A caste war that doesn't spare the dead

A caste war that doesn't spare the dead
SUKHMANI SINGH

BHAIL (TARN TARAN), FEBRUARY 15: For 60-year-old Hazara Singh, a resident of the 4,500-strong Bhail village near the Beas, his inferior status as a Mazhbi Sikh could not have been more cruelly reinforced. "When a strong man's dog dies, people come running to commiserate, when my daughter died, I was not even allowed to cremate her," he bursts out bitterly.

Hazara Singh is one of the 1,000-plus landless labourers who have been peacefully residing in this Jat-Sikh-"ruled" village, 24 km from Tarn Taran. Yet, on the night of January 4, the Jat zamindars barred him from cremating his 22-year-old daughter Binder in the village cremation ground. He was forced to lug her body on a trolley to the river three miles away, and dump it after weighing it down with two sacks of mud.

The provocation? The Mazhbi Sikhs' first assertion of their own identity.

They, too, had built a simple mud-floored gurdwara here 15 years ago, adding to the five constructed by Jat Sikhs in this small, under-developed villagewhich boasts neither a hospital nor a secondary school. Even then they continued to freely visit the other Jat Sikh gurdwaras in the village. Traditionally, one of the four main Jat Sikh gurdwaras would take out a procession in rotation on the occasion of the birthday of Guru Gobind Singh.

This year, the backward Mazhbis mustered up Rs 10,000 and staked a claim to taking out a procession, asking the Jats to join in. The Jat Sikh committee, whose turn it was this year, was enraged by the request, and flatly refused to allow it. But in their first open challenge to Jat Sikh supremacy, the Mazhbis defiantly went ahead anyway.

Retaliation was swift. Armed with sticks, a party of Jat Sikhs encircled the village for three days and prevented the Mazhbis from entering their fields even for daily ablutions.

The Jat Sikhs prefer not to talk about the incident. Farmer Kartar Singh declares with contempt, "It is all their mistake. We are superior to them." Adds a Jat Sikh woman, "The Mazhbis have never had enoughmoney to organise any function. I don't know how they did it this time."

Eventually, the police had to intervene and coerce the two communities to put their thumb impressions on a raazinama. Today, the Mazhbi Sikhs claim the police forced them to compromise. Fumes one, "We are oppressed by both the police and the zamindars both of them are one." Thunders Hazara Singh, "The men who abused us should go to jail for six months."

However, Goindwal Sahib DSP Lakhvinderpal Singh, under whose charge the area comes, says, "It was nothing but partybaazi, everything is normal now."

The reality is somewhat different. Despite the fact that a month has elapsed, the relationship between the two castes is noticeably strained, and the truce seems tenuous. On February 8, 50-year-old Mazhbi Sikh Pritam Kaur died. The Jat Sikhs did not allow her cremation on the common village platform constructed for the purpose. Mutters her 30-year-old son Satnam Singh, "Who bothers about the poor? We work aslabourers for the Jats, so we have no option but to accept things. We had to cremate her on a kutchha patch of ground." Unlike in the past, only a couple of Jat Sikhs participated in the ceremony. And now they have asked the Mazhbis to build their own platform in a separate corner of the cremation ground, for which the latter are still collecting money.

The chasm in social relations remains unbridged ever since. Though the Mazhbis live in their own distinct colonies in the village, they were used to visiting Jat Sikh homes. In the largest colony of 100 houses where Hazara Singh resides, all that seems to be a thing of the past. To the extent that some like 15-year-old illiterate Mazhbi Sikh girl Rajvinder protests, "I will not go to wash clothes in their homes anymore. I have stopped meeting my Jat Sikh girlfriends. I prefer to sit at home."

Predicts Hazara Singh: "Things are OK now, till the next time we have a fight..."