In one fell swoop, the Amarinder Singh government has replaced the police top brass in Punjab’s Jalandhar district. So far, so belated. The shake-up is welcome in as much as it signals that the government is stirring at last. But there is reason to believe that it stoutly ignored all the warning signs in the run up to the vicious caste violence that rocked the region recently. What occurred in and around Talhan village, the epicentre of the conflict, did not happen in a day. It was allowed to build up over time. Almost five months, to be precise.Tensions first broke out into the open when, on January 20 this year, the Jat Sikhs of Talhan announced a social boycott of the local Dalits. At the heart of the dispute was the management of a cash-rich shrine. Dalits demanded participation in the 13-member management committee of the Samadh of Baba Nihal Singh, which rakes in Rs 4-5 crore in annual offerings; their move to press for an election of a new committee triggered violence; the Jats slapped on a social boycott. Since then, the two communities have lived together separately, on the edge of violence. And the government and political leadership has been spectacularly missing in action. The directives issued by the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes following an on-the-spot inquiry were ignored. By all accounts, there was no attempt to heal the rift over these months, or to prevent it from exploding into bloody violence. In this context, the chief minister’s charge that the confrontation was triggered by ‘‘outsiders’’ immediately invites the damning counterquestion: What was his government doing to prevent them from fishing in troubled waters?Talhan frames a larger culpability as well. Though it is generally believed that Sikhism is not riven by caste, ground reality tells a different story. In a large number of villages, lower castes have been forced to build their own gurdwaras even though this goes against the tenets of Sikhism. The caste violence in Talhan must provoke the SGPC to some long overdue questioning: Why so many gurdwaras in one small village? Why does caste discrimination persist, centuries after the religion was founded? Why is it that almost 30 per cent of Punjab’s population — incidentally, the largest percentage of Dalits in the country — owns a measly 2.54 per cent of agricultural land and lags far behind in literacy tables?
