THE SIKH TIMES
sikhtimes.com

Noteworthy News and Analysis from Around the World

In-Depth Coverage of Issues Concerning the Global Sikh Community Including Self-Determination, Democracy, Human Rights, Civil Liberties, Antiracism, Religion, and South Asian Geopolitics

Home | News Analysis Archive | Biographies | Book Reviews | Events | Photos | Links | About Us | Contact Us

Bharati Mukherjee: Khalistanis Envision a "Theocratic State"

By BILL MOYERS
Bharati Mukherjee was born in Calcutta in 1940. She lived there until she was eight when her father's career brought the family to London. After getting her B.A. from the University of Calcutta in 1959 and her M.A. in English and Ancient Indian Culture from the University of Baroda in 1961, she traveled to the U.S. for the first time and found herself changed by her first coeducational experience. She fell in love with Canadian writer Clark Blaise, a fellow student, and married him impulsively during her lunch break after only two weeks of courtship. Mukherjee immigrated to Canada with her husband after completing her M.F.A. and then her Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from the University of Iowa. She became a naturalized Canadian citizen in 1972, but chose to leave Canada with her family in 1980 to move to the U.S. In 1986, She was awarded a National Endowment of the Arts grant. She is presently a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California-Berkeley.

Public Broadcasting Service, Apr. 25, 2003



Bill Moyers: "You and your husband spent over a year investigating that tragedy, and produced this book: The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy. I think of you, of course, as the novelist you are. And I've read some of your essays. I don't think of you, or Clark, your husband, as a investigative journalist. Why did you spend so much time on this?"
---
Bharati Mukherjee: "I had no idea that the book would turn out to be a detective book about who actually financed the bombing and who were members of the five-member terrorist cell that actually pulled it off. But it was meant to be simply about the bereaved."
---
Moyers: "The victims were mostly women, weren't they? I mean, you interviewed a lot of the widowers, and the survivors?"
---
Mukherjee: "The widowers. Yes. This was the first plane that left for India after school closings for the summer. So, the plane was packed with women and children. The good immigrants, the good Canadians, who wanted to keep up relationship with their grandparents back in India, who wanted to, you know, take dance lessons with special teachers in Indian cities. And I might have been on that plane if I had not moved to the U.S. in 1980. I would very definitely have been on that plane. And a good friend of mine, a woman that I'd gone to college with in Calcutta, died on that plane. So, it was a very personal kind of grief for me."
---
Moyers: "Who were these terrorists?"
---
Mukherjee: "These were people of Sikh religion, who used militant tactics, terrorist tactics, in order to establish in Punjab, the state of Punjab in India, a religious theocratic state for the pure Sikhs, the re-baptized Sikhs. They didn't want anyone who was impure even within their religion. And they were very, very anti-Hindu, and anti-everyone else. They were called Khalistanis, called themselves Khalistanis. And they were able to, in temples, Gurdwaras, or later on with 9/11, I realized, in mosques*, do fundraising at an enormous scale. Terrifying scale."
---
* On Aug. 11, 2003 P.B.S. posted the following correction on its Web site: "It has come to NOW's attention that an editing error in our interview with Ms. Mukherjee has resulted in some misunderstanding and confusion. A statement edited inaccurately in NOW's interview with Ms. Mukherjee implies that she believes that Sikhs were involved in fundraising activities in support of the terrorism activities of 9/11. This statement is not only untrue, but it is not one that Ms. Mukherjee made or meant to suggest. NOW regrets this error and has corrected it in the transcript below."
---
Moyers: "It's uncanny how you wrote, even then, in the mid-1980's of airport security failures. Of political extremists, plotting under the guise of religion. I mean, this should have been a wake-up call for us."
---
Mukherjee: "This should have been. But I think that the white establishment, at that time, in the late 1980's in Canada, after this happened in 1985, and throughout the 1990's in the United States, always assumed, quite wrongly, that these dark peoples with their homeland feuds will maybe raise funds here, but will take their terrorist activities back to their own countries and get their enemies back in their own countries. It never occurred to them that maybe every American, every Canadian, could also be caught up in these conspiracies."
---
Moyers: "You and your husband, Clark Blaise, burrowed yourself into this world that created this act of terrorism. And you were threatened, weren't you? Several times? Didn't you receive death threats?"
---
Mukherjee: "Yes. We were denounced from the Sikh temples in big cities in North America, and put under death threat. And I really thought for at least two years that I was going to die a violent death at the hands of these cells."
---
Moyers: "These were sleeper cells in Canada?"
---
Mukherjee: "Yes. We didn't even know the phrase . . ."
---
Moyers: "No."
---
Mukherjee: ". . . sleeper cells in those days. And actually, they had been in places like New York and New Jersey, and California, too. But . . ."
---
Moyers: "Sikh cells?"
---
Mukherjee: "Yes. Doing The Sorrow and the Terror, I discovered very rich ophthalmologists, for example, in American cities who would say, 'Six days of the week, I give to the U.S. government, and I earn a lot of money, and I pay my taxes if I have to. But one day a week I give to Khalistan.' We tracked the money and we zeroed in on the man who financed the bombing. And after, it's taken 15 years for that man to have been detained in a Canadian, a Vancouver jail. And I don't know when the lawsuit will actually be heard in court."
---
Moyers: "What did you learn about the mentality of the terrorist?"
---
Mukherjee: "Most importantly, I think it was about the fear of the religion in diaspora. Modernization is what the group of terrorists and fundamentalists, religious fundamentalists, were afraid of. They were afraid that girls, Canadian Sikhs, American Sikhs girls in tight sweaters and boys in fast cars, would somehow not follow the rules that the religion had set, or the society, religious society had set. And that therefore, the religious leaders would lose control."
---
Moyers: "That is . . . seems to be such a parallel between what we've learned about the terrorists who . . . the Muslim terrorists who brought down the World Trade Center, attacked the Pentagon, that it was the modernizing of their religion that they most despised the United States for encouraging."
---
Mukherjee: "Right. I mean, I sat there in 9/11 watching the two planes hit . . . the second plane hit the World Trade Center buildings, and I said, 'My goodness, this is on a mega-scale, a replication of what we had witnessed, experienced, discovered in the Jun. 1985 terrorist bombing of Air India jet.' And it seems to me, though, that a lot of people don't understand that we have a very different kind of enemy with the fundamentalists than we did during the Cold War. That when the U.S. or the West was fighting the Soviet Union and it's buffer states, satellite states. They were talking the same kind of language. And that the culture of battle between opposition, battle between the West and the Soviet was on a very different plane than what we have with the Islamic fundamentalists, where in addition to this being a great marketing opportunity for the Islamic bosses, the people who believe in Jihad. It's a wholly different language."
---
Moyers: "But you take for granted, don't you, because of your previous work, the presence of continuing sleeper cells in America?"
---
Mukherjee: "Oh, absolutely, and I think that these sleeper cells are going to proliferate in number and that the hatred, unexamined hatred against Americans and America is going to increase a hundred-fold."
---
Moyers: "What does all this do to the new immigrant experience?"
---
Mukherjee: "It certainly makes it much harder for my students from Muslim countries at Berkeley for example to feel as though they belong. This is a tilt time in our culture. And it's, you know . . ."
---
Moyers: "A tilt time?"
---
Mukherjee: "Well, that we don't know what the rules are anymore. We don't know what is ahead of us. There's no pattern, no tradition that we can fall back comfortably on or to comfort us, that we can seize to comfort us. And so as we are improvising rules on how to behave . . ."
---
Related Links:
Air India Bombing Trial Expected to Last Well Into 2004, By KIM BOLAN, The Vancouver Sun, Apr. 24, 2003