The Rediff Special

With the lessons of terrorism being fast unlearnt, peace could get broken any day and in any way

And yet, in saying and doing all this, Beant Singh was being little more than politically correct. They were not enough to reconstruct Punjab with. For instance, in Barnala's government, which fell because he had authorised Operation Black Thunder, only terrorists with proven murder charges were jailed. Those who could be corrected were sent to correction homes. And the rest who were innocent were sent back home.

Beant Singh's government, however, followed a policy of indiscriminate killing. Many, many innocents who would have been alive if the police had shown even a little more prudence, and, in a couple of cases, just plain honesty, were liquidated and thrown up as terrorists.

''I concede that in a terrorism situation, there will be human rights violations," says Dang. "Mistakes can be made. Towards the end, while people did not come out to mourn the death of a terrorist, they did protest the killing of an innocent. In two or three cases I know, the respective district SSPs immediately conceded their mistakes, where there were, and announced the same amount of compensation to the family of the deceased as given to the family of a victim of terrorism, and the people were satisfied."

"But how," continues Dang, "do you expect people to keep quiet when some police officers murdered innocents either because they had taken money from one or two parties involved in a village rivalry over land, over property, or, say, over control of a well-endowed gurdwara, or because they wish to boost figures in messed-up encounters with terrorists? The result is always litigation against the Punjab Police. This too is excessive but I am not surprised at all. I told Beant Singh again and again to be generous with compensation and to address the issue of the killing of innocents more fairly, but it came to nothing."

There were hopes from Beant Singh's successors Harcharan Singh Brar. "But he was totally ineffective," says Dang. 'Rajinder Kaul Bhattal is strong-minded but she became chief minister alittle too late to make an impression." Her problem seems also to be that she cannot own the pace without owning, too, the process of getting it. "And that, as everyone knows, is problematic," says Pramod Kumar, a Chandigarh sociologist.

The result, then, is an election campaign that has refused to articulate the real issues. 'No one seems even to be thinking of reconstruction," says Gill. "What is being offered are palliatives like octroi abolishment and free water and power. In the process, the long-term perspective -- that the Sikh and the Punjabi is very forward-looking, and wishes to step into the next century with a lot of elan -- is being lost sight of."

Another thing that has got obscured is the matter of Sikh hurt. And, the new bright lights of Chandigarh or of Amritsar or Ludhiana or even of smallish Patiala cannot blind this. Beant Singh's bombers from the Babbar Khalsa International, for instance, are 'spiritually' linked to the Akhand Kirtini Jathas who consider their only mission to be the protection of the Sikh religion and its shrines.

In the early years, boys from these Jathas chased Jarmail Singh Bhindranwale from the offices of the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandak Committee because they perceived him to be bringing disrepute to their faith. Bhindranwale fled in terror to the main Golden Temple complex.

After Operational Bluestar, however, these same boys picked up guns in large numbers. The only temple in the world they called their own had been raided and desecrated, and they felt their faith to be endangered.

The more sensitive police officers had convinced Beant Singh to invite all the groups in India and outside for talks and to get it across to them that in the war in Punjab, there were no winners or losers. The Akalis were also to be made a party in this reconciliation process, to pre-empt any future recrimination, but Beant Singh was assassinated before. He was the first major victim of 'revenge terrorism'.

And revenge terrorism hasn't really ended. Many of those boys who fled abroad, carrying the stigma of the defeat of the older generation of terrorists with them, have returned and bought small businesses in such places as Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Amritsar, Ferozepur, Saharanpur and Jaipur. They are waiting to strike. "The type of breakthrough which should have been made with terrorism has not come about," admits Gill. "I have a feeling that its managers settled abroad are waiting and watching the situation."

There is, then, a fragil peace prevailing in Punjab now. With political parties refusing to grapple with the real issues, and the lessons of terrorism being fast unlearnt, that peace could get broken any day and in any way.