Description

This book provides an authoritative political history of the Sikh separatist insurgency in Punjab by focusing on the "patterns of political leadership", a previously unexplored variable. It describes in detail the events which led to the emergence of the "Punjab Crisis", the various means through which the movement was sustained, and the changing nature of political leadership and courses of military action which necessitated its decline in the mid-1990s.

Providing a microhistorical analysis of the Punjab crisis, the book argues that the trajectories of ethnonationalist movements are largely based on the interaction between self-interested political elites, who not only react to the structural choices they face, but whose purposeful actions and decisions ultimately affect the course of ethnic group-state relations.