Sword-wielding Amritpal Utters the K-word, Demands Release of a Suspect, the State Capitulates

Punjab needs a strong Jatt-Sikh chief minister who is his own boss, not one who is controlled from Delhi. We need to question if we can clam this new wave of radicalism with free power, better schools and hospitals

Shekhar Gupta

If the visuals we have seen from Amritsar these past couple of days — radical followers of the new charismatic preacher Amritpal Singh overrunning the Ajnala police station in Punjab — do not jolt us, it shows how indifferent and lazy we’ve become on critical issues of our supreme national interest. They stormed a police station next to the border with Pakistan.

They forced the state to release one of theirs arrested for kidnapping. Watch those craven, grovelling videos of the Amritsar police chief saying that the protesters have proved that the charges were fake, and that the police were withdrawing the FIR.

Thank you sir ji, this is the new bleeding-heart Punjab Police we never thought we’d live long enough to see. There were some such surrenders made by Punjab Police in the post-1978 epoch of militancy. But with a demonstration of embarrassment and helplessness. Now, it has been done with a straight face, with much relief. This, in a state where even an FIR for a fake bicycle theft charge is near-impossible to erase until a person’s death.

Not for three decades, in fact, not since V.P. Singh’s disastrous daily-wage government traded those arrested militants for then Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s daughter Rubaiya, have we seen a state capitulation like this one. Think. A big police station right on the border was overrun by a mob armed with swords and firearms, an arrested suspect was freed, and then the state said ‘sorry, we were in the wrong’.

You have to be nuts to imagine there will be no consequences for it. Nothing will please me more than to be proven wrong on this in the times to come. The cruel fact, however, is that we are repeating mistakes of a bad past in Punjab. Escapism is no plan or solution. But, for what’s going on in Punjab, I find it impossible to avoid unleashing that awful cliche on you: we have seen this movie before.

The last time we saw it, say from 1978 to 1993, it was like a horror film that never ended. It consumed tens of thousands of innocent lives from all communities, though mostly Sikh and Hindu, saw countless assassinations, a controversial military operation at a scale never before, strained communal relations and caused a generation-long alienation. It took 15 years to begin the return of normalcy.

Now, much seems like the way troubles began on Baisakhi day, 13 April, 1978, except two differences. One, there was bloodletting and death that day as a group of Bhindranwale’s supporters protesting at a Nirankari sect congregation were fired at in Amritsar. By God’s grace, we haven’t seen violence even at a fraction of that scale now. If you are relieved with a sense of ‘so far, so good’, I underline for you the other difference. Bhindranwale never, ever used the word “Khalistan”.

Never. Many, many journalists met and interviewed him; I did so nearly 20 times in 1983-84 and he never mentioned the word. In fact, even the last time I saw him in his huddle with key lieutenants at the Akal Takht, his last appearance when the Army had already begun encirclement of the Temple Complex in Operation Bluestar, he did not ask for a sovereign state. We asked him often — on the record — if he wanted Khalistan, or what he thought of the demand. He would say with a mischievous smile, “I never asked for Khalistan”.

But if the “bibi” (the lady, as he referred to Indira Gandhi) gave it to me, I will not say no. Amritpal Singh has been using that K-word from Day 1. Of course, he packages it as simply a demand for self-determination, which he asserts should be anybody’s right in a democracy. Then he goes on to say that if Amit Shah says he will crush the “Khalistan movement”, he’d rather first remember the fate Indira Gandhi met for making the same boast.

Part of the old movie/new movie story is the politics of the state. Punjab’s post-Independence history tells us that the state sees a crisis whenever it has a weak leadership; the leader seems controlled by Delhi and incapable of keeping Sikh religiosity in his political tent. The definition of ‘weak’ is particularly nuanced in Punjab and it isn’t determined by the size of an elected government’s majority. Or there’d be no issue now. The state needs a strong individual as chief minister. The party in power also doesn’t matter so much.

Partap Singh Kairon ran an effective Congress government from 1956 until Nehru erred and removed him under pressure in 1964. Kairon