by AMANDEEP SANDHU
When Partition was imminent, the uncertainty faced by the Sikhs first took the shape of Sikhistan.
By late noon on February 23, the country was abuzz with footage of a huge crowd of Sikhs—armed with lathis, swords, and guns—breaking barricades and taking over the Ajnala Police Station in Punjab’s Amritsar district. The police stood down because the bus they had arrived in carried the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy scripture. The person at the centre of the chaos was Amritpal Singh, the Sikh religious preacher whose Waris Punjab De faced a police crackdown on March 18.
At the time of going to press, Amritpal Singh was still on the run but, according to official versions, over 112 of his associates had been arrested. Mainstream television media is pushing the theory of Amritpal Singh being sponsored by Pakistan’s ISI, showing 24/7 footage of arms recovered. There are also rumours that Amritpal Singh was arrested on March 18, but that the police declared him a fugitive. There is much that remains ambiguous, but Punjab is holding its peace.
Last year saw police stations attacked in Katihar in Bihar, Hubballi in Karnataka and Vizhinjam in Kerala as well. As in Ajnala, policemen were injured. They made news for a day, then the clamour died. However, for days after February 23, media and commentators have been asking ad infinitum whether the Ajnala incident signals a revival of the Khalistan movement. One asks why.
It could perhaps be because the protesters, all Sikhs, were armed; also, Amritpal imitates Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the radical Sikh leader of the 1980s. There are other parallels with the 1980s situation: the State administration seems paralysed, the police ineffective, the Sikh institutions, even religious ones, silent.
In Punjab, the labelling is met with hostility. They say, the government and the media called the unarmed demonstrators during the farmers’ protest of 2020-21 as Khalistanis and anti-nationals too. A poster held up then sums up the mood: “When we die to save Hindus, you call us angels; when we die to save the nation, you call us martyrs; when we ask for our rights, you call us terrorists”.
Punjab is convulsing
Almost a quarter century after 1993 — when militancy had supposedly ended in the State — I travelled to Punjab to examine if peace had returned. In the end of 2015, I reached a site where farmers were protesting the devastation of their cotton crop by whitefly infestation. One night before the farmers decided to call off the agitation, an incident of sacrilege targeting the Guru Granth Sahib took place at Bargari village. Then, police fired at a gathering in Kotakapura, killing two unarmed protesters. The Deputy Chief Minister promptly said: “This is revival of Khalistan. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence is behind the incident.”
A shopkeeper selling T-shirts sporting images of Bhagat Singh, militant Sikh leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and the late singer Sidhu Moose Wala, outside the Golden Temple in Amritsar. | Photo Credit: Ashutosh Sharma
Punjab erupted in anger. For over 15 days, religious scriptures were randomly torn even as people of all faiths carried out peaceful demonstrations. Eight years later, despite two commissions, special investigations teams, multiple reports, two governments, and three Chief Ministers, the cases have not been resolved. This is an instance of how a farmers’ protest, about a political economy issue, was given a religious twist. This is also an example of how the State’s police-judicial-political system invariably fails to deliver justice.
During my travels through Punjab, at farmer union platforms, I heard, “When India was hungry, we fed her. Now as we die of thirst, India does not look at us.” From religious-oriented groups, I heard, “Punjab has been reduced to being a food-producing colony for India.” From Left-oriented unions I heard: “Green Revolution was Green Genocide”. To me it is clear that Punjab is convulsing, but neither the Centre nor the State has ever addressed its fundamental concerns. Punjab is an agrarian powerhouse, but its intense wheat-paddy agriculture cycle has depleted the ground water levels. Once the “breadbasket of the nation”, Punjab is fast becoming a desert. Heavy use of chemicals has turned the State into a cancer belt. Mafias dominate every revenue source, from sand to gravel to transport.
Dying industry, dropping education levels
Punjab being a border State, the Centre has always been reluctant to instal big industry here. Small- and medium-scale industry is dying out because of a huge electricity crisis and the labour exodus. Education levels have dropped, health facilities are dismal. Once the country’s number one State, Punjab has now moved to a middling 16th position in GDP ranking. The State’s loan burden is over Rs.3 lakh crore. The average individual farmer loan exceeds Rs.2 lakh. In the last two decades, about 20,000 farmers and labourers have committed suicide, a number close to the official count of those who died during the Khalistan movement of 1978-93 (the unofficial count is higher).
If militancy plunged Punjab into a crisis, after militancy, politicians of all hues — traditionally Congress and Akali Dal, and now the new Aam Aadmi Party — have displayed apathy and unwillingness to untie Punjab’s knots and give it the healing it needs. A former Chief Minister kept talking about security threats from across the border but never answered why Pakistan viewed the State as ready for the picking and if his own government had assuaged Punjab’s woes. The Centre deployed the Border Security Force in half of Punjab, along the India-Pakistan border, yet ironically, the drugs everyone talks about proliferates in this very belt.
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