Word: punjab
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Hope glimmered faintly last week that the often bloody problem of autonomy- seeking Sikhs in Punjab, an Indian state on the border with Pakistan, may finally be easing a bit. Nearly ten months after the Indian army stormed the sacred Golden Temple in Amritsar, the central shrine of the 15 million Sikhs, India's Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi announced the release of eight prominent Sikh leaders taken into custody at the time of the raid, in which 600 were killed on both sides. Those freed included Sant Harchand Singh Longowal, president of the Akali Dal, the Sikh political party. Longowal...
...capturing four-fifths of the seats in the lower house of parliament. Last week he moved quickly to replace some veteran ministers and administrators with a group of young technocrats and prepared to tackle such problems as demands by Sikhs for greater autonomy in the state of Punjab. The Prime Minister was in a relaxed mood as he discussed his plans with TIME New Delhi Bureau Chief Dean Brelis. Excerpts from the interview...
...democratic, nonaligned policies. Rajiv then confidently called parliamentary elections for Dec. 24. One opposition candidate: Maneka Gandhi, 28, the widow of his younger brother Sanjay. The elections will be held in all states but Assam, where disputes over the voting rights of recent immigrants have erupted, and Punjab, which has been the scene of civil unrest...
...rights from the Golden Temple on the All India Radio. The contentious issues, however, have been the very demands of religious, political, economic and territorial nature that involve other states and therefore dismiss the feasibility of simple bilateral bargaining between the Sikhs and the central government. Rights over the Punjab river waters, the transfer of the city of Chandigarh (which had been given to Haryana in 1966) to Punjab, and political autonomy for Punjab except for the central government's retainment of control over foreign affairs, defense, currency and communications--all these demands constitute extreme difficulties for a central government...
...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 now living in other areas...