Is Punjab sliding towards chaos? Since the central government dismissed the state government and began running Punjab in May, Sikh terrorists have killed more than 500 people. That is three times as many as they killed in the first three months of this year. Now Mr. Darshan Singh Ragi, the top Sikh priest with authority over temporal matters, has left the Golden Temple and retired to his village home. This leaves the Sikhs’ holiest shrine in the hands of extremists who will accept nothing less than a separate state of “Khalistan”. The shadowy “panthic committee” which runs the separatist movement has announced that it will call a meeting of all Sikhs to appoint a new head priest and depose Mr. Singh. Their move may not work, but if it does Punjab will come a step closer to civil war.
Mr. Rajiv Gandhi, the Prime Minister, imposed direct rule on Punjab because he wanted to give the police a free hand, unhindered by local politicians, to mop up terrorists. The results have not been encouraging. The Delhi- appointed police chief of Punjab, Mr. Julius Ribeiro, had claimed in the spring that there were only about 100 hard- core terrorists left in the state and that one big push would break them. The imposition of direct rule gave Mr. Ribeiro his chance. In the very first month of it, the police killed or captured 404 suspected terrorists. Since then they have been killing two to three alleged terrorists every day, and catching two or three times as many. Despite this the number of terrorist killings and attacks has risen dramatically: up at least fourfold since this time last year.
One reason is that some police tactics have aroused sympathy for the terrorist groups—and stimulated recruits. For the past four years the terrorists have been making a special point of attacking judges, witnesses, informers and families of policemen and politicians (on August 16th Six close relatives of India’s Sikh home minister, Mr. Buta Singh, were murdered). As a result, almost no one is willing to give evidence against the terrorists in what are officially described as “encounters”. The police claim that they do no such thing, But these denials are hard to take seriously in the cases of encounters, increasingly frequent, in which no policeman is killed or injured despite prolonged exchanges of gunfire, and no terrorist is injured, only killed.
Faked encounters have come as a propaganda godsend to the separatists. Yet the real difficulty is not that the government’s policing have taken on certain attributes of a “dirty war”. It is that the government has not joined to its toughness any policy of giving support to the moderate Sikhs who are trying to resist the drift to extremism.
This failure began last year when Mr. Gandhi reneged on certain important promises—notably to give Punjab sole control of the city of Chandigarh—in the accord he signed in 1985 with a moderate leader of the Sikhs. The government has made things worse by its failure this year to back Mr. Darshan Singh. Ever since December 1986, When he became acting high priest of the Akal Takht (the “timeless throne”), Mr. Singh has used his considerable authority to condemn the killing of innocents, to bring all Sikh factions including the terrorists on to a common platform for talks with the central government, and to press the government to open talks with the militants.
In February, Mr. Singh succeeded in getting almost all the Sikh political parties to agree on a programme to satisfy Sikh grievances with the framework of the Indian constitution. In the following weeks several major terrorist leaders gave their support to the high priest. This encouraged the central government, which had been watching Mr. Singh closely, to open indirect talks with him and with some of the militant leaders in April.
By the end of April a four-point peace plan had been drawn up which had the support of all moderate Sikh groups and all but two of the terrorist groups. But in a sudden reversal, Mr. Gandhi’s home minister went to parliament to repudiate the government emissary who had agreed to Mr. Singh’s peace plan. Two weeks later Mr. Gandhi imposed direct rule.
Mr. Singh made a second attempt to get talks started on August 4th, when he held a convention at the Golden Temple of all Sikh groups including the terrorist ones. Opinion had seriously hardened against the idea of a deal with the central government. The high priest was unable to get even the more moderate groups to agree that any autonomy for Punjab should be within the existing Indian federation. A few days later he invited the militants to take over responsibility for looking after the Sikhs and left the Golden Temple.
It was a tactical dare, intended to reassert his authority. But the government in Delhi needs to reflect on it. If Mr. Singh goes for good, there soon may be nobody left in Punjab for Mr. Gandhi to do business with. That vacuum could be even more dangerous than it sounds: A Punjabi Hindu organization calling itself the “national defence force” has already been set up, with the aim of recruiting a 10,000-strong sacrificial squad” to “fight terrorists and protect the lives of innocent people in the state”,
