The Rediff Special

Are the happy images of families tucking into pizzas in delicatessens in Amritsar mirages?

Elsewhere in Punjab, electioneering hadn't really begun. But when it does, it promises to be short and bitter, and possibly bloody. The Punjab Police ran all opposition to ground in the last elections to make Beant Singh -- later human-bombed by the Babbar Khalsa -- victorious. Now, being unnerved by a series of adverse Supreme Court judgments in the past years, it is unlikely to intervene in the same manner. This would be to the Akalis's advantage.

And yet, both the Congress and the Akali Dal have much to answer. The outgoing Congress government is widely acknowledged to be corrupt. ''Eleven Congress ministers were produced before Punjab's Lok Pal," says Captain Kawaljeet Singh, the general-secretary of the Akali Dal. "Then abruptly, the Lok Pal was wound up. Why? Then again, a farmer of Punjab sells wheat to the government at Rs 380 per quintal. But for some months now, he had had to buy it back at Rs 900 per quintal. Why must he? Who is responsible for this? Can anyone accept this?"

Then, there are questions of Congress encouragement to terrorism. "For only 20 months out of 13 years of terrorism, the state was ruled by the Akalis, by Barnalasaheb," says Tandon, the chief of the BJP's Punjab unit. 'For the remaining years, Punjab was ruled by the Congress party either directly from the Centre or from the state. So, who is to blame for the rise of terrorism in the state?"

There are as many queries about the Akalis. 'Even today, Badal has not condemned terrorism," says Satpal Dang, the forthright, Amritsar-based Communist Party of India leader. 'Why hasn't he? Why hasn't he said that the terrorists were wrong to take up guns? Also, I find it intriguing that the Akali and BJP politicians should now be concerned about the wheat price hike. Why not before? Why not before the Centre decided to import wheat? Is it because imports have affected the big traders supporting the BJP who hoarded wheat in the first place and the large landlords who back the Akali Dal? Isn't that why?"

There are still bigger questions, however, which neither the Congress nor the Akali Dal wish to confront, but which nevertheless remain significant regardless of who comes to power. Has peace finally come to Punjab? Or is this now a lull phase before a second round of a newer and deadlier kind of terrorism? Are the happy images of teenagers at Chandigarh's late-closing ice-cream parlours or of families tucking into pizzas in delicatessens in Amritsar's main boulevard mirages? Is the peace there to stay?

"It is," says Satpal Dang. "It has not been there for five years but more like three or four. But the fear has gone totally. The only qualification is that the way it was brought about has left a lot of bitterness. The earlier view was to make a deal with the terrorists and this was wrong. Then, Beant Singh fought it as a law and order problem without tackling the political issues which caused it. We continue to believe that terrorism cannot have come without the support of a section of the people."

K P S Gill, the former Punjab Police chief, will not admit as much. But he is clearly uneasy. 'My feeling is that we are quickly unlearning the lessons of terrorism in Punjab," he says. 'There is a strong need for a continued condemnation of terrorism which completely destroyed the political ethos of Punjab. Beant Singh voiced it but no one after him. This only indicates that whatever is the political brains-trust of the different political parties, it is more interested in immediate political gains than in the long-term solution of the real problems of the people."

What could these be? Gill is vague. And he is not alone. Punjab's politicians, political scientists, sociologists and agro-economists are all fumbling for answers. The key to it is to figure out what started off terrorism, and there are few convincing explanations. Even without having any real clues, it would have helped if Beant Singh had begun a reconstruction of Punjab almost as soon as his government had started to overcome terrorism in the winter of 1992. But Gill reckons that this could have been beyond Beant Singh's capacity.

"Beant Singh had a lot of rustic common sense," says Gill, "But he couldn't conceive of a reconstruction model." He did do things. He wooed rural Punjab, even though towns are Congress strongholds, held panchayat, municipal and zilla parishad elections, got central loans to Punjab written off and managed a significant increase in support prices for wheat and paddy.

Then, he abolished octroi and made such townships as Anandpur Sahib, Talwandi Sahib and Fatehgarh Sahib liquor-free. Chandigarh and the Punjabi-speaking areas of Abohor and Fazilka, he said, were Punjab's and refused to transfer them to Haryana. And, on the sharing of river waters among Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan, he took the Akali line that the Eradi Tribunal had considered the water-flows of the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej but not those of either the Yamuna or the Ghaggar.