Chandigarh: Sikh thinkers and intellectuals today criticized Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar for misrepresenting Sikh warrior and sovereign Baba Banda Singh Bahadur as ‘Baba Banda Bairagi’ and naming Lohgarh-Shahbad road after him with an apparent motive of ‘placating the Hindutva forces’.
“Such move is a clear blatant distortion of the history being done to appropriate the Sikh hero into the Sangh privar fold”, said Gurtej Singh IAS, Dr. Gurdarshan Singh Dhillon, Sukhdev Singh Journalist and Jaspal Singh Sidhu, (both senior journalists) and Gurpreet Singh (spokesman of Kendri Sri Guru Singh Sabha Chandigarh) in a joint statement.
“We appreciate Mr Khattar’s desire to honour the Banda Singh who had created an indigenous republic after centuries of slavery is laudable But he should not insult the great Khalsa general, saint and statesman by posthumously converting him to the Bairagi sect of the Hindu faith”, the statement added.
File Photo used for representational purpose only
Historical evidences openly say that after his initiation, Baba Banda Singh Bahadur subscribed to “the Naash Doctrine” of Guru Gobind Singh and thereby renounced all previous spiritual affiliations of being an Udasi sadhu. Banda Singh later married and as per Sikh traditions he named his son as Ajay Singh.
“There was no dearth of Bairagis in that world but not a single Bairagi joined Banda Singh’s struggle. Five thousand Muslims did join in his effort to establish the only indigenous “People’s Republic lead by the Khalsa” after centuries of political slavery”, the statement added.
“On the contrary, most of the Hill Rajas, the confederacy of Jats, most of the Rajputs and the illustrious Hindu leaders of the age joined the enemies of Banda Singh to destroy the latter. The Khatris of Lahore subsidized the Mughal struggle against Banda”.
“It is indeed laudable if Mr Khattar’s ancestor was amongst the only 17 people from Haryana who joined Banda Singh. It must be celebrated if he indeed died a martyr because 15 of his compatriots offered to accept Islam after Baba Banda Singh’s martyrdom”.
“Any attempt to misappropriate icons of the Sikhs and minorities by the Hindutava forces is pathetic and deplorable. Glory cannot be gained with retrospective effect by an administrative action now. The act of stealing icons rather becomes a painful reminder of the shocking cultural barrenness of the contemporary society during slavery. Painfully as it is, the deficiency cannot be covered up by renaming monuments, historical persons and by rewriting history to suit the cover-up. Since Mr. Khattar has memory of Sikh ancestry, it is doubly condemnable when the inglorious effort comes from him”, the statement reads.