A secret admirer....
Have there been times when you have looked at your own community, that is, its inner workings, its leadership and its successes and failures and decided that some other community is doing better than your own? When this happens people secretly admire the other community but are not able to share that secret.
The question of leadership is unavoidable in these debates. East African Asians, during the period leading to the 1972 expulsion, almost certainly found that their leaders were mostly thrust upon them. The main contenders for representation and leadership came from faith based organisations.
I am going to talk about the Sikh community, a grouping that I came to know well as a member of that community. In general the Sikhs had minimal political experience with no ambition to propel themselves into the civic society with the aim to lead a political party. With the exception of four or five people in the whole of East Africa, Sikh leadership came from faith based organisations. There was some intra-Sikh factionalism based on the Indian caste system which meant that their leaders came from two distinct ‘pathways’ but both factions drew from a pool of people who actually knew little about the religion and were not always qualified to lead. Their main endorsement was their wealth, which was largely generated by their success mainly in the building construction industry. The Ramgarhia Sikh contractors became leaders and their energy and knowledge went into – you’ve guessed it, building temples or developing them. This appeared to be the case in Kenya as well as Uganda.
The Sikh communities have always been prone to a high level of fragmentation, especially in the UK. This results in the formation of a larger number of organisations with members distributed amongst them. Because each temple can only sustain one president and his team of henchmen, those with leadership ambitions go on to start new splinter groups that are differentiated by minor identifiers. They aim to build more and more temples. But the boomerang always returns to hit one in the back of the head. It is now acknowledged that there is excess capacity in the temples of the UK based Sikh communities but the multiplication of the temples has continued. The boomerang is debt. It has also multiplied. Having said all this, there is no evidence that a Sikh temple has ever gone into receivership owing to its inability to service debts anywhere in the world. The Almighty always lends a hand.
When one talks to the Jaat Sikhs, who are traditionally farmers, they say that the builders and artisan Sikhs who came from the Ramgarhia caste have helped to create an asset base that is quite disproportionate to the size of their communities. Both Sikh factions in the East Africa of the 1960s did not build schools, hospitals, playgrounds or housing for poor African communities. But they did not also look after their own poor, ill or elderly with the exception of offering a few scholarships for Sikh school children who went to Sikh faith schools. That was the picture until 1972.
The fragmentation of the Sikh communities, the servicing of high debt charges and the high maintenance costs of bricks and mortar and lack of strategic vision have also meant that, in the main, the Sikhs in the UK have not built schools, hospitals and playgrounds for the needy. There is a hypothesis for a PhD dissertation in these lines. Why did the fragmentation take place in the Sikh communities? How many rival Sikh temples did it create? What was the impact of the size of the congregations and how does each temple cope with their debt service boomerangs? Are my questions valied and sustainable? Can these questions be applied to analyse the status of other Asian communities?
Here is a confession. I have been secretly admiring the Ismaili communities and their phenomenal achievements in the East African countries. It appears to me that they have succeeded in dealing with all the questions that I have raised. More about this in the next post.
Have there been times when you have looked at your own community, that is, its inner workings, its leadership and its successes and failures and decided that some other community is doing better than your own? When this happens people secretly admire the other community but are not able to share that secret.
The question of leadership is unavoidable in these debates. East African Asians, during the period leading to the 1972 expulsion, almost certainly found that their leaders were mostly thrust upon them. The main contenders for representation and leadership came from faith based organisations.
I am going to talk about the Sikh community, a grouping that I came to know well as a member of that community. In general the Sikhs had minimal political experience with no ambition to propel themselves into the civic society with the aim to lead a political party. With the exception of four or five people in the whole of East Africa, Sikh leadership came from faith based organisations. There was some intra-Sikh factionalism based on the Indian caste system which meant that their leaders came from two distinct ‘pathways’ but both factions drew from a pool of people who actually knew little about the religion and were not always qualified to lead. Their main endorsement was their wealth, which was largely generated by their success mainly in the building construction industry. The Ramgarhia Sikh contractors became leaders and their energy and knowledge went into – you’ve guessed it, building temples or developing them. This appeared to be the case in Kenya as well as Uganda.
The Sikh communities have always been prone to a high level of fragmentation, especially in the UK. This results in the formation of a larger number of organisations with members distributed amongst them. Because each temple can only sustain one president and his team of henchmen, those with leadership ambitions go on to start new splinter groups that are differentiated by minor identifiers. They aim to build more and more temples. But the boomerang always returns to hit one in the back of the head. It is now acknowledged that there is excess capacity in the temples of the UK based Sikh communities but the multiplication of the temples has continued. The boomerang is debt. It has also multiplied. Having said all this, there is no evidence that a Sikh temple has ever gone into receivership owing to its inability to service debts anywhere in the world. The Almighty always lends a hand.
When one talks to the Jaat Sikhs, who are traditionally farmers, they say that the builders and artisan Sikhs who came from the Ramgarhia caste have helped to create an asset base that is quite disproportionate to the size of their communities. Both Sikh factions in the East Africa of the 1960s did not build schools, hospitals, playgrounds or housing for poor African communities. But they did not also look after their own poor, ill or elderly with the exception of offering a few scholarships for Sikh school children who went to Sikh faith schools. That was the picture until 1972.
The fragmentation of the Sikh communities, the servicing of high debt charges and the high maintenance costs of bricks and mortar and lack of strategic vision have also meant that, in the main, the Sikhs in the UK have not built schools, hospitals and playgrounds for the needy. There is a hypothesis for a PhD dissertation in these lines. Why did the fragmentation take place in the Sikh communities? How many rival Sikh temples did it create? What was the impact of the size of the congregations and how does each temple cope with their debt service boomerangs? Are my questions valied and sustainable? Can these questions be applied to analyse the status of other Asian communities?
Here is a confession. I have been secretly admiring the Ismaili communities and their phenomenal achievements in the East African countries. It appears to me that they have succeeded in dealing with all the questions that I have raised. More about this in the next post.
posted by K Singh Ajimal at
9:55 am
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