ABSTRACT
The sudden eruption of Sikh nationalism in the 1980s, especially in its most virulent form of demand for Khalistan (a Sikh homeland in the Punjab) touches on some complex issues of ethnic conflict in the postcolonial nationbuilding process in South Asia. While it raises issues concerning the nature of Sikh ethnicity — which in a short period of time, has transversed from group consciousness, to political community and staked a claim for a statehood — the form of conflict also calls for an examination of the emerging nature of Indian state, which despite having evolved a common framework for democratic process of political bargaining remains locked in ethnic conflicts. Some have assumed that Sikh nationalism has traveled along the route from an ethnic group toward a nation-in-the-making, yet, it has surfaced only as a reaction to certain events, and its course suggests a puzzling and inconsistent route. The eruption of Sikh nationalism in the post-1984 period as a reaction to the Indian state’s invasion of the Golden Temple in Amritsar posed a serious challenge to the Indian state’s borders and legitimacy. The violent insurgency lasted a decade, was suppressed brutally by the security forces, involved large-scale human rights violations, and costed over 25,000 Sikhs’ lives. Many of them were executed through extrajudicial killings and a few thousand remain unaccounted for, or “disappeared” — a new term for state terror.
