Politics of The Early 1980s
The late 1970s and the early 1980s saw the increasing involvement of the Sikh religious leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in the Punjab politics. Indira Gandhi's Congress(I) party supported Bhindranwale in a bid to split the Sikh votes and weaken the Akali Dal, its chief rival in Punjab. The Congress supported the candidates backed by Bhindranwale in the 1978 SGPC elections. The Congress leader Giani Zail Singh allegedly financed the initial meetings of the separatist organization Dal Khalsa, which disrupted the December 1978 Ludhiana session of the Akali Dal with provocative anti-Hindu wall writing. In the 1980 election, Bhindranwale supported Congress-I candidates Gurdial Singh Dhillon and Raghunandan Lal Bhatia. Bhindranwale was originally not very influential, but the activities of the Congress elevated him to the status of a major leader by the early 1980s.
Read more about this topic: Khalistan Movement
Famous quotes containing the words politics and/or early:
“...to many a mothers heart has come the disappointment of a loss of power, a limitation of influence when early manhood takes the boy from the home, or when even before that time, in school, or where he touches the great world and begins to be bewildered with its controversies, trade and economics and politics make their imprint even while his lips are dewy with his mothers kiss.”
—J. Ellen Foster (18401910)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)