In 30 Seconds
The previous article ranked the population’s turn first among the forces that ended the insurgency, and this one gives that turn its concrete form, because it did not consist only of withheld shelter and quiet information. In the endgame years, portions of rural Punjab armed and organised against the militancy openly, in village defence committees and their informal cousins, and the phenomenon, familiar from other insurgencies and always double edged, deserves its own honest entry: it was brave, it was effective, it was manipulated, and in places it added its own wrongs to the era’s ledger.
The Turn Made Visible
The committees institutionalised what the massacres had begun. Villages in the terror districts, Sikh and mixed alike, had absorbed years of midnight levies, abductions, and the murder of sarpanches and elders who resisted; the state, from the early 1990s, offered such villages weapons licences, shotguns and in schemes of the period rifles, training, and sanction to stand sentry. Night pickets went up on village approaches; gurdwara loudspeakers, the militancy’s own summoning instrument, became alarm systems; and the era’s news pages began carrying a new genre of report, the raid repelled, the extortion party fought off by farmers, occasionally the wanted militant captured by the village he had come to tax. The committees’ spread through 1992 and 1993 tracked the collapse district by district, and their message exceeded their firepower: the population that the movement claimed as its nation was shooting back at it.
The Older Lineage
The endgame committees had a lineage this series should record. From the militancy’s early years, individual villages and communities had organised protection, Nihang orders and ex servicemen anchoring some, the Hindu and mixed villages of the border belts improvising others, and the CRPF and police raising precursor schemes in the terror corridors; the comprehensive endgame programme built on a decade of such improvisation. Punjab’s dense population of former soldiers, the recruiting grounds this series noted in its Majha article, supplied the committees their NCOs, and the same martial tradition the militancy had claimed for itself thus armed, in the end, its rural opponents.
The Double Edge
Honesty requires the other column, because armed civilian auxiliaries carry known pathologies and Punjab’s carried them too. Committees settled village factions’ scores under the era’s cover; licensed weapons serviced land disputes and old enmities; police used committee cover for operations this series has already categorised; and the arming of one village against another’s suspects fed, in documented instances, exactly the abuses the rights record of the period preserves. The state’s honour rolls remember committee members murdered by militants in reprisal, and they were many; the era’s fuller ledger also holds men wrongly beaten or delivered to custody on a committee’s word. Both entries stand, as this series’ method requires.
The Meaning
The committees matter to the era’s interpretation out of proportion to their battles, because they refute the story in which Punjab’s peasantry was merely ground between two armed machines. In the end, and at real cost, the village organised as a third force, chose its side, and enforced the choice with its own shotguns, and the side it chose was not the movement that had spent a decade claiming to be its army. No communique ever answered the committees, because there was no answer: an insurgency’s final argument is that it is the people, and the people, standing picket at their own gates against it, had closed the argument. This series records their dead beside the era’s other honour rolls, and their excesses beside the era’s other excesses, and counts their verdict, delivered village by village, as the authentic referendum the dark years never otherwise held.
