Protest, Politics, and Panjab

A conversation between Navyug Gill and Rajbir Singh Judge

Hazuri Bagh, the seat of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s court, with the Badshahi Masjid in the background. Lahore, Pakistan. Photo credit: Navyug Gill

Over the last several months, hundreds of thousands of farmers, laborers, and their supporters have been protesting three controversial farm laws passed by the right-wing BJP government in India. The movement began over the 2020 summer in Panjab and has been largely led by Sikhs while drawing in Hindus, Muslims, and others from across the country. The laws will privatize agriculture by allowing corporations to control procurement and distribution networks while removing public supports and safeguards. The protest has garnered international attention, with massive rallies in dozens of world cities, along with support from Western politicians, civil society organizations, and celebrities.

In this conversation, Navyug Gill and Rajbir Singh Judge explore the multiple and contradictory histories, logics, and potentials that inform the protest, and what they might mean for democratic culture and popular politics under global capital. Their exchange was conducted over phone calls, emails, and text messages from November 2020 to January 2021.

Rajbir Singh Judge: This is an incredibly tense yet generative time for anyone invested in questions of Panjab, South Asia, and indeed the globe. I would like to begin by rethinking beginnings. Though we like to find a singular originary moment for the birth of revolution and protest, this is rarely the case. Can you speak more to the historical dimensions of the protest, keeping in mind the relationship in Panjab between ruler and ruled, which is also a question of center and periphery?

Navyug Gill: Out of necessity I am more interested in pursuing multiple strands of emergence rather than a singular origin. Part of the burden of thinking through extraordinary moments such as the one we are witnessing in Panjab is to hold together the specificity of the struggle along with the elisions, tensions, and contradictions it inevitably entails. It might even begin with the name we ascribe to it: protest, or upsurge, or movement? Or, andolan, or morcha, leher, sangharsh, jang, or indeed inquilab? When all of those terms (and the possibilities they imply) are present, it no longer remains a question of semantics. And it is not quite the same as the debate over naming the 1857 revolt because we are living through a struggle rather than analyzing it afterward.  

To your prompt, the very binaries of ruler/ruled and center-periphery imply antagonism. This is something we need not conceal, or generalize away. But then, what does it mean to actually acknowledge it? The language of diversity rolls off of every tongue right now, though rarely are its implications given serious consideration.  

At the level of historical analysis, there is a long history of conflict between each of the terms in those two pairings. For “ruler” and “ruled” within Panjab, much of the literature, poetry, and aphorisms point to widespread irreverence and even contempt of common people toward authority. This resonates through Sikhi and its philosophy of empowering the most exploited and excluded to confront their oppressors. Even at a broader level, it is not merely a colonialist fantasy to acknowledge that the legitimacy of rulers in Panjab and its environs was quite precarious. (James Scott might argue that this has been the case almost everywhere for most of human history.) Indeed, we may have taken for granted the very authority of authority, which is exactly part of its logic. In other words, what we are witnessing on the streets of Delhi could be seen as a sign that the question of legitimacy was not settled in 1947.  

Another way to approach the problem of authority is by thinking with Ranajit Guha’s poignant phrase, “dominance without hegemony.” What began as a way to explicate the unique and ever-present violence of colonialism in the face of those who would normalize British rule, can be extended to re-think the perpetually fraught interplay of consent and coercion at other times and places. The various uprisings throughout Panjabi history – using all sorts of weapons, and gleaned in all sorts of ways – affirm that the ruled never neatly submit to rulers. It is telling that statements of support from Western politicians revolve around affirming the right to peaceful protest, but do not specify the extent of acceptable tactics nor condemn the actual content of the laws. In that sense, events such as the Ferguson uprising of 2014, and the broader BLM rebellions in the summer of 2020 should, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor points out, make us question the weight of hegemony in the US too. This might be obvious, but sometimes its lessons need to be re-learned.   

To the second paring of center-periphery, again, it is clear that no region ever self-consciously imagines itself as a “periphery.” It is actually a figment in the arrogant imagination of the so-called “center.” We tend to forget that Panjab was an independent polity with its capital city of Lahore until the mid-nineteenth century. Mughal rule (as well as Afghan potentates) was fitfully eroded and finally extinguished during the eighteenth century, replaced by a confederation of Sikh misls united under Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1799. Delhi might have mattered as much as Kabul. After the British conquest in 1849, most of Panjab became an administrative province governed first from Calcutta and later Delhi. The rest was a collection of subservient princely states with only nominal autonomy. During the tumult of partition and independence in 1947, two-thirds of Panjab ended up in Pakistan and one-third in India. (The separation and relegation of the western portion is marked by an abiding aporia.) Almost immediately the Sikh-led Shiromani Akali Dal launched a struggle to make Panjabi the state language in the eastern portion. This was repeatedly thwarted by the Indian National Congress, while right-wing groups encouraged Hindus to falsely claim Hindi as their mother-tongue during the censuses of 1951 and 1961. Only in 1966, with the separation of what became Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, did the present-day Indian state of Panjab emerge.

Soon after, a struggle over center-state relations and greater autonomy spiraled into a complex, multi-faceted, and increasingly armed competition among different religious and Left groups, political factions, and state agencies. This culminated in the Indian government’s attack on the Darbar Sahib in Amritsar in June 1984, followed by a state-sponsored massacre of Sikhs in Delhi and north India after the killing of Indira Gandhi that November. At that point, Panjab became engulfed in an insurgency that witnessed the imposition of military rule accompanied by massacres, disappearances, and extensive human rights violations that lasted until the mid-1990s. It should be clear that even this sparse and partial itinerary leaves too much unsaid, and unexamined. Nevertheless, it helps illuminate why there is a powerful symbolic layering (perhaps collapsing) of time in the image of Delhi – as the seat of power for the Mughals, the British, and the Government of India – in perpetual confrontation with Panjab.   

Much of this can be detected at the popular level, if one pays attention. The very terms “Dilli Darbar” or “Dilliye” signal both menace and mockery. It is repeated in nearly all of the hundreds of new songs and poems that have emerged in the course of this struggle (see here, here, here, here, and here). What this suggests is a commonsense awareness that Delhi as a “center” has been and is a fount of oppression for Panjabis and especially Sikhs. Mention of figures such as Aurangzeb or Ahmed Shah Abdali points to a deeper subaltern memory of fighting against the powerful despite the odds. And its genealogy is not simply derivative of colonial divide-and-rule tactics, much less modern Hindutva propaganda. I do wonder if there are similarities in the way “Dilliye” is invoked in Tamil Nadu or Nagaland, or if there is a colloquial pronunciation of “Dhaka” in Chittagong or Sylhet? English as a static language does not allow variations in the words “London” or “Washington” in the same way.    

At the same time, I have been thinking about the ways these protests have invoked a range of sacred figures from Sikh history. Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh are prominent, as are Banda Singh Bahadur, Baba Deep Singh, and Sardar Baghel Singh. Some have said this is ahistorical, or simply the erroneous confusing of time and context by the uneducated. How do you make sense of the presence of these figures in such spaces at this moment?

RSJ: To reflect on a slightly inverted question: Why wouldn't one expect people to draw on their tradition, on their learning, to make sense of the world? Their experience evades us as we jump to new expectations, looking to jettison their learning for our teaching. Our expectations shed from experiences, a central tenet of modern time, adjudicate the 'correct' type of revolutionary fervor or national citizenship. Long ago, Subaltern Studies taught us about the futility of such searches. Religion, as Partha Chatterjee wrote early on, provides its ontology, epistemology, and political ethics--one that gives us a different relation to the past, one that is always convivial with the present to give it an Asadian framing.

We can pause here to consider, for example, the invocation of the “char sahibzade,” the four sons of the Guru Gobind Singh. All four were martyred while quite young fighting against the tyranny of Delhi, to invoke a subaltern memory that resonates amongst Sikhs. The youngest two, Baba Fateh Singh and Baba Zorawar Singh aged 7 and 9 years, were arrested by local Mughal authorities and placed in jail. Eventually, they were taken to Sirhind where Wazir Khan, the governor (faujdar) of the territory, ordered their execution by sealing them alive in a wall—an attempt that, it is said, failed and the execution had to proceed again the next day.

In the farmer's recounting, the Sahibzade are still present, not a past to be buried and considered from a distance. Instead, we are asked to contemplate their sacrifice in the present itself. This is not to say their memory is itself a monument, a substantial fullness that then sets the record straight. This memory is not a melancholic fixation—a fixation that would give in precisely to the logic of Wazir Khan and his violent attempt to entomb Sikhi. Instead, as Guru Gobind Singh Ji taught, their memory is imbued and embodied in the Khalsa itself, which escapes the bricks of memorials. Their remembering is tied to questions of justice and sacrifice rather than a context. What we see is that remembering is not so easily codified, which itself shuttles as peoples contest, situate, and make sense of the violent encroaches into their world. 

Of course, the historicist desire remains and History retains dominion--can we imagine, Gil Anidjar asks, anyone who would consciously oppose the claims of history? Sikhs have refused this demand to obey the dictates of History at much cost—labeled fundamentalists and unable to recognize their own historical placement. My own memory arises: I remember at a conference where a scholar showed artistic renditions of shaheeds depicted at Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib side by side with encyclopedia entries, mocking their false "representation." The painting was of Baghel Singh and the capture of Delhi and the Red Fort—a memory that arises again after the raising of nishan sahib on January 26th. And, I hear what representation means as scholars and journalists interpret the ‘picture’ for the worldly public.

In their attempt to adjudicate the past, to re-present the past, historians have become grave diggers, trying to match corpses to their depictions as if liberating from chimeras will undo the yoke of domination. (Is it a surprise they find do not find a whole, but only heterogeneity?) Yet good history, good grave digging, has little to do with good politics, a basic point made by many that still eludes us today. Hindsight itself brings no certitude as Saidiya Hartman puts it elsewhere.

Perhaps, it is those who call the farmers “ahistorical” who need to rethink their relation to the past. In this rethinking and reflection, it behooves to cultivate a different relation to the dead and the past, a different register for thinking and studying that is not simply tied to instilling the correct historical disposition. We might have much to learn from the farmers here. What if we turned to the farmers and refused our desire to codify tradition to provide it an essence and an attending accurate representation? As you rightly note, there is a collapsing of time, rather than its ordering.

This temporal muddle, this collapsing of time, is precisely what the Sikh tradition requires we inhabit. It would do us well to consider, more memories, that the Sikh tradition is not constituted through saviors providing accurate representation, tying together a transcendent image to an immanent earth moving in linear fashion toward redemption. These are, after all, Christian theological principles that we take as given. Instead, the Sikh tradition teaches us that we must struggle through the sangat, the community. It is this struggle through the sangat that we see today against the dictates of historicist representation that look to entomb into a national or even regional imaginary.

That leads to another question, however, a question about fractures in society. It would be remiss to speak in terms of totality since there are, like elsewhere, divisions-- class, caste, gender, religion, and even regional ones. I ask this question not to deny the current cohesion, but to ask about the changing parameters between social divisions in the current protests? How are they undone or re-inscribed? In what ways do you see points of convergence in the divergent claims?

Fields in preparation for the summer transplanting of paddy. Saffuwala, Moga district, India. Photo Credit: Navyug Gill

NG: The specter of division is an ever-present concern. We learned this most prominently from Frantz Fanon and the pitfalls of nationalism writ large. It might even be part of the reason a few otherwise progressive scholars have been hesitant to embrace this upsurge. There is no denying that Panjabi society is riven with tensions of caste, class, gender, religion, and sexuality, among others. This is true for every society, at all times and places. Invariably those divisions would also extend into the ambit of the protest itself, especially in terms of land ownership, patriarchal control, and caste conflict. Again, this would be true for every struggle that has achieved anything meaningful, past and present.

Does one have to emphasize yet again that the enemy of an enemy is not a friend? The shallow tenacity of such zombie clichés is appalling. Yet nor do we have to follow the trickery of elite anti-colonial nationalism, which insisted that so-called sectional interests – of women, religious minorities, Dalits, workers, and others – wait until after independence. Such a politics of deferral is why the situation for the marginalized (which, together, are actually majorities!) is abysmal in so many postcolonial countries.

In terms of division, there are at least two important lines of inquiry to pursue. On the one hand, we ought to recognize that meaningful solidarities have been forged by individuals and organizations on the ground. Several prominent Dalit organizations have spoken out in support of the protest, specifically identifying the BJP’s neoliberal Hindutva agenda as the greatest threat to their wellbeing, and stating that a victory for the protest will aid in their own struggles. One example of this is the Zameen Prapti Sangharsh Committee, a group active in the Malwa region fighting to help Dalits acquire their share of village common lands for collective cultivation. Others have noted the remarkable sense of comradery that has developed among various castes and classes in the course of this movement. For instance, Randeep Muddoke, a prominent photographer, filmmaker, and activist, strikingly described the atmosphere at the blockades as “a new Begampura,” invoking the radical affect and imaginary of Bhagat Ravidas. Fortunately, there is a growing body of reporting and analysis on these perspectives. Elsewhere I have tried to discuss the texture of these tensions. We can be aware of the deep fissures and ask critical questions in good faith while retaining hope for new possibilities.  

Women too have been active at every step of the struggle, from the initial mobilizations over the summer, to the public encampments and actions in Panjab in the fall, to the march on Delhi in November and its ongoing blockade. One report mentions that in early December there were approximately 25,000 women encamped at just one of the barricades. This too has been documented on social and independent media, as well as new writings, as perhaps the feminist issue of our time. Yet if there is a video clip of a woman cooking collective food, or singing a religiously-inflected song, or giving a rousing speech, some seem to prefer the last and are less enthused with the first, and do not quite know what to make of the second. But what if it is the same woman? How might we, following Saba Mahmood, self-critique our own secular assumptions and desires? It is an abiding political and theoretical challenge to recognize solidarities as neither resolution nor fiction.   

On the other hand, we ought to recall the unruly, exponential power of political struggle itself. There is a transgressive quality to transgression. The fact that many hundreds of thousands of people have been mobilized to challenge a right-wing majoritarian party that has previously crushed all dissent across the country creates possibilities for many other challenges. Even if the current objectives of the protest focus squarely on revoking the farm laws, those that have experienced pushing aside barriers and braving water cannons and tear gas to shut down the main arteries to Delhi will not simply go back to their lives exactly as before. The poor, Dalits, and especially women will potentially be emboldened to resist a re-imposition of the status quo. Learning with Silvia Federici, this might be why patriarchy is so paranoid – it is a never-ending obsession to contain the boundaries of inquiry and assertion for fear of where they might lead.   

We are witnessing, therefore, a cultural transformation before our very eyes, and yet some demure! Perhaps it is because this sort of mainstream challenge is exceedingly rare in North America: to not only watch but be part of fighting back against the overwhelming forces of the state. There is, in other words, an incalculable, even infectious potency to disobeying and defeating authority. This protest both inhabits (yet struggles with) the tensions within Panjabi society, as well as creates the new potential to transgress them in unexpected ways. It is not mere optimism, much less romanticism, to appreciate this relationship.  

Back to the protest itself, there is a noticeable difference in the horizon of struggle among the various groups. The main collective body of unions has foregrounded repealing the farm laws, while others' voices have called for extending the MSP and mandi system to other states, or even self-determination and re-thinking the federal structure of India. What might be at stake in this apparent separation of economic and political demands?

RSJ: This is a difficult question about the reach of transformation as you said. To add to your answer, we have to keep in mind that there is no horizon to adjudicate, but that the horizon itself is a utopian line that keeps disappearing or, perhaps, a democracy yet to come while remaining cautious of Messianic promises in a time of political action. I love how you put it: we often forget that there is a “transgressive quality to transgression” as we magically contextualize the actual protest away.

It is precisely the continual disappearance of this context in the transgression that makes these protests robust. Though there are demands within the frame of state politics--the question of MSP--and there are strategic alliances between unexpected partners, demands also exceed that very frame and organization. One could easily ask: How? What are these transgressions? This is precisely the incalculable nature of action.

We would then be remiss to consider protests are simply functioning through an inclusion model in that they want recognition from the central authority.

There is, to follow your lead, something else here, an opening to rethink the relationships that bind. To take one example, there is a question of blameworthiness. If the liberal subject is one who is responsible and disciplined, and, therefore, blameworthy, what does it mean to refuse individual responsibility as farmers are doing? They are refusing to take the onus of responsibility onto themselves, refusing market rationality, but also refusing the allocation of responsibility by Delhi as well as the media. Farming, in this sense, is not merely an occupation tied to notions of improvement and productivity and the attendant responsibility that comes with them, but life itself. To summarize, I think there is a tendency to think of the outcomes as responsibilities of the farmers—MSP or not—when there is no choice there and the farmers recognize this point.

It is this refusal to take on this burden that makes the protest remarkable. Early on in the protest and even to today, whereas the center has continually asked the farmers to move the protest site to an acceptable one—once again looking to discipline and regulate the movement of the farmers—the farmers have simply responded with a refusal to move while refusing blame that the state seeks to allot to them as anti-nationals, for example. And, on January 26th, we saw once again that protesters could not be confined to what are acceptable spatial coordinates, redressing the Red Fort. To appropriate Marx, when Delhi plays bhangra at the top of the state, that does not mean Panjabis below will dance even if that is indeed the expectation.

To appreciate these tensions that you draw out, perhaps we actually have to be pessimistic. In their elusiveness, these protests might not accumulate anything at all, that there is no possibility for the farmers’ demands to be met and, moreover, their ability to effect a reversal of power is limited—as our Marxist friends continually remind us and lament. But one of the reasons for this failure might be that there is only an impasse within what is a singular movement: one that seeks to determine how Capital will flow (or hop) into the countryside in a state that crushes dissent and maneuvers capital as you noted.

But what is promising is the refusal of the double blackmail of the postcolonial state and the multinational corporation—the refusal to locate a possibility in those options. It is a protest against Delhi and also the corporation, against unity and flows, but also our theoretical predilections. This protest, then,  might not be successful, or, put a better way, might not have the possibility to be successful, but one we should, again, appreciate because what is at stake is politics as such, and an opening of the question of both resources and sovereignty. It is precisely the fact that there is no possibility to meet demands that creates action to consider the determinates that structure possible action. It is not the protest that is unsatisfactory, but our world.

Remember that it is possibility itself that creates allowances to perpetuate a given order, as Alenka Zupančič has written. It is in this space without possibility where we can find the allowance of new objects and new voices to arise, again, a collapsed time, which might be a broken time to act—a time, to borrow your words, that is neither resolute nor fictional.  

Yet in many framings, peasant demands become tied to questions of development, improvement, and upliftment—which has, as you know, its own temporality alongside its own history. How do these questions of 'development' obfuscate the changing relationship between Panjab and Capital? Put another way, how are market relationships themselves responsible for inequity that is driving these protests, rather than relationships that just need to be perfected and improved?

NG: “Development” is but a recent mirage. It was preceded precisely by the language of “improvement” and “upliftment.” (It might be soon followed by plain-old “growth,” or “efficiencies” – again without asking how, why and for whom?) Such notions are grounded in the colonialist understanding of non-European societies as inherently inferior, lacking both the economic and cultural wherewithal to be civilized and modern, and therefore in need of forever tutelage. This logic in turn informs the auto-biography of Capital, which is why it so easily traveled to the term “development” in the post-Second World War context of decolonization and Cold War. No doubt it is available in other ways of organizing social and economic relations based on endless linear progress too.

At the same time, there is no denying the importance of tangible advances in human wellbeing, from rising infant mortality and life expectancy rates, to the dramatic expansion in what is captured in that capacious phrase roti-kapda-makaan, to the very chance for vast numbers of people to read, express and share. The creation of the frontline “Trolley Times” newspaper along with the shrewd use of various social media platforms is simply exquisite, especially because it caused such confusion and consternation among the urban elite! My point is to appreciate – without nostalgia – the pre-colonial dynamism of Panjabi society (the critique of timelessness never seems to stick), and yet still imagine an alternative future that does not end up as an apologia or yearning for capital. Andre Gunder Frank understood this well, in his exasperation at certain Brazilian radicals who – mired in stagism – interpreted the poverty within their society as requiring more capitalism. 

Front page of the third edition of Trolley Times (December 26, 2020). Cover design & illustration by Thukral and Tagra. [Image taken by Navyug Gill from a pdf of the newspaper itself].

In the present conjuncture, this too seems permeated by a slight stench of deficiency. This time it comes from a sequential logic that does not have a political program or theoretical outlook for small-scale largely autonomous agriculture. It is clear the BJP’s new farm laws will allow large corporations to procure and distribute agricultural produce outside the existing system of price supports and market rules. They will also be able to stockpile essential grains in unlimited quantities and engage in contract farming without due legal recourse for farmers. Far from the euphemism of “reforms,” these laws are little more than the deregulation and privatization of the agrarian economy. They will plunge farmers back into the nightmare of volatility while providing a boon to corporations. It seems to me only a fanatic belief in the market can explain a government handing over the food supply of 1.3 billion (mostly under-nourished) people to profit-driven private interests.  

Yet there is also a bit of hesitation when condemning the BJP’s economic agenda. Perhaps it looks too similar to the Congress one? In any event, the critique of neoliberalism falters partly because the question of what exactly to do with agriculture lurks in the background. Even many critics of the laws regard cultivation as antiquarian, too reliant on government subsidies and protection, involving too many people yet financially too un-remunerative, and environmentally disastrous. So while the style and methods of the BJP are condemned, there is a tendency to believe that such laws are, in one form or another, the only way forward. In short, while everyone mocks Margaret Thatcher, many quietly agree that there is indeed no alternative.

Rather than succumb to this horizon of inevitability, we might try to plot different trajectories that are unburdened with the given expectations of capitalist progress. Keep in mind that people in Panjab have been demanding policy changes for five decades, as Francine Frankel warned back in 1971. Again, fortunately, the growing body of literature on alternative models of agrarian political economy is slowly entering into popular conversation. The point is that there are ways to make agriculture both economically and environmentally viable as well as socially just. Every peasant might not have to become a proletarian, even as we re-think both those figures for the twenty-first century. At a deeper level, we might respond to the clamor of certain economists decrying agriculture as un-productive and human beings as “surplus” by refracting the role of political authority: If a state cannot equitably figure out what to do with its people, perhaps it should not be a state? Such discordant imaginations are trailing behind the people embodying difference through collective will and action at the blockades.   

Another area of debate revolves around how a section of the mainstream Indian media has labeled the protesters “Khalistanis” bent on dividing India. How did this term become a pejorative and an accusation? Beyond the Hindu right-wing, why do you think it is so difficult for progressive and even radical Indians to engage with the question of sovereignty for Panjab? Why does it not seem to be the case in relation to other struggles in South Asia or elsewhere in the world?

RSJ:  Khalistan refers to demands for Sikh autonomy against the incorporative attempts of the Indian state, what is then called a separatist movement. “Separatist movement” presumes an integral unity of the nation, a unity of an Indian people, that then Sikhs violate. There has been tremendous violence to maintain the illusion of this unity, notably in the 1980s, as Sikhs demanded autonomy and were suppressed by the Indian state.

Sikhs create problems for the idea of a unified nation and the social scientific, humanistic, and political models that accompany the nation-state. As a problem, they are rendered immaterial. How so? Sikhs are immaterial because we live in the era of number's despotism as Alain Badiou has it—a counting that begins with atomized social relations that became predominant with the advent of Capitalism. In this "egotistical calculation" that structures liberal governance, abstract calculability reigns over the population and a numerical relation governs. These dual aspects, the counting of substitutional abstract individuals alongside the dominion of numbers in a state, render Sikhs a minority. Unless one can situate Sikhs into broader trends and frequencies, more numbers, Sikhs are assumed irrelevant.

Yet peoples and numbers are not so easily calculated. The individual is not an atomized entity that can be counted so neatly and numbers themselves might be immaterial, innumerable. There is something incalculable that refuses state dominion. In this incalculability, perhaps we can think about the Sikh tradition. As I mentioned earlier, there is something immaterial in the persistence of Sikhism. Recall, the ghosts refuse burial and continue to haunt the Khalsa, the unnumerable ghosts and martyrs that refuse to be settled into history, refuse the convictions of our archival counting.

There is a refusal of the numbers game the state plays politically. From the Anandpur Resolution in 1973, Dharam Yuddh Morcha in 1982, to the recent Sarbat Khalsa in 2015, we see a continual attempt by Sikhs to rethink the very understanding of governmentality that is not tied to a center-periphery relation, to federalism, constitutional politics, a majority/minority logic.

There is an attempt to delegitimize this persistence by pointing to other numbers. One hears constantly: “No one supports Khalistan in Panjab.”  This argument of “not even numerical,” or “not even one,” looks to functions to cement the hold of Delhi and its counting of Sikhs. But there is also more than one as you note. There are endless rumblings of too many Khalistanis entering and infecting Panjab themselves. This reasoning, “not even one” and “more than one” also introduces the incalculable, the unaccountable, into, what we are told is, the largest democracy numerically in the world. Democracy, too, is a problem of numbers.

Yet to contain, organize, and circumscribe is a central feature of state and police violence against Sikhs—consider the present moment. For many, violence against Sikhs began with the rise of Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. But the demand for a separate Sikh state has existed far before in the 1940s and state violence did not simply emerge in response to Bhindranwale as the state media would have it but occurred early on in Darbar Sahib in 1955 when the police entered the Golden Temple, a central Sikh socio-political institution in Amritsar. As Balbinder Singh Bhogal has argued, the Sikh tradition is an obstacle to the Indian nation-state's stabilizing language, a game of numbers as we know governmentality is.

What remains unquestioned, however, is, as scholars of Kashmir have shown most forcefully—Huma Dar for example—why must the nation-state remain the frame for understanding, what becomes, provincialized politics? How to undo Indian national innocence and its temporal durability? Put another way, even if we think about subaltern politics, the goal for many remains to see how civil society is tied to political society or how to rethink the center's relationship with the provinces. Such understandings can function as an incorporative move as the very attempt to think of a counter-hegemonic strategy remains tied to an assumed integral unity. In other words, what are the taken for granted limits of what is politically conceivable that we might have that others, such as the farmers, might not? If we take the idea of dominance without hegemony seriously as you mentioned earlier, we have to reconsider the very container within which we locate the striving for hegemony—a container that might be divided anew.

How to think with the Sikh tradition without rendering it simply irrelevant or historical or marginal?  It is a difficult question for us, indeed, since in the counting today the Sikh tradition is a minority one. Of course, for the farmers, this is a ridiculous notion since it is a question of Truth not adjudicated by numbers codified into data. We might need to let go one's dominion over reality and what counts—that the scholar has unimpeded access whereas the other is ideological, fanatical, or some other derision--since the goal might be to make reality precisely what it is not. That is, it is precisely reality that is not working for the farmers in the present. Let's say, the numbers aren't adding up (did they ever?), even though they are all that count.

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Navyug Gill is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at William Paterson University. His research explores questions of agrarian change, postcolonial critique, and global capital. His academic and popular writings have appeared in venues such as the Journal of Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Outlook, Al Jazeera, Law and Political Economy Project, and Trolley Times.

Rajbir Singh Judge is Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach. He specializes in intellectual and cultural history of South Asia. He has published in numerous venues including the Journal of the History of Sexuality, History & Theory, Cultural Critique, Qui Parle, and has forthcoming articles in positions: asia critique and Theory & Event.