The Punjab chief minister, Mr. Surjit Singh Barnala, has said that the executive committees of the Akali Dal and the SGPC would meet in the next one week to decide on steps to clear the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar of the extremists. In constitutional-legal terms this is an extraordinary announcement. For implicit in it is an abdication of the responsibility the Punjab government headed by him owes to the people in Punjab and indeed the country. The occupation of the Golden Temple complex by armed extremists constitutes a threat to law and order; as such the state government is under an obligation to tackle it; it cannot wait for instructions from the Akali and SGPC leadership. But such logic does not work in Punjab. So we shall patiently wait for another week for the Akali and SGPC leaders to meet.
Meanwhile the chief ministers of Punjab and Haryana have met once again at the initiative of the Union home minister and failed to reach an agreement whereby the Rajiv-Longowal accord on the transfer of Chandigarh to Punjab and of some Hindi-speaking areas to Haryana “in lieu of” Chandigarh could have been implemented. This is not surprising. The issues involved are too complex and emotion-laden to be sorted out at such meetings. Finally, there shall have to be an award by someone. Even Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi must by now be aware of the realities on the ground. Thus whatever the tactics he pursues, his strategy has to be to delink the issue of the transfer of Chandigarh to Punjab from that of Punjab government’s obligation to maintain law and order of which the expulsion of the extremists from the Golden Temple is part.
There can be no doubt that the naive and the interested will try to mix the two issues. Indeed, they are already arguing that unless Chandigarh is transferred soon to Punjab, Mr. Barnala’s position within the Akali Dal will be greatly weakened with the result that he will not be able to summon the necessary support to deal firmly with the extremists. This argument is flawed. The former Punjab chief minister, Mr. Badal, and his supporters are not opposing the entry of the police into the Golden Temple primarily because Chandigarh has not been handed over to Punjab; they are doing so because, in their view, such an action on the part of the state government would alienate the Sikh community from the Akali Dal. Mr. Badal said so in so many words at the “Sarbat Khalsa” at Anandpur Sahib last Sunday. There is frankly some merit in this proposition. The Akali-SGPC leaders cannot easily get out of the trap in which they find themselves. The trap is the concept of Panthic unity. The extremists can disregard it with impunity but not the Akalis. That was one reason why Bhindranwale had the better of Longowal.