India’s security apparatus also responded with increased patrolling along the border. Greater coordination between Punjab Police and Border Security Force (BSF) led to a spike in the number of drug seizures. In 2013, the BSF began using advanced All Terrain Vehicles to patrol the marshy areas along the border. Since 2017, speed boats have also been sought to be deployed by the BSF’s water wing in the riverine tracts along the Punjab border.

With increased surveillance along the Punjab border, drug traffickers are now being forced to use other routes. Stretches along the Rann of Kutch in Gujarat are believed to be the main hotspots of smuggling now.

Manufacturing Hysteria – The Case of Punjab’s Missing Drug Addicts

What really brought Punjab’s drug problem under the national spotlight were certain unconfirmed reports that claimed one in every five youths in Punjab was addicted to drugs. The reports were mostly based on an affidavit submitted in the Punjab assembly by a senior civil servant. As election fever gripped Punjab, Rahul Gandhi was quoted as saying 70 per cent of Punjab’s youth were addicted to drugs. This figure was then picked up by the film Udta Punjab and it stuck.

In all the hysteria, what nobody bothered to clarify was that the umbrella term ‘drugs’ being used in various studies on Punjab included all intoxicants such as alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, opium, and heroin. So, in many sample surveys, anyone responding in the affirmative to having consumed beer and cigarettes was classified as a drug user.

While alcohol consumption has always been widespread in Punjab, the consumption of opium – colloquially known as feem, doda, or bhukki, has long been part of the culture of north-western India. In Rajasthan, for instance, the sale and consumption of doda, an opium derivative, had been legal and it was even sold through government-licensed vendors till 2016.

It should be recalled that Union minister Jaswant Singh courted controversy back in 2007 when he served opium to guests at his ancestral village in Rajasthan. What Singh was, in fact, doing was performing an ancient, and mostly harmless, ritual that has been a part of the culture of the region.

The debate over opium consumption in many ways mirrors that over cannabis consumption – each of the substances is an integral part of certain Indic traditions. Heroin, on the other hand, being a highly refined form of opium, is not just highly addictive but also deadly. To put the potency of opium and heroin in perspective: opium is distilled to produce morphine, which is just 12 per cent weight by volume of opium. The morphine is then further distilled until it is reduced to one-fourth of the quantity. This is heroin. By comparison, the opium commonly consumed in north-west India is simply a diluted version of poppy husk.

So how many people in Punjab were actually addicted to hard drugs like heroin?

A 2015 study conducted by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in association with a non-governmental organisation estimated that out of the state’s total population of 28 million, about 232,856 individuals were addicted to opioids including both opium and heroin – roughly 0.8 per cent of the population. Further, of these opioid users, only 53 per cent were addicted to the deadly heroin and 33 per cent were using it intravenously. While this figure for the number of opioid users was certainly among the highest in the country, it was a far cry from the 70 per cent being cited by clickbait media outlets. Even accounting for the notorious ‘chitta’ – a generic term for a wide variety of synthetic drugs including methamphetamine – the total number of users of hard drugs (excluding alcohol, tobacco, bhang) in Punjab could not have exceeded 1 per cent of the population at the height of the drug epidemic.

The figure of 70 per cent, however, stuck and the resultant hysteria was milked to the full by everyone from Bollywood to media to political parties. It was no coincidence that the Punjab drug epidemic suddenly burst into public attention barely a year before the state was headed for assembly elections. Captain Amarinder Singh of the Congress publicly promised to rid the state of the drug menace within four weeks of being elected. The election won, the newly elected Chief Minister later clarified that when he said ‘drug menace’, he was referring to synthetic drugs like chitta and not opioids, which have traditionally been part of society.

The Road Ahead

Punjab isn’t the only Indian victim of Afghan heroin. The neighbouring state of J&K has long been known to suffer from one of the worst addiction rates in the country. Manipur, on the country’s eastern border, has a similar tale to tell. The only difference is that Manipuri heroin comes from the Golden Triangle (another global heroin production nerve centre on the Myanmar-Thailand border) instead of the Golden Crescent. With this exception, everything remains the same as in the case of Punjab and Kashmir – a long and violent insurgency, a society emotionally and psychologically brutalised through violence, and economic stagnation. It is India’s misfortune that it is geographically sandwiched between the Golden Crescent and the Golden Triangle. And India’s neglected border pockets are paying the price.

That Punjab’s largely agrarian economy has been stagnant for nearly two decades is by now common knowledge. Diminishing returns from agriculture led to a wave of overseas migration as peasants desperately sought other means of livelihood.

Punjab spent nearly Rs 20,000 crore in battling a decade-and-a-half long insurgency that left the state bankrupt. Today, nearly the entire state GDP goes in making the interest payments on this amount alone. Several big-ticket infrastructure projects announced in Punjab never took off. For instance, in 2007, it was announced that a mega eight-lane expressway connecting Pathankot on the northern edge of Punjab to Ajmer in Rajasthan would be constructed, thereby allowing the state easy access to the Kandla port in Gujarat. This was supposed to greatly boost exports and industrialisation. More than a decade later, nothing materialised of the said expressway.

A person born in Punjab in 1918, exactly a 100 years ago, would have been 29 years old in 1947, when the partition riots claimed close to half a million lives and displaced over a million others. A person born in 1948, just after the partition riots in Punjab, would have been 31 years old in 1980 – the year the insurgency in Punjab began. This person would also have lived through three wars in which enemy planes flew over his house and enemy bombs fell in his fields. By the time the insurgency ended, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives, hardly a household remained in Punjab that had not lost a loved one to violence. A person born in 1996, the year the insurgency ended, would be 22 years old today and only beginning to navigate her way through a society scarred by violence and drug abuse. No generation born in the last 100 years in Punjab has been spared the trauma of extreme, horrific violence. No other state in India, perhaps with the exception of Kashmir, has been subject to such a prolonged, unending state of crisis.

And yet there exists a disconnect between the popular perception of Punjab and the state’s reality.

Nothing highlights this disconnect more than the fact that in the year 1995, while Aditya Chopra was presenting to an enraptured nation his Bollywood magnum opus of the happy Punjabi family wedding in the backdrop of swaying yellow mustard fields of the Punjabi countryside, a car bomb ripped through Punjab’s capital, Chandigarh, killing the chief minister, Beant Singh, along with 17 others. That same year, Afghanistan dumped its largest ever haul of heroin into the Punjabi countryside – a poison that would soon be injected by the violence-scarred youth of Punjab.

Despite all this, Punjab stands. The state remains the single-largest contributor to the nation’s pool of wheat and rice and still sends a large segment of its youth – both men and women – to guard the nation’s borders as soldiers. The state has among the best Human Development Indices in the country as well as among the highest rates of life expectancy. On all almost all metrics used to compare Indian states, Punjab, for all its suffering, ranks among the best in the country.

What the state needs is assistance in the form of investment in industry and infrastructure, as well as fiscal relief in the form of waiving off its huge debt burden. It has seen off the worst of yet another adversity thrown its way and, with a little help, can reclaim its rightful place as the driver of India’s march to the future. In the longer run, India would need to invest in the peace and stability of its neighbourhood and strengthen trade relations with them so that its remote, landlocked border pockets can diversify their economies.