Home Ministry note on Khalistan, April 1981

Who: The writers of a note "prepared by the Secretariat on the Sikh's demand for 'Khalistan'", which Gurmit Singh prints in the first volume of his History of Sikh Struggles under the heading "Home Ministry's Note on Khalistan"; and the people and bodies it names: Ganga Singh Dhillon, the Dal Khalsa, Dr Jagjit Singh, the SGPC, the Akali Dal and its factions, the Chief Khalsa Diwan, Khushwant Singh and Lala Jagat Narain's Jullundur newspapers. This is the state's own file: what follows is what the note says, not a finding.

What: The note was written after the Educational Conference of March, the SGPC resolution of 29 March and the Anandpur Sahib convention of 13 April 1981, all of which it describes. It is numbered Annexure XVIII and has 24 paragraphs.

• Paragraphs 1 to 11 set out events. It says Ganga Singh Dhillon, "a U.S. based travel agent", came to India in about mid-March 1981 with Khalistan passports, seals, letterheads, maps and stamps and gave them to the Dal Khalsa, which it calls an extremist group of "militant Sikh youths". It says Dr Jagjit Singh, a former Akali minister based abroad, announced a provisional government of Khalistan in Canada, and it lists the National Security Board of 14 April and Longowal's German analogy. Paragraph 4 gives Khushwant Singh's warning of 3 April against a two-nation theory.
• Paragraphs 13 to 18 and 21 gather grievances and press and party opinion: Lala Jagat Narain's papers saying it would be "Akali Raj"; the magazine Sunday's four positions on Khalistan, from the radical slogan to Badal's line that the demand was for more powers, not a separate state; and a Spokesman list of demands on Chandigarh, river waters and boundaries.
• Paragraph 12, a "brief historical background", says the SGPC passed a resolution for a Sikh state in 1946, that the British had proposed an Azad Punjab, and that Master Tara Singh had originally coined the Khalistan slogan when he began to lose his base to Pratap Singh Kairon. It gives no source.

Its own conclusions, in paragraphs 19 and 22 to 24 (paragraph 20 gives a commentator's advice, which the note calls right), say the demand "is not likely to gather much support", that the danger lies in the demand to amend the Constitution and for associate status at the United Nations, and that the "Pakistani and American connections" with Dhillon and Jagjit Singh are "well known". It advises patient explanatory work, promotion of a "Punjabi nationality" of which Hindus and Sikhs are "two hands", and the removal of genuine Sikh grievances, including more powers for the State and the transfer of Punjabi-speaking areas to Punjab. Paragraph 24 says "Sikh nation" had long been used for a religious community with its own practices.

Where: The note gives no place of writing. It concerns Punjab, Chandigarh and Anandpur Sahib, and Sikhs abroad, in the United States, Canada and Britain.

Why it mattered: It shows how the state read the nation resolutions of March and April 1981: as a Khalistan campaign with foreign links, to be met by explanation and the removal of grievances. The Akali Dal's lists of 45 and 15 demands followed in September and October 1981, and the Government's White Paper of July 1984 later said the Indian people constitute one nation.