522.The Man in Blue – Violence in Southall

This is not a discussion about whether we should follow this ‘professor’ or that ‘kathakar, baba, pardhan, jathedar’. My subject is the fact that many Sikhs seem to be unable to discus differences in a respectful way ! Why do we have to fight over agreeing or not agreeing with Professor Sarbjit Singh Dhunda ? Why can’t there be a peaceful demonstration ?

I am inclined to the Singh Sabha way of thinking and I also try to develop my love for God and to open myself to the Love that The One keeps giving us. The Singh Sabha types usually have the right basic, more or less intellectual understanding, but are often not receptive to the ‘mystic’ side of Sikhí, which we share with the bhagats of the Bhaktí movement and with Sufi pírs like Sheikh Faríd.

There are different ways of looking at Sikhí. This can be annoying, but it is allowed. As long as people do not claim that Sikhs should believe in caste or that another Granth/Holy Book should be put at the same level as the Guru Granth, Guru leaves us a lot of freedom.

Mind you, many Sikhs ignore ‘One God – One Humanity’ or ‘Guru Granth – Guru Panth’. For reasons that I cannot understand many Sikhs value the writings of Bhai Gurdas more than the teachings of the Guru Granth Sahib.

Even in discussions on the internet we cannot agree to disagree with respect. Very soon participants in discussions get personal instead of trying to convince others using arguments.

I have in the past repeatedly written about the thugs who broke the legs of Jasvir Singh Hayes Wala and I publicly challenged those who threw stones through the windows of the Miri Piri Gurdwara because Professor Darshan Singh was inside.

Now we have similar or the same misguided ‘Sikhs’ who created mayhem and behaved in the worst possible way outside Southall Singh Sabha Gurdwara.

Everybody has the right to disagree strongly with others, be they Babé, Jathedars, Professors or whatever. They have the right to demonstrate and shout slogans to make their opinions clear to all.

But Guru taught us to use violence only as a last resort and not to act in anger or because we want to take what is not ours. Tenth Guru made peace with Rám Rai, earlier Guru’s came to an understanding with Sri Chand.

We are not only allowed, no we have to resort to violence if other means are not available to fight against injustice, against oppression. But nowhere did Guru use violence because individuals or groups had different opinions.

The breakers of legs, the throwers of stones and creators of general mayhem ignore Guru’s teachings. They deny freedom, they oppress and they commit injustice. Let us join the fight against this kind of anti-Sikh behaviour, let us try to liberate their minds from un-Sikh notions.

Sikh Council UK, A Sangat Forum

Gurmukh Singh’s weekly column in the Panjab Times UK

All are welcome in the gurdwara. The Sangat is fairly representative of all shades of Sikhs and non-Sikhs, who have come to the Guru’s Darbar with faith in the Guru’s universal Message in their hearts, as they bow before the Jagat Guru. However, few have ever argued that the management of gurdwaras should not be in the hands of those who, ideally, are Amritdhari Gursikhs.

Two types of seva (service with humility) is required of those who run Gurdwaras. First and foremost, it is the seva of Sri Guru Granth Sahib ji: the recitation of Gurbani and the seva of Kirtan and Katha. That means, the singing of Gurbani and, as necessary,  explaining the Message of the Shabad to the Sangat. Only a practising Gursikh scholar is capable of doing that while visibly projecting the Guru given Sikh identity.

The second type of seva is the management of the Gurdwara, which, for reasons to do with Khalsa (miri-piri) ideology, institutions and Panthic identity must remain in Gursikh hands.

However, the Sikhi miri-piri ideal is not confined to gurdwaras only.  It is also very much an extrovert twin track concept which has been practised by the Khalsa Panth for centuries.  It is interpreted into Khalsa socio-political activism extended from the gurdwara as the local focal point of Sikh life, to outside local, national and international activities and forums.

Gurdwara management in Gursikh hands is extended to participation in Panthic forums for the achievement of Panthic jathebandi (corporate) aims and objectives for promoting a just and tolerant society.

To my mind, Sikh Council UK is an expression of Sangat representation extended from local to national level. It is the first next step to international level Sikh representation and revival of the Sarbat Khalsa tradition. Recent challenges to Sikh identity also pose a challenge to gurdwara managements to revive the spirit of Sarbat Khalsa. To quote from own article in the August 2012 issue of The Sikh Review, “Sarbat Khalsa is an expression of Panthic solidarity”  which is translated into a decision making process at global Panthic level.

Due to the dedicated voluntary seva of some very able individuals, Sangat (grassroots) based organisations have achieved much over the years. However, recent events have shown that these organisations, no matter how ably led, cannot resolve the issues, concerns and challenges faced by independent Sikh ideology and identity. Only gurdwaras, represented on a national level platform can make an impact on governments and agencies. UK Sikhs have the critical mass to provide a lead.

The only way to ensure that all viewpoints are represented on the Sikh Council UK and the constitution of the General Assembly and the Executive Committe, is to join in and not remain outside. Sikh Council UK is the business of every gurwara and Sikh organisations in the UK. (Continued next week)

Gurmukh Singh, Norwood, UK

BBC Column, Soutik Biswas – Is hope a fiction for India’s poor?

Soutik Biswas, Delhi correspondent

Wednesday, 15 February 2012. “We try so many things,” a girl in Annawadi, a slum in Mumbai tells Katherine Boo, “but the world doesn’t move in our favour”.

Annawadi is a “sumpy plug of slum” in the biggest city – “a place of festering grievance and ambient envy” – of a country which holds a third of the world’s poor. It is where the Pulitzer prize-winning New Yorker journalist Boo’s first book Behind the Beautiful Forevers is located.

Annawadi is where more than 3,000 people have squatted on land belonging to the local airport and live “packed into, or on top of” 335 huts. It is a place “magnificently positioned for a trafficker in rich’s people’s garbage”, where the New India collides with the Old.

Nobody in Annawadi is considered poor by India’s official benchmarks. The residents are among the 100 million Indians freed from poverty since 1991, when India embarked on liberalising its economy.

‘Garbage justice’

Boo’s story – a stirring and gritty non-fiction narrative, one of the best ever written by a foreigner on India – revolves around the self-immolation of a cantankerous, one-legged slum woman called Fatima Sheikh and how her neighbour and a hardworking, young garbage trader called Abdul and his family are framed on a charge of murdering her. Fatima’s death is a liberation from enervating poverty, and a chance for some eighbours to make money from Abdul’s family, who are making a bit more money than the rest from selling recyclables.

This is when Abdul realises that the Indian criminal justice system was a “market like garbage” – “innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags”.

Boo adopted what she calls the “vagrant-sociology approach” and followed Abdul and his neighbours of this unexceptional slum over the course of several years – November 2007 to March 2011 – to see “who got ahead and who didn’t, and why, as India prospered”.

She used more than 3,000 public records, many obtained using India’s right to information law, to validate her narrative, written in assured reported speech. The account of the hours leading to the self-immolation of Fatima Sheikh derives from repeated interviews of 168 people as well as police, hospital, morgue and court records. Mindful of the risk of over interpretation, the books wears its enormous research lightly.

Boo’s narrative is peopled by a vast range of gripping characters from Annawadi, the world from which New India shies away.

An aspiring slum boss woman who volunteers for a local Hindu right-wing party. A man who paints his horses with stripes and rents out the fake zebras to birthday parties of middle-class children. A corrupt nun who runs a children’s home. A deranged man who talks to a luxury hotel building skirting the slum.

Then there’s a bunch of young scavengers and thieves, ravaged by rats and high on white correction fluid, who live, work and die quickly. They are the young flotsam that India breathlessly parades as its demographic dividend when, in reality, the children, tired and brutalised, are already past their sell-by-date.

Bleak

The people of Annawadi are also caught up in the hideous web of corruption and official venality which hurts the poor most, and lead utterly de-humanising lives in a city that aspires to become India’s Shanghai. It is far removed from the dreadful stereotype of the happy-poor Mumbai of Slumdog Millionaire.

Behind The Beautiful Forevers  

The local councillor runs fake schools, doctors at free government hospitals and policemen extort the poor with faint promise of life and justice, and self-help groups operate as loan sharks for the poorest. The young in Annawadi drop dead like flies – run over by traffic, knifed by rival gangs, laid low by disease; while the elders – not much older – die anyway. Girls prefer a certain brand of rat poison to end their lives.

Behind The Beautiful Forevers is a bleak, heart-breaking book, which leaves you numb with anger, helplessness and pain. In this age of globalisation, Boo writes, hope is not a fiction. But hope flickers dimly in Annawadi as the “unpredictability of daily life has a way of grinding down individual promise”.

Boo asks some uncomfortable questions: What is the “infrastructure of opportunity” in India? What capabilities does the market offer? What capabilities are wasted? Why don’t places like Mumbai where filthy slums stand cheek-by-jowl with the world’s priciest buildings explode into violence? Why don’t unequal societies implode? What happens to the powerless when, among powerful Indians, the distribution of opportunity is “typically an insider trade”.

Boo has an interesting take on corruption, rife in societies like India’s. Corruption is seen as blocking India’s global ambitions.

But, she writes, for the “poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained”.

On the other hand, Boo believes, corruption stymies our moral universe more than economic possibility. Suffering, she writes, “can sabotage innate capacities for moral action”. In a capricious world of corrupt governments and ruthless markets the idea of a mutually supportive community is a myth: it is “blisteringly hard”, she writes, to be good in such conditions. “If the house is crooked and crumbling”, Boo writes, “and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-17038326

Dawn – Shift the focus, please!

Shyema Sajjad, Deputy Editor at Dawn.com

Karachi, 13 January 2012. The current political situation is like one of those soap operas that go on for decades. The characters remain the same and keep appearing after intervals in different guises and roles. The twists start becoming predictable and the plot gets drab and stretches on and on. Yet, we tend to follow it, focus on it and guiltily, want more of it.

In the midst of this, we tend to forget what really matters – or at least should matter.

Every single day the front and back pages of our daily newspapers are filled with details of our key political players, their controversies, their statements, their empty promises and their unrealistic plans. Sure, national security is important, sovereignty is crucial, foreign relations are essential and democracy is vital – but what about the bullet-riddled body found in Surjani Town? What about the four-year old girl who was raped and killed? What about the flood victims who are STILL awaiting aid? Are their stories not as important, if not more? Don’t they deserve the front-page and prime air time? Apparently not.

It seems that the memo scandal, judiciary proceedings and the government’s perpetual tiffs are what matters most – and because this point of view is further perpetuated by the print and electronic media, we hardly object.

Instead of tangling itself in constant controversies and feuds, the government should be taking the lead in paying attention to these issues. It should put a lid on its hourly statements on democracy, put aside its foreign-element paranoia and instead deliver what it promised to the common man – relief.

Instead of constantly setting up benches to hear proceedings on various cases against the government and former politicians, the judiciary should instead open the dusty files which have been waiting in line for decades and deliver what it promised to the masses – justice.

Instead of allowing one dubious character to create such a fuss over national security, the military should instead focus on the airspace violations, border protection and the discovery of OBL in Abbottabad. Instead of being caught up constantly in the midst of a political confrontation, the military should to do its core duty – protect (the good guys, that is).

Why do these leaders spend more time talking than doing? Because unfortunately we are providing them with the platform to do so, with a silent nod to go on. Be it our criticism or praise, we allow them to assume that this is their show – when clearly it is not. The show belongs to the party worker who was gunned down outside his home. It belongs to the mother collecting money to pay ransom for her kidnapped child and it belongs to the families who have no gas to cook their meals with.

The government has succeeded in continuing their term until now; however, it has been a rocky journey. So paranoid has this government been thus far, that instead of focusing on all of the issues of the common man, it has instead spent all its time nervously clutching its chair in fear of losing it. It has failed to provide any kind of relief and instead brought some (literally) dark times to the masses. The masses who they proudly claim, support them. The common, downtrodden man doesn’t support them or their beloved fight for democracy. The common man only supports the element that will give him food and shelter.

This blog and others of its kind unfortunately will fall on deaf ears but to those to whom it matters, achievement for this government will not be in completing its term, instead achievement will be in the form of solutions for the energy crisis, minority rights protection, educational reforms and provision of healthcare.

Accomplishment will not be in pushing forward a deceased leader’s agenda but in providing welfare to a state which is called a failure and the term can hardly be disputed. Triumph will not be in having a free judiciary but in having a functioning judiciary that is independent and prioritises what is important to the nation – not the leadership. Victory will not be in repeatedly declaring Pakistan’s sovereignty but instead proving that it is a nation that can stand on its own.

Until the leadership and the common man are not on the same page about what achievement and triumph means, Pakistan will continue to go around in circles of self-destruction to which the outside world will be nothing more than mere spectators to.

http://www.dawn.com/2012/01/13/shift-the-focus-please.html

Dawn Blog – The hypocrisy of misdirected faith

by Fahad Faruqui

22 October 2011. After reading the news that Saudi morality police — acting as “God’s agents” on earth to prevent sin — beat up a woman and a man accompanying her on suspicion of dating. I asked myself this question: what right do these “keepers-of-faith” have to rigorously impose Islamic morals on other people. The woman and man turned out to be relatives.

When the members of Haia realised their folly, they tried to hush up the Yanbu woman, who was accompanying her uncle for work in Medina, by paying for their hotel stay, SR 500 in cash, and mint leaves, with hopes that she would not lodge an official complaint.

The image of God’s men welding iron rods, exerting force on women and being afraid of an earthly complaint is all a bit odd when thinking of the Prophetic character. Do they really think they’re furthering God’s wishes on earth? If so, why does their lack of tact so contradict the manner of the last prophet who, through kindness, won the hearts of the rigid Meccans?

To answer my initial question, it is important to ponder upon what constitutes faith. Being a practicing Muslim man, who has experienced Muslim life in the United States, London, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Pakistan, I’m often driven to despair by the emphasis on outward appearance as opposed to one’s manners, morals and ethics.

“Why do you not keep a beard?,” I am often asked, whether I am at the Regents Park Mosque, in London, or the mosque on 96th Street and Lexington Avenue, in New York City. Some have more forcefully tried to convince me that it’s feminine to have a clean shave. “If you keep a beard, my heart will automatically draw toward you because you’ll be fulfilling a sunnah,” said a man, who hardly knew me, at the Columbia University prayer room that I frequented during my undergrad and graduate-school days. But it surprised me that the gentleman never bothered to actually get to know me; if he did, he would have found a man eager to lead an ethical and moral life and someone who was working toward bettering himself spiritually.

Over the years, I have taken heat from many Muslims for using prayer beads because it’s a “despicable innovation in Islam,” for getting a western-style haircut because “the prophet either kept long hair or shaved his head” (mind you, there were no scissors then), for wearing black because “it’s a color for women and men are supposed to wear white,” and for my interest in Sufism because “all those Sufis had gone astray” from the right path and some of them were “heretics.”

This is only a fraction of the list of things that others commanded that I address in order to be granted a place in heaven, in addition to finding myself an honorable wife who would keep me away from the “lure of women.”

If the true measure of faith for men is a four-finger beard and for women is to wear hijab miserly, covering every lock of their hair, then what about the prophet’s teaching: “The most excellent jihad is that for the conquest of self.”

Surely, Islam talks about modesty, but what is it? “Modesty is ultimately an awareness of both our sensual energy (our marvelous capacity for mischief) — and whence, also an awareness of our capacity for restraint (our awareness of limitations),” Abdallah Adhami, a prominent Muslim scholar explained. “Modesty in this sense is, therefore, inextricably linked to humility.”

So, what is humility? “Like modesty, humility begins in the heart, and inwardly, it is the most radiant manifestation of inner calm; outwardly, again like modestly, humility exudes dignity, poise and restraint,” the scholar noted.

Ah! So it starts from within.

I can dress modestly, but what good is it if I don’t restrain my glance when a woman passes by. What if I am only pretending not to look? I often hear that an unintentional glimpse of the opposite sex is forgiven, but I’ve seen glimpses that last for 60 seconds, jokes apart.

Forbidding the wrong and commanding the good with use of force will never generate the effect that inward stirrings of the faith would. One can force the other to read a religious text but it is unlikely that the person will drink deeply from the fountain of divine wisdom. The requisite factor for modesty, humility and piety is the intention and the will to change and progress.

Counseling is effective when the other is seeking counsel. With force you can create a social deviant, but not steer somebody toward religion. In response to a question on the mannerism of good counsel, Faraz Rabbani, a leading scholar of Islam, wrote: “Our age is an age where the Prophetic mercy, gentleness, gradualness, and wisdom need to predominate and condition any “promotion” of both virtue and law.”

The only plausible reason for the morality police — may they be government funded or otherwise — to intimidate devotees to follow their commands is that it takes less effort to tell other people to do something than it takes to do something yourself. There is a psychological benefit in the knowledge that they are fulfilling God’s wishes by preventing sin. And there is also an element of pride in being God’s agent.

It is easier to counsel others to keep a beard and to dress modestly than to counsel others on how to be a better human being. All you have to do is to pontificate for a few minutes, scare the other person with talk of hellfire or threaten them with an iron rod or just beat them up — after all, you’re only ensuring that they’re making headway to heaven (pun intended) — and you can feel the instant gratification from demonstrable change.

Conversely, for real change, one would have to take the pains to mold the other person in a way that would enable them to start thinking for themselves which, in affect, brings an inward change.

If you ask me, until you’re squared away on the bigger issues — manners, morals and ethics — don’t go out picking on the minor shortcomings of other people. We’re all works in progress. Live by example and inspire others to improve themselves.

Fahad Faruqui is a journalist, writer, and educator. Alumni Columbia University.

You can email him at fahad@caa.columbia.edu.

http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/22/the-hypocrisy-of-misdirected-faith.html