The Punjab Paradox

...In a sense, Rajiv's task will be more formidable than his grandfather's, for India has been traumatized by 429 racial or religious riots in 1984...

...The Sikhs' material advancement began inauspiciously in 1947...

...Sikh terrorists stopped buses on the Grand Trunk—an important highway—lined up passengers, demanded to know their religion, and killed Hindus and members of the Nirankari group, a dissident Sikh sect...

...Most observers believe Rajiv Gandhi will prevail—temporarily, at any rate...

...Under the leadership of a disgraced general of the Indian Army, the insurgents brought automatic weapons inside the Temple...

...The outlook for the longer run is more tentative...

...Ironically, the Sikhs of the Punjab, the religious minority whose industry was chiefly responsible for ending India's chronic starvation, also produced the bodyguards who shot her...

...and dams had collapsed, Indians and Pakistanis were fighting over the use of the Indus River, and millions of refugees swept back and forth upon the ruins of the economy...

...The government's support of the " Sikh ethic," a local version of Max Weber's famous Protestant Ethic, helped the Punjab escape its dreary cycle of floods and droughts...

...Even its separatist advocates are simply engaged in a serpentine game whose point is not to dissolve the union but to increase their share of the national power—or in too many cases, to fill their purses...

...The zealots declared a holy war on New Delhi in 1982...

...During the years 1966-69 they planted new brands of high-yielding wheat in 70 per cent of their fields...

...Much as the country as a whole is divided by religious, caste, class, linguistic, and ethnic disparities, so too are its states...

...Myths of injustice gathered force regardless of fact...

...Conscientiously, the Sikh diaspora sent back remittances that provided a pool of local capital...

...India's new satellite will make such information still more widely available...

...But Sikh nationalism refused to die...

...In this atmosphere she was gunned down...

...Harvests remained relatively stagnant in Pakistan but began to improve in the Indian Punjab...

...Punjabi Sikh peasants grew two thirds more wheat per acre in 1984 than the agrobusinessmen of Midwestern America...

...Known for 400 years as "the land of agitations...

...In fact, the laborers of poorer areas flocked to the Punjab until the Army sealed it off this past June in the wake of the trouble at the Golden Temple, the Sikhs' holy shrine...

...Indeed, thePunjabi experience contradicts an important belief, quite prevalent in the West, about the relation of politics to economic development...

...The dream of Khalistan—envisioned as a thin sliver of territory stretching from the Punjab to Bombay—can never be a reality, because social hatreds, clashing economic interests and religious minorities would split it apart...

...With financing from the World Bank, New Delhi revitalized colonial-era irrigation systems...

...In spite of Mrs...

...Thanks to prosperity, parents have ceased to feel the need to beget large numbers of children: Helped by family-planning campaigns, the Sikhs slashed the state's rate of population growth from 2 per cent a year in 1970 to 1 per centin 1984...

...A system of waterworks started to emerge in 1960, particularly on the eastern side of the border...

...Having been coached and financed at the end of the 1970s by Mrs...

...Gandhi refused to entertain even minor, symbolic concessions, prompting Bhindranwale to step up the violence in early 1984...

...The untouchables feared that autonomy would reinvigorate the caste system: Sikh nationalists crave a return to tradition, and unscrupulous "saints" have identified its erosion with the recent explosion of upward mobility...

...Back in 1947, in the last days of the British raj, the state's Akali Dal party demanded the creation of an independent Sikh nation...

...They interlock the subcontinent's various parts, so that any real attempt to break up the relationship—say, by creating a Sikh nation called "Khalistan" —would founder...

...To be sure, such inevitable dependence on the military could trigger a coup d'etat, or at minimum heighten tensions between Sikh and Hindu soldiers, but the risk will have to be borne...

...Led by the Sikhs—52 per cent of the state's population—Punjabis sent nine tenths of their output to the rest of India in 1983 and reinvested their earnings at the remarkably high rate of 35 per cent annually...

...Consumer industries and little machine shops proliferate in the city, and in 1983 the country's first plant to manufacture silicon chips opened there...

...Only this message, reinforced where necessary by military power, will let India preserve its freedoms and build on its economic accomplishments...

...Anarchy forced the President of India, Zail Singh, a Sikh, to dismiss the provincial government in October 1983...

...Gandhi's socialist ideology, it did not collectivize the land and instead aided private farmers, providing tube wells, roads, electrification, schools, clinics, and birth control...

...Finally, on June 6, Mrs...

...Unrest spilled over into trivial matters, too: Sikhs compose an astonishing 50 per cent of India's Olympic teams, for example, and complained that Olympic finances were being neglected...

...Many lower-caste Sikhs backed the Congress-I (for Indira) Party, so that contrary to the hopes of their upper-caste coreligionists, who tend to support the Akali Dal, it governed the state until 1984...

...Gandhi's Finance Minister lifted controls on the cost of food sold in the cities, offered a guaranteed minimum profit to Sikh farmers, and made available low-interest funds to assist them in purchasing fertilizer and seeds...

...Twenty thousand credit unions, in a state of 17 million, financed the expansion of the service sector and of small, labor-intensive factories...

...Full employment has been realized, too, with the coming of mini-tractors, threshers and a new system of crop rotation...

...Gandhi's late younger son, Sanjay, who saw him as an instrument for splitting the Akali Dal, the Sant effectively pushed the party to more and more extreme positions...

...On the other hand, 16 per cent of the officer corps and 15 per cent of the national civil service consist of Sikhs...

...Reversing the urban bias of national policy, Mrs...

...It was the larger Sikh landowners who took the lead...

...Sikh particularists continued to nurse their grievances...

...It did not prevail, and India's constitution did not even recognize the separateness of the Sikh religion, lumping it with Hinduism...

...First, Mrs...

...Yet by 1960 several factors converged to create a renaissance...

...These, in turn, gave the landless, particularly the untouchables, a chance to move to urban districts, notably Chandigarh, the joint capital of the Punjab and the neighboring state of Haryana...

...Meanwhile, after nine years of negotiation the World Bank persuaded Pakistan and India that joint exploitation of the Indus would benefit both countries...

...Encouraged by private and government loans that offered a chance of profit, agricultural extension officers and price guarantees, Sikh peasants experimented with rice and other crops that were entirely unfamiliar to them...

...Eventually, though, tenant farmers and even landless laborers joined in this process that included self betterment...

...Sikh leaders burned copies of the constitution, and terrorists killed Congress-I politicians, Sikhs opposed to violence and innocent bystanders...

...Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the most violent and charismatic Sikh leader, swore that he would "slaughter all Hindus in the Punjab...

...Nehru was appalled when a mere 23 broke out in one of the years he held office...

...The consequent curbing of the central government's bureaucratic meddling is certain to neutralize, if not altogether eliminate, demands for regional independence...

...there is no Mussulman...

...Our food production has kept up with the population...

...Thereafter, the Prime Minister basically ignored the religious hatred resulting from the attack, and made no serious attempt to placate the Sikhs or to resolve the Punjab's problems...

...At the same time, the coming of affluence under the country's democratic system increased the well-being and political power of the Punjab's most disadvantaged people, the untouchables, a caste that has survived in Sikhism despite the religion's egalitarian ideals...

...tucked away in a volatile triangle formed by Pakistan, Kashmir and the Himalayas...

...we are all brothers...

...First, lacking opportunities at home, Sikh men fled "abroad"—to commerce in Bombay, to transportation in New Delhi, to the Indian Army (where the percentage of Sikhs is seven times higher than in the population as a whole), and to California and New York City (they maintain a temple in the Borough of Queens...

...Mrs...

...By now average earnings are three times higher in the Punjab than in the rest of the country's agricultural regions...

...Unhappily, the new freedom contributed to the Punjab's current crisis...

...proclaimed one of this group to Richard Critchfield in 1982...

...Eventually, the Sikhs and the other discontented peoples of India must settle for major concessions on taxation, local management of development spending and symbolic gestures—for instance, recognition of the separate-ness of the Sikh religion...

...In a misguided attempt to spread wealth more equally, socialist planners tried to divert investment from the Punjab and even to force local investors to place their money outside the state...

...Indira Gandhi's legacy is a sad one: communal enmity, the weakening of parliamentary democracy, and a steady erosion of capable leadership within her own party...

...Notwithstanding the 80 per cent illiteracy rate of Punjabi Sikhs and Hindus in 1947, they eventually took part in elections and benefited from the protections of secular Indian law...

...A series of late-19th-century British-built canals William McCord, a professor of sociology, is spending this academic year at the National University of Singapore...

...SUCCESS TAKES ITS TOLL The Punjab Paradox BY WILLIAM MCCORD Bombay "We have been able to prevent people from dying" of hunger, Indira Gandhi said in the last interview she gave before her assassination...

...Life expectancy and adult literacy have doubled in the last two decades...

...Together they preached, "There is no Hindu...

...The dangers to India's freedoms, to its fragile if increasing prosperity and to its unity are obvious...

...Singh's turning out his own Congress-I Party, however, merely resulted in the Akali Dal bemoaning his unwillingness to act more quickly...

...We're free...

...full of nomads when the rains failed...

...Soon the country was faced with a full-blown insurgency in its agricultural heartland and showpiece...

...By the 1980s, militant Sikhs were planting bombs, sabotaging railroad trains, and using motorcycles to make hit-and-run attacks on Congress-I and government officials...

...The splintered opposition, especially the fanatical, corrupt Hindu groups vulnerable to bribes and offers of power, will find it very hard to forge a national union...

...He and other men of blood hid in the Golden Temple at Amritsar, a traditional sanctuary in addition to being the faith's holiest structure...

...As the wealth of this historically unstable region boomed, the dangers of anarchy steadily mounted, precisely because all groups were enriched...

...During the communal riots of that era, Sikh bandits sided with Hindus, sabotaging trains and murdering Moslem refugees...

...Mrs...

...Gandhi attempted to crush the monster she had helped create...

...Today's typical harijan owns a home, bicycles to work, earns cash wages, drinks illegal whiskey, watches television, and has escaped the worst humiliations of the past...

...India's leaders know this...

...Nonetheless, several underlying elements of strength—and of weakness—suggest that the country and its liberties will survive further "dangerous decades...

...Education was expanded on all levels . Popular television programs directed at peasants spread knowledge of farming techniques, markets and prices to the remotest villages...

...In 1966, against his deepest inclinations, Jawaharlal Nehru bowed to the Akali Dal and divided the state into a new, Punjabi-speaking, predominantly Sikh Punjab and Hindi-speaking Haryana, with a Hindu majority...

...Long recognized for diligence, willingness to innovate, and receptivity to science, the Sikhs then eagerly adopted the weapons of the Green Revolution: new kinds of seeds (such as the "dwarfs" originally developed in Mexico and the Philippines), modern irrigation methods and chemical fertilizers...

...It boasts more schools, more health facilities, more banks, more tractors, and more television sets per capita than any other Indian state...

...Outside, they clashed with Sikhs who adhered to the Congress-I , while some Sikh holy men j oined Hindus in days of mourning...

...Rajiv Gandhi, who follows his mother as Prime Minister, must do what Nehru did: defeat the forces of revenge by promoting reason and tolerance...

...Gandhi's death has stimulated a new political competition in New Delhi that ought to reduce the over-concentration of power she fostered and rectify distorted balances among the states...

...The region reaped the benefit not only of a science-based transformation of agriculture but also of marked industrialization in the towns...

...Between 1960-80, the area's production of both crops went up four times, while the yields of sugarcane and cotton doubled...

...The typical Punjabi consumed 3,000 calories a day in 1982—a 50 per cent improvement on the diet of Indian peasants elsewhere...

...victimized by partition—the Punjab did not seem at all likely to nurture blossoms in the dust...

...Rightly or wrongly, they believed that they had contributed far more to the country than the government acknowledged in making appropriations, investments and appointments...

...The roots of Sikh discontent are still more ironic: Enterprise made them prosperous, prosperity lessened distinctions among castes and classes, and the trend toward equality generated fanatical opposition to change by those whose status was thus threatened...

...Troops were sent in to clean the fanatics out of the Golden Temple...

...To the consternation of the Sikhs, the two shared a common capital, Chandigarh...

...There had not been a major famine in a decade, she continued, proudly pointing to what she looked upon as her major accomplishment...

...At this stage Bhindranwale, backed by wealthy students, took the spotlight away from the more moderate Sikh leaders...

...The real nature of New Delhi's discrimination toward Sikhs was far more complicated...

...Soon it emerged as India's development model...

...This Sikh-dominated domain, "India's shining example," has provided the nation's margin of hope...

...In the 1970s, as prosperity started to divide the Sikhs, it also began to estrange them from their fellow Indians...

...They killed about a thousand people, including the extremist chieftains...

...Although they constituted only 2.5 per cent of India's farmers, they contributed 25 per cent of its wheat and 45 per cent of its rice reserves...

...Five hundred years ago, Guru Nanak chose a Moslem musician, Mardana, and a Hindu peasant, Bala, to travel the countryside with him as he created a new faith...

...devoid of natural resources...

...India's government played an important role in promoting this exceptional economic and social advance, partly through what it did and partly through what it did not do...

...At times, this will require resorting to force—which means calling in the Army, though, not the police, with their growing reputation as abettors of violence...

...Its 33 demands now included recognition of Sikhism as a separate religion and Amritsar as a holy city, the extension of the Punjab's boundaries, greater rights over shared rivers, a larger part of the nation's development funds, regional control of taxation, and political decentralization...

...Third, although India is disunited, oddly enough that disunity itself limits the possibilities of geographical fragmentation...

...Battles among the police, adherents of the Akali Dal, and Hindu and Sikh supporters of Congress-I exploded throughout the state...

...In fact, what India needs today is a return to the traditions of the first Sikh...

...It was truly a great achievement, nonetheless...

...Small-scale industries flourished...

...Second, now that India is a significant industrial power it has a network of mutually dependent factories and industries, transportation and communications facilities, and food suppliers...

...Gandhi paid the ultimate penalty for her one great achievement...

...This, combined with her unwillingness to offer the slightest conciliatory gesture, drove moderate Sikhs to resistance as well...

...The tragedy is that the Punjab's economic miracle did not generate long-term political stability and may actually have undermined it...

...The Punjab, India's breadbasket, cannot afford a political divorce from its markets, nor could any conceivable government in New Delhi allow such a development...

...Farm income rose twofold and agricultural investment sixfold...

...The Prime Minister responded by giving the Army wide-ranging powers of arrest and seizure, imposing censorship and curfews, and using the preventive detention laws to arrest Sikhs...

...She also appealed to Hindu communalism, thereby exacerbating Sikh fears of domination by others...

...Younger rich Sikhs have actually joined more radical political formations holding out the heady prospect of a new nation...