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Where your hometown is your ticket to fame

Josy Joseph in Amritsar

What's in a name?

In Punjab the answer would be mostly a village, sometimes even a city.

Here's an example. Do you know Parkash Singh Dhillon, Gurcharan Singh Tiwana or Rajinder Kaur Sidhu?

No?

Surely, however, you have heard of Parkash Singh Badal, Gurcharan Singh Tohra and Rajinder Kaur Bhattal?

Well, the surnames of all these top Punjab politicians are the names of their native villages, which have replaced their original surnames.

Why? Because the original surnames reflected their castes.

The trend was begun almost a century ago by reformist Sikhs who appealed to their co-religionists to dump surnames that reflected their caste.

Today, the new surnames are also tickets to fame and votes.

Consider the Kairons, who hail from Kairon village in Patti. The sprawling household has produced numerous politicians and some alleged criminals as well. All of them go by the same surname, which is often a ticket to victory or escape as the case may be.

While Adesh Partap Singh Kairon, a member of the present government in Punjab, son-in-law of Chief Minister Badal and grandson of the late chief minister Kairon, is employing his surname to the best possible effect in the election, his brother Gurpartap has damaged his chances. The younger Kairon's alleged involvement in a murder in Patti is now the central electoral issue there.

Parkash Singh Badal remains the most famous of the Badals, but there are dozens others who go by the same surname, some of them no relation of the chief minister. Like Agriculture Minister Gurdev Singh Badal, who is not related to his chief minister, nor is he even a Jat Sikh like the latter. Yet, his surname gets him added mileage.

The practice of shunning caste surnames was started by the Singh Sabha movement in the first decade of the 20th century and adopted by the newly formed Shiromani Akali Dal a few years later. Today it is vigorously pursued by the young sophisticated set as well.

The late Punjab chief minister Beant Singh never used his village name, but his son, who is contesting the election this time, goes by the name of Tej Prakash Kotli, Kotli being a village in Payal constituency, where Tej Prakash is trying his luck.

The practice has also resulted in some extraordinary names. One of the leaders of the All-India Sikh Students' Federation is Karnail Singh Pir Mohammed. No, he is not born of mixed parentage; his village is named Pir Mohammed.

And can anyone forget former AISSF general secretary and minister in the outgoing government Manjit Singh Calcutta? He was named for the eastern city in which he was born.

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