Hegemonic Control: Punjab Politics, 1947–84

Abstract

Most accounts of Punjab politics between 1947 and 1984 fall broadly into two schools of thought: those that hold that the centralization drives created by Mrs Gandhi undermined the Nehruvian framework of regional politics, and those that accept many of the assumptions of the former but emphasize the destabilizing social and political consequences of the ‘Green Revolution’.¹ Neither of these approaches, as we have seen, accounts for the main actor within the Punjab political system — Sikh ethno-nationalism. In contrast to these two approaches this chapter will outline the mechanisms of hegemonic control, suggest how they were contested by Sikh ethno-nationalism, resulting in full-scale confrontation in 1984.