Punjab Gave India Its Bread, Its Soldiers and a Prime Minister. In Between, It Lost a Decade

Start with what Punjab is, because the decade this article is about makes no sense otherwise.

Punjab is a small state. It holds a little over one part in fifty of India’s land. From that sliver, in the years when it mattered most, came the wheat and rice that took India from importing food to feeding itself. Punjabi farmers did that. Not a policy, not a ministry. Farmers, on their own land, taking a risk on unfamiliar seed.

Punjab is also where a great deal of India’s freedom was paid for. Jallianwala Bagh happened in Amritsar. Bhagat Singh was a Punjabi. So was Ranjit Singh, whose kingdom was the last serious Indian power the British had to defeat.

And Sikhs have served in India’s armed forces in numbers far out of proportion to their share of the population, in every war the country has fought. The langar, the free kitchen that will feed anyone who sits down in the row, has turned up after earthquakes, floods, and at the edge of a pandemic, feeding people who were not Sikh and were never asked whether they were.

Hold all of that in mind. What follows happened inside India’s own house, to a community that had built a great deal of it.

How the trouble started

The politics of Punjab in the 1970s were about ordinary things: how river water should be shared with neighbouring states, whether Chandigarh belonged to Punjab or Haryana, how much power states should have against Delhi. These were real grievances and they were negotiable ones.

They did not get negotiated. They festered through a decade of manoeuvring in which national and state politicians each tried to use religious sentiment to outflank the other, and in which a preacher named Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was, at the start, useful to people who later could not control him. By the early 1980s he and armed followers demanding a separate state called Khalistan had installed themselves inside the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar, and politically motivated killings were happening across Punjab, Haryana and Delhi.

It is worth being blunt about the arithmetic here, because it is often lost. The great majority of Punjabi Sikhs never wanted Khalistan. They were about to spend a decade paying for a demand they had not made.

June 1984

In June 1984 Indira Gandhi authorised the army to go in. Operation Blue Star began with a night of artillery fire; then tanks and troops entered the temple precincts, and the fighting ran for four days and nights. Bhindranwale and most of his gunmen were killed.

So were a great many other people. Britannica records that hundreds of innocent people were caught in the cross fire and at least a hundred soldiers died. Sikh accounts put the toll considerably higher, and no single figure has ever been agreed. It was early June, which meant the complex was full of pilgrims.

The Akal Takht, the seat of temporal authority in Sikhism and one of the most important structures in the faith, was badly damaged.

To understand what followed you have to understand what this did, and it was not principally about casualty counts. For Sikhs who had never had the slightest sympathy for Khalistan, who had sons in the Indian Army, who had voted Congress their whole lives, tanks inside the Harmandir Sahib was a wound of a different kind. Soldiers who were Sikh had been sent into their own holiest place. Some deserted. The sense of it, widely and deeply, was that the Indian state had chosen to treat a sacred centre as a military objective.

Nothing about that justified what came next. But no honest account can skip it either.

October and November 1984

On 31 October 1984 Indira Gandhi was shot dead in her own garden in New Delhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards.

From the following day, mobs moved through Sikh neighbourhoods in and around Delhi. They burned homes, shops and cars, and they killed. Around three thousand Sikhs died. Thousands more were wounded, and thousands were left with nothing. Britannica describes it as the worst religious riot since partition.

Two things need saying plainly, and this article will say them once and then move on.

The first is that this was not a riot in the sense of a crowd losing its head. Survivors described organisation: men arriving with voter rolls and lists of Sikh-owned addresses, and a police force that in many places stood by. That is the account the commissions of inquiry eventually recorded, over decades and after a great deal of resistance.

The second is that justice took forty years, and is still not finished. Commission followed commission. Almost nobody was convicted for a very long time. In 2018 the Delhi High Court convicted Sajjan Kumar, a former Congress Member of Parliament, and sentenced him to life. In February 2025 a Delhi court sentenced him to life again, in a separate case, for the murders of Jaswant Singh and his son Tarundeep Singh on 1 November 1984. His appeal is pending before the Supreme Court.

A country that took four decades to reach that point should not congratulate itself on arriving. But arriving matters, and it happened because Sikh families refused to let the files close.

The years in between

What followed in Punjab was roughly eight years of killing, and it is the part of this story that is hardest to summarise honestly, because there is no version of it in which only one side did wrong.

Militant groups killed a great many people. Most of their victims were Punjabis and a large share were Sikhs, including those who spoke against them. The single deadliest act came in June 1985, when Air India Flight 182 exploded off the coast of Ireland with 329 people aboard, all of whom died. Most were Canadians of Indian origin, many of them children on their summer holidays. Sikh extremists based in Canada were accused; one man was convicted, in 2003, and the Canadian prosecution of the case is widely regarded as a failure.

The counter-insurgency was also brutal. Punjab Police broke the militancy, and the record of how includes a large number of documented allegations of disappearances and killings outside any legal process, some of which Indian courts and the National Human Rights Commission have examined for years since. Families are still asking about relatives last seen in custody in the late 1980s.

Both of those paragraphs are true. Writing one without the other would be propaganda in one direction or the other.

By around 1992 the militancy had been broken. Punjab voted, and kept voting.

How it actually ended

There was no single dramatic ending, no surrender ceremony, no treaty. What ended it was a combination of hard policing, exhaustion, and the plain fact that Punjabis stopped supplying the movement with people. A separatist campaign that had begun by claiming to speak for the Sikh community ended without it, because the community had watched what the decade cost and wanted its life back.

That is a form of victory, and it belongs to Punjab rather than to Delhi.

What came afterwards

In 2004 India got a Sikh prime minister. Manmohan Singh held the office for ten years, a man born in what is now Pakistan, who came into government as an economist rather than a politician.

On 11 August 2005, during a debate in the Rajya Sabha on the Nanavati Commission report, he did something no Indian prime minister had done. He apologised.

“I have no hesitation in apologising to the Sikh community,” he said, and added that he bowed his head in shame that such a thing had taken place.

It did not bring anybody back and it did not convict anybody. Plenty of Sikhs found it too late and too little, and that reaction is entirely reasonable. But consider the shape of it. Twenty-one years after tanks entered the Golden Temple and mobs hunted Sikhs through Delhi, the head of the Indian government was a Sikh, and he stood in Parliament and apologised for it on the country’s behalf.

That is not a country that expelled a community. It is a country that injured one and then, slowly and inadequately and eventually, began to say so.

Where Punjab is now

The state has been at peace for thirty years. It has other troubles, and serious ones: groundwater falling year on year under the very crop pattern that fed India, farm incomes squeezed, a drug problem, and young people leaving for Canada and Australia in numbers that have hollowed out villages. Those are the arguments Punjab is actually having today, and none of them are about Khalistan.

Meanwhile the contribution has never stopped. Sikhs remain heavily represented in the armed forces. When Delhi’s hospitals ran out of oxygen in 2021, Sikh organisations set up oxygen langars in the street. The instinct to feed whoever turns up, without asking who they are, has outlasted every political argument in this article.

The decade Punjab lost was real, and so was what was done to Sikhs in it, and India is better for saying both out loud rather than letting them sit in a footnote. But the thing worth remembering at the end is the ordinary one: the wheat kept coming, the regiments kept filling, the kitchens kept running, and the state that went through all of that is still, entirely and without qualification, India.