Arjun says:

Full of historical inaccuracies .Just the usual khalistani propaganda which Hindus keep on promoting without checking the facts.Dr Koenraad Elst has already exposed much of the above as nonsense

‘

Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom is usually interpreted as an act of
self-sacrifice for the sake of the Kashmiri Pandits threatened with
forced conversion. As such, it is a classic Hindutva proof of the
Hinduness of Sikhism, though it is also a classic neo-Sikh proof of the
“secularism” of Sikhism (“showing concern even for people of a different
religion, viz. Hinduism”). However, this whole debate may well rest
upon a simple misunderstanding.

In most indo-Aryan languages, the oft-used honorific mode of the singular is
expressed by the same pronoun as the plural (e.g. Hindi unkâ, “his” or “their”, as opposed to the non-honorific singular uskâ), and vice-versa; by contrast, the singular form only indicates a singular subject. The phrase commonly translated as “the Lord preserved their tilak and sacred thread” (tilak-janjû râkhâ Prabh tâ-kâ), referring to unnamed outsiders assumed to be the Kashmiri Pandits,
literally means that He “preserved b is tilak and sacred thread”,
meaning Tegh Bahadur’s; it is already unusual poetic liberty to render “their
tilak and sacred thread” this way, and even if that were intended,
there is still no mention of the Kashmiri Pandits in the story.

This is confirmed by one of the following lines in Govind’s poem about his
father’s martyrdom: “He suffered martyrdom for the sake of his faith.”
in any case, the story of forced massed conversions in Kashmir by the
Moghul emperor Aurangzeb is not supported by the detailed record of his reign by Muslim chronicles who narrate many accounts of his biogorty.

Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom in 1675 was of course in the service of Hinduism,
in that it was an act of opposing Aurangzeb’s policy of forcible
conversion. An arrest warrant against him had been issued on
non-religious and nonpolitical charges, and he was found out after
having gone into hiding; Aurangzeb gave him a chance to escape his
punishment by converting to Islam. Being a devout Muslim, Aurangzeb
calculated that the conversion of this Hindu sect leader would encourage
his followers to convert along with him. The Guru was tortured and
beheaded when he refused the offer to accept Islam, and one of his
companions was sawed in two for having said that Islam should be
destroyed.

At any rate, he stood firm as a Hindu, telling Aurangzeb that he loved his Hindu Dharma and that Hindu Dharma would never die,-a statement conveniently overlooked in most neo-Sikh accounts. He was not a Sikh defending Hinduism, but a Hindu of the Nanakpanth defending his own Hindu religion. However, even Tegh Bahadur never was a warrior against the Moghul empire; indeed, the birth of his son Govind in the eastern city of Patna was a souvenir of his own
enlistment in the party of a Moghul general on a military expedition to
Assam.

Though Govind Singh is considered as the founder of the Khalsa order (1699) who “gave his Sikhs an outward form distinct from the Hindus” he too did things which Sikh separatists would dismiss as “brahminical”. As Khushwant Singh notes, “Gobind selected five of the most scholarly of his disciples and sent them to Benares to learn Sanskrit and the Hindu religious texts, to be better
able to interpret the writings of the gurus, which were full of allusions to Hindu mythology and philosophy. Arun Shourie quotes Govind Singh as declaring: “Let the path of the pure [khâlsâ panth] prevail all over the world, let the Hindu dharma dawn and all delusion disappear. (…) May I spread dharma and prestige of the Veda in the world and erase from it the sin of cow-slaughter.”

Ram Swarup adds a psychological reason for the recent Sikh attempt to sever
the ties with Hindu society and the Indian state: “‘You have been our
defenders’, Hindus tell the Sikhs. But in the present psychology, the
compliment wins only contempt-and I believe rightly. For self-despisement is the surest way of losing a friend or even a brother. It also gives the Sikhs an exaggerated self-assessment.

Ram Swarup hints at the question of the historicity
of the belief that “Sikhism is the sword-arm of Hinduism”, widespread
among Hindus. It is well-known that the Sikhs were the most combative
in fighting Muslims during the Partition massacres, and that they were
also singled out by Muslims for slaughter.

The image of Sikhs as the most fearsome among the Infidels still lingers in the Muslim mind; it is apparently for this reason that Saudi Arabia excludes Sikhs (like Jews)from employment within its borders. Yet, the story for the earlier
period is not that clear-cut. Given the centrality of the image of
Sikhism as the “sword-arm of Hinduism”, it is well worth our while to
verify the record of Sikh struggles against Islam. In the Guru lineage, we don’t see much physical fighting for Hinduism.

Guru Nanak was a poet and a genuine saint, but not a warrior. His
successors were poets, not all of them saintly, and made a living with
regular occupations such as horse-trading. Guru Arjun’s martyrdom was
not due to any anti-Muslim rebellion but to the suspicion by Moghul
Emperor Jahangir that he had supported a failed rebellion by Jahangir’s
son Khusrau, i.e. a Muslim palace revolution aimed at continuing the
Moghul Empire but with someone else sitting on the throne. Arjun refused
to pay the fine which Jahangir imposed on him, not as an act of
defiance against Moghul sovereignty but because he denied the charges
(which amounted to pleading his loyalty to Jahangir); it was then that
Jahangir ordered a tougher punishment. At any rate, Arjun was never
accused of raising the sword against Jahangir, merely of giving
temporary shelter to Khusrau.

Tegh Bahadur’s son and successor, Govind Singh, only fought the Moghul army when he was forced to, and it was hardly to protect Hinduism. His men had been
plundering the domains of the semi-independent Hindu Rajas in the hills
of northeastern Panjab, who had given him asylum after his father’s execution. Pro-Govind accounts in the Hindutva camp equate Govind’s plundering with the Chauth tax which Shivaji imposed to finance his fight against the Moghuls;
they allege that the Rajas were selfishly attached to their wealth while
Govind was risking his life for the Hindu cause.

The Rajas, after failed attempts to restore law and order, appealed to
their Moghul suzerain for help, or at least to the nearest Moghul
governor. So, a confrontation ensued, not because Govind Singh had
defied the mighty Moghul Empire, but because the Moghul Empire
discharged its feudal duties toward its vassals, i.c. to punish what to
them was an ungrateful guest turned robber.

Govind was defeated and his two eldest sons killed in battle; many Sikhs left
him in anger at his foolhardy tactics. During Govind Singh’s flight, a
Brahmin family concealed Govind’s two remaining sons (Hindus protecting
Sikhs, not the other way around), but they were found out and the boys
were killed.

The death of Govind’s sons provides yet another demythologizing insight about Govind Singh through its obvious connection with his abolition of the Guru lineage. A believer may, of course, assume that it was because of some divine
instruction that Govind replaced the living Guru lineage with the
Granth, a mere book (a replacement of the Hindu institution of gurudom
with the Book-centred model of Islam). However, a more down-to-earth
hypothesis which takes care of all the facts is that after the death of
all his sons, Govind Singh simply could not conceive of the Guru lineage
as not continuing within his own family.

After his defeat and escape (made possible by the self-sacrifice of a
disciple who impersonated the Guru), Govind Singh in his turn became a
loyal subject of the Moghul Empire. He felt he had been treated
unfairly by the local governor, Wazir Khan, so he did what aggrieved
vassals do: he wrote a letter of complaint to his suzerain, not through
the hierarchical channels but straight to the Padeshah. In spite of its
title and its sometimes defiant wording, this “victory letter” (Zafar Nâma)
to Aurangzeb is fundamentally submissive.

Among other things, Govind assures Aurangzeb that he is just as much an idol-breaker as the Padeshah himself: “I am the destroyer of turbulent hillmen, since they are idolators and I am the breaker of idols.”Aurangzeb was sufficiently
pleased with the correspondence (possibly several letters) he received
from the Guru, for he ordered Wazir Khan not to trouble Govind any
longer.

After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, Govind tried to curry favour with the heir-apparent and effective successor, Bahadur Shah, and supported him militarily in the war of succession: his fight was for one of the Moghul factions and against therival Moghul faction, not for Hinduism and against the Moghul Empire as such. In fact, one of the battles he fought on Bahadur Shah’s side was
against rebellious Rajputs. As a reward for his services, the new
Padeshah gave Govind a fief in Nanded on the Godavari river in the
south, far from his natural constituency in Panjab. To acquaint himself
with his new property, he followed Bahadur Shah on an expedition to the
south (leaving his wives in Delhi under Moghul protection), but there
he himself was stabbed by two Pathan assassins (possibly sent by Wazir
Khan, who feared Govind Singh’s influence on Bahadur Shah) in 1708. His
death had nothing to do with any fight against the Moghuls or for
Hinduism.

So far, it is hard to see where the Sikhs have acted as the sword-arm of Hinduism against Islam. If secularism means staying on reasonable terms with both Hindus and Muslims, we could concede that the Gurus generally did steer a “secular”
course. Not that this is shameful: in the circumstances, taking on the
Moghul Empire would have been suicidal In his last months, Govind Singh had become friends with the Hindu renunciate Banda Bairagi. This Banda went to Panjab and rallied the Sikhs around himself. At long last, it was he as a non-Sikh who took the initiative to wage an all-out offensive against the Moghul Empire.
It was a long-drawn-out and no-holds-barred confrontation which ended in
general defeat and the execution of Banda and his lieutenants (1716).
Once more, the Sikhs became vassals of the Moghuls for several decades
until the -Marathas broke the back of the Moghul empire in the mid-18th
century. Only then, in the wake of the Maratha expansion, did the Sikhs
score some lasting victories against Moghul and Pathan power.

We may conclude that Ram Swarup has a point when he questions the Hindu
attitude of self-depreciation and gratefulness towards the Sikh
“sword-arm”. Sikh history has its moments of heroism, but not
particularly more than that of the Marathas or Rajputs. And like the
Rajputs and Marathas, Sikhism also has a history of collaboration with
the Moghul throne.

By Dr Koenraad Elst