INDIA: With Manmohan Singh being sworn in as India's first Sikh prime minister tomorrow, the small but visible flamboyant community that considers itself born to rule feels it has finally got what it deserves. Sikhs across India say Singh is now truly 'King'.
Singh's appointment also reflects India's diverse religious character. President A P J Abdul Kalam is a Muslim, Mrs Sonia Gandhi, the head of the Congress party leading the federal coalition a Roman Catholic, while Opposition leader, former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, belongs to the majority Hindu community.
"Manmohan is the Singh of Singh's," said Gurbachan Jagat, a Sikh who is a former director general of India's largest paramilitary, Border Security Force. "He has done our community proud," he added joyously.
Sikhs form around two per cent of India's population of over one billion. But with their distinctive turbans and long beards which religion forbids them to cut or trim, the Sikhs have acquired a prominence in public life far exceeding their small numbers.
Overseas, especially across Europe and North America, Sikhs are a prominent community with a reputation for working and living hard.
One of India's former presidents was a Sikh, while Sikh regiments have earned laurels not only in the two world wars but also in several battles after India's independence in 1947.
Sikhism was founded over 500 years ago in northern India by the visionary peasant Nanak Bedi, the first of the reformist and eclectic religions. Followers of Nanak, who died in 1539, came to be known as Sikhs. But Sikhs earned international opprobrium after a small number launched a separatist movement in Punjab that was ruthlessly crushed in 1993, after raging for 13 years.
But that too was the work of Punjab's Sikh chief minister, Beant Singh, and his massive 'wall-to-wall' Wyatt Earp-like Sikh police chief, Kanwar Pal Singh Gill, who ran the terrorists aground after a long and bitter campaign in which over 70,000 people died.
The community's reputation suffered another blow after prime minister Indira Gandhi's two Sikh bodyguards assassinated her in 1984 for sending in the army to the Golden Temple, Sikhism's holiest shrine in Amritsar, north of Delhi, to flush out hundreds of terrorists who had fortified themselves inside.