1986 TENUOUS PEACE

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With the Punjab Accord of 1985 in a shambles after the assassination of H.S. Longowal, the crisis in the state only deepened with a split in the Akalis that left Chief Minister S.S. Barnala increasingly isolated. The terrorist toll rose to 600 while Julio Ribeiro’s bullet-for-bullet strategy was soon running out of ammunition. The violence, once restricted to the border areas of Amritsar and Gurdaspur, had spread to Hoshiarpur, Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Faridkot. Hundreds of terror-stricken Hindu families fled to neighboring Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. On August 10, General A.S. Vaidya was shot dead by assassins of the Dhalistan Commando Force while driving his car home from the market in Pune, where he was living after retirement. He dies instantly of head and neck wounds. Vaidya was Chief of Staff when Indira Gandhi sent the army into the golden Temple during Operation Blue Star. There was no going back for the insurgents because extremism in Punjab was a life-long trap.

FIRST CUT


The first full-blown aids cases in India were reported in six prostitutes in Chennai in May. While the appearance of the dreaded disease in India was scary enough, what was most disconcerting was the fact that it had happened despite Tamil Nadu being the only state in the country with a full-fledged aids detection programme.




DID YOU KNOW



Smita Patil, one of India’s foremost art house actors, died on December 13 due to complications after the birth of her son. She was only 31 and had appeared in films like Ardh Satya and Mirch Masala.




“I HAVE NO INDIAN PAPERS.”

Subhas Ghising


“My identification is Gorkhaland,” claimed Subhas Ghising, but the made headlines across India when he launched his 11-point separatist agenda in Darjeeling on April 13. What followed was a sate of crippling bandhs, escalating violence against tea-planters and skirmishes between cpi(m) workers and the local police which brought the situation to a peak in the second half of the year. Eventually, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was able to placate Ghising by allowing him an autonomous hill council rather than a state for Nepali speakers. The Centre, in effect, helped him stake the claim of being the spokesman of the 15 lakh Gorkhas in and around Darjeeling. And he found himself in the position of being able to play off the Centre against West Bengal in a situation where the two needed maximum cooperation.



THE GODEN PEN


Vikram Seth rocked the literary world with his book-in-verse, The Golden Gate. Styled along the rhyming tetrameter sonnets of Charles Johnston’s 1977 translation of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, a book he found in a Stanford second-hand bookstore, it changed the direction of his career, from academic to literary work. And gave India a new WordStar.

“I lacked the right exposure.”

For the Olympics, she may have lacked the right exposure but at the Asian Games, P.T. Usha thundered through Seoul, winning four gold and one silver medal, creating new Games records in every event she participated in.

ELSEWHERE…

• Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, 59, was assassinated in Stockholm where he was leaving a cinema hall with his wife, Lisbet.
• Space shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds after the launch, killing its crew of six astronauts and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.
• In the world’s worst nuclear disaster (below), one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine exploded, killing 31. Thousands more died from cancer due to exposure to radiation later.
  
  

1 lakh was the number of Maruti cars produced in 1986. The company, a brainchild of Sanjay Gandhi that had gone into liquidation in 1977, completed its turnaround to profitability when Suzuki came on board in 1980.

Courtesy By India Today