This is not the time for name-calling or for fishing in troubled waters. Certainly, this does not give the Badal government any excuse from its own responsibilities. It has to maintain law and order and provide protection to those following all faiths and sects. The Akali Dal, at the same time, has to take a long-term view of its own relationship with the clergy. The 21st century is not a time for hukamnamas (encyclicals) calling for social boycotts. Certainly, an Akali-BJP government cannot build its credibility around a government that panders to orthodoxy. In fact, Chief Minister Badal, one of the last survivors of the earlier maelstrom, has a special responsibility to make sure things do not spin out of control. But today’s Mrs Gandhi will also do well to restrain her own men, to ask them to read again that most forgettable chapter in India’s, Punjab’s and their own party’s history.

Postscript: Pramod Kapur, the publisher of Roli Books and a friend to so many of us, called just last week to raise an interesting question. Some of us, he said, had written a chapter each in a book called The Assassination and After, in 1984, following Operation Bluestar and Indira Gandhi’s assassination. A whole new generation has come up since then, he said, and they know nothing about what happened in those momentous days. So why don’t we re-publish that book so people do not forget that history? Good thought, I said. But scary now, to think that history could be repeating itself.

... contd.