(The following article is from the May 16-31,  2010 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)

By Gurpreet Singh

     When Sikh separatists held a procession to celebrate Vaisakhi in Surrey last month, they stirred controversy by displaying pictures of fundamentalist militants who had died during the bloody struggle for Khalistan. But they also offended progressive thinkers in the community by adding a picture of Bhagat Singh, one of the most revered martyrs of India, and an atheist who opposed religious orthodoxy in his writings.

     The organizers of the annual Surrey Vaisakhi parade are staunch supporters of Khalistan, an imaginary Sikh homeland they wish to carve out of India. Vaisakhi is the harvest festival of India, with great religious significance for the Sikh community. It was on Vaisakhi day that Guru Godind Singh, the tenth master of the Sikhs, laid the foundation of the Khalsa, an army of the devout and baptized Sikhs.

     The parade is organized under the aegis of the Gurdwara Dashmesh Darbar, a Sikh temple whose management openly demands Khalistan. Not only do they display the pictures of "their martyrs", but also wave Canadian and Khalistani flags. For years until 9/11, Canadian politicians attended the event without any reservations. Thanks to increasing trade relations with India, the Canadian establishment, which was earlier accused of being soft on the Sikh separatists by the Indian government, has mended its ways. A case in point is the unanimous resolution in the House of Commons condemning the online death threats against Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh, who is critical of Khalistan and violence. In an unrelated incident, Dosanjh and Dev Hayer, a B.C. Liberal MLA who is another opponent of terrorism, were also warned by one of the parade organizers to come at their own risk.

     In an apparent bid to tease the Indian government and critics of the Sikh separatists, the organizers displayed the picture of Bhagat Singh. A terrorist in the eyes of the British government, he had killed a police officer and had thrown a bomb in the assembly, and believed in an armed revolution. True, but he was not a religious fundamentalist. He and his comrades were fighting against the British occupation of India, leaving aside their religious beliefs and not seeking a Hindu or a Sikh state. Born in a Sikh family, Bhagat Singh gradually become an atheist after being influenced by the writings of revolutionaries. A year before his hanging in 1931, he wrote an essay, "Why I am an atheist?" in which he quoted leftist thinkers and challenged the existence of god. In other essays, he suggested that he was opposed to religious fundamentalism. Above all, his struggle was not only for the freedom of India but for social justice. He tried to organize the peasantry and the workers, and challenged the age old caste system that discriminated against those considered untouchables.

     It is pertinent to mention that Bhagat Singh was hanged along with two Hindu patriots, Sukhdev and Rajguru. They were all inspired by the secularist revolutionaries, and any attempt to equate their struggle with a sectarian movement is inappropriate. Those who lost their lives in the name of Khalistan, either in police encounters or after being hanged, were not followers of Bhagat Singh's ideology. During the Khalistan movement, not only Hindus were targeted, but women were forced to wear traditional attire by militants who curtailed the freedom of people. Three hundred communists were killed by the fundamentalists, including Darshan Singh Canadian, the Punjab MP well known to Canadians for his contributions to building the labour movement during the 1940s in British Columbia. Other theocratic groups, like the Hindu nationalist RSS, have also tried to embrace Bhagat Singh in the name of patriotism, but he was a socialist, while religious extremists of all shades have been enemies of the left.

     Even though the parade has passed, this controversy refuses to die. A Sikh website has accused Dosanjh and Hayer of double standards for joining the celebrations of Bhagat Singh's birth centenary in 2007. Although Dosanjh and Hayer represent parties that are in no way close to Bhagat Singh's ideology, and their participation in the celebrations was more tokenistic, Bhagat Singh cannot be simply confused with trigger happy anarchists. He was a thinker, who had adopted peaceful and Gandhian ways during the final years of his life. He participated in a hunger strike to oppose inhuman treatment towards Indian prisoners. He was responsible for only one murder of a police officer, and threw a bomb in the assembly to oppose draconian British laws, without any intention of killing anyone. This bomb, in the revolutionaries' own words, was thrown to make the deaf hear. Bhagat Singh and his friend B.K. Dutt courted arrest after the bombing and made no attempt to escape. As a part of the planning, Bhagat Singh wanted to reach the Indian masses by using the court system as a propaganda tool.

     Gurpreet Singh works for Radio India and is currently working on a book, Canada's 9/11: Lessons from the Air India bombings.