Punjab Keeps Rediscovering Its Ghosts Because No One Will Bury Them

Four Events, One Unresolved Argument In a

single week in Punjab: Shiromani Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal was attacked at a gurdwara in Nanded. Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann met the Governor to seek 10-day parole for Jagtar Singh Hawara, serving a life sentence for the 1995 assassination of former Chief Minister Beant Singh.

The film Satluj, dramatising the militancy-era killing of rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, was pulled from streaming days after release. And Akali Dal (Waris Punjab De) marched on Chandigarh demanding the release of jailed "Bandi Singhs." Treated separately, these look like four unrelated news items.

Treated together, they are one argument Punjab has been having with itself, unresolved, since the 1990s.

THE PATTERN BENEATH THE HEADLINES

None of these events invented a new grievance. Each one reopened an old file: the status of Sikh prisoners jailed for militancy-era crimes, the unresolved sharing of river waters between Punjab and its neighbours and Chandigarh's ambiguous status as a shared capital.

What's changed is who's carrying these grievances forward. Amritpal Singh won the Khadoor Sahib Lok Sabha seat from an Assam jail in 2024 - proof that panthic issues, once thought fading with the generation that lived through militancy, translate into real electoral power among voters too young to remember the violence firsthand but old enough to inherit its unanswered questions.

WHY GOVERNMENTS KEEP TOUCHING THIS FIRE

It would be easy to read Chief Minister Mann's parole request for Hawara as simple political calculation - and it likely is one, given AAP's need to compete for panthic votes against a resurgent Akali Dal (Waris Punjab De).

But the deeper problem isn't any one party's opportunism. It's that no government, of any party, has actually closed these files through the institutional channels built for exactly this purpose - courts for questions of law and clemency, constitutional mechanisms for river-water disputes and negotiated settlement for Chandigarh's status.

Leaving the questions open means every party eventually finds it easier to gesture toward resolving them for votes than to actually resolve them through the slower, harder, less electorally rewarding route of law.

THE COST OF LETTING THIS RUN ON A LOOP

Punjab faces pressing, unglamorous governance challenges right now - a drug crisis, agrarian distress and a steady outward migration of its young. Every hour of political energy spent relitigating 1990s grievances is an hour not spent on these.

Worse, using panthic sentiment as an electoral tool doesn't just fail to solve today's problems - it actively recruits a new generation into a decades-old conflict they never lived through, on the strength of grievance rather than resolution.

WHAT ACTUALLY BREAKS THE LOOP

The river-waters dispute needs a constitutional resolution, not another round of political posturing. The status of Sikh prisoners needs to be settled through the ordinary framework of law, mercy petitions and judicial review, applied consistently rather than selectively invoked when a chief minister needs panthic votes.

Until Punjab's parties choose that harder, slower path over the easier electoral one, the state will keep discovering the same ghosts every election cycle, mistaking recognition for resolution.