Punjab, today, is in political and administrative disarray, and in a social and economic crisis of unprecedented proportions. A petty, polarising and mischievous politics has long dominated the agenda of dominant parties, and has combined with near-unimaginable magnitudes of corruption, to bankrupt the State and provoke an exodus of capital and industry. At the same time, the ailing agricultural sector plunges deeper and deeper into a catastrophe of immiseration, debt and farmer suicides, in what was once the most flourishing agrarian economy in the country, a model for the developing world. Indeed, a decade and a half of terrorism failed to destroy the economy, but the depredations of elected leaders thereafter have devastated the state.