As Punjab is heading to assembly elections next month, Indian diaspora apologists of the ruling right-wing Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) in New Delhi have oiled up their propaganda machinery.  

Since Punjab is currently governed by the so-called secular Congress party that was responsible for the 1984 Sikh massacre, BJP supporters here are trying to revive the horrific memories to their advantage.  

Thousands of Sikhs were slaughtered across India following the assassination of then prime minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1984. The pogroms were engineered by the members of the slain leader’s Congress Party with the help of police and the administration.  

Gandhi was murdered to avenge the army invasion on the Golden Temple Complex, the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, in June that year. The ill-fated military operation was launched to deal with handful of militants who were accused of stockpiling arms inside the place of worship.

But most Sikhs believed that it was aimed at humiliating the minority community and polarize the Hindu majority to win the impending general elections. Their anticipations were proven right when the Congress won more than 400 seats in the house of 514 in the election that followed the Sikh genocide. The BJP at that time won only two seats.

This was a clear indication of a shift of BJP voters to Congress. Notably, BJP supporters not only celebrated the army attack on the Golden Temple in Punjab, but also participated in the Sikh massacre. The election was bluntly run on the emotive campaign of national unity, which paid rich dividends to the Congress party. 

However, BJP supporters have been squarely blaming the Congress party for the 1984 massacre to win Sikh support both in Punjab and the Indian diaspora without any sense of shame or self-criticism. Thanks to inroads the party has made within the Sikh community, it has found many takers of this theory. 

Recently, an acquitted suspect in the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182, Ripudaman Singh Malik, wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi praising him for his government's response to what happened in 1984.   

Air India flight 182 was bombed mid-air, killing all 329 people aboard. The crime was blamed on Canada-based Sikh separatists on a vendetta for the ugly events of 1984. Malik was charged in the conspiracy, but was found not guilty in 2005.

He was granted a visa by the Modi government in 2019 even as he was being portrayed as the financier behind the Air India conspiracy by the Indian state.  

Well-known as a cofounder of Khalsa Credit Union and Khalsa School in Metro Vancouver, he has a following in the community, but he does not represent the community, which has a diversity of voices.

There are many Sikhs, who are vocal against Modi and have also been critical of him for his involvement in the 2002 anti-Muslim massacre in Gujarat.

Modi was chief minister of the state back then when Muslims were targeted by the BJP mobs right under his watch after a train carrying Hindu pilgrims caught fire, leaving more than 50 passengers dead. Modi blamed the incident on Muslims. Although he was never charged, survivors continue to allege his complicity. It is well known that the technique used to torment Muslims was similar to the one applied on Sikhs in 1984.  

A group of Sikhs opposed Modi when he came to Canada in 2015 after being elected as the prime minister the previous year.  

So, Malik and others like him cannot claim to be the gatekeepers of the community. While they have every right to support or oppose anyone, the facts speak for themselves and any attempt to twist them must not go unchallenged.  

Malik has conveniently overlooked a few important aspects, while making one strikingly debatable observation that his government was instrumental behind the convictions of those involved in the massacre.

Let’s face it: the only high-profile conviction, that of former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar in 2018, was the result of a Delhi High Court verdict. Judge S. Muralidhar, who delivered it, also mentioned 2002 massacre in his judgment. Why would he do that, if Modi was the man responsible for Kumar's conviction? 

Also, Muralidhar was ordered to be transferred after he had raised concerns about police inaction in protecting Muslims who were targeted by BJP goons in February 2020 in New Delhi. This was when Muslims and their secularist allies were campaigning against the Citizenship Amendment Act passed by  the Modi government to discourage Muslim refugees coming from neighbouring countries.  

To be fair to Malik, he is not alone in this. In 2019, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in Government of India came out with a booklet on Modi's special relationship with Sikhs with similar misleading facts. 

Perhaps, Malik needs to do some homework to recognize that it was the Modi government that conferred the highest civilian award upon Nanaji Deshmukh, a leader of the Hindu supremacist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), in 2019.

Deshmukh previously justified the Sikh massacre and tried to blame Sikhs for what was done to them.

If that were not enough, the Modi government locked up two prominent activists and scholars who stood up for the Sikhs in 1984.

While lawyer Sudha Bhardawaj has recently been released, Gautam Navlakha is still being incarcerated. They were both taken into custody on trumped-up charges.

Their groups released the first authentic field report on the Sikh massacre, Who are the Guilty?, which documented the role of the Congress government in the violence. Both worked with the victims in New Delhi and Kanpur, two of the worst-hit cities in North India in the first week of 1984.    

Lastly, Malik who claims to be a devout Sikh and proudly dons the Sikh symbol on his turban, should practice what he preaches. True Sikhism teaches its followers to stand up for everyone.

Instead of giving Modi a clean chit, he not only must re-examine his own facts, but stand up for Muslims and Christians who are being hounded by BJP supporters. Attacks on religious minorities, especially those two groups, have increased under Modi's rule.

Even otherwise, Modi supporters have left no stone unturned to malign Sikhs as “terrorists” and “antinationals” during the recently concluded farmers’ protest against his unjust farm laws.

They did not stop there and even went to the extent of threatening a repeat of 1984 to teach protesting Sikh farmers a lesson through social media.

If Malik was really adhering to what the founder of Sikhism Guru Nanak had taught, he should have called Modi a tyrant. After all, that’s what Nanak did by talking back to power.  

In fact, the actions of Malik and his ilk are serving to weaken the broader struggle against the RSS’s design to assimilate Sikhs into the Hindu fold by denying their distinct identity and use them against other minorities and leftist forces.

It is not without reason that a right-wing media outlet, which up until now had been portraying Malik in a bad light, has started describing him as a  Sikh leader.