A majority of the Punjabis were terrified when the Ajnala police station in Amritsar came under the siege of Khalistanis on February 23. Armed with swords, sticks and guns, and using the Sikh holy book, Guru Granth, as a shield, the Amritpal Singh-led criminal mob of a couple of thousand people attacked the police station. They extracted an assurance from the police that one of their associates arrested under “fake criminal charges” would be freed, and sure enough, he was released the following day.
The dramatic success of the mob in extracting the release of a criminal was even more terrifying than the siege itself: people speculated openly about whether this was the curtain-raiser to a repeat of the dark years of terrorism faced by the state during the 1980s. Other than a few thousand hard core subscribers of the separatist ideology, an overwhelming majority of Sikhs in India and abroad are against the idea of Khalistan. As an American Sikh pointed out recently, there are ten lakh Sikhs in North America, who have nothing to do with a few hundred who demonstrate in favour of Khalistan outside the Indian consulates or high commissions.
In Punjab, there are 35,000 families, more Sikhs than Hindus, who are yet to recover from the loss of their relatives, either in terrorist killings under the leadership of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwala or in the state security’s counter and indiscriminate operations, in which countless Sikh youth were eliminated in fake encounters. Add to this the thousands who died during Operation Bluestar and in the genocide of Sikhs following the assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi, and you have a horrendous picture. Nobody, least of all the common Sikhs, wants the history repeated over yet another self-styled Khalistani. Even the problem of drugs in Punjab is a hangover of the decade of terrorism.
The government and the police faced condemnation for capitulating to the criminal mob at Ajnala, but it seems the police did not have a choice. Firstly, the police were taken by surprise at the ferocity of the mob. Secondly, they had failed to anticipate the violent design of the crowd and did not have sufficient force to handle the situation, but most important of all, they could not have used force on the crowd that was using the holy book as a shield without disastrous consequences.
Had the police used force and had any harm come to the holy book, the common Sikhs would have turned against the government and would have been prone to the Khalistani propaganda that the establishment is anti-Sikh. The common mind is unable to look at such situations rationally: the desecration of the holy book was done by the Khalistanis who used it as a cover for their violent acts. The same was done by Bhindranwla and his terrorists who ensconced themselves inside the Golden Temple and carried out despicable acts there, including torture and killings. Although most of the Sikhs knew the anti-religion activities Bhindranwala had been carrying out inside the temple, Operation Bluestar, the army operation in June 1984 to flush out the terrorists, turned them against the government.
By showing restraint at Ajnala, the police actually foiled the Khalistani plot of whipping up religious sentiments and triggering widespread communal disturbance in the state. For three weeks after that, the state government attention remained on carrying out the G 20 meeting without any mishap. Meanwhile, the criminal gang, emboldened by its success at Ajnala, was going gung-ho at its political activities behind the facade of Sikh religious programme of baptising the Sikh youth at various places in the state. The government was keeping watch and as soon as the G 20 meetings got over, the police cracked down on the Ajnala police station attack offenders. Amritpal and companions were sought to be arrested as they were on their way to one such function.
The story of his escape and the inability of the police to catch him till date is not as simple as it looks. He is once again using religion as a cover and is reportedly hiding in a gurudwara, knowing the police would find it difficult to raid it. There are even reports that, to perpetuate his facade of being a Sikh religious hero, Amritpal would surrender on April 13/14, the 325th anniversary of the establishment of Sikh religion by Guru Gobind Singh.
The police, on the other hand, are working on a strategy to deny him the hero’s mantle. It is for this reason that they did not arrest him from his village house in Dallepur. Any exchange between the police and the armed companions of the gang leader would have led to an ugly situation. The flip side of the story of the police failure to arrest the gang leader is positive. The longer he remains on the run and the more the evidence about the petty tricks he has been using to escape arrest, the worse it is for his image. The halo built around Amritpal by his supporters through a funded and aggressive social media campaign is gone. Some of the followers, who got carried away by Amritpal’s overtly pious talk and deeds, say they regret having supported him and that they did not think he would turn out to be such a coward. The self-styled Khalistani is also being widely lampooned on the social media.
Meanwhile, the general public interest in the case has waned. A majority of the state’s people are relieved that there is no mass support for the Khalistani gang, that there was no violence around the arrest of those nabbed by the police, that they were packed off to the faraway Dibrugarh jail in Assam, that they would not be able to spew out venom for a long while and that the security forces are present in Punjab in large numbers to tackle a crisis. The dreadful National Security Act (NSA) never had such mass support as in the present case. Nobody other than the sinister and small group of the Khalistan supporters, including an unhinged Punjab parliamentarian, gives a damn to the human rights of these fraudulent activists.
If the Khalistanis have no qualms about hijacking religion for their nefarious designs or about bringing bad name to the entire Sikh community, which has nothing to do with them and their phoney cause, and whose security is automatically jeopardised by these gangsters, why should the common Sikhs feel any sympathy for the Khalistanis arrested under the harsh law? These sentiments have been echoing over the social media for the last two months. Thanks to the social media, the voice of Sikhs against Khalistan is being heard, some of whom even say that NSA is too flattering to these “rats hiding in some hole”. There is also pity in the common mind for the associates of Amritpal whom he first misguided and then betrayed. The slapping of NSA on the gang has also put the fear of God in the closet Khalistanis. Although small in number, they have a lot of nuisance value.
Thanks to the restrain shown by the administration, the situation in Punjab has been peaceful so far, but nobody is prepared to bet upon it. The state’s people would heave a sigh of relief when Amritpal and associate Pappalpreet Singh are arrested and cast away to some faraway jail, no longer able to threaten public peace and security.
(The author is a Delhi-based journalist)
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