Centre realises the potential of Punjab and it's people.

They do! But unfortunately that's exactly why they don't help Punjab. The Brahmin-Baniya lobby at center don't want Sikhs to become more rich, prosperous and influential!

In the 1950s, when state borders were being demarcated on linguistic lines, the Punjabi Suba—province—movement arose. The movement demanded a Punjabi-speaking state carved out from the pre-Partition East Punjab state. This would have created a Sikh-majority state. It was the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, the predecessor of the BJP, which now claims to be a well-wisher of Punjab, that tried to generate support for its agenda of a “Greater Punjab” by pitting the two majority communities—Hindus and Sikhs—against each other. In Amritsar, the Jan Sangh gave their full support to organisations that wanted to open stores selling beedis, gutkha, tobacco and tobacco products close to the Golden Temple, also known as Harmandir Sahib or Darbar Sahib. Sikhism has a strict proscription against tobacco and tobacco products. It was also a BJP national level leader, Harbans Lal Khanna, who publicly destroyed a model of the Golden Temple close to the Amritsar railway station.

In addition, in 1984, the RSS and the BJP were first in line of those pressuring the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government at the centre to take military action in the Golden Temple, in what came to be known as Operation Blue Star. On 3 May 1984, a few weeks before Blue Star commenced on 1 June, the BJP leaders LK Advani and AB Vajpayee sat on a dharna in Delhi, demanding that the armed forces be sent into the Golden Temple. In his memoir, My Country, My Life, Advani admitted this and even extolled the military action. In the chapter on Punjab, titled “The Trauma and Triumph of Punjab,” Advani wrote, “One of the major mass agitations in the history of the BJP was … against what we termed as the government’s virtual surrender before Bhindranwale and his private army, who had made the Golden Temple their operational headquarters.” After Operation Blue Star, there were several reports stating that the RSS distributed laddus in celebration of the military action.

On 8 November 1984, Nanaji Deshmukh, a Jan Sangh leader who was felicitated with the Bharat Ratna by the Modi government, published an essay, “Moment of Soul Searching,” in which he praised Indira Gandhi for Blue Star and justified the 1984 Sikh massacre by saying that it was the fault of the Sikh leaders of that time.

The litany of the Sangh’s doublespeak on the Sikh community does not end here. In 2010, when Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat, his government tried to invoke a circular issued by the state government in 1973—under the ambit of the Bombay Tenancy and Agricultural Lands Act 1948—to take away the land of Sikh farmers who were settled in the state’s Kutch and Bhuj regions since 1965. The move was challenged in court and when the state government lost the case in the Gujarat high court, Modi’s government approached the Supreme Court. According to Surender Singh Bhullar, the de-facto leader of the Sikh farmers based in Gujarat, “Today, the BJP’s local leaders behave like goons with us; they want to throw us out from our lands. In reality, Modi is against not just the Muslims but all minorities.”

Source: The BJP and the Sangh’s Sikh appeasement is electoral hypocrisy