The Punjab crisis, a two-decade long armed insurgency that emerged as a violent
ethnonationalist movement in the 1980s and gradually transformed into a
secessionist struggle, resulted in an estimated casualty of no less than 25,000
people in Punjab. This ethnonationalist movement, on the one hand ended the
perceived notion of looking at Punjab as the model of political stability of
independent India, and on the other raised several politico-social questions
which had a great effect on Indian politics for decades to come. The Sikh
Separatist Insurgency in Punjab-India provides an authoritative political
history of the Sikh separatist insurgency in Punjab by focusing on the patterns
of political leadership