Giorgio Shani

Beyond Khalistan? Sikh diasporic identity and critical international theory1

This article examines the possibilities opened up by critical international theory for the articulation of a post-nationalist diasporic Sikh identity which seeks to go beyond Khalistan. Critical theories of international relations contest the hegemony of realism within international relations (IR) by examining the origins, development and potential transformation of the bounded territorial state and the Westphalian order of territorialized nation-states. It is argued that realism, based on a positivist methodology, ‘naturalizes’ the Westphalian order by recognizing the nation-state as the only significant actor in IR. This, consequently, serves to ‘territorialize’ Sikh identity and stimulates the demand for an independent Sikh homeland, Khalistan. However, the twin processes of globalization and fragmentation have made the notion of a bordered, self-contained community that is at the heart of international political theory difficult to sustain in the post-Cold War world. This has created space for the articulation of a deterritorialized Sikh identity which challenges the Westphalian order in its rejection of sovereign statehood and its assertion of the sovereignty of the Khalsa Panth.

The Construction of a Sikh National Identity

The Sikh Nation: ’Real’, ’Invented’ or ’Imagined’? The 300th anniversary of the founding of the khalsa or ’community of the pure’, on 13 April 1999 has renewed interest in both Sikhism and the Sikhs. Whilst Sikhs throughout the world congregated on the holy city of Amritsar to take part in Vaisakhi celebrations sponsored by the Punjab state government, recent research within India and elsewhere continues to cast doubt on the existence of a single, homogeneous Sikh identity. For many worshippers at gurdwaras throughout India and the diaspora, Sikh identity may appear ’real’ enough: Sikhs possess their own separate religion, history, institutions, territory and martial traditions. Indeed, after a decade-and-a-half of political unrest in the Indian state of Punjab following the Indian government’s decision to storm the Golden Temple complex, the holiest site in the Sikh religion, most Sikhs would regard themselves as constituting a separate nation, distinct from other ethnic groups in northern India. As early as 1974, Paul Brass wrote that ’of all the ethnic groups and peoples of the north, the Sikhs come closest to satisfying the definition of nationality or nation’. For Brass, ’the Punjabi-speaking Sikhs are a people objectively distinct in religion, though not in language, from other ethnic groups in the north; who have succeeded in acquiring a high degree of internal social and political cohesion and subjective selfawareness.’ I This article will discuss the ways in which the Sikh people were able to acquire this internal and political cohesion and subjective self-awareness. We can identify three distinct approaches to the development of a Sikh national identity. One approach, favoured by hegemonic Sikh elites, holds the Sikh nation to be built on the edifice of a homogeneous religious and cultural identity imbued with a strong, historical personality. For the Council of Sikh Affairs, ’the Sikh thesis, as laid down by the Gurus, is that they have a separate religion and culture and that in order to safeguard it they must maintain their distinct, socio-political entity’.2 The Sikh political party, the Shiromani Akali Dal, has been charged with the responsibility of maintaining the Sikhs’ distinct; socio-political entity within independent, multinational India. The Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) affords the Sikhs a forum to legislate on all issues concerning the community; and its headquarters in the Akal Takht, situated within the Golden

THE MEMORIALIZATION OF GHALLUGHARA: TRAUMA, NATION AND DIASPORA

The storming of the Golden Temple complex in 1984 is central to the imagination of both a Sikh ‘nation’ and a specifically Sikh ‘diaspora’. Both ‘derivative discourses’ construct Sikhs as ‘victims’ of a ghallughara which forced them into a physical or emotional exile from India. Translated as ‘genocide’, the term ghallughara resonates deeply with earlier pogroms in Sikh history, and is memorialized through the image of the desecrated Akal Takht. Mediated through Information and Communications Technologies, this on-line lieux de mémoire provides testimony to the attempt by the ‘secular’ Indian state to violently wrench the temporal from the spiritual dimensions of Sikh sovereignty as embodied in the Khalsa, thus leaving Sikhs ‘mute and absolutely alone’ in a world of nation-states. In contrast to the nationalist imaginary, it is suggested that Sikh claims to sovereignty should be grounded not in territorial claims to an imagined homeland of Khalistan, but in a reconceptualization of the Khalsa as a distinct de-territorialized religio-political community, one better able to articulate the universal values of the Gurus in an increasingly ‘post-western’ world.

‘Provincializing’ critical theory: Islam, Sikhism and international relations theory

This article will attempt to ‘provincialize’ or ‘decentre’ critical theory by looking at the development of critical discourses from within the Islamic and Sikh religious traditions. Although important theological, philosophical and historical differences exist between the two communities, Islamic and Sikh narratives share a rejection of the subordination of the religious to the political and thus potentially challenge the Westphalian order. However, in the case of the Sikh Qaum, no clear distinction between ‘nation’ and ‘religion’ is possible given the strong attachment to a territorially defined ancestral homeland. This article suggests that both critical Islamic and Sikh discourses, particularly those emanating from the diaspora, are potentially compatible with the ‘discourse ethics’ of critical theory. This is, however, conditional on the recognition of the universality of their beliefs, a position incompatible with the ‘thin’ cosmopolitanism of critical theory.

Introduction: Protecting Human Security in a Post 9/11 World

The limitations of the national security paradigm which has dominated both the theory and practice of international relations for most of the twentieth century have become glaringly obvious in the five years since the events of September 11, 2001 (hereafter 9/11). The response of the US-led coalition to the 9/11 attacks has been to attempt to physically eliminate the terrorist threat in both Afghanistan and, most recently, Iraq, by removing those regimes which allegedly provide them with sanctuary while increasing state powers of surveillance and detention of groups and individuals suspected of terrorist activity within their own state borders. This may be seen as consistent with conventional approaches to security studies, founded upon realist assumptions, which privilege the state as the most significant actor in international relations.

Rethinking Sikh Nationalism in the Twenty-First Century

This article seeks to draw attention to some of the core issues which beset the study of Sikh nationalism as a coherent phenomenon in an increasingly globalized and socially fragmented world. First, it highlights the importance of revisiting the debate about the communitys religious boundaries, arguing that in contrast to the new conventional wisdom informed by poststructuralism, Sikh identity has exhibited a remarkable degree of continuity from the establishment of the Khalsa in comparison with other South Asian religio-political communities. The second key issue highlighted is the role of the Sikh diaspora in the development of Sikh nationalism and statehood. It critically examines the extent to which diaspora may be regarded as an instrument of ‘long-distance’ nationalism. Third, it argues that the existing literature on Sikh nationalism is remarkably community-centric and needs to engage with theories of nationalism. Finally, while acknowledging the cleavages which fragment the Sikh nation, it concludes that Sikh nationalism has been remarkably cohesive.

Globalization, the ‘War on Terror’ and Human In/Security in South Asia

This chapter will seek to examine the effects of neo-liberal globalization and the war on terror upon human security in South Asia. In the first section, it will be argued that economic liberalization in South Asia in general and its most populous country, India, in particular has resulted in unbalanced growth which has disproportionately benefited, and politically empowered, members of the dominant classes, religious communities and castes at the expense of the rural and urban poor. As we shall see in the second section, this has had profound consequences for members of South Asia’s religious minorities and subaltern castes and classes who find themselves increasingly marginalized by national discourses derived from the majority religious tradition. These trends have been reinforced by the post 9/11 political climate and the introduction of anti-terrorism legislation which has contributed to a greater securitization of society in general and the targeting of ethno-religious minorities.

Human Security as ontological security: a post-colonial approach

ABSTRACT This article will critically interrogate the relationship between Human Security and Ontological Security from a broadly postcolonial perspective. The dislocation engendered by successive waves of neo-liberal globalisation has resulted in the deracination of many of the worlds inhabitants, resulting in a state of collective ‘existential anxiety’ [Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991]. Under such conditions, the search for ontological security becomes paramount. However, conventional understandings of Human Security as ‘freedom from fear and want’ are unable – from a post-colonial perspective – to provide ontological security since they operate within a culturally specific, Eurocentric understanding of the ‘human’ as ‘bare life’ [Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Daniel Heller-Roazen (trans), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998]. It will then be argued that post-secular conceptions of Human Security [Giorgio Shani, Religion, Identity and Human Security, London and New York: Routledge, 2014] by acknowledging the role which culture and religion can play in providing answers to existential questions concerning the ‘basic parameters of human life’ are better able to ‘protect’ ontological security in times of rapid global transformation given the centrality of religion to post-colonial subjectivity. This will be illustrated by the case of the global Sikh community. It will be argued that ontological, and therefore, Human Security rests on reintegrating the ‘secular’ and ‘temporal’ dimensions of Sikhi, which had been severed as a result of the colonial encounter.

Religion as security: an introduction

In recent years, the discipline of international relations (IR) has undergone a religious renaissance. The previously stable distinctions between the religious and the secular, sacred and profane and ontology and theology have been decentred by a resurgence of interest in religion, culture and identity. This is reflected not only in the proliferation of studies focusing on the rise of religious violence in various parts of the world (and its capacity for peacebuilding) but also in efforts more generally to locate religion in IR itself as one of the constitutive elements of the discipline. Religion, broadly defined, may be seen to have been present in the foundations of the contemporary (European-based) international order at the Peace of Westphalia and greatly influenced the ‘expansion of international society’ through the ‘civilizing mission’ of modern colonialism. It was also, as Weber reminded us over a century ago, present in the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production in the West. Consequently, the globalization of capitalism and the Westphalian states system or international community of territorialized nationstates has posed profound existential challenges for societies with very different faith traditions and cosmologies. The ‘religious resurgence’ in IR can be traced back not only to 9/11 and the ensuing ‘War on Terror’ but to the globalization of transnational religious identities. Much of the literature on religion and IR has narrowly focused on ‘Islamic exceptionalism’ and, specifically, the security threats posed by ‘Islamic’ terrorism. For explanatory IR theories, the pathologies of religion in general and Islam in particular constitute a problem to be contained by the ‘international community’ through the establishment of secular security architectures which stress the importance of state-building, liberal peacebuilding and human rights. Realists favour the establishment of strong secular states capable of ‘securitizing’ the threats posed by transnational religious movements from within their borders with the help of the ‘international community’. Liberals believe that these secular state structures need to be legitimized through periodic elections, the establishment of human rights mechanisms and the rule of law, the so-called ‘Liberal Peace’ (Doyle 2005). States are furthermore reminded of their ‘responsibility to protect’ their citizens from religious-inspired extremist violence. Failure to do so opens up the possibility of intervention by ‘the international community’ in the form of periodic air-strikes. Critical accounts, most particularly those influenced by postcolonial framings, problematize the representation of Islamic societies in mainstream IR discourse as ‘orientalist’ (Said 1978). However, efforts to ‘provincialize’ (Chakrabarty 2000) IR by bringing in voices from ‘outside’ the West have hitherto privileged the secular. This is noticeably the case with Marxist-inspired Critical Theory and its application to security studies and