The legacy of Prakash Badal: Reflecting on a century of Sikh politics
The legacy of Prakash Badal: Reflecting on a century of Sikh politics
Badal’s recent death has sparked significant conversation and reflection on the future course of Sikh politics. In this condensed article, Prabjot Singh outlines the foundational questions before modern Sikh politics and identifies the structural limitations that the Akali Dal has faced in the past. The full article can be found in the June 2023 issue of Sikh Shahadat.
In the wake of Prakash Badal’s recent passing, political analysts and commentators have been scrambling to author hurried summaries and analyses of his life, politics, and legacy for Punjab. In terms of critics, there are plenty who blame Badal as the sole cause of the decline and stagnation of Sikh politics over the past thirty years–focussing solely on his personal conduct. Without serious introspection about the widespread stagnation of nearly all modern panthic organizations today, and almost no serious analysis of the root issues that plague Sikh existence in the modern/colonial world or the structural limitations of Indian electoral politics however, their proposed solutions amount to little more than empty promises doomed to fail.
With Badal’s death, we are no closer to a solution to the political challenges we have been facing for the past 174 years. Instead, the structural forces that produced the rise of Prakash Singh Badal remain fully entrenched today and will inevitably engulf his successors and aspiring replacements as well. If we seek to meaningfully address the harms that Badal wrought on the Panth and Punjab, we need to reflect on the structures and conditions that produced Prakash Singh Badal and made his ascent possible in the first place.
Evolution of the Shiromani Akali Dal: Modern Sikh Political Thought and the Structural Challenges to Sikh Sovereignty
In the aftermath of the colonization of Punjab in 1849, the Firanghis (colonizers) disbanded every vestige of Sikh sovereignty, organization and self-governance, implanting its own set of administrative institutions from schools to the eventual establishment of a “constituent assembly” setup along parliamentary lines. With the overturning of Sirkar-i-Khalsa, the literal hunting of the sovereign Akalis, and the dismantling of traditional Sikh vidyalas and taksals (knowledge institutions), Sikhs had to reconceptualize how to navigate an entirely new reality without any of our own independent institutions. While a number of answers have been proposed since, we still collectively face the same set of questions today that the Panth faced post-1849:
How do Sikhs institutionally express their collective hond-hasti (being/existence) in this modern/colonial world?
How do we maintain and exercise the divine sovereignty bestowed upon the Khalsa (patshahi)?
What kind of political structures and relations do we strive for in order to fulfill our responsibility to establish halemi raj (a just and sovereign society-polity)?
Every shade of Sikh political thought and action since 1849, fundamentally comes back to these issues and seeks to provide some kind of answer. The dawn of the Shiromani Akali Dal in the 1920s, was one specific answer to some of these questions given the circumstances of the time, and, naturally, it has undergone massive evolution since then:
The Akali Dal was first mobilized as a panthic collective dedicated to reasserting the Khalsa’s sovereignty, starting by wresting control of Sikh gurdware and institutions from the colonial-backed administration in the early 1900s. This mobilization gave Sikhs political direction built around decentralized grassroots organization, collective leadership, and radical direct action. While the Akali Dal began as a bold manifestation of sovereign Sikh organization and leadership against colonial rule, it has since declined into a disfigured shadow of its predecessors and reduced itself within the confines of Indian nationalism.
In this sense, the Akali Dal started as a bold project to express Sikh autonomy rooted in the strength of independent panthic institutions and radical Sikh thought and action. The fundamental setback the SAD faced however, was that once it accepted the terms of engagement within the Indian state, it surrendered its commitment to Sikh sovereignty and consented to being subordinated to another power (the electoral process of the Indian state). By tying its reason for being to its ability to wield subedari (borrowed power) from Indian institutions, the modern Akali Dal gave up its strength to interact with India as an equal, and instead committed itself to maneuvring within the ideological and structural confines of Indian nation-building and state-building.
In order to holistically trace this evolution from the radical mobilization of the Akali Dal in the 1920s to the ascendance of Prakash Badal, it is necessary to identify the key structural forces that Sikhs have been up against over this past century. Badal’s rise to power and his 76-year political journey provides an anecdotal reflection of Sikh interactions and conflict with three primary challenges:
Modern/Western state structures and “liberal democracy”
Secular nationalism and Indian nation-building
Imperialism and neoliberal globalization
Modern/Western state structures and “liberal democracy”
The Firanghi (European colonizer) imposed the colonial state structure to eliminate expressions of indigenous sovereignty (patshahi) and replace them with an authoritarian model that could exploit the land and people for the profit of the empire. The structure of the state has itself been developed and deployed as an imperialist structure to make exploitation and domination more efficient throughout the colonized world.
The eventual acceptance of this state structure and attempts to work within it led to a situation wherein Akali politics were eventually grounded in surrendering Sikh sovereignty to the state which thereby limited the SAD’s political horizon to the parameters of this structure itself. While early iterations of Akali politics still centred around exercising autonomous Sikh power through powerful mass mobilizations demonstrated in various morchay, the incentive (and structural requirements) of subedari (limited/borrowed power through forming “government”) gradually domesticated this impulse. In order to access this power and influence (subedari), Akali Dal politicians had to police and domesticate Sikh politics in order to successfully quench their thirst for the illusion of power.
Rather than building autonomous Sikh power, the SAD became focussed on making appeals to power (the Indian state) in order to a ddress the Sikh political problems identified above. Through this relegation of responsibility and authority, the process of political engagement morphed into a performative process of complaint/protest in order to convince the governing party to address Sikh grievances. This paternalistic relationship further entrenched our gulaami (powerlessness) when our politics became fundamentally disconnected from our sovereignty–no longer centring “appan hathhi apna appai hi kaaj svariye”.
Even more nakhidh (worthless) however, was when Akali politicians began to limit their politics to simply performing their concern fo Sikh grievances in order to gain trust and climb the steps of power (ie. Badal’s 1997 election campaign). This eventually advanced to a point where they did not even feel the need to express Sikh concerns. This gradual decline cannot solely be blamed on the personal inclinations and greed of politicians like Badal, however. This was a structural requirement of engaging in Indian state politics. The clearest evidence of this is the fact that not even a single Akali government was able to complete its full term without being overridden by Delhi until Badal’s 1997 government which kept completely silent on panthic issues.
Similarly, the electoral processes of India’s so-called “liberal democracy” are tied to this. The structural requirements of the Indian electoral system impacted the logic and tactics of Akali politics due to the inevitable reliance on crafting electoral majorities. This quickly led to sacrificing Sikh principles and panthic objectives in order to appease the broader electorate or the SAD’s coalition partners. This imperative leveled huge impacts, especially given the sliver of a majority (those defined by the census as) Sikhs possess in Punjab.
Badal exemplified the pitfalls of this when the SAD formed government under his leadership immediately following the Punjabi suba agitation. Even at that time, Badal completely ignored and neglected any cultural or linguistic issues–let alone addressing any panthic issues–in order to maintain his coalition with the Jan Sangh (the predecessor to today’s fascist BJP). When the Akalis formed government again in 1997–for the first time after the genocidal counter-insurgency–Badal ignored and eventually buried all of his campaign promises to prosecute security officials responsible for crimes against humanity and human rights violations. Again, this was called for by the fact that he had entered into an alliance with the BJP and had finally received the patronage of Delhi to become Punjab’s “overseer”. Most recently, Badal’s alliance with Dera Sacha Sauda and Gurmeet Ram Rahim was an open secret after the beadbi incidents in 2015. When winning elections becomes the primary objective and winning depends on mobilizing a plurality of voters, numbers become everything. Modern Akalis like Badal maneuvered in every way possible to get a taste of power and hold on.
When the attention and focus of “Sikh” politics becomes engrossed in par-adheen (subordinated) institutions after turning away from Guru Granth-Panth, there is little doubt that this inevitably leads to the political manifestation of becoming bemukh (unfaithful; one who turns their back on the Guru).
Nationalism and Indian-nation building
Emerging from the violence of Partition, India’s Congress-led government launched an aggressive “national integration” initiative to help transform the massive landmass and myriad populations and cultures into a singular identity and unitary government–ruled by Delhi. This identity would be based around the archetype of the “Hindu”, and as a result is particularly intolerant and aggressive with non-Hindu identities mobilizing in Punjab, Kashmir, and the Northeast.
As an ethnic democracy, the Indian state shifts between “hegemonic control” and “violent control” when policing non-Indian/Hindu communities. When these communities step outside the realm of “hegemonic control” to challenge their assimilation and subordination, the state employs “violent control” to reassert its domination. These communities are thus permitted to exist within the state’s administrative structures with some basic civil rights–contingent on their submission to the nationalist project. When they step outside this framework to claim their dignity or exercise autonomous power, they are faced with the genocidal violence of the state apparatus and fascist mobs.
Out of the various Akali factions jostling for internal dominance, Badal was at the forefront of the faction that repeatedly capitulated to the narrative of secular nationalism in order to enjoy the borrowed power of the state (subedari).
Around 1947, the dominant SAD leadership remained committed to Sikh political autonomy and agitated for a separate, autonomous state within India which would be a Sikh homeland as contemplated before Partition. On the other hand, Badal was at the forefront of the SAD faction which ousted Master Tara Singh and secularized this objective into a simple demand for a Punjabi-speaking state, reorganized solely on linguistic terms. In other words, while the Akalis initially pushed for an autonomous Sikh homeland as a safeguard against Hindu majoritarianism, the structures and ideology of Indian nationalism coerced pliant Akalis, like Badal, to reframe their demand in secularized, linguistic terms instead.
The most overt example of this structural limitation was seen in the Badal-led Akali Dal in the 1990s after Indian security forces reestablished “violent control”. The genocidal counter-insurgency launched by the Indian state violently erased sovereign Sikh politics–explicitly juxtaposed to the establishment Akalis–and all entities that supported or were sympathetic with the liberatory project symbolized by Sant Jarnail Singh jee. Members of jujharoo jathebandiyan were literally hunted with bounties on their heads, Sikh parchariks were targeted, and the Sikh Students Federation–which had become the radical de facto replacement for the nationalist Akali Dal–was criminalized and repressed.
This alternative to the collusion of the Akalis was violently erased by the Indian state with the implicit consent of the Badal Akali Dal who explicitly transformed the SAD from a panthic institution into a Punjabi party in the mid-90s. With the support of India’s security apparatus, his return to power in 1997 generally succeeded in secularizing politics in Punjab by forcefully repressing panthic issues and identity from political discourse. These issues were instead replaced with emphasizing Indian nationalism and the apolitical politics of “development”.
Imperialism and neoliberal globalization
Over the past 75 years, Badal represented a specific contingent within the SAD that was made up of the landed elite of Punjab who sought to channel their political activity towards increasing their individual/family wealth and power. Immediately after 1947, the Indian state-building process intentionally underdeveloped Punjab in order to serve Indian food and national security objectives. While the so-called “Green Revolution”–an imperialist project to subjugate Punjab’s agrarian economy to the whims of the Indian state and multinational corporations–was an obvious ecological disaster, it also accelerated economic disparity and helped this landed elite concentrate further power and wealth by providing greater profits for a significant period. When they hit a ceiling however, they sought to transfer this wealth into various agroindustries but hit the stonewall of India’s centralized planning. The landed elite would benefit from the Akali push for Indian decentralization as this would hypothetically grant them increased autonomy to accumulate further wealth. This situation would drastically shift following India’s genocide against Sikhs in the 1990s, however.
Following the liberalization of India’s economy in the early-1990s and the genocidal counter-insurgency that eliminated Panthic politics from the mainstream political area, Badal established himself as the “overseer” of Punjab and SAD enjoyed its first full term in modern India from 1997-2002. The new economic policies allowed the Badals to increase their wealth astronomically, while simultaneously replacing Panthic politics with the rhetoric of neoliberal vikaas (development). The issues that Sikhs mobilized around and sacrificed their lives for were suddenly erased overnight and violently repressed whenever they raised their head.
It is in this sense that:
Combining the violent security policies with the cultural and political impacts of neoliberalization, the Indian state brought a devastating shift in Punjab’s social and political culture towards rampant consumerism and the commodification of every sphere of life–from family relations to news reporting and governance itself. Privatizing every sector imaginable, elites like the Badals were able to financially benefit from this process while completely eroding the level and seriousness of political discourse to a point where infrastructure projects and promises of economic development replaced all other issues of collective wellbeing, political autonomy, or annkh (dignity).
Along the lines of the “shock doctrine”, the trauma of genocide and political repression was used to transform the mental architecture of Sikhs in Punjab in order to erase and obscure Sikh politics while implementing a drastic economic transformation facilitating the concentration of wealth and power into an even smaller set of hands. Eroding cultural norms and values, collective identities, and the capacity for mass political action, the Indian state sought to transform residents of Punjab into atomized individuals whose political horizons were limited solely to seeking economic prosperity, with limited to no value for other spheres of life and politics. This subsequently led to the corresponding erosion of the Akali Dal as a mass political party into a clientelistic instrument purely focussed on amassing wealth and power.
Imagining alternatives to the “Badal Dal” and laying foundations for another century of Sikh sangarsh
Following the colonization of Punjab and the overturning of Sirkar-i-Khalsa, the Sikh world has faced a situation of gulaami (powerlessness/homelessness), and has fought to express Sikh sovereignty in a hostile world committed to assimilating or annihilating all alternative (non-Western) paradigms of life and society. In trying to confront these challenges, the establishment of the SAD was a valiant attempt to reorganize and reassert Sikh political power in this world. While it was initially rooted in autonomous Sikh power and radical direct action, it was gradually cannibalized by the very institutions it tried to engage with as a “representative body” of Sikhs within India’s electoral system. The rise of Badal’s brand of client politics was therefore not simply because of the personal faults of one man but the result of sophisticated structural forces committed to neutralizing the radical challenge that Guru Sahib’s vision of sarbat da bhala poses to authoritarian domination and exploitation.
Contrary to the current Akali Dal, the initial phase of Akali politics and the example of Sant Jarnail Singh jee shine light on our path forward. The antidote to Badal’s brand of client politics and crony capitalism is not simply to replace the head of a problematic institution, but to fundamentally transform our mode of politics and institutions altogether:
Sikh jujharoos did not submit to the state as the sole source of “power” nor were they seeking “rights” to be conferred by the state–they proactively and definitively lived with annkh (dignity) as a transformation and goal in itself. In this sense, Sikh jujharoos were not making requests for “equality”, “rights” or “justice” to be conceded by the state.
Because Sikh jujharoos did not see the state as the source of power, justice, and sovereignty, they instead regenerated Khalsa institutions outside the framework of the state to build power with the blessings of Guru Granth-Panth and support of sangat. By rejuvenating the Khalsa’s lifeworld, Sikh jujharoos began the regenerative process to develop the necessary institutions to ground and rehabilitate Sikh subjectivity in the world–the only avenue to genuine liberation.
Today, rather than absolving ourselves of any responsibility by simply blaming Badal for our problems and posting about our panthic opinions on social media, we must seriously reflect on the evolution of Panthic politics over the past century and the structural challenges we now face, contemplate the values and principles Guru Sahib has blessed us with, and then seriously work on building alternative structures of political mobilization–capable of addressing today’s challenges.
Navigating our way through the modern/colonial world today must fundamentally be rooted in gurmat and the traditions of Guru Granth-Panth in order to build an alternative world–not just an alternative organization in a world that is not ours. By centring the Guru Khalsa Panth and our Guru-granted patshahi to build autonomous Sikh power on our own terms, we can then successfully intervene politically in order to fulfill the Khalsa’s responsibility of establishing halemi raj.
Prabjot Singh | @SikhShahadat