The Economist

MARCH 31, 1984 p. 23 (U.S. Edition p. 41)

When the sants go marching in

FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT IN INDIA

At his daily durbar above the Sikh soup kitchen in the Golden Temple, Sant (Saint) Jarnail (General) Singh Bhindranwale proclaimed from the rooftop what hundreds of his turbaned followers had come to hear: "The Sikhs have been enslaved by Hindus and must be liberated". And what does Sikh liberation mean, your correspondent asked, crouched on a mat between rifle-, sabre- and pistol-packing Sikhs, as rupee notes showered down at the feet of the Khomeini of the Punjab. "Let Mrs Gandhi come to Amritsar," he boomed through his Sony microphone, "and we will give her our interpretation of Sikh nationhood".

On the same day earlier this month the prime minister of India told a Hindi newspaper, "I am even prepared to go to Punjab and hold talks with the agitation leaders there". But the mountain is not about to go to the self-proclaimed prophet of the Golden Temple. Nor is Mrs Gandhi ready to tackle him head on. Instead, she continues to push the more reasonable faction of the Sikh movement into his outstretched arms.

On March 19th the government issued a sedition charge against the less fiery of the two sants holed up in the Golden Temple, Harchand Singh Longowal, who heads the Sikh political party, Akali Dal. It also banned Sant Bhindranwale's heavily armed students' federation, whose members have been taking sacred oaths to die in defence of the temple; hundreds of these young warriors have been arrested since. But the avenging fundamentalist fury himself carries on, unhindered by the forces of law.

Mrs Gandhi is justifiably apprehensive that any concessions to the militant Sikhs, who have been burning India's constitution and murdering their way through a hit list of "enemies", will simply evoke further, insatiable demands. So she is waiting until military necessity or political expedience dictates some solution. Meanwhile, people kill and get killed in Punjab -- about 80 in the past month. Punjab's governor recently described the communal conflict there as "the most serious since 1947".

A similar policy of wait and hope has taken over in another sensitive border state, Jammu and Kashmir, where Mrs Gandhi has been bent on dislodging the state government led by Dr Farooq Abdullah. Dr Abdullah committed two sins in prime ministerial eyes: he rejected an alliance with her Congress party for the state election last June and went on to win on his own; and then he put his weight, as India's only Moslem head of a state, behind the anti-Gandhi opposition.

For some months Kashmir's Congress party tried to provide a pretext for ridding Mrs Gandhi of this turbulent chief minis ter by provoking street violence. But the state governor, a Gandhi appointee and relative, Mr B. K. Nehru, refused to go along with the plan to oust Dr Abdullah and impose central rule. On March 26th Mr Nehru himself was ousted. The new governor of this Moslem state is best known for razing a Moslem quarter of Delhi during the 1975-77 emergency. Governor Jagmohan and Sant Bhindranwale have something in common: both were proteges of Mrs Gandhi's late son Sanjay.

Kashmir is quiet these days but destabilisation goes on as a Gandhi ally, who also happens to be Dr Abdullah's brother-in-law, tries to buy enough support to outvote the chief minister in the state assembly. The price per defecting legislator is said to be about $30,000 or 10 years' salary plus perks.

Intolerance of opposition has always been part of Mrs Gandhi's make-up. So have political opportunism and a personalisation of politics. These traits alone would explain the counter-productive effort to unseat Dr Abdullah and a similar exercise in opposition-ruled Karnataka state. But only a new quality of indecisiveness and a failure of what used to be the surest political instinct in the business can account for the mishandling of the Sikh challenge in Punjab. It is a chronicle of mischief made and opportunities lost by both sides, in the run-up to India's general election, due by next January.

India's Sikhs, like Iran's Shias, do not draw a line between religion and politics: the two are one. So the claims the Sikhs have been making on the central government are a peculiar amalgam of narrow religious issues and an assertion of states' rights in general, Punjabi rights in particular, and the rights of Punjabi farmers in very particular. Most of the specific demands, as put forward by the Akali Dal party in negotiations in Delhi, are legitimate and supported by virtually all Punjabis; some are irrelevant or just plain incomprehensible to non-Sikhs; and one is so frivolous and ill-judged that it could prevent agreement on all the others.

The religious demands -- such as a ban on the sale of alcohol and tobacco around the Amritsar temples, and the broadcasting of Sikh prayers -- had been virtually conceded, the home minister told parliament last month. Then the Sikhs came up with a new one: that article 25 of India's constitution, which guarantees unrestricted access to places of worship, should be amended on the unconvincing ground that it blurs the Sikhs' sense of their separateness from Hindus. For the past month Sikhs have been burning copies of article 25. Next week the Akali Dal will take its campaign to the streets in a traditional Indian way by setting up some 20,000 people to "court arrest" for defacing the constitution. The extremists will undoubtedly do their bit for the cause by committing the odd murder.

The agitation about article 25 is a glaring example of how rational men fall into irrational postures when they are squeezed between a rock (Delhi) and a hard place (the Bhindranwale camp). All of the top Akali leaders who are now sitting in jail for burning the constitution opposed this campaign. The go-ahead was given by Sant Longowal, appropriately called in Sikhspeak the "dictator" of the morcha or protest movement.

Sant Longowal, unlike Sant Bhindranwale, does not wear an ammunition belt and revolver, not does he tie his turban in the style of the Sikh warriors. But in his office-bedroom in the Golden Temple complex, only 100 yards from the Bhindranwale fortress, he has been more exposed than other Akalis to the competitive pressures of the wild-eyed ones.

The article 25 campaign is propelling the Akalis along a dangerous line of logic.Elections are held under the constitution. The constitution is unacceptable to Sikhs. Therefore Sikhs must boycott elections. The only election available to boycott at the moment is that to the upper house, whose representatives are chosen by state assemblies. So the Akalis have pulled out of the Punjab race for the Rajya Sabha. Even at the best of opposition times, the Akalis are a negligible force in parliament in Delhi. But if the Sikh party were to carry this campaign into the next election for the Punjab state assembly, the damage to Indian democracy could be great. This is because the Akalis's real motivating force is not religious fundamentalism but a frustrated quest for power. And if the Akalis exclude themselves from the pursuit of power by democratic means, Sikhs will seek it in other ways.

The only thing that can shift the Punjabi pendulum back toward reason is a reasonable offer from the government on the two main issues of substance. These are a reconsideration of earlier allocations of river waters and territory between Punjab and its one-time other half, now the state of Haryana. Punjab was split in 1966 in response to 40 years of campaigning by the Akali Dal for Punjabi Suba, a state for Punjabi-speakers, which meant mainly Sikhs. But this second bisection of Punjab, after the bloody one with Pakistan in 1947, simply generated further grievances. Sikh-majority Punjab and Hindu-majority Haryana are now reaping the whirlwind.

There is something wonderfully, democratically Indian about militants who are ready to go to jail and even to die for the right to bring their cause before a commission or a court. This is essentially what the Akalis, and even the Bhindranwale crazies, are demanding, except in the dispute over Chandigarh, the purpose- built capital of Punjab which is now shared with Haryana. Punjabis want Chandigarh and they want it now; other territorial questions, including the compensation for Haryana, can be settled later by an appropriate tribunal.

Punjab has an ally in its Chandigarh claim: none other than Mrs Gandhi herself, who said on March 16th, "Personally, I am committed to give Chandigarh to Punjab". In fact she agreed to do so 14 years ago as part of a settlement whereby two fertile, Hindu-majority districts of Punjab would be transferred to Haryana. The trouble, then and now, is that these districts are not contiguous to Haryana and that therefore the award amounted to creating an alien island inside Punjab.

A government that truly wanted to end the unrest in Punjab, which has already spread to Haryana in the form of Hindu vengeance attacks on Sikhs, would immediately hand over the shabby, monsoon- stained remains of Le Corbusier's dream city, Chandigarh. It would then appease Congress-controlled Haryana with money for a new capital, plus the promise of a readjustment of state boundaries on linguistic (ie, religious) lines. Unofficial estimates put the cost of a new capital at some $300m-$400m, or about half the admitted (ie, understated) cost of staging the Asiad games in Delhi last year.

Three times in the past 16 months mediators brought Mrs Gandhi's ministers and Akali negotiators to within signing distance of a deal. But three times the deal fell apart because of last-minute government quibbles. Today the substantive difference between the two sides is small but the emotional distance is growing all the time. And so is the divide between Hindus and Sikhs, who have been intertwined for centuries in mixed marriages and mixed religious rites. This polarisation is taking place not only in Punjab but in Haryana, Delhi and wherever else Sikhs are settled in significant numbers. Already Sikhs of the diaspora are talking about returning to Punjab, much as Tamils in Sri Lanka fled back to their ethnic homeland after the communal holocaust last summer.

Peace needs peace movers

Restoring normality to Punjab, in the wake of the communal ugliness of recent months, will require more than an agreement on redividing water and land, though that is a necessary element. Leaders of both Sikh and Hindu communities and of Congress and opposition parties will have to lend their influence to the nascent peace movement, which is trying to mobilise public opinion against the politics of communalism and of violence. Only then will it be possible to isolate the terrorists who are claiming to speak, not only for all Sikhs, but for all Punjab.

This means Akalis having the courage to dissociate themselves from Bhindranwale and his hit squads, rather than claiming, as Sant Longowal does now, that all Punjab's murderers are government agents and that at a word from Akali headquarters the extremists will come to heel. The government is already calling this bluff by demanding an end to violence as part of any package deal. But ending terrorism will plainly require main force, which can only be applied by unintimidated enforcers of the law.

Punjab does not have such defenders today. Nor does it have a government in Delhi prepared to seize the moment to flush the men of violence out of their religious refuges. One such opportunity came and went last year when Punjab's deputy inspector of police was killed in the Golden Temple. The then chief minister of Punjab, from Mrs Gandhi's party, says that he wanted to raid the temple at that time but counter-orders came from Delhi. Last October he was replaced by the governor in a device called "president's rule". The change of administration has brought neither law nor order to Punjab. Some 62 wanted men are still hiding in the Amritsar temple complex, many of them charged with murder.

There are right and wrong reasons for not taking the battle against terrorism on to Sikh holy ground. The tenable one is that it might involve high casualties and embitter the entire Sikh community for a long time. The insupportable calculation is that allowing the Hindu-Sikh conflict to fester a while longer will force more and more Hindus throughout north India to look to their traditional saviour and vote Congress at the next election.

Find the foreign hand

Hindu phobias have been fed by official charges that "anti-national" forces are at work in Punjab and also in Kashmir. For anti-national, read secessionist or pro- Pakistani. Yet even Sant Bhindranwale has held back from defining his elusive notion of Sikh "nationhood" as meaning separation from India. As for Pakistani meddling, the governor of Punjab recently said that he had seen no evidence of a "foreign hand"; he was duly contradicted by the prime minister. A parliamentary question about Pakistani gunrunning revealed that out of 5,600 illicit weapons seized in Punjab, one Sten gun and one revolver showed Pakistani markings.

In Kashmir, the anti-national label has been hung round the neck of the chief minister himself, in spite of his repeated protestations that he is as committed an Indian patriot as India's other ruling Kashmiri, Mrs Gandhi. The only evidence for the government's charge is Dr Farooq Abdullah's alliance of convenience with another Farooq, who leads a small but potentially disruptive Moslem party in Srinagar. Maulvi Farooq's nationalist credentials may not be of the best but every other governing party has felt compelled to deal with him: Mr Rajiv Gandhi, the prime minister's son and heir apparent, wooed him last year; so, longer ago, did the former Janata prime minister, Mr Morarji Desai.

The main impact of the propaganda campaign against Dr Abdullah has been to turn him into a national figure and a rallying point for Moslems throughout India. He is not above playing the besieged Moslem but his main theme has been "I'm an Indian too". He intends to use his new-found strength to stump for the opposition in the general election.

Both sides of the communal confrontation in Punjab are using it to make political capital; the question is who is profiting, apart from Bhindranwale and the sorcerer's apprentices. Many of the Akali demands -- for more rights for India's states, for example -- would find a readier echo elsewhere were they not tied up with the assertiveness of a single religious community, which also happens to be one of India's richest. The opposition parties, which are struggling to put together a united front against Mrs Gandhi, are beginning to find Akali communalism an embarrassment.

Even in Punjab itself, Sikh fundamentalism, which at first brought the Akalis a surge of support, may now have come to seem like a side issue to the Akalis' biggest constituency, the Jat farmers. When some 50,000 of these farmers were camping out on the wide green streets of Chandigarh earlier this month and barricading the governor to demand higher farm prices, they refused even to hear a spokesman for the Akali party. Akali leaders were deeply troubled.

Without the Jat farmers, the Akalis would be a spent political force. But even if the farmers rally round the Sikh flag when the time comes, demographic arithmetic gives the Akalis no chance of coming to power in Punjab on their own. Sikhs constitute only 52% of Punjab's population, and a section of Sikhs, including the present president of India, have traditionally thrown their lot in with the Congress party. The Akalis have run the government in Punjab several times but always in coalition with a Hindu-based party. The question is whether, after all the recent communal bloodletting, it will be possible to revive the Sikh-Hindu political alliance that is the Akalis' only route to power.

The editor of the respected English- language newspaper in Punjab, Tribune, argues that the best way to peace in Punjab lies through an electoral pact between the Akalis and Mrs Gandhi's own Congress party. This might be the least unpalatable solution for both parties, provided both are prepared to swallow a lot of bitterness. Neither party can get the votes to govern alone in Punjab and, so long as the Sikhs remain aggrieved, Punjab may be ungovernable. But first Mrs Gandhi will have to show more generosity and the Akalis more common sense than either has done so far.Coalition-building could turn out to be the key to Indian politics over the next few years. Many Indians are predicting that the likeliest result of the next general election will be a multi-party government of one shape or another. If the Congress party loses its majority, for only the second time in 37 years, it could still stay in power by wooing (or buying) independents or by joining forces with regional parties, such as the one now ruling Tamil Nadu. The less likely coalition would consist of the dozen or more opposition parties, now negotiating their way toward some kind of united anti-Gandhi front.

One lesson of the Punjab troubles is that India needs a strong centre, to adjudicate between the competing demands of its sub-nationalities. But strong leadership should not be confused with the concentration of power in a few dithering hands. Power-sharing at every level may well be the only way to stop the Punjab rot from spreading.

A second lesson from both Punjab and Kashmir is that narrow communal politics are self-defeating. The point is that Indians are not one thing or another: Punjabis are torn between their dual identities as Punjabis and as Hindus or Sikhs, just as the people of Jammu and Kashmir feel themselves to be at once Hindus or Moslems and Jammuites or Kashmiris as well as loyal citizens of India. Any politics that aims, in 1984, to force Indians into ethnic laagers is unworthy of a democracy that is not only the world's biggest but also its most richly diverse.