The American Sikh Council (ASC) is extremely perturbed and concerned about the illegal detention of innocent Sikh youth across the state of Punjab in the past two weeks.

ASC – 15 July 2020. Since late June 2020, over dozen Sikhs have been randomly and illegally arrested around Punjab including Lovepreet Singh of village Kaithal and Iqbalpreet Singh of Fatehgarh Sahib who are from poor working-class families who are not only trying to live honestly but volunteering for the welfare of others.

They have been arrested on trumped up charges under the UAPA law and have little chance of ever getting out of jail, while trying to prove their innocence of a crime they do not even understand.

What chance do minorities have in an inherently racist system which enjoys trampling on the defenseless simply to appease the emasculated majority by using the anti-national/terrorist label repeatedly.

The Sikhs of Punjab have protested for their inalienable rights as citizens of India innumerable times.

Sikhs have complained starting right after 1947 for the right to their natural resources (water), complete autonomy to control their agriculture, freedom to operate any kind of business without restrictive central control, freedom from the restrictive land ceiling act, freedom to control their own religious institutions, freedom to maximize the usage of their language (Punjabi), the right to be constitutionally accepted as a independent and distinct world religion, etc.

These peaceful protests were conducted by hundreds of thousands from 1947 to 1984.

Except for getting a piece of trifurcated Punjab, with no state capital, the Indian state through its long-term stratagem made sure that the landlocked agrarian state is abused to the hilt, till one day it turns into a waterless desert and all the farmers who happen to be Sikhs either end up penniless or move away to other countries, making way for Hindu-Bihari labor to become the majority in the near future, permanently sealing the fate of the Sikhs in Punjab.

Starting in early 1980s till 1998 over one million innocent Sikhs were murdered by the Indian regime, all under the pretext of curbing terrorism.

The largest pogrom committed in South Asia in recent memory by a so-called democratic country right under the noses of the modern world, yet mostly everyone turned a blind eye to the “Third Sikh Genocide, 1984-1998” [www.thirdsikhgenocide.org] because Hindu-India did such a fantastic job of making sure that the brute repression with the help of the constitution and the judiciary made everything disappear, while the liberty loving voices of those Sikhs were snuffed out!

Today the powerbrokers and the puppeteers who run India want to make sure that either everyone toes the line of Hindutva or else they will be subjugated as second-class citizens or better still as anti-nationals, otherized and ostracized by the multiheaded governmental machinery.

Dissention of any sort is not tolerated by Hindu-India because the masters behind the curtain are the Brahmin-Bania caste-capitalist coterie which wants to corner the private economy but keep the lowered oppressed (non)Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Tribals, Dalits, Sikhs and many other marginalized, powerless, so that they cannot envision true freedom and liberty of a real democracy.

The Sikhs have always been the canary in the coal mine and have had to bear the brunt of the Brahminical ire for the last 73 years of modern India, but there are many others also, such as, Mizo, Naga, Manipuri, Assamese, Kashmiri, Bodo, etc., struggling to get out of the shackles of Hindu-India.

A true democratic structure can only work when the system is based on the full consent of and by the people it represents.

In a country which is probably the most diverse on Earth, the only way it can function is to have federally independent states with each having a large degree of autonomy while joined together as whole but with the full consent of the states, like the United States of America.

Using age old Hindu statecraft of ‘Chankyaniti’ the right-wing Hindu majority is enacting archaic (illegal) laws all under the guise of stopping terrorism or any kind of anti-national activity to intimidate all minorities (religious and non-religious) so that they never ask for their legitimate rights.

In the last twelve months, first the brute Hindu majority enacted the Article 370, overnight to first split the state of Kashmir in two, second clamping down and shutting down the entire (new mini-Kashmir) state, including all communication internally and to the outside world since August of 2019.

In December 2019 new CAA, NPR, NRC laws were enacted again overnight to target 200 million Muslims who are citizens of India.

These arcane and obtuse laws put the onus of responsibility on the common citizen to prove whether or not they are legitimate citizens of the country, where many of the rural poor did not register births till the late 70s and early 80s.

Moving forward, today the ‘Unlawful Activities Prevention Act 1967’ (UAPA) law which is an undemocratic and an extremely dangerous law to begin with, is being used to terrorize and demonize common Sikhs across Punjab.

Why now? The Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) enacted and enforced on May 23, 1985 particularly for the Sikh uprising in Punjab, and later the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), 2002 all meant to arrest, detain, torture Sikhs with impunity under the pretext of suppressing terrorism.

There are approximately 2.5 million Sikhs in the diaspora who are living mostly in countries with sound democratic institutions and understand the farce and façade of the much-touted Indian democracy.

A small group of educated freedom loving Sikhs have had the guts to stand up, pick up the cudgel using all legitimate means to peacefully try and implement a referendum in Punjab.

Since the Indian regime is constantly afraid of its own shadow, the Brahminical power brokers lash out at anyone who threatens their illegal hegemonic control.