IF there had been live television news in 1978, I would have shown you the visuals from that summer in Punjab, and made you wonder how little things seem to have changed in three decades. But then, angry religious mobs carrying kirpans would always look the same. The more interesting, and scary, thing here is that their causus belli also sounds so very similar to what it was in that summer of ’78 that unleashed a spiral of violence that ultimately took 15 years to subside, but not before it had consumed tens of thousands of lives, threatened to divide the country, caused a sizeable mutiny in its army and, most important of all, pushed Punjab back by at least a decade. That 15-year phase is one of the primary reasons that the state, once the most prosperous in India by a long distance, now ranks number seven. Doubly distressing then that the anger, the prejudice and the violence that we had thought we had left behind with so forgettable a phase of history that nobody in Punjab seemed to even talk about till the other day should now threaten to make a comeback.

Nobody who was in a newsroom on the evening of April 13, 1978 can forget those hours, particularly somebody in a newsroom in Chandigarh and who was then a still wet-behind-the-ears reporter, the type our founder Ram Nath Goenka proudly — often with a mischievous look that was both dismissive and affectionate at the same time — described as Goenka’s drain-pipes, since narrow trouser legs were in vogue then. Tickers had just reported a clash between a sect called Nirankaris and devout Sikh followers of a Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Until then, both Nirankaris and Sant Bhindranwale were unknown, and the next morning’s papers had front-page side-bars headlined, predictably, ‘Who are the Nirankaris’, and, ‘Who are the Bhindranwales’. Just as, today, we are asking, ‘What is Dera Sacha Sauda? Why are devout Sikhs angry with it?’

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