Your Content Goes Here
Article extracted from this publication >>
This is the stock question that India’s diplomatic corps, India’s politicians and camp followers are especially inclined and trained to ask.
Yes, Khalistan is viable, as much as any other country is economically viable. No single country, under any government, is or can be self-sufficient in every respect in the world today. India’s food shortages are a matter of notoriety for the world administrations. Is India itself viable, economically, today when half of its annual budget is earmarked for the cost of food imports it needs as fodder for its teeming 500 millions, who increase by 20 million and more each year ?
Take the richer nations. Even the U.S.A. has now to look to Canada for natural gas, electricity and fresh water. Oil and gas shortages in U.S.A. are forcing rationing of fuel, even for its airlines. A little earlier meat, especially beef, shortages in U.S.A. and Canada were causing a scare, and feed grains were in short supply in both countries. The energy crises caused by the short supply of Arab oil is changing the economy of the globe itself in 1974. Who is above economic interdependence in the World in the 20th Century?
India is no more viable itself than Khalistan or Pakistan, in economic terms. India’s debt owing to the U.S.A., even though payable in rupees, runs into almost 4 billion dollars, which India can never seriously hope to retire, particularly the way Indian economics are lagging currently. And the U.S.A. has just decided to write off almost 2.2 billion dollars, equal to 15 percent of total currency of India, to assist India’s future five-year economic plans. Possibly the remaining one billion dollars could be used for developing Khalistan – the final citadel of freedom and democracy in south East Asia.
India is in grim shape economically, admits a government report!. While in the corresponding period of eight months in 1973 India had a trade balance surplus of some two billion dollars, in the same period ending March 31st, 1974, it shows a deficit of one hundred million dollars. Its imports have increased 45 percent and have swallowed up the 20 percent increase in exports. This trade imbalance in India’s income will continue, in view of the general world economy.
A false sense of “abundance” is being concocted in the U.P. state in preparation for the forthcoming provincial election in that state by cutting off power supply from neighboring states like the Punjab, and switching it to U.P. The ruling Congress party has also made an alliance with the Communists in UP to fight the forthcoming election there.
Khalistan, given a chance, may in fact have a better prospect of economic survival and success than India ever will. The population problems of India will not be the problems of Khalistan. Khalistan will be responsible only for its own people. The per capita ratio of population is higher in other parts of India than in Punjab. The efficiency of a smaller administrative unit, like Khalistan, is an added asset.
- Even the small, left-over, Indian Punjab today produces 85 percent of the food supply of India. It took the farmers of the Punjab, during the current decade, to bring about the “green revolution” in the country. Three crops a year, the most fertile soil in the world, ‘drenched both by history and the sun on 32-30 parallel north latitude, and the perennial broad rivers for irrigation of this historical plain, have combined to assure the economic success for this area. Not long ago, the American colonists were particularly aware of the tobacco and cotton growing potential of Virginia and other southern states. These states were assets for the American settlers who fought their way to freedom from Britain and are now the proud nation of the United States of America. Why not Sikhs, The Punjab and Khalistan?
- The last Sikh Kingdom, financially, was a highly successful government. The annual revenue of Sarkar Khalsa, around the year 1838-39 was rupees 2,88,89,032. Of this income, the receipts derived from land revenue, from all four provinces of the Sikh Kingdom, Lahore, Multan, Kashmir and Peshawar, amounted to rupees!,75,57,741 annually. Against this, the annual expenditures were rupees 1,41,09,300 inclusive of the sum of rupees 1,07,39,000, as the cost of the maintenance of the Khalsa army totaling 92,200 men, including the salaries of many English and French officers, uniforms, supplies, transportation and magazines. The Sikh government thus had a net annual surplus or saving of almost 1½ crores of rupees.
Notwithstanding accusations of corruption, scandal and mismanagement against the Akali (Sikh) cabinets of the present mini Punjab in India, which are not peculiar to this region alone but are part of the total economic panic and insecurity of the whole country, and of the administrative incompetence of other Indian
_________________________________________________________________________________________
- “The Vancouver Province”, page 2, February 26th, 1974.
