ABSTRACT
Terrorism in Punjab l is linked with the politics of some members of the Sikh religious minority which forms the majority in that state. About 80% of the 15 million Sikhs live in India. There are over a million of them seeking their livelihood outside the mother country. The Sikhs, who object to the headlines that link them with terrorist acts, are not terrorists. One may reserve the term "Khalistani" to describe the groups that favour a separate Khalistan, or an unborn "land of the pure" for Sikhs. Khalsa means the "pure" or the militants of the faithful. The "Naxalites", who had resorted to terrorist methods but who did not have separatist aims, however, focused their efforts ostensibly on their "class enemies" and tried to keep up a bloody vendetta against them. The hoped-for nation wide uprising failed to occur, but the Naxalite strategy of agrarian mass revolution, coupled with urban terror, profoundly shook the Indian political system between 1967 and 1972. Terrorism of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LITE) in Sri Lanka, lying in the southern tip ofIndia, spilled over in Tamil Nadu, an Indian state.
