Punjab needs a vision for all-round development

THE other day, I went to a bookstore to see if there were fresh arrivals. I picked up a few books and was about to leave when a young lady said she wished to have a word with me. I knew her and her family in Delhi very well. She was quite agitated and straightaway asked me what the election of Amritpal Singh and Sarabjeet Singh Khalsa to the Lok Sabha signified for the future of Punjab. I tried to allay her fears, but did not succeed fully. The confrontation in the placid confines of the bookshop shook me up and I tried to push back the thought process just initiated. I came home and received a call from an older cousin, who had retired from the Army at a senior position and was now settled in Punjab. He enquired what was happening in Punjab. I again tried to smooth-talk him out of his anxiety and suggested that he and his wife go for a short holiday. In the course of the next few days, I received a number of calls from relatives, friends and acquaintances from Punjab, asking the same question, half-seriously, half in jest. There were ripples of anxiety below the surface in Punjab which had seen a tsunami of violence for a decade. Was the past going to become the present and future?

That saga of violence had taken years to build and I for one had seen it unfold from the beginning to the end. It had taken years to grow into the spectre it finally became, and contrary to popular perception, the dramatis personae in that evil drama were well-known. The political and social forces moving the pieces on the chessboard were well-known, but like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, we could foresee the future but not intervene, and the tragedy would wind its way to its gory end. That was not too long ago and people have a short memory… are we on course for a ‘Second Coming’? I would not like to say so, but then why is the government quiet? Why are political parties quiet? Why is the media quiet and why is civil society quiet? Where did these two men come from and how did they get to be elected members of Parliament? It is high time to ask these questions and it is high time for the government and political parties to give answers. Political parties today seem to have only one goal — to fight and win elections to Parliament, Assemblies, municipal corporations and panchayats. They only wish to have power at all levels, with no accountability. The government should by now know that people are worried; they should go into the root cause of what has happened to Punjab to explain these election results and even the slap in the face of Kangana Ranaut.

Governments have come and gone in the past over two decades, but not one of them has gone into the causes of what happened in the 1980s and 1990s, and no lessons have been drawn. No government has come up with a comprehensive plan for the education of the youth, their employment, development of infrastructure and industry. This is not to say that no development has taken place in Punjab. The Green Revolution and its aftermath produced the glory days of Punjab and made India self-sufficient in foodgrains. An IIT, an IIM, premier medical institutes and road infrastructure have come up, but it’s a case of too little with much of the hinterland remaining trapped in an outdated agricultural economy and diminishing landholdings, leading to a severe cycle of debt and farmers’ suicide. Other sources of employment, such as the armed forces, have shrunk, leading to mass migration to foreign countries. This has led to simmering resentment among the young and the old which can be exploited by extremist elements. The tendency of politicians to offer false promises, freebies and false data is counterproductive — whom are you trying to fool? Drug proliferation is the order of the day throughout the country, and the countrywide response has been to carry out raids and catch the small fry. No major druglord has been arrested nor any financier.

Mainstream political parties continue to cede space to the extreme right. In the recent Lok Sabha elections, the vote share of the SAD (Shiromani Akali Dal) was 13.4 per cent. The BJP did not fare much better with an 18.5 per cent vote share. The SAD has dropped even below the 18.3 per cent it got in the 2022 Assembly elections. I mention the SAD as it was the party that launched the Punjabi Suba Morcha and is the second oldest political party in India after the Congress. The late Parkash Singh Badal was a five-time CM, a towering personality who was jailed multiple times for his stand on political issues ranging from the Emergency to the SYL canal. However, during the militancy-dominated era of the 1980s and 1990s, he and his party, along with other mainstream parties, chose to remain mute spectators, thereby leaving the field open for the extremists. Furthermore, under pressure from the diktat given by the militants, his party had boycotted the state elections in 1992.

The state Congress and its leadership were absent from the biggest farm protests in recent memory, launched by Punjabi farmers against the policies being framed in Delhi. Through its absence during this agitation in an agrarian state like Punjab, the party committed hara-kiri. This was later validated in the resounding defeat of the Congress in the Assembly elections (subsequently, most of the state leaders migrated to the BJP). Punjabis rejected the established political parties and families and gave a chance to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). The AAP has obviously not made an impact, as can be seen in the paltry number of seats (three out of 13) won in the Lok Sabha elections and the drop in its vote share from 42 per cent (2022 polls) to 26 per cent. The point is that the mainstream parties are losing their votes to the likes of Amritpal, thereby making the political debate shrill and extreme. It’s harking back to the time when the mainstream parties had to boycott the elections and adhere to extremist diktats. This does not bode well for the state and its people.

With the extreme right blowing on the old embers, the security and peace of Punjab and India will be threatened. Conspiracy theories will abound and the peace which has taken decades to establish will flounder, unless the rot is checked. The ‘rot’ stems from the fact that the real issues — unemployment, education, health, security — are avoided. Punjab has long lost its lead position on the development index and now languishes in the bottom half of Indian states on almost all parameters of growth and development. Politicians can play with fire, but at what cost? It is time that the mainstream ups its game and regains lost ground by mobilising people. You can mobilise people if you have a vision for the state as a whole, a vision that encompasses planned development on all fronts for all its citizens.

The author is a member of the Tribune Trust