Editorial: Recent Developments in Punjab

The events that unfolded in Punjab after March 18, 2023, following the clumsy attempt to arrest Amritpal Singh, the putative head of Waris Punjab de, would not be so comical if they were also not so tragic: a radical Sikh preacher breathing fire and brimstone about Sikh separatism, a Punjab government unsure of its legitimacy despite a landslide only a year ago, a Hindu nationalist central government seeking to dislodge political opponents at every opportunity, a venomous national media that has become the pliant wing of the state, and vocal sections within the Sikh diaspora that have neither forgotten nor forgiven 1984 - these all were ideal ingredients for a disaster waiting to happen. So regular and familiar is the script to which the key actors and institutions have performed it seems inevitable how the drama will end. It is tempting to repeat Marx’s aphorism about history repeating itself, except in this case the farce has all the hallmarks of a greater tragedy in the making.

These events have been played out against the aftermath of Covid-19 pandemic. The euphoria and mobilisation which followed the farmers’ agitation have all but dissipated into competing factional rivalries. The main voice of Sikh political representation, the Shiromani Akali Dal, has collapsed under the personal fiefdom of the Badals. Similarly, the Congress, too, has suffered a terminal decline, unable to revive the economy or offer a meaningful vision for Punjab’s future. Although the Aam Aadmi Party, a loose anti-corruption populist coalition with a soft Hindutva underbelly, has been the main beneficiary of this political vacuum, it has struggled to be autonomous from its Delhi-based leadership. Symbolically, the agricultural laws (2019) and the Agnipath scheme (2022) of contractual recruitment into the Indian army have marked the death-knell of traditional Sikh society: agriculture and the army. Mass youth unemployment, low rates of economic growth and an unmanageable fiscal deficit have made emigration the only feasible option. The recent census data for Sikhs in Canada, USA, Great Britain, and Australia suggests that Arvind Kejriwal’s idea of turning Punjab into California in five years is a bigger pipe dream than Pratap Kairon’s laboured efforts in the 1950s and 1960s.

Yet even these explanations do not address the underlying cause: the catastrophic failure of successive central governments – Congress or BJP – to foster the structural transformation of Punjab’s economy by delivering on the Rajiv-Longwal Accord (1985). The latter could have overcome the bitter legacy of 1984. Instead, it has produced an equally bitter harvest that might yet still unleash uncontrollable fires. Almost forty years after it was signed, most of the key elements of the accord remain unfulfilled or have been revoked. Today, the irony is that while Haryana and Himachal Pradesh have free reign to demand and charge for their water resources, Punjab’s regional needs are regularly communalised by the centre. The creation of a Punjabi Suba has provided none of the guarantees for the autonomy and self-governance for Punjabi society which its advocates fervently hoped: rather, the centralisation of power in Delhi and the immiseration of Punjab’s economy has gone together with the new terms of trade between political Sikhism and Hinduism that have turned distinctly in the latter’s favour in which Indic religious minorities are now to be assimilated. The future conditions of minority existence in India, of living by sufferance or under official stigmatisation, are being meticulously demarcated.

We have not arrived at this juncture as a result of an accident or an individual error. A historical perspective on Indian democracy is imperative. The rise of Hindu nationalism is not an aberration but was the logical outcome of nation and state-building failures of the Congress and the Muslim League in the Punjab and Bengal. Whereas the Muslim League’s project now stands on the brink of collapse, Hindu nationalism is unlikely to be much more successful than Congress’s ‘secularism’. Both nationalisms are modular because India was crafted as an ethnic democracy in which violent and hegemonic control is exercised over religious minorities. It was also constitutionally sanctioned (Singh 2000). Sadly, India has failed to evolve as a liberal democracy so that the dilemmas of religious minorities and the peripheral regions could be resolved. Since 2014, it is now consolidating as an ethnic democracy. The one major contribution of Narendra Modi and the BJP to this process is to remove the ambiguous rhetoric of Congress and to align state power with the main cultural force in Indian society – Hinduism (Singh 2019).

The crises now engulfing South Asian states are so systemic, so deep-ridden, and now, with the looming prospect of devastating climate change, so pervasive, that neither the chimerical promise of economic development nor the familiar toolkits of post-independence statecraft can arrest the strong tides that might render these states irrelevant. Before it is too late, it is time now to rethink the political futures that were closed in 1947 by the British Labour government’s hasty transfer of power to the two dominions of India and Pakistan. As part of this exercise, Giorgio Shani and I have argued in Sikh Nationalism (2021) about the need to take seriously the study of what the late Professor Anthony D. Smith called the ‘nationalisms of small peoples’ – their aspirations, hopes and imaginaries in worlds shaped by bigger nationalism and states around them. In these imaginings, we find the dilemmas of vulnerable minorities, of pluri-multicultural nations and the institutional protection for minority rights. Accordingly, against this rich and complex heritage it is important to recognise that the rhetoric of Khalistan is but one extreme, one small constituency, in the broad spectrum of Sikh nationalism that has always viewed a separate state as the least desirable outcome. As in the past, it is an extreme which might well become mainstream because once again, as in the early 1980s, the compulsions of Indian national politics require that the Sikhs, as ‘small peoples’, need to be sacrificed.