By Amarjit Singh Buttar
* The Indian government has at last acknowledged that violence in Punjab is out of control… Mr. Gandhi now has to show how he proposed to bring peace to Punjab. A correspondent in Delhi in the Economist, N.Y.
* Re imposition of Central rule in Punjab is worse blow yet to Gandhi’s peace bid.
Wall Street Journal Reporter
* The dismissal of the beleaguered Punjab State government marks the worse set back yet to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s efforts to end the region’s long standing ethnic conflicts through mediation and democratic elections rather than through confrontation. The decision signals the collapse of moderate Sikh politics in the strategic north Indian state. Mr. Matt Miller in Wall Street Journal
* In telling V.P. Singh to go, not only has Gandhi lost a valuable colleague, but for worse he has further damaged his reputation as a Prime Minister. Karon Thapar in Sunday Telegraph,
* Glow fading from Rajiv Gandhi’s halo Indian Prime Minister’s Congress Party loses ground. Miller in Wall Street Journal
* Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi saw the foreign hand behind just about anything that went wrong with the country. She once blamed the C.I.A. for the absence of an expected monsoon.
India again blames the “Foreign Hand”. Gandhi revives mothers’ anti-Western rhetoric. Matt Miller in Wall Street Journal
*The constitution of India has enough provisions to make the President a dictator. Prof, Alan Gledhill, British Expert
* For the past two years Punjab’s agriculture has been suffering from an acute crisis of plenty. There was too much of food grains chasing too few buyers and the stocks slowly withered away in sun and rain. R.C. Agarwal ILA.S. (Retired)
* Today the alienation of the Sikhs in near complete. Issues like Chandigarh and river waters are peripheral to their Central problem, which is that the Sikhs want their “izzat” restored. All else is secondary. This is the message of smoking gun in Punjab. Lieut, Col. J.S. Bindra
* Internally, the country is divided as before by religious, caste, economic and communal conflicts. Separation is not a remote threat but a present and growing one. Public trust in the government is perhaps at its nadir. A.S. Abraham, Times of India.
Article extracted from this publication >> June 5, 1987
