New Delhi—For the grey-bearded Sikh sitting in a cosy academic study India’s Punjab crisis is no longer a series of grim newspaper headlines. 

Last week he had to abandon plans to drive through his home state because he feared attacks by angry crowds of Hindu militants roaming the highways. 

As communal violence continues in Punjab state. Mr Khushwant Singh and many other Indians are asking why Sikhs and India’s majority Hindus have turned on one another.  

At least 80 people have died and about 400 been injured in clashes between the communities in the past month. 

Mr Singh (68), a former newspaper editor, politician, and author of a definitive history of the Sikhs, is bewildered by the bitter feud between two religious groups that lived peacefully together for centuries in the prosperous farming region. 

The trouble in Punjab, home for most of India’s 12 million Sikhs, brought him anguish and a sense of impending catastrophe as he struggles to analyse it. 

Mr Singh, whose writings include a contribution on Sikhs in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and publications by Oxford University Press and Princeton University Press, describes the Sikh religion as a reformist movement. 

It was founded, ironically in the present troubles, by a Hindu called Nanak Chand around 1500 AD. Nanak sought to remove Hinduism’s caste distinctions, fought idol worship and wanted to do away with Hinduism’s many gods. 

Guru (teacher) Nanak, as he was known, distilled Hindu and Muslim beliefs drawing converts from both religions. 

Arjun, the fifth guru, compiled the Adi Granth, the Sikhs’ holy book with more than 6,000 verses written in simple language understood by every Punjabi, whether Hindu or Sikh. 

“The Granth Sahib, as it is also known, contains the teachings of every major Hindu and Muslim saint in India,” Mr Singh said. 

His execution by Mogul Emperor Jehangir in 1606 produced the first stirrings of Sikh militancy. But it was Gobind Singh, last in the line of Sikh gurus, who gave the Sikhs a martial tradition and the characteristics of unshorn hair and turbans. 

Stung by Mogul persecution, Gobind Singh forged the Sikhs in 1699 into a fighting fraternity called the “Khalsa”, a Persian word meaning “pure.” 

Mr Singh says Hindu-Sikh links have remained strong. Until Punjab was partitioned in 1947 when India and Pakistan won independence, each Hindu family in west Punjab (now in Pakistan) raised its eldest son as a Sikh and Hindus even now worship in Sikh shrines.

The only previous violent rift between Sikhs and Hindus came in the 1920s when the forerunner of today’s main Sikh political party, the Akali Dal, launched a movement to dislodge Hindus who had traditionally administered Sikh shrines. 

At least 400 Sikhs were killed and more than 30,000 went to prison before the then British rulers gave control of the shrines to a Sikh temple management committee. 

“History is repeating itself today,” said Mr Singh. High up in the Akali Dal’s current religious demands is the transfer of about 30 Government-administered Sikh shrines outside Punjab to the committee’s control.

“The Sikhs’ anti-Hindu paranoia stems from a feeling of suffocation,” said Mr Singh. “They lost a large chunk of territory to Pakistan during partition. Then the Indian Government carved the states of Haryana and Himachal Pradesh out of the remainder.” 

Mr Singh warned that if Hindu-Sikh tension grew, more and more Sikhs settled in other parts of India would migrate into Punjab, dislodging Hindus there. 

“Sikhs constitute only 52 per cent of Punjab’s population, which is not enough to win total political control of the territory,” he said. 

“But if their numbers are swelled by panic-stricken migration, the extremists will finally be able to accomplish their objective—a Sikh-majority province that will only be a hair’s breadth away from a demand for secession. 

-Reuter