COVID-19: A Padma Shri awardee from the Mazhabi Sikh community was denied cremation spaces in Punjab
At 4.30 am on 2 April, Nirmal Singh Khalsa, a 67-year-old Padma Shri recipient, became the fifth person in Punjab to die of the COVID-19 virus. Born in Punjab’s Firozepur district, Khalsa was a member of the Mazhabi Sikh community, comprising Dalits who had converted to Sikhism. For close to three decades, starting from 1979, he served as a hazoori ragi—employed to perform kirtan at a gurudwara—at the Golden Temple. He was awarded a Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award, eleven years back. But despite the accolades he garnered in his life, his death was marked by chaos—his son, Amiteshwar, accused the hospital that treated Khalsa of negligence and his last rites had to be performed on unkempt land, not in a crematorium.
Media platforms focused on just one obstacle to Khalsa’s cremation, news of which emerged on the afternoon of 2 April. The administration had tried to arrange for his cremation in Verka, a village in Amritsar, but its residents said they feared that the funerary processions would result in the spread of the novel coronavirus. Among others, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee—which manages gurdwaras spread across several states, including the Golden Temple—and the Akal Takht, the highest temporal seat of Sikhism, expressed outrage at the Amritsar district administration and the residents of Verka for disrespecting Khalsa.
The quest to find a cremation ground for Khalsa was far more arduous than what received public attention. Vikas Hira, a sub-divisional magistrate in Amritsar, and Harpal Singh Randhawa, an addition deputy commissioner of Punjab Police, confirmed that they were trying to find a cremation ground for Khalsa all day. In fact, the SGPC and the Akal Takht only stepped in to try and find such land at 4 pm that day. According to various accounts, residents of at least two villages in Amritsar, Verka and Jethuwal, had gathered at their respective cremation grounds and refused to let Khalsa’s last rites be performed there. Hira and Randhawa also said that they refused to hold the cremation in some other designated grounds as they knew it was crowded. Ultimately, Khalsa’s funerary processions were not carried out in a public crematorium, but in a secluded land—around the border of the villages of Fatehgarh Shukla and Verka—sixteen hours after his death.
On 4 April, Inder Iqbal Singh Atwal, a former member of legislative assembly from the Shiromani Akali Dal, wrote to the Punjab State Commission for Scheduled Castes that the Dalit community, and especially the Mazhabi Sikh community, feels “insulted, ashamed by disrespect by the denial of Cremation.” That day, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes directed the state government and Dinkar Gupta, the director general of the Punjab Police, to set up a special-investigation team “to enquire the Discrimination done before and after death of an Padma Shri Awardee SC person.” The next day, the state’s commission for Scheduled Castes directed the Amritsar administration and police officials to probe the reason for this delay and submit a report within seven days.
These obstacles to Khalsa’s cremation also indicate that the Punjab government has failed to educate the public about COVID-19. Guidelines issued by the World Health Organization and the ministry of health clearly state that casualties of COVID-19 can be cremated or buried with appropriate precautions, such as the use of gloves. As Amiteshwar said, his father’s “caste could be a factor” behind these hurdles as well; Khalsa had faced discrimination earlier too. Tejinder Kaur, the chairperson of the state’s scheduled castes commission, told me, “Every person is entitled to the right of dignity in death … This is unheard of.”
Khalsa did not know he had contracted COVID-19 till as late as the day before his death. According to Amiteshwar, his father had complained of fever and cough after conducting a kirtan in Chandigarh on 19 March. The family took him to Amritsar’s Sri Guru Ram Das Charitable Hospital, which is run by the SGPC. “A few tests were run and showed an infection,” Amiteshwar said. On 21 March, the family took him to the Guru Nanak Dev Hospital, run by the state government, in Amritsar, where the doctor prescribed him some medicines. For ten days, Khalsa shuffled between the SGRD and the GDNH for treatment, but did not recover. The GNDH was empowered to run tests for COVID -19 but chose not to do so, Amiteshwar said.
On the night of 29 March, Khalsa felt so sick at his home that the family had to call an ambulance and rush him to the SGRD. The next day, the hospital referred him the to GNDH, and another day later, the family found that he had contracted COVID-19.
Amiteshwar said that the GNDH was a “dirty hospital” that was negligent towards his father. “For nearly three days, I attended to him without any protective gear while none of the staff or the nurses on duty attended to him,” Amiteshwar said. “He used to cry and call for help but the nurses kept sleeping and obviously, I had no choice other than to run to him. I myself changed the water bottle of the oxygen [humidifier] twice a day.” He said the nurses stopped him from doing this often and told him, “Don’t do this, you will also become positive.”
At about 4 pm on 1 April, Khalsa was wheeled into an isolation ward at the GNDH. Amiteshwar said that at about 8.40 pm, Khalsa was in the ICU of the isolation facility and his family members were standing outside it and talking to him on call. Khalsa was in immense distress. According to Amiteshwar, Khalsa said that the hospital had not given him any medicine since he was brought to the room. The doctor on duty told Amiteshwar that they were going to intubate Khalsa. The doctor said that a nurse gave him a required dose of medicine and that he would be given a dose at night.
Around this time, Amiteshwar spoke to his father and recorded the exchange. During their conversation, Khalsa kept breaking into tears again and again. He said that if the hospital does not give him any medicine, he will commit suicide. “I am only here for a few more minutes,” he said. When his family tried to assure him that they would be together soon, Khalsa replied, “It’s difficult for me to survive this. These are my final hours. They aren’t treating me properly.” When I spoke to Amiteshwar on 5 April, he said that his father’s words from that conversation—“I want to live”; “I am going to die”—were still ringing in his ears.
I approached the SGRD and the state’s health department for a comment on the matter. According to Dr AP Singh from the SGRD, “On 24 March we asked him to isolate himself and get tested for COVID-19 at GNDH because of the flu-like symptoms.” Om Parkash Soni, Punjab’s minister of medical education and research, defended the GNDH and said that Khalsa was treated in a VIP room, but he gave up all hope upon hearing that he was positive.
Khalsa died at around 4.30 am on 2 April. That day, his family members, including his son, were quarantined in the hospital. Amiteshwar said he was informed that the administration was “trying to find a place for cremation.” But as hours passed, he said he kept wondering, “How are they not able to find a little space? Not even a few feet?”
That afternoon, the administration reached a cremation ground in Verka for Khalsa’s last rites—his body remained in the mortuary till the cremation ground was not finalised. Its residents feared that if they allowed Khalsa to be cremated there, they too would contract COVID-19 from him. Baldev Singh Hundal, a professor who presides over the village’s the mushtarka malkana committee—which is incharge of the village’s common land—and Harpal Singh, the husband of Parminder Kaur, the Congress councillor from Verka, led this opposition.
According to Harpal, the sub-divisional magistrate Hira and the additional deputy commissioner Randhawa reached the cremation ground at 2.30 pm. “The employee manning the cremation grounds in Verka, on getting to hear that it was a corona patient, refused to let them enter the grounds. But we agreed to hand over the keys when we got to know that it was bhai Nirmal Singh Khalsa whose body was being brought,” Harpal said. The police took the keys, but by then, a crowd had gathered, refusing to let the authorities inside.
“Don’t create new problems for us,” Harpal, who worked in a government school in Amritsar’s Majitha town at the time, told the media gathered outside the cremation ground that day. “So far, Verka has been spared of the wrath of coronavirus. Why don’t they go for electric cremation or give it to us in writing that cremating so close to the residential area will not spread the infection?”
Sikhs from across the world took to social media to criticise the residents of Verka, and especially Harpal. But according to Harpal, a station-house officer who was present at the grounds had told him that villages had refused to cremate Khalsa before his body was brought to Verka. “When I asked the SHO why despite his death at 4.30 am, the cremation didn’t take place especially at Sultanwind cremation ground or at crematorium near Gurudwara Baba Deep Singh Shaheed, which were both close to his residence in Udham Singh Nagar, I got to know that it was refused at both the places.” When I asked Nishan Singh, the SHO of Verka police station, about this, he refused to talk about the matter and said his domain is “law and order.” Harpal claimed that as they heard that other villages had protested against Khalsa’s cremation on their land, the residents of Verka refused as well.
Baldev Singh, too, claimed that he had heard that people from nearby villages had also opposed the cremation. “Everyone was alert,” Baldev said. “People gathered in the respective cremation grounds. The news reaches just like this.” According to him, in 1980–1990, when Punjab saw widespread militancy, “a militant Jugraj Singh Toofan was also cremated here at Verka.” But since then, he said, no one from outside the village was ever cremated in Verka. “Those days were different. Had we allowed them, they would have made it routine to do COVID-19 cremations here.”
While members of the SGPC and the Akal Takht have been at the forefront of criticising the delay in Khalsa’s funeral, they learnt about the difficulties in finding space for cremation only twelve hours after his death. Jaspal Singh, the personal assistant of Giani Harpreet Singh—the jathedar, or head, of the Akal Takht—said that he started making calls to the police and the administration at 4 pm to find out if they had found the land. Gobind Singh Longowal, the president of SGPC, told me that he learnt about the incident at Verka in the afternoon via television news. “I felt extremely sad after seeing this on TV, that something like this is happening with such a renowned kirtan singer,” he said. At about 4.30–5 pm, he said, he made calls to the deputy commissioner of police, but he did not respond.
He then asked Sukhdev Singh Bhurakona, the additional secretary of the SGPC, to convey to the Amritsar administration that Khalsa can be cremated at the SGPC’s land at Gurdwara Satlani Sahib, around thirty kilometres away from GNDH. Jaspal Singh also said he coordinated to make funeral arrangements at Chhatiwind village, around fifteen kilometres away from GNDH. By the time they managed to offer these spaces, according to them, the administration had finalised the spot for his cremation.
Around that time, Nirmal Singh Jethuwal, a dhadhi at SGPC—who sings religious verses using dhadd and sarangi, traditional musical instruments—was in his village with the same name, Jethuwal, located around four kilometres away from Verka. At about 5.30 pm, he got a call from a friend to reach the village’s cremation ground. Upon reaching, he said he saw Hira, Randhawa and a few people gathered there. The authorities asked him to arrange for woods and he complied. “Meanwhile, I got calls from SGPC and Akal Takht representatives, and assured them that the arrangements were made,” he said. Soon, a few residents of the village refused to cremate Khalsa there as they heard about the developments at Verka. Bhurakona, who was in touch with the dhadhi, said that ten–fifteen villagers reached the spot and scattered the woods that had been collected. “Out of fear, they refused,” Jethuwal said. The authorities left the premises.
While residents of Jethuwal village had also protested cremating Khalsa, Verka, and especially Harpal, became the focus of the media’s wrath. On 10 April, he was suspended from the school where he worked. People even refused to even accept ration relief from him.
Meanwhile, that day, members of the SGPC and the Akal Takht said that when they offered cremation spaces to the district administration, its officials refused and said they had found another spot. According to Hira, the administration was getting calls from people who were offering their land at faraway places, such as, Bhikhiwind, located more than forty kilometres away from the hospital. I sent Hira some more queries, but he had not responded at the time of publishing.
Hira said, that day, the administration and the police had been in talks with various people to arrange the cremation in the villages of Jethuwal, Fatehgarh Shukarchak and Verka. They also tried to approach the crematorium next to the Guru Nanak Dev University College in Verka. “Randomly, I got calls that specific places were not possible. It wasn’t exactly a refusal rather, the answer was on the lines that there was a huge crowd present at those sites,” Hira said. “Things were happening at such a fast speed … There was so much panic.” He added that a “police counterpart” also tried to coordinate for getting the cremation done at the ground close to Durgiana temple.
While Randhawa spoke to me about the police’s involvement, Sukhchain Singh Gill, the police commissioner of Amritsar, wrote to me in a text response, “You can speak to DC Sahib … police have no role in Cremation Procedure.”While discussing the reasons for the delay, Randhawa said the authorities did not want others who had to use the cremation ground to panic. “Not that we could not have deployed force to get the cremation done, but then a bout of cough or cold among others present at the cremation grounds would have send them into panic and fear of having contracted COVID-19. That’s why we decided to cremate at suburbs.” he said. “Now people have become aware.”
Ranjit Singh, a former jathedar of the Akal Takht, questioned why Khalsa’s last rites were not performed at the cremation ground close to Gurudwara Baba Shaheed in Amritsar, which is located close to Khalsa’s residence, at Shaheed Udham Singh Nagar. Ranjit said it “belongs to SGPC in the land records. Why was he not cremated there?” According to him,“All SGPC employees or common Sikhs go to this cremation ground because starting from Baba Deep Singh to Jassa Singh Ramgarghia and his brothers, were all cremated here,” he said, referring to Sikhs leaders from centuries ago. “Today, SGPC is unable to reply as to why Bhai saheb could not be cremated in their own land. This is an insult to Sikhs. Who could have resisted the administration?”
According to Randhawa, Khalsa could not be taken to the cremation ground near Gurdwara Baba Shaheed because “it had ten cremations planned of which seven had taken place and three were pending till 5 pm. See, you can’t stop seven, 10 or 12 families—their feelings were involved since they did not have any corona patients.” But the administration arranged for the cremation of Jaswinder Singh—a 65-year-old, who died after contracting COVID-19—at the same ground close to Gurdwara Baba Shaheed on 7 April. (Jaswinder’s family declined to claim his body from a private hospital at Amritsar—the stigma associated with COVID-19 has proved to be a hindrance in cremating others who died after contracting the disease too.)
As the criticism against Verka residents was fierce, Harpal said that on 2 April itself the village committee decided to give their common panchayat land, about half a kilometre away from Verka, to perform the cremation there. But the district administration did not agree. “We contacted Bhai sahib’s son at 5 pm and showed him the place. He did not know of it,” he said. “We assured his son that we shall extend all help for construction of a monument for Khalsa” at the land.Randhawa said, “This place was apt, secluded, open and no families were present here since there was no ongoing cremation here.”
When Jaspal heard this, he said, “I took out the SGPC vehicle and started off for the place along with two more secretaries, and the dushala and siropa”—types of garments—“for honouring the body.” Malkit Singh, the head Granthi at Akal Takht, also accompanied them. “I went along, lest Malkit Singh thought that he was the only one being pushed into all this.”
Less than two kilometres from the cremation spot, the police stopped them, according to Jaspal. The police asked them to handover the siropa and dushala, and five minutes later, asked one person to come to the cremation spot to conduct the ardas, a prayer in Sikhism. “We weren’t even told to bring anybody for the ardas and neither had they made any arrangements. Thankfully, Malkit Singh was there,” Jaspal said. The authorities only had the protective gear required to conduct the funeral for one of them, he added.
Khalsa’s body was brought to the spot from GNDH and the cremation started at around 8.30–9 pm. Harpal Singh, the councillor’s husband who was present there, said that they discovered in the middle of the cremation that there was insufficient wood in the pyre. The villagers opened a sawmill in the middle of the night and supplemented the wood. Malkit told me that as it was dark, the entire proceeding was carried out to light emanating from car headlights. Usually, a cremation is “completed by 6 or 7 pm unless pressing circumstances,” Malkit added. It is unclear why the cremation was conducted in a secluded land, if it had to be conducted late at night.
On 14 April, Baldev told me that land where the cremation was finally performed did not belong to the committee and was owned by a non-resident Indian. According to him, the committee was negotiating with the NRI to get ownership of the land.
Soni, the medical-education minister, had few answers for the issues that rose during his cremation. He said the authorities at the cremation ground near Durgiana temple “told me there are usually a lot of people there and they might refuse, and that the refusal could stem from the obvious reasons related to COVID-19.” When asked about the other areas where residents refused to cremate him, Soni said, “I am holding meetings with officials to discuss all this.” Amiteshwar said that while he had been making frantic calls to various senior officials, he got a call from “Captain Amarinder Singh uncle” post his father’s death, who expressed grief and said that he wished he knew about the issues the family had to face earlier.
Longowal expressed his disappointment with how the cremation had been conducted. “No officer reached, and no honour was bestowed despite he being a Padma Shri and being a renowned personality,” he said. Kiranjot Kaur, a senior SGPC member and a former office bearer, said that Khalsa could have been cremated with dignity on the next day instead of the hurried cremation late that night.
Amiteshwar said that his family has been contemplating why so many people came out to stop the cremation from happening in their vicinity. They think it might be because of his caste.
Khalsa had faced discrimination because of his caste earlier. I spoke about this with his friend, Charanjit Singh, a reporter at the local daily Rozana Pehredar, and Ranjit, the former jathedar of the Akal Takht. Ranjit told me that Khalsa wrote a letter to various Sikh clergies about the treatment meted out to him back in late 1990s. In it, he spoke about being addressed with “abusive words coloured with casteism.”
Charanjit said that Khalsa “was saddened by the religion being ruled by politics and concerned about the caste system prevalent in the religion. He complained that he and others from the lower castes have always been ignored by the so called higher castes.” Khalsa himself asserted that there is no provision of caste system in Sikhism and argued that the community should stop the practice of having separate cremation grounds and gurdwaras for Dalits and upper-caste Sikhs. After his death, an interview Khalsa had given earlier circulated on social media platforms, including on a page called, “Dr. Rajwant Singh - EcoSikh, National Sikh Campaign.” In it, he spoke about how absurd it is to have caste-based cremation grounds. “How can a community or race which is not one even after death, further the Sikh cause?”