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by newusertoday·2y ago·view on hn ↗
|It is not in dispute that India has a complex and bloody history discriminating heavily against it's Sikh minority in Punjab

It is in dispute, what is not in dispute is killing of sikhs in delhi incited by party members of than ruling govt.

Sikh's are not in minority in punjab they are in majority or do you mean punjab region itself is discriminated by federal govt?

Also you need to make distinction between sikhs(followers of religion) and khalistani(people demanding separate statehood). In punjab there was genocide against minority(hindus) by khalistanis NOT sikhs(they were protectors and some even laid their lives against it) but it is inconvenient to talk about so doesn't get much mind share.

I generally refrain talking about india because whenever i try to dig deeper it becomes more and more complex that i simply give up on finding what is true. What i do know is to treat popular narrative with skepticism.

2 comments
Also, important to note that Khalistani movement does not exist because there is any discrimination against Sikhs in any way shape or form. It's entirely a foreign intelligence operation, and not by one single nation state, and unfortunately for them, it does not resonate with the local population at all, specially now. So, the idea that India killed him is absurd. I would look to foreign intelligence who are looking to escalate tensions.
> Sikh's are not in minority in punjab they are in majority or do you mean punjab region itself is discriminated by federal govt?

Let's be frank, regardless of who rules at the center, the non-Hindi states have always been discriminated against in every facet, while shit hole states like BIMARU get a pass. It's damning for India when a southern relatively right wing leaning state (although ruled by a secular party) has to promulgate a law stating that bank services have to be delivered in Kannada, their mother tongue, in addition to Hindi. That itself shows how much the Hindi belt takes the rest of the country for granted.

> shit hole states like BIMARU

Holy sh*t, you're supposed to reserve the rabid mask off racism for private spaces.

UP and Bihar were run by local minoritarian govts, mostly allied with the national minoritarian party. They ran criminal govts for decades, because India has a system with a 'weak center' and any fair but targeted retaliation would be seen as targeting specific communities.

The reality of things is that you can't run an underdeveloped heterogenous society like a homogenous rich country in the west.

There is something uniquely wrong culturally in those states, and it permeates all the way down to the lowest levels. That something is a rampant culture of corruption and oppression of minorities and lower caste peoples. In some states, there's only corruption and dishonesty in the upper levels (or little of it like Kerala and HP). In most states, there's corruption in the upper and middle levels. But in the BIMARU belt and Karnataka, it's practically every where. Every one is looking to scam and cheat you regardless of where you are. Karnataka was "saved" thanks to the IT boom, but without that happening, it would have remained an extremely corrupt mining state. But for the others, it's telling when you get in a lot more Central funding and still have nothing to show for it.

IMO, most of those states should be split for good reason, to make administration easier and more easy to monitor. UP should be 3 states, Rajasthan should be 2, MP should be 2. Even worse, looking at the split away states such as Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh or Jharkhand, they're all now currently better run than their parent states.

Yeah, 1000 years of being the easiest target of foreign raids erodes all culture down to the bone.

I don't think it has much to do with minority oppression. If anything, these states have been run through minority favored govts for a long time. SP favored the Muslims, BSP favored lower castes, Lalu favored the OBCs, and Nitish a combination of them all.

> IMO, most of those states should be split for good reason, to make administration easier and more easy to monitor. UP should be 3 states, Rajasthan should be 2, MP should be 2

Whole heartedly agreed, 50 million is near the upper bound of how many people can be sanely governed by a single entity.

Punjab and Haryana are the gateway for any foreign invasions, yet while corrupt, they don't have anywhere close to the corruption that those states have. Besides, Malwa (where MP is) was often not conquered soon enough because of the hilly Vindhyas and the presence of powerful ruling states in that region. So I don't buy the foreign invasion argument.

I didn't say that the corrupt culture has much to do with the oppression of minorities. By that factor, Gujarat should have been doing severely poorly. But oppressing minorities seems to be something all of these states tend to want to do some time or the other. That's just something that's bad for business and economic growth, but still doesn't explain why these states are uniformly corrupt, even worse so than poorer states like Sikkim or Odisha.