Punjab needs a hero, not a leader

{ 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF RAJIV-LONGOWAL ACCORD

- Harcharan Bains

Exactly 40 years to the day, the country gave itself a chance to revive its dead and putrid moral spirit and give its politics a new ray of hope to flourish beyond petty politicking.

Eleven months after the catastrophic Operation Bluestar and anti-Sikh pogrom, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi signed a rather extraordinary Memorandum of Settlement with then president of Punjab’s only regional and predominantly Sikh religious party, Shiromani Akali Dal. The Punjab accord, inked on July 24 in 1985, marked a break from the past as this was probably the first time ever since Independence that a constitutionally elected Government of India had entered into a formal accord for the resolution of a conflict in a strifetorn state, not with the government of the province but with just a political party, and that too one which at that time did not have a formal mandate of the people of the state to represent them.

A daring political approach