Indian governments past and present only have themselves to blame for tensions, renewed by a separatist leader’s murder in Canada, says Karishma Vaswani for Bloomberg Opinion.
desire for Sikh nationhoodKhalistan, as campaigners call this proposed independent homeland, is a crisis of India’s own making. Successive governments have neglected, manipulated and exploited the state of Punjab - traditionally seen as India’s breadbasket - and the Sikhs who inhabit it for their own political and economic gain.
Numbering 23 million, Sikhs make up just under 2 per cent of India’s population but play an outsized role in the economy and socio-cultural life. After India’s independence from Britain in 1947, Punjab and its mostly Sikh farmers helped a food insecure nation take steps toward self-sufficiency. That’s when the insurgency spilled over into other parts of India, mainly the capital New Delhi. Punjab saw a steady stream of violent attacks, thousands of deaths and two horrific moments in Indian history: The Indian army’s storming of the Golden Temple, the holiest of all shrines for Sikhs, and the subsequent assassination, an act of revenge, of then prime minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards.
In India, the desire for a separate nation is much smaller, but even so, of great concern to the authorities who have outlawed the movement and view it as a terrorist threat. Punjab’s economy has also not kept up with Indian growth, and young people are struggling to find well-paying jobs. A lack of role models and viable leaders - both political and spiritual - have contributed to the problems.
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