Word: khalistan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...grisly attacks, which left a total of 72 dead, were India's worst acts of political violence since Sikh extremists launched a movement five years ago to gain an independent homeland in Punjab, which has a Sikh majority. The assaults are believed to have been carried out by the Khalistan Commando Force, a militant Sikh organization...
...home in Pune, some 80 miles from Bombay, a motorcycle and a scooter roared up on either side of his car. Each two-wheeled vehicle carried a pair of armed youths. One of them sprayed the car with gunfire, killing the general and wounding his wife. The Khalistan Commando Force, a Sikh terrorist group, promptly took responsibility...
...Punjab over the past few months. Indeed, the final go-ahead was given by Punjab's chief minister, Surjit Singh Barnala, who was compelled to move against the extremists after they issued a call for Sikhs to take up arms against New Delhi and declare an independent Sikh nation, Khalistan...
...past three years, that struggle has focused on Punjab, a northwestern state in which the Sikhs, a relatively prosperous 2% minority in greater India, have a slight majority. Tensions came to a head last June after armed Sikh radicals, many of them demanding an independent state to be called Khalistan, barricaded themselves in the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhdom's holiest shrine. After a week-long standoff between the rebels and the government, the Indian army stormed the temple, at a cost of some 600 lives...
...notion of a "Khalistan," a separate Sikh state, remains an unworkable goal; the Sikhs--who represent only 2 percent of the Indian population--could never survive as an independent nation. Too many economic, territorial and population factors run against the murmurs of creating a separate state. Only 40 percent of the Sikhs live in Punjab; the rest are scattered around other parts of the country. To implement the establishment of a separate and solely Sikh nation would only result in massive and traumatizing migrations of non-Sikhs out of Punjab (almost half of the present population there) and of Sikhs...