Abstract
The history of Subcontinent remembers the year of 1947 as a year of political
chaos where leading communities of Indian Subcontinent comprising Hindus,
Sikhs, and Muslims strived to secure their territorial ambitions in wake of
partition of India. In this strife, Punjab gained cardinal status where its leading
stakeholders comprising Sikh and Muslim communities had to face irreconcilable
differences towards each other. These unbridgeable differences led to partition of
Punjab. The paper aims at exploring the rationale of Sikh proposals regarding
their plan of partition in a comparative fashion with its opposite perspectives. The
Sikh community aligned with Congress and opted for accession to India instead of
Punjab. The article analyzes that alliance of Sikh community with Congress
rendered them unsuccessful to materialize their ambition of having Azad Punjab
or Khalistan, however it served Congress’ ambition of giving a truncated and
moth eaten piece of land to Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Moreover, it is analyzed that
Sikh community could not gain autonomy or sovereignty; instead they preferred
Hindu domination to Muslim domination. The major ambitions of Sikh comprised
securing their stakes in canal colonies, preserving their holy shrines, and
eschewing large scale Sikh migration. However, they failed to achieve none of
their objectives. The study attempts to find out the rationale and objectives behind
Sikh community’s demand of division of Punjab; moreover, it attempts to explore
the extent of success in pursuit of these ambitions.
Muhammad Abrar Ahmad, Robina Shoeb, Anam Iftikhar, Bashir Ahmad. (2018) Demand for Sikh State in India: an analysis of the claim on Canal Colonies and Lyallpur during colonial period, Journal of the Research Society of Pakistan, Volume 55, Issue 2.
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