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THE SIKH SEPARATIST INSURGENCY IN INDIA: Political Leadership and Ethnonationalist Movements. By Jugdep S. Chima. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2010. xix, 314pp. (Tables, figures.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-81-321-0302-8.
Jugdep Chima offers a thoughtful analysis and the best collection so far of the materials on Punjab's separatist insurgency. Chima has studied the different phases of the rise and eventual fall of the insurgency in fine detail. He has made the "patterns of political leadership" as his central explanatory variable to describe the rise of the Sikh insurgency in the 1980s and its fall by the mid-1990s. He has made an original contribution in looking at almost every year from 1978 until 1995 and providing in tabular form the range of political tendencies in Sikh politics, from moderate federalists to armed secessionists.
His central argument is that it is the interaction between the two elites- one of the governing state and the other of the dissenting ethnic group-that determines the fate of ethnonationalist movements, and his claim is that by highlighting the role of these two elites he has accorded a prominent role to human agency in explaining the rise and fall of ethnonationalist movements. He has attempted to demonstrate the appropriateness of this...