Communalism and the Green Revolution in Punjab

Abstract

This study focuses on the rise and fall of the ‘Green Revolution’ in Punjab and on its social impact, demonstrating how this modernization process had a forefront role in the process of formation and consolidation of the political and social forces that supported and fed the political violence that was triggered from the tension among the area’s main religious communities (Sikhs and Hindus). The research hypothesis of this study is that there is a close relationship between the rapid process of modernization set off by the Green Revolution, starting from the second half of the 1960s, and the separatist violence that devastated the Indian Punjab throughout the 1980s. The argument is that the forces behind the violence did not derive from Punjabi economic backwardness, but, rather, from the overcoming of this condition as a result of the Green Revolution.