It would be closer to the truth if they were described as National blackmail as their impact is felt all over the country. They are also contagious. We saw that when the Akalis called a two-day bundh to protest against the goings on in Dera Sacha Sauda most of northern India from Jammu, Punjab, Haryana to Delhi and beyond normal life was disrupted, hundreds of crores of rupees went down the drain.
What followed in Rajasthan a few weeks later was much worse. Gurjars wanting the same privileges as Meenas of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes gathered in their thousands to confront even larger numbers of Meenas armed with hatchets, lathis, lohar-made pistols. It could have turned into a civil war between two factions of the same religious community of the magnitude of the partition riots of 1947. Fortunately, this was averted by timely action taken by Vasundhara Raje, Chief Minister of Rajasthan. But by then contagion spread to Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
Gurjars beseiged Delhi by cutting off acess to the city. Did the retired Army Colonel who master-minded the criminal exercise knew that the Supreme Court has held all bandhs illegal? Was this the kind of discipline he maintained in the troops serving under him? If he was still in service, he would have been court-martialled and cashiered.
I think governments of Punjab and Rajasthan should have taken punitive action as soon as proposed bandhs were announced by arresting the Akali Jathedars in Amritsar and the colonel in his village and prevented them from committing mischief. In a democracy, everyone has a right to lodge a protest if he thinks injustice has been done to him or his community. But protests should not cause damage to others’ property and the country. Bundhs do both.

They never die
While working on translations on Celebrating the Best of Urdu poetry (Penguin-Viking), it occurred to me that languages do not readily die out as is said about Urdu in India, they merge in other languages and enrich them. What goes into disuse and may die is the script in which they are written.
The origin of Urdu proves this. Among the invaders of India were Turks, Arabs, Iranians and Afghans, each with languages of their own. They became rulers of the country and enlisted Indians speaking Hindi, Punjabi, Dakhni and various dialects. It was in Army cantonments that a common language took birth inheriting the best qualities of languages which gave it birth. At one time the elite disdained using it preferring Persian instead. Soon it realised that the main purpose of a language was communication, and since the common people could not understand Persian, it was best to use Urdu or Hindustani. So we had our great masters of Urdu poetry who first wrote in Persian, then switched on to Urdu: Meer, Ghalib, Iqbal down to Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
Urdu is not dying out in India, what is dying out is the Arabic or Nestalik script in which it has been written till recent times. It is energing in Devnagari, Punjabi and other languages. Every language enriches itself as it absorbs others, it thrives on parasitism. That is why English is the richest in vocabulary and has become the most widely used in the world. Those that tried to preserve their purity, as did French, lost out to English. We Indians must learn from the experience of English, our national language Hindi would have become much richer but for linguistic puritans who resist assimilating words from other languages.
Election promises
When dead bodies lie strewn all around
And highways turn into battlegrounds,
When hillsides burn and townships blaze
When the travellers are stranded for days and days
When the goons gun policemen down
And the police in turn slays half the town,
When Gurjars, Meenas and Jats and all
Face each other eyeball to eyeball and civil-war like situation prevails,
When well-knit hamlets for centuries quiet
Get permanently divided and openly riot,
When the polity is torn asunder and parties sink
And political class’s opportunism stinks -
We rub our eyes and recall all their promises tall,
And wait forthe next election to be called
When most cynically for electoral gain
They’ll make the same promises again.
(Contributed by Kuldip Salil, Delhi)