Punjab: Beyond the exotica

Hit by water scarcity, agrarian distress, and drug addiction, Punjab needs a multi-pronged recovery strategy

The recent media coverage of developments in Punjab is not just horrifying but also insulting and unfair to an entire community. The media’s disregard for nuances and fetish for sensationalism has led people to take refuge in apathy. Punjab was once known as the bread basket of India but by the late 1980s, the state’s narratives of prosperity began to crumble, and it lost its status as the state of plenty.

Today, the land of five rivers has no water; the wells of the villages and towns have run dry but are protected behind barbed wires for nostalgia. The soil that once fed the country turned almost inert and dead after being bombarded and mauled with decades of heavy fertiliser that guzzled enormous amounts of water. Animals disappeared. Heavy mechanisation pushed the marginalised further. Tractors displaced the organic linkages of humans through monetised arrangements. And then the turbulent, violent decade of extremism and militancy arrived to further deepen the wounds.

The land of the revered gurus, which stood for coexistence, inter-faith bonhomie, and fraternity-feeling, became the victim of identity politics that celebrated segregation along narrow lines.

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The disillusionment with the green revolution experiment and the stark decline in agriculture, the mainstay of a state’s economy, should have alerted the planners and policymakers. But that unfortunately did not happen as the tableau from Punjab during the Republic Day parade, year after year, continued to pander to that exotic image of Punjab as the land of industrious farmers. Soon, the posters of IELTS and Visa agencies mushroomed and covered the countryside, promising and selling illusions of escape in some distant land.

In these times of hopelessness and uncertainty, the drug mafia has made inroads. Ever alert to opportunities, the ubiquitous market reached the farmers, left to fend for themselves, through multinational seed manufacturing companies and their bandwagon to sell dreams of prosperity through commercial crops. This too, like elsewhere, did not help much as cases of farmer suicide started getting reported for the first time from the region.

Punjab today needs listening; it needs healing and to be understood with all its complexities. It needs to be imagined beyond its green fields, through industry corridors that are sensitive to its ecology. In real terms, the state needs to be rescued from its eternal exoticization and put on the road to recovery.

There are many theories about the return of peace in the region, and one of the most irrefutable ones is that if the region could return from the dark days of militancy, it would have been largely because of the ordinary, peace-loving people of Punjab, who simply but decisively refused to side with any fissiparous agenda.

Not to forget the sturdy religio-cultural bedrock of co-existence and sharing, nurtured and irrigated by the sacred messages of the Gurus, that kept hope alive and communities together even in the darkest time.

In a Sikh-dominant, multi-religious village in Punjab, near Chandigarh, which borrows its name from the Hindu epic Mahabharata, there is a pond that is believed to have been dug by Bhima, the mightiest of the Pandavas. The unequivocal manner in which people of other faiths take pride in the ancestral roots of the village would flatten the inflated ego of the hardnosed cartographers looking for boundaries in the territory of fluid faiths.

The same village observes the celebration of the nagarkheda, the village deity, which is attended by people of all faiths.

In a time like this, when Punjab resurfaces in our cosy dining table-talks, scaring us because of its faint mimicking of the past, remember the essays we wrote in our school days on the Green Revolution, singing paeans to the land of agriculture.

It’s time to repay the debt, at the very least through gestures of gratitude and a warm hug from Delhi. Punjab defended our borders; it fed the nation and made supreme sacrifices throughout our history. No plaque listing the martyrs of India is complete without them. So the least that we could do is not preach patriotism to the Punjabis.

(The writer teaches sociology at the School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University, Delhi.)