6 - Crises of national unity: Punjab, the northeast, and Kashmir

Summary

Linguistic federalism has proven to be a satisfactory means of maintaining the unity of India and the loyalty of the citizens of its principal language regions. No territorial solution to ethnic problems, however, can by itself satisfy the claims of all minority groups. We have seen that many minority language speakers have remained within the linguistically reorganized states and that several political movements have arisen among them claiming discrimination against their language by the speakers of the dominant regional language in a state.

Moreover, the political leaders of India have not been able to resolve as satisfactorily as in the case of the major language groups the political demands and the political status of non-Hindu and tribal minority groups. States reorganization has either failed or been a far more prolonged and violent process before satisfying the political aspirations of the Sikhs in the Punjab and the tribal peoples in the northeastern region. Outright secessionist movements accompanied by bitter, prolonged, and bloody confrontations between insurrectionary groups and government security forces marked the politics of Punjab, Assam, and the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir as well in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Finally, forty-five years after partition, Indian state leaders had failed to resolve satisfactorily the persistence of Hindu-Muslim communal division, which continued to find expression in vicious killing in cities and towns in many parts of the country.

The question naturally arises, therefore, whether India has departed from its proclaimed secularism and become a state based implicitly on a Hindu definition of nationality. It will be argued here and in the following chapter, on the contrary, that it is the secular ideology itself together with the persistent centralizing drives of Indian state leaders and the unending struggle for power in New Delhi, intensified during Mrs. Gandhi's leadership of the country, which have been more responsible for the failures to resolve the political problems of non Hindu minorities.