Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress I Party was delivered a devastating defeat in Tamil Nadu by a regional party the Dravida Munnerta Kazhagam (D.M.K.) party led by its leader M. Karunanidhi. It is more of a debacle the Prime Minister who had visited the State it times to campaign personally. He visited each electoral constituency twice in recent electioneering.
The DMK won 147 seats and Congress scraped through with just 25 out of the total 198 seats in the state assembly. Karunanidhi has avenged his unconstitutional dismissal as the state’s Chief Minister by Mrs. Indira Gandhi during the emergency of 1976.
Gandhi has not won any significant assembly election since he took office after a campaign which was fed by the blood of thousands of innocent Sikhs in Delhi and other places who were massacred by Gandhi’s henchmen in November 1984. He has since then lost in the states of West Bengal, Karnataka, Kerala, And here Pradesh. That all these states are ruled by parties which represent the aspirations of the people in these states is significant.
Karunanidhi had been at the forefront of the agitation launched against the imposition of Hindi language on the Tamil speaking State since the times of Rajiy’s grandfather, India’s first Prime Minister, Jawharlal Nehru. His DMK party has been asserting its distinct identity and trying to distinguish itself from the Hindi speaking mainland. Its victory marks yet another blow to the myth of the India as a nation state.
The non-Hindi speaking states like Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have all elected non Congress I governments who cater to the regional and sub-national aspirations of the people there. That all these are now a part of the National Front the new opposition party has given an additional boost to the anti-Gandhi forces.
In Punjab to the national demands of the Anandpur Sahib resolution were those of more autonomy and for the rights of the Sikhs but the government did not even implement these basic demands of the people in spite of a massive peaceful agitation by the (then) representative Sikh political party, the Akali Dal.
The Sate responded to the natural and legitimate aspirations of the Sikhs by attacking the Golden Temple, as well as retaliating with arbitrary arrests, new laws, applicable only in Punjab, which hold an accused guilty {ill he proves his innocence in a closed court and killings by the police of innocent Sikh youth in staged “encounters” etc.
This exposed the Hindu chauvinistic imperialist as what they ‘were and removed any doubts in the minds of the Sikhs about the nature of the so called democracy in India. Since then the Sikh masses have been demanding the independent state of Khalistan which alone will fulfill the needs of the Sikhs all over the world and where alone will the Sikhs be able to get a “glow of freedom” which the Indian leaders had deceitfully promised them.
The freedom fighters and the silent majority of Sikhs in India which is supporting them have recognized the inevitability of Khalistan. They are fighting with their lives to realize it. In time other Indian states will also rebel against the subjugation by the center and will break away from the stifling bonds of Hindustan.
Article extracted from this publication >> February 3, 1989
