Today Sikhs are seen as among the most prosperous and able communities of India. But two decades ago the religious minority were portrayed as bloody terrorists, and for many years Jagjit Singh Chauhan, who has died aged 80 of a heart attack, was the international voice of a would be independent country, the "Republic of Khalistan", a Sikh homeland to be carved from India's Punjab. A gifted propagandist, Chauhan was its self-declared president, and issued passports, postage stamps and currency.
Chauhan could have been a typical Indian success story. Having spent his student years in the Communist party of India, he started up hospital services in his home town of Tanda. Treating the poor for free, he built up goodwill among the least well-off. A natural politician, Chauhan ran for office, initially for the Republican party, trading allegiances to stay in power, briefly becoming finance minister of the Punjab in the late 1960s. His lasting achievement was to introduce state lotteries.
The fires of his nationalism had been lit in 1966 by the break-up of the old Punjab state into the Sikh-dominated Punjab and Hindu-dominated Haryana. This left the Le Corbusier-designed capital, Chandigarh, shared by both.
Within a few years Chauhan had decamped to run a Khalistani government-in-exile from London, also spending time in the US and Canada. He made trips to Pakistan to seek support for his project. In 1971 he took out an advertisement in the New York Times proclaiming a separate Sikh state of Khalistan. He drew support for his enterprises from wealthy Sikh expatriates, notably a Californian peach magnate. In India he was seen as an enemy of the state.
By the early 1980s the campaign for Khalistan had turned violent. The bombings and shootings culminated in Operation Bluestar, when in June 1984 the Indian army stormed the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest Sikh shrine, to capture an armed band of separatists. Much of the temple's spiritual centre, the Akal Takht, was destroyed.
Chauhan, sensing the mood in Punjab, took to the airwaves in Britain. In a now notorious BBC interview he claimed that the then Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi would, along with her family, be "beheaded". Margaret Thatcher's government asked him to desist from making inflammatory statements from British soil.
Later that year Gandhi was shot dead by her Sikh bodyguards. Violent anti-Sikh riots shook the country's cities and claimed the lives of thousands. Innocents were caught up in the violence and in India some compare the killings to Nazi Germany's Kristallnacht.
In Britain Chauhan took his fight to the courts, suing noted writer and fellow Sikh Khushwant Singh for claiming in his History of the Sikhs that the putative president of Khalistan had been, while living in Canada, a shorn tobacco-smoking citizen. Cutting one's hair and smoking is an anathema to a revolutionary Sikh.
Chauhan won a pyrrhic victory. The judge awarded one penny in damages to Chauhan but awarded full costs to his opponent and publishers, leaving Khalistan's chief ideologue with a large legal bill.
In Punjab a bloodier contest ensued for the best part of a decade. Democracy was suspended as the Indian army occupied the state. The security forces eventually crushed the Khalistani movement by adopting a "bullet-for-bullet" policy of extra-judicial killings. More than 40,000 people died.
Chauhan returned to India in 2001, after the Indian government reprieved 100 "anti-nationals". He founded a political party that sought self-rule for the Sikhs through the ballot box and distanced himself from the armed struggle. The doctor, too, returned - running a 30-bed charitable hospital in Tanda.
He continued to be a propagandist in the service of the "Khalistani" cause, claiming India was an "artificial country" that would one day swallow up its neighbours.
However with Punjab transformed into the richest state in the Indian Union and Sikhs as Indian prime minister, army chief and running Delhi's powerful economic secretariat, Khalistan's flame appears to have gone out along with that of its most visible proponent
He is survived by his wife, Charanjit Kaur.
Jagjit Singh Chauhan died April 4 2007
Chauhan could have been a typical Indian success story. Having spent his student years in the Communist party of India, he started up hospital services in his home town of Tanda. Treating the poor for free, he built up goodwill among the least well-off. A natural politician, Chauhan ran for office, initially for the Republican party, trading allegiances to stay in power, briefly becoming finance minister of the Punjab in the late 1960s. His lasting achievement was to introduce state lotteries.
The fires of his nationalism had been lit in 1966 by the break-up of the old Punjab state into the Sikh-dominated Punjab and Hindu-dominated Haryana. This left the Le Corbusier-designed capital, Chandigarh, shared by both.
Within a few years Chauhan had decamped to run a Khalistani government-in-exile from London, also spending time in the US and Canada. He made trips to Pakistan to seek support for his project. In 1971 he took out an advertisement in the New York Times proclaiming a separate Sikh state of Khalistan. He drew support for his enterprises from wealthy Sikh expatriates, notably a Californian peach magnate. In India he was seen as an enemy of the state.
By the early 1980s the campaign for Khalistan had turned violent. The bombings and shootings culminated in Operation Bluestar, when in June 1984 the Indian army stormed the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest Sikh shrine, to capture an armed band of separatists. Much of the temple's spiritual centre, the Akal Takht, was destroyed.
Chauhan, sensing the mood in Punjab, took to the airwaves in Britain. In a now notorious BBC interview he claimed that the then Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi would, along with her family, be "beheaded". Margaret Thatcher's government asked him to desist from making inflammatory statements from British soil.
Later that year Gandhi was shot dead by her Sikh bodyguards. Violent anti-Sikh riots shook the country's cities and claimed the lives of thousands. Innocents were caught up in the violence and in India some compare the killings to Nazi Germany's Kristallnacht.
In Britain Chauhan took his fight to the courts, suing noted writer and fellow Sikh Khushwant Singh for claiming in his History of the Sikhs that the putative president of Khalistan had been, while living in Canada, a shorn tobacco-smoking citizen. Cutting one's hair and smoking is an anathema to a revolutionary Sikh.
Chauhan won a pyrrhic victory. The judge awarded one penny in damages to Chauhan but awarded full costs to his opponent and publishers, leaving Khalistan's chief ideologue with a large legal bill.
In Punjab a bloodier contest ensued for the best part of a decade. Democracy was suspended as the Indian army occupied the state. The security forces eventually crushed the Khalistani movement by adopting a "bullet-for-bullet" policy of extra-judicial killings. More than 40,000 people died.
Chauhan returned to India in 2001, after the Indian government reprieved 100 "anti-nationals". He founded a political party that sought self-rule for the Sikhs through the ballot box and distanced himself from the armed struggle. The doctor, too, returned - running a 30-bed charitable hospital in Tanda.
He continued to be a propagandist in the service of the "Khalistani" cause, claiming India was an "artificial country" that would one day swallow up its neighbours.
However with Punjab transformed into the richest state in the Indian Union and Sikhs as Indian prime minister, army chief and running Delhi's powerful economic secretariat, Khalistan's flame appears to have gone out along with that of its most visible proponent
He is survived by his wife, Charanjit Kaur.
Jagjit Singh Chauhan died April 4 2007
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