Madam
Chairperson, I will start by saying that the biggest sufferers of
partition were the people from Punjab, especially the Sikhs and other
minorities. During partition time, lakhs of our brothers and sisters
were forced to flee Pakistan, and they had to come to India. Even if they had
land, other properties or any business there, everything was taken over. They
were left with nothing, and they came to India. You might have heard, seen and
read the news reports. Trains full of bodies were sent to India. During
partition, a few members of the minority communities still stayed back in
Pakistan. If you look at the figures that I have got from the data during
partition in 1947, you will see that 75 per cent of the people of Pakistan
belonged to the majority community, and 25 per140
cent of them belonged to all other minorities. Today, after 72 years, less than
5 per cent belong to minority160
communities in Pakistan. So, where has the large number of people gone?
Majority of them were forced to convert into the majority religion because that
was the only way left for them to live there. I can give you thousands
and thousands of such examples where a person living in Punjab, India is a
Sikh, and his cousin or his brother living in Pakistan is a Muslim. One of our
MLAs is a Sikh but his uncle in Pakistan is a Muslim. So, they were all forced
to convert. However, a few people still maintained the identity but they had to
face a lot of hardships. A lot of members of the Sikh Community keep on
visiting us during their280
visits to Golden Temple, and we have the opportunity to talk to them. A
lot of our Jathas go to Pakistan to visit our religious places. They have the
opportunity to talk to our brothers and sisters there. There is320 a sense of suffocation there. I can give
you numerous examples. Thousands of cases come up in newspapers about Sikh
girls being forcefully converted to Islam.
The
situation in Afghanistan is not very different. There were more than 3,00,000
Sikhs and other communities living happily in Afghanistan. They were
controlling the business there, they were very well-off and when Taliban came,
they started persecuting these communities. They were kidnapped, killed or forced
to flee. During the last 25 to 30 years, at least 75,000 of them have come to
India. They have been living here, but without any citizenship. 420 A lot of them have met us because
Shiromani Akali Dal represents the Punjabi community and they came to us. Since
the last three decades, we have been regularly approaching the Home Ministry
and representing that these poor people have left Afghanistan and Pakistan.
They cannot live here because they do not have any papers with them. They have
no480 rights and police and
other officials harass them day after day and they are living here without
citizenship. Their children born here cannot live here. They gave examples that
their Sikh brothers from Afghanistan, who have gone to America or England or
any other European country, have got citizenship within two months. But in
our country, we were not given citizenship. Shiromani Akali Dal has
been regularly pursuing their case and we are happy that finally those people
who spent560 30 years of their
life here can see the light at the end of the tunnel. They can feel that they
are citizens of India. But at the same time, I would like to mention one
thing. We must not forget that India is a secular country. Our nation is one
where every religion in the world is here. India has been a land of saints and
gurus and Sikhism preaches secularism. Our ninth Guru, Shri Teg Bahadur
sacrificed his640 life for
saving Hindu religion because Hindus were being converted. I will give you
another example. When our fifth Guru, Shri Arjun Dev started the construction
of the Golden Temple, he made a Muslim lay the foundation stone.
Madam,
my father has served as the Chief Minister five times. Our Party has always
believed that every community, especially minorities, need700 to be protected. My father, when he was
the Chief Minister, used to go and attend every religious function of every
community. I will give an example. You might have heard of riots in other parts
of the country in other States. But you will never hear of a communal riot in
Punjab. Even during the worst phases of Punjab when the terrorism was at its
peak, everyone in Punjab lived in peace and harmony. So, we have to preserve
our secular status. I know this Bill affects minority community. It does not
have that much effect on the majority800
community. We are talking about Pakistan. I do not want to take names of
religions here. I just want to request. Why do we not add the name of Muslims?
I give you an example of Ahmadiyya community in Punjab840 where Qadian is the headquarters of
Ahmadiyya community of the whole of the world. They are the minority Muslims in
Pakistan. That means, they cannot perform namaz there. Their hands are cut.
They are treated like second-class citizens in Pakistan. Just as we go to Nankana
Sahib, people from Ahmadiyya community come from Pakistan to Qadian on a
regular basis. Anyway, this Bill is based on religious persecution. You are
having a Committee which is going to examine each and every case individually. If
you are examining each and every case individually, you will not get any case
from this community in Punjab. At the same time, we will be able to shut them
up, but they are putting960 up
false propaganda around the country that NDA is communal, NDA is this and that.
For them, they are just980
looking at one word and are trying to fight it. If we abjure that word, I
think, it will send a good message among everyone. At the same time, it will
hold the secular credential.
Hon.
Chairperson, this Bill is not just an affront to the basic tenets of equality
and religious non-discrimination that have been enshrined in our Constitution
but also an all-out assault on the very idea of India that our forefathers gave
their lives for during the freedom struggle. Our freedom movement was split on
the issue of whether religion should be the determinant of nationhood. Those
who believed in that were those who advocated the idea of Pakistan. Mahatma
Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Maulana Azad and many other leaders believed in the
opposite that religion has nothing to do with our nationhood and they created a
free (1120) country for people of all religions, regions, castes and languages. The
Indian Constitution rejected the notion of the two-nation theory. If this Bill
passes, it will mark the victory of Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s thinking over that of
Mahatma Gandhi. You cannot say that you reject Pakistan while advocating the
same logic as Pakistan. Ironically, it goes against the historic legacy of
Hindus in this country. Swami Vivekananda has already been quoted. He said how
proud he was to speak of a nation that has long given refuge to the persecuted people
of all nations and all faiths. We lived up to Swami Vivekananda by giving
refuge to Tibetan refugees, to the Bahai Community, to Sri Lankan Tamils and also
to ten million Bangladeshis, the largest refugee extradition in human history
without once asking them what their religion was. Today, you (1260) are violating
Article 14 of the Constitution by singling out one community and refusing to
grant them asylum from oppression. (1280) We already have had a partition of the
Indian soil. This Bill is marking a partition of the Indian soul and I beg this
Government not to proceed with this. I worked for United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees for 11 years and I can tell you, how sad it is that
India is one of the few democracies in the world not to have ratified either
the refugee convention or protocol and India is one of the few democracies not
to have a refugee law.
I
am saying that we have a wonderful record of refugees. I mentioned about the
largest refugee extradition in the history but we have not created any legal
instruments. I went to the former (1400) Home Minister and put my Private Member’s
Bill, requesting a national asylum and a refugee policy. I have met the Minister
of State and the Home Secretary too. The Government has not been interested in
pursuing this. The point is (1440) that unfortunately the Government is not taking
any basic step which is required under international law to improve the determination
of refugee status, to go ahead with ensuring treatment of refugees. There are
people who are fearing persecution on the grounds of ethnicity, gender,
political opinion and sexual orientation. All these people are excluded from
this Bill. It seems to me that differentiating on the basis of religion, you
have omitted Muslim minorities like Ahmadis in Pakistan, Persian and Hazaras in
Afghanistan, and Rohingyas in Bangladesh. In fact, you have left out Myanmar
altogether even though we have a border with it. (1542)
