Makkar: Sikh divides, mushrooming gurdwaras for different castes worrying
Amritsar, June 2
THE SHIROMANI Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) has decided to set up a commit tee to analyze the reasons for a large proportion of Sikhs, especially from the lower castes, embracing the Dera culture.
Speaking to HT, SGPC president Avtar Singh Makkar said a panel of Sikh intellectuals would shortly be asked to study the genesis of the issue, its ramifications and suggest measures to not only arrest but reverse the trend of Sikhs moving away fro Sikhism.
He said the panel, which would accomplish its task in a time-bound period, would be announced shortly and the measures put forth by it would be analyzed at the level of the SGPC management before implementation.
The panel would go into the reasons of the mushrooming Dera culture, besides deter mining the forces responsible for “taking Sikhs away from Sikhism”. “We would also have to restructure our preaching wing. For the objective we would tap young talent with qualifications in religious studies,” he said. Disclosing that though there was a statutory provision of keeping at least one baptized Sikh from the Scheduled Caste category in each gurdwara committee comprising five members, Makkar admitted that a lot more needed to be done to keep the lower community Sikhs in the religious fold, besides stopping their conversion to Christianity.
Makkar said no adequate efforts had been made to acknowledge the contribution of other saints to Sikh religion, despite their “bani” being incorporated in the Guru Granth Sahib.
“Befitting memorials of all these saints like Bhagat Kabir, Bhagat Ravidas and others should have been raised and their birth and death anniversaries should have been com memo rated like Sikh Gurus,” he said.
The SGPC chief claimed that he had pioneered efforts in this regard by arranging a piece of land in Uttar Pradesh to raise a memorial of Bhagat Kabir there. He said similar efforts had been made in the past to arrange the land for raising the memorials of Bhagat Dhanna and Bhagat Peepa in Rajasthan.
Asked whether the recent clash of Sikhs with the followers of Bhagat Ravidas had come as a wake-up call for the SGPC, Makkar said the divide of Sikhs on caste lines and mushrooming number of gurdwaras to cater to different castes was worrying him since long.
