Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh!

I am grateful to the organizers of this convention for inviting me all the way from London, England to come and share my thoughts with you. I bring to you the greetings of the Sikh community of the United Kingdom (UK), which without offending anyone, we say with a degree of pride that the Sikhs in UK are perhaps the largest Sikh community outside of India. Now, I started of by referring to the UK Sikhs as a Sikh community, but essentially I have been asked to speak to you about the concept of Khalsa as a nation, and to this I will address myself.

Nation and nationhood are of course political and legal concepts. But before we move to the legal and political definitions of these two terms, let me say at once that the Sikh religion is a quite distinctive religion from all the other religions of the world. In particular, from the two main religions of the sub-continent of India. So, let us have no nonsense of Sikhs being Hindus or Sikhism being an adjunct of Hinduism. It is an independent and dynamic religion in its own right. And it is from that distinctiveness that stems the concept of Sikh nationhood. I should perhaps say this, that twin pillars of Sikhism are the fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of mankind. So, essentially the Sikhs regard the entire human race as one family.

Insofar as Sikhism preaches equality, in many of its facets, we believe that all men and women are created equal. Rich and poor are equal; Brahmins and Shoodars are equal and indeed as equal as they are imbued with the same rights to live in dignity and honor. It is thus a democratic faith which stands for spiritual and political freedom and for the sovereignty, not just for Sikhs, but the sovereignty of all mankind. And it is therefore important that we understand the true nature of our community before we can understand the concept of the Sikh nationhood. The Sikhs are no longer purely a religious community. They are more than just a religion. They are now distinct and self-conscious community.

Mary Pike was very kind to refer to one of the cases I was involved in-it's called the "turban case" because it concerned the right of a Sikh boy to wear his turban to a private school to which he had been admitted after passing a strenuous admissions test. Now, we had a long and checkered career in this case, but eventually after 4.5 years, running the gauntlet of all the English courts, that we finally won in the House of Lords, which held that the Sikhs are a separate racial group under the English Race Relations Act. But the important thing of course is that one of the five judges in the House of Lords, Lord Templeman, said that Sikhs are almost a race, almost a nation. And it was this which prompted Sant Jarnail Singh Ji Bhindranwale to proclaim from the ramparts of the Akaal Takhat that even the House of Lords in England have accepted the Sikhs as a separate nation-so let's get on with it.

In order to understand what all this was all about, you have to look at the distinctiveness of the Sikh community. And in looking at this distinctiveness, I would like to examine with you how this distinctiveness translates into Sikh nationhood. Of course you all know that the Sikhs, with Guru Tegh Bahadur Sahib, introduced their own language-Gurmukhi, the language of the Sikh gurus. The fourth guru, Guru Ram Dass founded the city of Amritsar and initiated the building of the Golden Temple. So as to give you your "sanctum sanctorum," your holiest religious shrine. The fifth guru, Guru Arjan Dev Ji, of course completed the building of the Golden Temple and installed in it the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy book of the Sikhs. Special ceremonies for birth, marriage and death were established and with the continual persecution of the Sikhs by Muslim rulers and their Hindu princely underlings, Sikh martyrs were created. All these distinctiveness saw the first stirrings of Sikh nationalism.

Two subsequent events turned this nationalism to a quest for full sovereignty. The very first event of course was the quest for sovereignty in terms of transforming the Sikhs from being a purely devotional and positive faith, the Bhakti movement, into a dynamic and active religious movement, a brotherhood in arms. So you see, the first stirrings of Sikh nationhood came with the combining of two functions, the Sikh body politic. This source first expression when Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji, our sixth master, dawned two swords, one spiritual and one temporal. This was not just symbolic, but an acknowledgment that the Sikhs regarded the spiritual and temporal aspects of the two faith as a single entity. So you see the fusion of religion and politics. Now this fusion was carried a step further by our tenth master, Guru Gobind Singh Ji, when he created the Khalsa, whose 300th birthday you are celebrating today. The significance of the creation of the Khalsa, to my mind, is three-fold: Firstly, it gave you a very important social event, Vasakhi, to commemorate; Secondly and more importantly, it gave a spiritual flavor by saying the highest form of Sikhism is the Khalsa, but it also had a political dimension. In this political dimension it laid the foundation stone of the Sikh nation. And I say this because Guru Gobind Singh said this himself, "Jab Lag Khalsa Rahey Niara, Tab Lag Tej Diun Mei Sara, Jab Eh Gayeh Bipran Ki Reet, Mei Na Karun En Ki Parteet." So, it was that distinctiveness that was going to be the foundation stone for the new holy order of the Khalsa that he had created. Only this morning you started the convention by singing the Sikh national anthem, another one of Guru Gobind Singh Ji's contributions "Deh Shiva Barh Mo Eh Hai, Shub Kar Man Te Kab Hu Na Daron." That of course was the philosophy of a saint-soldier, who should lay down his life for the cause of the community. And hence, the creation of the Khalsa was thus a response to the tyranny and oppression of the Mughal emperors. Matters of course do not end there, this quest for sovereignty found further expression in the prayer which we all of course recite these days, the Khalsa shall rule. The tyrants shall be vanquished. The deserters shall return to the fold. Only those under the lord's protection shall be saved. And in this particular prayer, with which we conclude all our other ceremonies, we have the beginning of the current perspective on Sikh nationhood. The idea forever requesting God to allow the Khalsa to rule is interesting because it is an echo of the Jewish prayer, which the Jews have been reciting for 2,000 years before the Jewish nation itself re-surfaced as the state of Israel, after 2,000 years. They also, like us, every single day used to pray to God that they should be allowed to return to the Promised Land. So, it is not an empty prayer. It took the Jews 2,000 years to achieve a return to their Promised Land. I can promise you its not going to take us 1/10th as long to return to our Promised Land, in the true sense of the word.

Guru Gobind Singh organized a social political body of spiritually awakened and politically conscious people. The idea was to transfer sovereignty to the poor; this was in every sense of the word, a popular mass movement. Guru Gobind Singh's idea in elimination of the caste distinction and in creating a single community was to ensure that everyone will participate and partake of this ultimate objective of the Khalsa to achieve its own nationhood.

The very first Sikh kingdom to be established was by Banda Singh Bahadur, and as a matter of some interest, the kingdom that he established between Karnal and Lahore, constituted some 31, 476 square miles, which compares with the 37,400 square miles of East Punjab today. So the first Sikh kingdom was not just a patchy village state, it was a fairly sizable kingdom. Unfortunately that only lasted 8 years, from 1708-1716. But during that time, we see for the very first time the manifestation of the Sikh sovereignty. Coins were struck in the names of Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh Ji. A royal seal was introduced bearing the legend "Deg O Tegh O Fateh O'Nusrat Bedherang, Yaft az Nanak Guru Gobind Singh." So, this is the very first manifestation of Sikh sovereignty, but we know of course that did not survive. For the next 25 years, the Sikhs were in a state of political doldrums but they re-surfaced as confederacies, as Missals and these Missals were finally united into the single state of Punjab, which Ranjit Singh claimed on behalf of the Sikhs, way back in 1797 at the age of 17. I do not have to remind you how long that kingdom survived as it eventually finished in 1849, when the British troops, after the second Anglo-Sikh wars, entered Lahore and annexed the Sikh kingdom. But even after that Sikh sovereignty did not die off all together because 5 Sikhs states survived: Patiala, Faredkot, Nabha, Jind and these carried forward the torch of Sikh sovereignty until the independence of India.

As only after the independence of India when Sardar Valabh bhai Patel subsumed these states into the Indian union that the Sikh sovereignty finally ended. So, do not forget that if we use 1708, Banda Singh Bahadur's kingdom, as the starting point of Sikh sovereignty, you did in fact enjoy sovereignty for something like 240 years. Therefore, when we talk about Sikh nationhood, we are really talking about something that has a lot of pedigree, a lot of background to it.

So, how does all this translate to Sikh nationhood? Oxford dictionary defines a nation as a community of people of mainly common descent, history, language etc. Stout's traditional dictionary defines a nation as a country and its people living in it. One of the arguments that we faced in the turban case, which militated the Sikhs being accepted as a nation was that, the Sikh nation did not establish itself with any degree of permanence. But it was short-lived. But, you may think that even that is a misinterpretation of Sikh history by an English court, as they know no better. One of the arguments that I was presenting was that it was not open to Oxford dictionary to de-nation a nation. And hence, you have certainly every right to call yourself a nation.

Indeed Sikhs are a nation, one of the foremost examples of a true nation. The only thing you lack is a nation state. It is right to state that international law does not concern itself with nations, they are more concerned with nation states. And it is for this reason that you have to establish your status under international law. I dare say that you have the right to self-determination about which the next speaker, Dr. Gurcharan Singh is about to speak. There are other options available to you but what you can achieve today is to resolve as to what is the way forward for you.

I would simply say this in concluding, that even though in recent years that our political fortune has suffered a decline, and that has resulted in some degree of lapseness in our spirituality, the Guru Granth Sahib and the Gurdwara system, particularly the Golden Temple, has always held the Sikh society together. The fighting potential and marshal qualities of the Khalsa remain intact and these are then the foundation on which to rebuild the Sikh nation. I say to you that we do not need new traditions, new culture, new religion or new creed, or values but what we do need if for us to go back to our roots. To the noble ideas and teaching of the Sikh gurus. We need to rediscover ourselves and our greatness.

I conclude on this plea, 300 years ago our tenth master, Guru Gobind Singh Ji, created the holy order of the Khalsa and decreed that the Khalsa shall rule. To this end, we the Sikhs here, resolve that we shall restore to the Khalsa the glory that is its birthright. We shall keep faith in our tenth master and restore the Sikh nation the distinctiveness of its character. We shall preserve and promote the dignity and honor of the Sikhs. We shall preserve and promote the noble ideas of the Sikh gurus; we shall strive and struggle to uphold the sanctity and integrity of the Khalsa Panth and if we do that, I dare say the Khalsa will not only endure, it shall prevail.

Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa. Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh!