Word: haryana
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Resistance to Sikh militancy from Hindus in the Punjab and the neighboring state of Haryana has raised the latest violence to alarming levels. Within the past two months, at least 88 people have died and almost 250 have been wounded in frenzied clashes. In one instance, Sikh extremists threw a grenade into a Hindu religious festival in Amritsar. Three people were killed, 51 injured. The Hindus quickly became an outraged mob, charging the police and accusing them of favoring the Sikhs. Unable to contain the crowd with their long bamboo poles, police opened fire with tear gas and finally...
...politically subservient to the Hindu majority. Soon they began agitating for their own state. In 1966 they were given Punjab by the federal government. Although that state has India's richest, most fertile land, the Sikhs still felt their portion was too small compared with that of neighboring Haryana, the state created at the same time for the Hindus. Therefore, the Akali Dal Party, the political arm of the Sikhs, began an insistent drumbeat of peaceful protest. In 1973 the Akalis passed a resolution setting out various religious and political demands, among them that Punjab's capital, Chandigarh...
...February Hindus in Haryana staged then-most violent assaults yet. A mob of 5,000 quickly grew to 8,000, attacking however many Sikhs they could find. In one instance half a dozen Sikh prisoners were held immobile and their beards and hair shorn as Hindus hooted and yelled. "There goes your hair power," cried out one Hindu demonstration leader, referring to the Sikh belief that spiritual power derives from long hair. Their heads shaved to the scalp, faces no longer covered with luxuriant beards, Sikhs lay in the street, blasphemed, humiliated and scorned. Last week, in an atmosphere...
...violence has shattered centuries of friendship between Sikhs and Hindus, and it is spreading. Three bombs have already exploded in Delhi, and last week, in Punjab's neighboring state of Haryana, Hindu mobs began storming Sikh-owned shops. With neither side giving way, tensions seem sure to mount. In the ominous words of senior Akali Leader Prakash Singh Badal, "The central government has already taken the Punjab problem to the point of no return...