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| Beheading of Sikhs direct attack on PM: Talks with Pak weak signal | | STARK REALITY | | RUSTAM
EARLY TIMES STORY
JAMMU, Feb 23: The shocked and enraged people of Jammu observed a complete bandh today to register their protest against the gruesome beheading two Sikhs, Jaspal Singh and Mahal Singh, and throwing inside a Gurdwara in Pakistan’s Peshawar their heads and tell New Delhi that they are against the idea of India reengaging Pakistan whose intentions are evil and which has failed to provide protections to the minorities in Pakistan.
The shutdown call had been given by the aggrieved Sikh community and was supported by one and all for the reasons not difficult to understand. The most notable reasons, of course, being their belief that Pakistan would never ever behave and that it is hand-in-glove with the dreaded terrorist organizations, which want to destroy and eliminate not only the minorities, but also India.
The response the shutdown called evoked does indicate that the patience of the people of Jammu has ended and that they want New Delhi to comprehensively defeat Islamabad so that they could live peacefully and India saved from the Pakistani depredations.
The dreaded Taliban had kidnapped these two Sikhs, along with few others, more than 34 days ago and their demands were two. One was that they must pay “jazia “to them to the tune of Rupees three crores in lieu of protection of their lives. The other was that they should renounce their religion and embrace Islam. The whereabouts of the other abducted Sikhs are still not known. An apprehension has gained ground among the Sikhs across the world that the remaining kidnapped Sikhs might meet the same fate. These poor and innocent Sikhs were picked up from a place called Badi in Peshawar.
It is not for the first time that zealots have targeted the minority Sikhs or the minority Hindus. They have been targeting the minorities in Pakistan at regular intervals, with thousands of the Hindus and the Muslims crossing over to the Indian side to escape their physical liquidation. The zealots have been demanding jazia from the Sikhs and other minority communities for quite sometime now.
According to one estimate, more than 6,000 Pakistani Hindus and an almost equal number of Sikhs have migrated to India during the past few months. The process of migration started as early as in 2000 and gained momentum in 2008, when Sardar Balwant Singh, a Hakeem by profession, was abducted from Peshawar and murdered in cold-blood.
Some of those who settled in Haryana and Punjab after their migration, including Lashkar Das, consistently claim that they were “under pressure to convert to Islam”; that “some families did budge under the pressure and embraced Islam” and that “those who didn’t renounce their religion had no option but to come here” (India).
As per the version of those who migrated to India in 2000, the “local residents used to call” them “Kafirs”; they would “not sit with us”; and “our children were discriminated against in schools and forced to go in for Namaz”.
It also bears recalling that in 2009 the Taliban had demolished as many as 11 houses of the Sikh community in the Aurakzai tribal region of Pakistan to produce a moral effect and enforce their dictate that if the minority communities wanted to live in Pakistan, they had no other alternative except to pay jazia.
The Sikh community has been living in the Aurakzai tribal area or Aurakzai Agency and other areas of Pakistan since centuries. In fact, these Sikhs and members of other minority communities, particularly those belonging to the Hindu community, are the original inhabitants of the areas, called the Pakistani areas.
The woeful tales of those migrated from Pakistan reveal the nature of situation that prevails in Pakistan in general and the frontier areas in particular and what they reveal is also too well-known in India. It is also well-known in the country that the dreaded Taliban enjoy overt and covert support of the Pakistani political establishment, the ISI and elements in the Pakistani Army and that these bad elements in the Pakistani establishments allow the zealots to scot-free saying they have no control over them.
It is time for New Delhi to redesign their whole approach towards Pakistan and the kind of barbarities the Taliban are perpetrating on the Sikh and other minority communities. The best course would be to identify itself with the outraged sentiment of the Sikh community and other Indians and abandon the idea of talks with Pakistan at the present juncture. Talking to the Pakistani officials/rulers at this point in time would be to send a wrong signal across the world and play on behalf of the fanatics and anti-India forces. This is the message from the Jammu’s massive shutdown. Another message is the beheading of the Sikhs is a direct attack on the Indian Prime Minister, himself a Sikh, who is relentlessly pursuing the dialogue-with-Pakistan agenda overlooking the widespread opposition to his approach towards Islamabad and terrorism.
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