Akali-Government talks, October 1981 to May 1984

Who: For the Akali Dal, Sant Harchand Singh Longowal, Gurcharan Singh Tohra, Parkash Singh Badal, Surjit Singh Barnala and others, among them Balwant Singh and Ravi Inder Singh; for the Government, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, ministers including P. V. Narasimha Rao, Pranab Mukherjee, P. C. Sethi, R. Venkataraman and Shiv Shankar, and senior officials; Swaran Singh as an emissary in 1982; and, in the tripartite talks, Opposition leaders.

What: The talks followed the Akali Dal's lists of 45 and 15 demands: the White Paper says that on receipt of them the Prime Minister invited the Akali Dal to a meeting on 16 October 1981. The calendar of meetings that Gurmit Singh prints as appendix 29 of his second volume lists these rounds, with dates as printed there. The SGPC's white paper counts at least 26 rounds of meetings between Akali representatives and the Centre, ten of them tripartite, citing the Government's White Paper; the calendar lists ten tripartite dates.

• With the Prime Minister: 16 October 1981 (South Block), 26 November 1981 and 5 April 1982 (Parliament House).
• With Cabinet ministers: 23 and 24 October 1981, with Narasimha Rao, and two meetings in January 1983, one at Raj Bhavan, Chandigarh, and one on 18 January with Sethi, Venkataraman and Shiv Shankar.
• Secret meetings: 16 and 17 November 1982 at 27 Safdarjung Road; 17 January 1983, with Rajiv Gandhi MP and Amarinder Singh MP present; and in 1984, 24 January, 27, 28 and 29 March, 21 April and 26 May.
• Tripartite talks with the Government, the Akali Dal and Opposition leaders: 24 and 25 January, 8, 10, 15, 18, 19 and 20 February 1983, and 14 and 15 February 1984.

Gurmit Singh counts three near-agreements. In September 1982 Swaran Singh was sent to Punjab, and on 2 November an agreed formula was finalised, but the Home Minister's statement of 3 November altered it. On 18 November a formula was worked out and a Government plane kept ready to take the Akali representatives and the Home Secretary to Amritsar for Longowal's consent, but the Prime Minister vetoed it. On 20 April 1983 an agreement was reached and the Government backed out. He cites the Communist leader Satyapal Dang's remark that three times an agreement had almost been reached and each time the late Prime Minister prevented it. Grewal tells a similar story of October 1982: a cabinet sub-committee accepted Swaran Singh's formula, but the statement placed before Parliament differed materially from it. The talks of 5 April 1982 broke down, Gurmit Singh writes, over the immediate transfer of Chandigarh and the reopening of the Ravi-Beas award, and three days later the Prime Minister inaugurated work on the Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal at Kapuri, which the Akali Dal then set out to block.

The White Paper tells it differently. It says the Prime Minister's attitude was one of accommodation of all reasonable demands, that the Akali Dal resiled from a consensus on river waters reached in the tripartite talks, and that it insisted that the Anandpur Sahib Resolution be named in the reference to the Sarkaria Commission although it had agreed in a tripartite meeting not to press this. Grewal says the tripartite meeting of 14 and 15 February 1984 came close to a settlement before violence against Sikhs in Haryana from 15 to 20 February. The last rounds of spring 1984 are in the page on the final negotiations.

Where: New Delhi (South Block, Parliament House, Parliament Annexe, 27 Safdarjung Road and a guest house) and Chandigarh (Raj Bhavan, private houses and the airport lounge).

Why it mattered: More than two and a half years of meetings produced no settlement, and the Dharam Yudh ran alongside them. The two sides still tell the story differently: the Akali side says the Prime Minister vetoed agreements, the Government says the Akali Dal resiled from them.