The Punjab Crisis

Abstract

The present Punjab crisis in India has been widely represented in the U.S. press as a religiously motivated drive for secession that threatens India's political unity. Given this definition, the actions of the central government might be viewed as brutal but hardly unjustified. This view is neither useful nor correct. It is not a conceptualization that will lead to a viable resolution of the actual conflicts, and it does not in any way accurately describe the concerns of the people of Punjab or similar people in other states. As is so often the case in political matters, the conceptualization is not a detached objective formulation, but rather embodies a view that has been picked up by the press from one of the parties to the conflict. It is, in fact, part of the political phenomenon itself-it has an origin in the crisis and an effect on it. The Punjab crisis grows out of the very structure of the Indian Union and its history. The forces at work in Punjab are also at work in many other states, particularly those with substantial populations of politically alert and well-organized peasants at the core of an emerging rural middle class. The central government policies that have stirred the fear and anger of such groups in Punjab have done the same in other states, although the commonalities have been masked, even within India, by the way in which the events in Punjab have come to be construed as a clash between Sikhs and Hindus. Many definitions serve to explain the Punjab crisis, each naturally implying different remedies. The definitions fall into three main groups, depending on the level of organization one looks at. At the household level in Punjab, it is primarily economic; at the level of state-wide political discussions, it is legal and constitutional. Only at the national level is it primarily religious, and this construction is mainly the product of actions of