tarzlan Inc Bloomington Indtana linguistic sub-nations, the Chinese came to Nehru's rescue with what is endearingly referred to as a border clash...
...And in fact courts have generally acted as though they had inherent unlimited authority to impose quotas for racial balance and, as in the Memphis case, to modify consent decrees to maintain preferential treatment...
...He was a corn merchant's son and a follower of a Muslim poet Kabir...
...guru, Gobind Singh who was murdered in 1708, that Sikh leaders began to look upon their 6,000 mystical hymns as scriptures, proclaimed the baptism of the sword, and became like the Knights Templars of medieval Europe...
...On the face of it all these sound as plausible as they could be fabricated...
...The Supreme Court has now admonished them to the contrary...
...When the Hindus in the British Army mutineed in 1857 (folklore has it that they revolted against having to use cow-fat for greasing their cartridges) the Sikhs helped to put down the rebels...
...Kashmir had a Hindu ruler with a Muslim majority population...
...What happens now depends very much on how the Sikhs react...
...They are, like most Punjabis, a hardy, enterprising, nomadic community...
...And now she has muscled her way into the Sikh fortress of the Golden Temple, in Amritsar, to prevent the establishment of another breakaway nation, Khalistan...
...Common sense says that voluntary agreements intended to carry out the purposes of a statute must conform to the requirements of the statute...
...Weber upheld the fiction that racial quotas acquiesced in under the threat of discrimination charges are private voluntary agreements that need not conform to the requirements of Title VII...
...It has been a hopeless task in a brutally partitioned and hastily decolonized subcontinent which harbors every conceivable species of religious humbuggery, and caste, cult, clan, class, or culture...
...Nehru's ancestral home...
...But it will be necessary to apply the principles announced in the Memphis case to a Weber-type situation...
...For forty years the secular Republic of India has grappled with the task of trying to invent a nationality pervasive enough to claim the allegiance of its inhabitants, now around the 700 million mark...
...They have also had a fair share of heavy infighting within the diaspora...
...Gandhi has permanently split the ranks...
...Nanak died in 1583, preaching Hindu-Muslim unity and not, as is commonly understood, expounding a Hindu heresy Some historians say it is even possible that Nanak performed the Muslim pilgrimage, the Haj...
...it is a border state...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 33...
...it was a tourist paradise...
...I wonder how many more partitions we have to see...
...If Pakistanis could infiltrate the Sikh stronghold could the Indians have not done so in their own country...
...Fortunately for Nehru, a selfproclaimed agnostic ruler of a massively Hindu Congress party, right from Victor Anant has written for the London Spectator and other publications...
...they have worldwide trading networks and currency transactions...
...The passions of the Sikhs have been pampered by India's central government in a country where disbelief--not faith--is the norm...
...and, if you are any kind of a yogL you head for California...
...Baptized with bullets in the Golden Temple, the 38-year-old hot gospeler, the sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, can now be counted among the martyrs who seem to fuel the new "fundamentalism...
...Internationalism became the refuge of a Nehru who simply could not see what went on under his nose...
...In 1965, after three days on the road with him in the northern Uttar Pradesh, I asked Shastri whether the Congress party had reconciled itself to the existence of Pakistan...
...Although it sounds purely semantic now, the Golden Temple in Amritsar has always displayed swords and muskets and other arms in its inner sanctums...
...During the first two decades as Indians regrouped themselves into There opportun, ity I n America...
...It is precisely what the elders of the Sikh community need to tighten their grip on the easygoing, freewheeling youngsters who, like other youngsters, are about as holy as the Hindu next door...
...It is this escalating style of militancy which set the stage for Nehru's real successor, his daughter Indira Gandhi...
...Instead, it tried to be all things to all Indians...
...His successor, the diminutive and shortlived Lal Bahadur Shastri, an orthodox Hindu in his habits, homespun, gave India's search for nationhood a fillip with two thunderingly bizarre wars against Pakistan...
...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 The first guru of the Sikhs, Nanak, was born on the banks of one of the Indus tributaries, the Ravi...
...Racial egalitarianism-defined as racial preference--can no longer be considered immune from responsible criticism...
...the Islamic State of Pakistan was born out of distrust of the Congress...
...This was the argument of the minority in Weber, but has become the argument of the majority in the Memphis case...
...There are prosperous Sikh communities in Britain, Canada, and the U.S.--and, for a couple of decades now, they have notched up a remarkable rate of conversion in these countries...
...they have found "Pakistani spies" among the Sikhs killed...
...Alas, it became the touchstone of India's foreign policy, forever damning a vast and weighty nation with the vision of a Peeping Tom...
...Sikhs are monotheistic, unlike the Hindus who have a pantheon of gods and goddesses, but there is a deceptive virulence of a highly prosperous and visible minority hidden in that remark...
...William Bradford Reynolds has said his goal is to overturn this egregious decision, and now the Memphis decision provides a way of doing so...
...His tough, down-to-earth home minister, Sardar Patel, chewed up the princely Native States with no more rhetoric than a spit and a cough, while Nehru had to send the Indian Army to take "police action" against the Nizam of Hyderabad and, later, Goa, "the Portuguese pimple on the face of India...
...During much of his reign, 1947-64, the Punjab and Bengal, two volatile provinces clumsily cut up, allowed Nehru room for periodic bloodletting...
...Today she is putting up a tortuously long barbed-wire fence along the border with the Bengali nation...
...It is impossible to escape the logic of history: that fundamentalism, which springs not from deep faith but disbelief in an age of disbelief, began in India a long age ago: The Buddha, a reform Hindu, was driven out and Buddhism, fleeing from its country of origin, footprinted itself across Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka to China and the Far East...
...and, most frightening for a secular country, India has always conceded Sikh regiments in the army...
...The Indian authorities have gone to great extremes to destroy and discredit the Sikh extremists who made the Golden Temple their battle headquarters...
...Certainly it is not until the time of the tenth (and last...
...Signed, sealed, and delivered as consent decrees, affirmative action plans come under the equity jurisdiction of the federal courts...
...Will there be an exodus--violating the penultimate clause of the Tashkent Treaty drawn up under Russian auspices after the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war in which both countries agreed not to create any situation which could lead to yet another refugee flight of panic...
...She sent her troops into East Pakistan and turned it into Bangladesh...
...There may be irreconcilable factions within the 15 million Sikhs of India but, dammit, there's not one Sikh who does not bear the name of Singh: fifteen million people with one surname...
...What if the Sri Lanka government claims that the separatist Tamil Eelam Army (TEA) has been given hiding places in South Indian enclaves...
...they have also discovered sophisticated foreign arms and heroin smuggled in from Pakistan...
...Congress politics in the Punjab has always played the divide-and-rule game...
...it justified a grotesquely imbalanced defense budget for a fledgling, "non-aligned," impoverished country...
...Each Sikh leader who has taken on the central government has had to up the ante, demanding more...
...Modern Sikhism got its Five Ks (the distinguishing marks of the clan, from long hair and comb to dagger), invited persecution, solidified into a distinctly visible and hardy community, and became so powerful as to sign a Treaty with the British, in 1809...
...The reason is that most quota programs are in a technical legal sense the result not of Title VII litigation, but of voluntary agreements entered into in order to avert Title VII discrimination charges...
...The broader question that now has to be answered is whether consent decrees aimed at fulfilling the policy goals of Title VII, and judicial authority to enforce the decrees, are subject to the requirements of Title VII...
...the Sikhs in Britain made their own Indian passports...
Vol. 17 • August 1984 • No. 8
