The Punjab Story: Reissued on the 20th Anniversary of Operation Bluestar

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6th June, 1984: The Indian Army storms the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Called Operation Bluestar, the historic and unprecedented event ended the growing spectre of terrorism perpetrated by the extremist Sikh leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his followers once and for all. But it left in its wake unsolved political questions that continued to threaten Punjab's stability for years to come. How, in a brief span of three years, did India's dynamic frontier State become a national problem? Who was to blame: the Central Government for allowing the crisis to drift despite warnings, or the long- drawn-out Akali agitation, or the notorious gang of militants who transformed a holy shrine into a sanctuary for terrorists?

First published two months after Operation Bluestar, The Punjab Story pieces together the complex Punjab jigsaw through the eyes of some of India's most eminent public figures and journalists. Writing with the passion and conviction of those who were involved with the drama, they present a wide-ranging perspective on the past, present and future of the Punjab tangle, the truth of many of their conclusions having been borne out by time.

TWO decades have passed since the vast upsurge of violence in Punjab - the Sikh fundamentalist terrorist movement for 'Khalistan' was quelled. The comprehensive defeat of this terrorist movement is unique in history, leaving behind no ideological lees, no residual rage, no reservoir of sullen hostility. Again and again, since 1993, Pakistan has sought to revive the movement, and has successfully engineered a handful of random incidents, ordinarily against soft targets, but has failed utterly in touching a sympathetic chord among the people of Punjab, particularly the Jat Sikhs, among whom, at one time, the extremists found a majority of their recruits - as, in fact, did the police and security forces.

Indeed, if any evidence of the Khalistani fervour survives, it is among a handful of lunatic expatriates, entirely divorced from the realities of the ground in Punjab. Even this lunatic fringe has been shedding regularly, as some of its leading oddballs crawl shamefacedly back into the country to 'rejoin the mainstream. Others continue to rant ineffectually in their safe havens in Pakistan, or in their adopted countries abroad, increasingly discredited among those who lent them some credence in the past.

Punjab's recovery from the years of violence has, in many ways, been miraculous. The latter half of the 1990s saw an unprecedented cultural resurgence, one that impacted, through a new range of mass media and television channels, on the entire country.