Sikh All-Parties Committee

The Sikh All-Parties Committee was the joint Sikh body that answered the Cripps proposals of March 1942. Its president was Baldev Singh. Sandhu and Mahmood describe a meeting of the Working Committee of what they call the Sikh All Parties Conference on 16 March 1942, at which Baldev Singh, Master Tara Singh, Giani Kartar Singh and others welcomed Sir Stafford Cripps and appointed a sub-committee to draft the Sikh demands. The sources found do not say when the Committee was formed; its record is its memorandum.

The interview of 27 March 1942: Cripps's own note lists Baldev Singh, Ujjal Singh, Master Tara Singh and Sir Jogendra Singh at his interview with the Sikhs. They asked for protection for the Sikh minority and for a province in which the Sikhs would have the decisive voice between Hindu and Muslim. Cripps set out the stages at which they could press their case: the constituent assembly, the treaty, the plebiscite in Punjab and a second constituent body.

The memorandum of 31 March 1942

• Baldev Singh signed as president, with Tara Singh, Jogendra Singh, Ujjal Singh and Mohan Singh. The Committee wrote to Cripps that it found the proposals unacceptable, because they made provision for the separation of provinces and a Pakistan and because the cause of the Sikh community had been "lamentably betrayed".
• Its grounds: a province with a statutory majority community that failed to win a three-fifths majority could still hold a plebiscite on a bare majority; the Sikh position in the Punjab had been liquidated; and Punjab proper ran only to the Jhelum. It said the Sikhs stood for the integrity of India, and that the right to stand out should need at least 65 per cent of the members present.
• Its facts: Sikhs were 13.5 per cent of the population of British Punjab and paid 25 per cent of the land revenue, 40 per cent with water rates. Their share of the Punjab cabinet had fallen from 33 per cent in 1921 to 25 in 1926 and 16 in 1937. The Allahabad Unity Conference of 1932 had agreed 14 of 300 central seats for Sikhs.
• Its demand: a new province of the Ambala and Jullundur divisions with the districts of Amritsar, Gurdaspur and Lahore, about 12 million people, 63 per cent non-Muslim by the 1931 census. It listed eleven safeguards, among them coalition cabinets, 5 per cent representation in the central legislature, a Sikh in the central cabinet and on a Defence Advisory Committee, a share in the services, Sikh religious laws to be amended only by Sikh legislators, and Punjabi in Gurmukhi taught where enough pupils came forward.

What followed: Sandhu and Mahmood write that the failure of the mission paved the way for the Sikandar-Baldev Singh Pact with the Unionist Party. They attribute the memorandum of 31 March to the SGPC; the document as Gurmit Singh prints it is headed from the Sikh All-Parties Committee and signed by Baldev Singh as its president.