Narendra Modi’s Punjab Problem
Violent Sikh separatism has been nearly nonexistent for decades, but that won’t stop India’s leader from manufacturing a security situation for an electoral boost.
In March, three months before the assassination of the Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada, the Indian government turned the Sikh-majority Punjab into a police state. Its internet was cut and messaging services restricted, gatherings of more than four people banned in some places, and a state-wide cordon and manhunt launched — all just to find one man, a 30-year-old fellow Sikh agitator called Amritpal Singh.
Over the previous year, Singh had been advocating for a separate homeland for Sikhs in northern India. He toured villages and towns in Punjab, a longstanding focal point of Sikh separatist ambitions, garnering a small following. He also drew the attention of security forces. Several weeks before the manhunt began, he and a group of armed supporters raided a police station in Ajnala, close to the Pakistan border, forcing the release of a close aide who was being held there. Singh then went on the run, moving from village to village, crisscrossing state lines, changing vehicles and guises. The police operation that ensued, with house-to-house raids and roadblocks set up across the nearly 20,000-square-mile state, resulted in the arrest of more than 300 people — including, on April 23, Singh himself.
It marked the intensification of a crackdown on Sikh separatists by Narendra Modi’s government — one that soon went international. Nijjar was killed outside a temple in British Columbia by an unknown assassin, an operation Canada pinned on India. Around the same time, according to an American investigation, an Indian official was directing a plot against another Sikh separatist in New York. Allegations of similar plots in the U.K. have since surfaced, and revelations of other India-backed assassination campaigns elsewhere in the world have emerged.
As the Singh manhunt widened in March, journalists and commentators began asking questions. Was Sikh separatism a valid concern, one deserving of such a far-reaching response? Or was the mass deployment of security forces to Punjab and the Indian government’s intensifying rhetoric around “Khalistan” — the long-imagined Sikh homeland beyond the control of New Delhi — serving other ends?
Despite once causing great tumult in Punjab and rocking the foundations of post-independence India, the Sikh separatist cause had lain dormant for three decades: Militant activity was so infrequent as to barely make headlines. As far as security threats were concerned, the government had spent the past decade far more interested in insurgencies in Jammu and Kashmir and the Maoist-Naxalite rebellion in the east.
The crackdown in Punjab — and the targeting of Sikhs on foreign soil that followed — seemed puzzling. Was Singh really raising an army? Did Nijjar really have the support in India to reinvigorate a long-dead insurgency? Or rather, was Modi, with an eye on the 2024 elections, raising the specter of a national security threat in order to sell the idea that his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), for whom national security has always been top of the agenda, must be reelected lest India break apart? Might he be diverting attention from the many real crises in Punjab, if not India more generally, that the BJP has been unable to resolve?
As the police dragnet widened in March, pro-Khalistan protestors organized actions in London, San Francisco, Brisbane and beyond. Khalistan banners were raised outside Indian embassies; in Punjab, police were forced to divert traffic as hundreds of Singh’s supporters, openly defying government orders, blocked roads. For anyone following the news at the time, it seemed as if their cause had substantial local and global backing — so much so, perhaps, that the government’s warnings of increasing separatist activity in Punjab might be worth listening to.
“Might Modi be diverting attention from the many real crises in Punjab, if not India more generally, that the BJP has been unable to resolve?”
From the air, Punjab appears like a patchwork quilt, its surface portioned into countless square farm fields. To its immediate west is Pakistan; beyond its eastern border, the foothills of the Himalayas begin.
Five centuries ago, as the Mughal Empire was expanding into Hindu lands, Guru Nanak Dev Ji found enlightenment at the Kali Bein rivulet, around 50 miles west of Ludhiana, and there Sikhism was born. Well-versed in the Vedas and fluent in Sanskrit and Persian, Bābā Nānak saw the new religion as a harmonizing influence on, if not a compromise between, the different faiths of northern India. He preached inclusivity and steadfastly opposed the caste hierarchies of Hinduism; at the langar — community meals — he encouraged all peoples, irrespective of caste divisions, to eat together, in the process birthing a core principle and practice of the new faith.
Some two hundred years later, in the dying months of the 18th century, Ranjit Singh, the “Lion of Punjab” and the first maharaja of the Sikh Empire, had captured Mughal Lahore and won Sikhs their own “nation.” But it was short-lived: His death in 1839 precipitated the decline of the empire, and via two Anglo-Sikh Wars in the mid-19th century, the British annexed the territory and brought Sikhs under their rule.
Over time, Sikhism grew to become the world’s fifth-largest religion, with around 26 million followers. Yet Sikhs, the majority of whom live in the towns, villages and farming communities of Punjab, remained a firm minority in India, and came to experience the social and political costs of that status. Out of a series of events in the first half of the 20th century — British duplicitousness, Partition, religious chauvinism, New Delhi’s authoritarianism, economic insecurity — grew support for the idea of an independent Sikh homeland in modern-day India.
The movement had begun in earnest in the years leading up to Partition in 1947. The division of the British colony into India and Pakistan split Punjab in two and sparked communal bloodletting between Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs of an intensity not seen anywhere else in India that year. The western region of Punjab, home to mostly Muslims, would become part of the new nation of Pakistan, while its eastern region, where the majority of Sikhs were concentrated alongside Hindus, would remain in India. “Foot caravans of destitute refugees fleeing the violence stretched for 50 miles and more,” Nisid Hajari wrote in “Midnight’s Furies,” his account of the violence of Partition. Trains carrying refugees moved in both directions across the new India-Pakistan border. “All too often they crossed the border in funereal silence, blood seeping from under their carriage doors.”
“When the midnight hour came, calls for a separate homeland grew in volume.”
As with all communities impacted by Partition, these were years of heightened insecurity for Sikhs. They had been failed already by the British colonial power: First, with the broken promise of fair representation in the Punjab legislative council in the 1910s, when a pledged 33% of seats for Sikhs never materialized, and later with the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, in which hundreds of Sikhs and others in the city of Amritsar, protesting Britain’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies, were gunned down.
Sikh leaders had generally opposed Partition on the grounds that the community would become a subjugated minority. Unable to influence the course of events in the mid-1940s, they then began pushing for a state of their own. There were hints from the incoming national leadership that this might be granted. “The brave Sikhs of Punjab are entitled to special consideration,” Jawaharlal Nehru said in Calcutta a year before Partition. “I see nothing wrong in an area and a set up in the North wherein the Sikhs can experience the glow of freedom.”
Yet the designs for Partition wouldn’t allow for that. Sikhs were a minority at every level, from the town to the state, and administrative energies were instead being directed toward the separation of the far larger Hindu and Muslim communities. When, therefore, the midnight hour came, with Sikhs knowing they would become a minority in a Hindu-majority state under the rule of the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress in faraway New Delhi, calls for a separate homeland grew in volume. Leaders implored Sikhs to think of themselves as not merely a community but a nation with cultural systems distinct enough from others to justify a state of their own. That belief underpinned the budding separatist movement. Khalistan may not have yet been named, but its core ideology was taking shape.
Congress, the first ruling party of independent India, repeatedly refused separatists’ calls. Nehru, asked in 1954 what had become of his pledge to Sikhs, simply replied: “The circumstances have now changed.” But by the 1960s, a movement called the Punjabi Suba that advocated splitting the new Punjab along linguistic lines was growing in influence. In some ways a precursor to the Khalistan movement, albeit non-violent, by 1966 the Punjabi Suba had pressured Congress to partition Punjab a second time: Hindi speakers would predominate in Haryana, in the south, and Punjabi speakers, most of them Sikhs, would be a majority in the north, in what is the present-day Punjab. Smaller parts of the territory went to neighboring Himachal Pradesh.
Many Sikhs, though, felt this concession wasn’t enough. Their new state was still firmly in the orbit of New Delhi. Both Punjab and Haryana were forced to share a capital, Chandigarh, built in the 1940s under Nehru’s orders following the loss of the old state capital, Lahore, to Pakistan. But Chandigarh was a union territory, not a state; directly controlled by New Delhi, Chandigarh ended the dream of an autonomous Punjab.
In the new Punjab, the Shiromani Akali Dal — then India’s only Sikh-centric party and the country’s second oldest after Congress — battled Congress in elections at the state assembly level. It was the Akali Dal that had led the Punjabi Suba movement. Congress — the party of Mohandas Gandhi, Subhas Chandra Bose, Nehru; the party that was, for many, the political embodiment of independent India — may have dominated national politics, but the Sikh party had become a formidable force in Punjab.
“The Akali Dal began to thread together narratives of political and economic disenfranchisement and religious oppression in a way that suggested New Delhi was intent on weakening all aspects of Sikh life.”
By the 1970s, economic problems were eating away at Punjabi society, heralding an era of even sharper hostility toward the central government.
Punjab had been receiving vast amounts of farming subsidies and technologies as part of the so-called Green Revolution, an effort to transform food production and thereby end India’s long-running hunger crisis. Its semi-arid climate meant the region was already a major contributor to national wheat stores, but the Green Revolution powered even greater agricultural output, earning Punjab the moniker of “India’s breadbasket.”
But although overall prosperity grew, the revolution’s gains were “distributed unequally,” wrote the scholar Rajshree Jetly, causing the “pauperization of marginal and poor peasants, who could neither reap the benefits of the land nor find employment in the industrial sector.” Added to that, the intensification of cropping meant that farmers needed to buy more seeds and equipment, spend more on water for irrigation, and hire more labor to work the land and process its output. New Delhi, meanwhile, was unable to sustain its subsidies. Even though Punjab grew richer as a whole on the back of the Green Revolution, small farmers fell into severe debt, unemployment worsened and drug and alcohol abuse spread.
The Akali Dal was able to consolidate support among aggrieved Punjabis by continuing to emphasize their mistreatment at the hands of Congress. It wasn’t an election-winning formula — the party was being weakened by infighting, and Congress, which fielded Sikh candidates in Punjab, was still able to gather enough votes to win a slew of state elections in the early 1970s. But the Akali Dal began to thread together narratives of political and economic disenfranchisement and religious oppression in a way that suggested New Delhi was intent on weakening all aspects of Sikh life. It also began crafting a more coherent, and more rigid, vision for a Punjab that wouldn’t be so beholden to the central government.
Congress saw the Akali Dal as a growing threat not only to the secular precepts it was ostensibly cultivating, but to its political supremacy. By then under the rule of Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, it made repeated efforts to undermine the Sikh party, culminating in a decision in the late 1970s by Gandhi’s inner circle that set the wheels in motion toward disaster.
Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was a young farmer and Sikh preacher who, by his early thirties, had been made leader of the Damdami Taksal — an influential traveling Sikh seminary. Through the late 1970s, he preached abstinence from drugs and alcohol and called for a revival of the traditional Punjabi way of life, one that was being lost to the Green Revolution. Gurharpal Singh, a scholar of Sikhism and Punjabi culture, has written that the rapid modernization of Punjab society in the 1960s and 1970s “ushered in a mass society by dislocating, atomizing and shattering traditional village Punjab.” Bhindranwale was a convincing orator, and those appeals struck a note among young and disaffected, educated but unemployed Sikhs who had felt this shattering in a multitude of ways.
By 1978, Congress had lost power in New Delhi and the Akali Dal controlled the Punjab assembly. Gandhi hoped Bhindranwale’s appeal to orthodox Sikhs and the young could split the Akali Dal vote and strengthen Congress’s position in time for the next elections. Following clashes between Sikh groups in Amritsar, during which more than a dozen people died, Bhindranwale questioned how Sikhs could be killed while a Sikh party held the Punjab assembly. Congress began quietly supporting him.
But Bhindranwale’s militancy gradually became more apparent. In his eyes, Hindus were holding Sikhs down as “slaves in independent India,” and he repeatedly and publicly scorned the religious majority. For a while, this worked for Congress: Hindu voters fearful of a Sikh separatist movement would be more inclined to support a party dominated by Hindus. Yet it was clear Bhindranwale could not be controlled, nor could his growing influence be contained. He fused appeals for Sikh revivalism with calls for greater water rights for Punjabis — a long-runn