There comes a period of about half a century of relentless persecution and genocide pogroms against the Sikh people by two contending empires, the mightiest empires of Asia of those days, the Moghul and the Pathan Empire. The Pathan Empire persecuted and tried to uproot the Sikhs and to destroy them, root and branch, under the leadership of Ahmed Shah Abdali, one of the greatest generals, of the stature of Chenghiz Khan, Halagu and Nadir, the greatest generals which Asia has produced. Under his might and under his generalship, and that of his successors, for almost fifty years, the Pathans as well as the Mughals tried their worst and tried their utmost to cow down the Sikhs, to finish the Sikhs and to make them submit. But the Sikhs, withstood this terrible onslaught.
They neither submitted nor abandoned their harsh cry of ‘death or liberty, a sentiment foreign to and unknown in the Eastern societies, ancient or modern. This is a sentiment which is unique in the history of Asia, though in Europe you do find traces of it. But for fifty years, under the most callous and under the most terrible persecutions, where the aim was complete genocide, the Sikhs not only refused to submit but refused to abandon their cry, “We want death or liberty! We want death or liberty !” And in the end they had their liberty. Sikh supremacy was then established. [A]nd then it slided into the form of the Sikh Empire, which was called the Sarkar Khalsa, that is, ‘the people’s Commonwealth’, from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century.”
Ever-since 1947, persistent, calculated, well-planned and regular attempts have been made on the cultural, on the political and on the economic levels, not only to disintegrate the Khalsa–the collectivity of the Sikh people once and for all, but to weaken the Sikh citizens in all ways.
I conclude and sum-up in a few propositions
what I have been trying to convey here:
1. Sikhism is not a Hindu sect but a prophetic religion and a unique political society, guided and led by an Order of the elite Sikhs, the Khalsa, whose unshorn hair and turbans are merely an exteriorization of their religious psyche, natural, spontaneous, evolutionary and authentic. This is the first proposition which I have tried to elucidate before you.
2. The second proposition which I have tried to make out before you is that Sikhism enjoins a religion grounded in truth alone, a growing truth in the enlightened conscience of man and sternly translated into day-to-day living of individuals.
3. The third proposition which I have tried to put before you, to demonstrate before you, is that the Sikhs are committed to help the establishment of a world-society which is plural, non-coercive, expansive and forward-looking, motivated God-wards, in which there is maximum toleration, ever-growing affluence and minimum of mutually destructive ambition. And on the basis of this, I want to observe in the form of the fourth proposition that:
4. The mosaic pattern of Canadian society comes nearest to the Sikh ideal of a world-society, though the Canadian society is not, in every respect and in essence, its replica or prototype.
5. And the last proposition which I now formulate in precise words is that, while, as Canadian citizens, the Sikhs may look forward to a hopeful and bright future, in India, their historical homeland, they now face the basic problem of their identity and existence, since the control of their own history has been snatched out of their hands and their historical potential has been submerged and throttled.
6. And I add that the Sikhs want to live, as all living things do; they do not want to die.
Excerpt from the address delivered by Sirdar Kapur Singh
All-Canadian Sikh Federation, Chandigarh, 1975
