Jagtar Singh

  Quashing of Kotkapura probe by High Court is not end of the road, expedite Bargari Ground Zero Jagtar Singh   Chandigarh: Impression has gone around that the verdict of the Punjab and Haryana High Court quashing SIT probing the Kotkapura firing case related to sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib has has put to an end the lingering hope of the Sikh devotees of getting justice from the System. It is not. The very institution that is the deliverer of justice has just put a spoke in the wheel and that to mainly because of the incompetence of the government in handling this sensitive case. It is just one case and that too is off-shoot of the basic case that is theft of Bir of Guru Granth Sahib from a gurdwara in Burj Jawahar Singh Wala village in the Malwa hinterland in June 1, 2015 whose pages were subsequently found scattered on the streets of the adjoining Bargari village on the morning of October 12, more than four months later. In power at that time in Punjab was the Akali Dal-BJ...

  Bargari sacrilege: Punjab can’t afford another systemic collapse in justice delivery Ground Zero Jagtar Singh   The System is expected to deliver justice and all the more so in cases in which the failure can later turn out to be historic. Not only Punjab, the country has paid the cost for what is assessed to be failure of the System to provide justice some decades back. Chandigarh, the city with the unique distinction of housing headquarters of three administrations, on Monday the April 19, witnessed two demonstrations on the same issue by people belonging to different ideological pretensions. These people were from the Aam Aadmi Party on the one hand and the others being from the Sikh radical political stream. The Dal Khalsa that was part of this conglomerate cherish no political ambition by way of contesting the Assembly or the Lok Sabha elections. The issue is the long delayed justice in the cases of sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib in Bargari village dating bac...

  Religio-political dimensions of Bargari sacrilege narrative more critical than probe itself Jagtar Singh Ground Zero A single judge bench of the Punjab and Haryana High Court last week turned upside down the Kotkapura police firing case associated with the sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib by quashing the probe conducted by the SIT, and the SIT itself. It has been a long wait for justice as the shocking incidents associated with sacrilege are rooted in 2015 when Punjab was being ruled by the Akali Dal-BJP alliance government headed by the towering leader Parkash Singh Badal with his son Sukhbir Singh as the Deputy Chief Minister who also had the Home department under him and thus directly responsible for law and order affairs. Here is the backgrounder in brief. The Bir (copy) of Guru Granth Sahib (the revered book that is Guru Incarnate for the Sikhs), was found stolen from Burj Jawahar Singh Wala village in the Malwa hinterland in the afternoon of June 1, 2015. This are...

  Modi could be as misleading on farm laws as   logic of demonitisation   as anti-terrorism weapon   Jagtar Singh Ground Zero In the latest such shocking incident, at least twenty-two security personnel were killed in a bloody confrontation with the Naxalites in Chhatisgarh. The number of casualties on the other side are stated to be twelve, including a woman. This perhaps is the case of the highest number of the security personnel killed since the Pulwama bomb attack on the convey in Jammu and Kashmir that changed the narrative in the run up to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. One of the differences now is that the Pakistan factor is missing in Chhatisgarh. Of course, the Assembly elections are being held in several states. The Chhatisgarh incident cannot in any way be linked to the struggle for existence by the farmers that has spread across several states after having been triggered in Punjab that historically is a turbulent zone. But then the two narrative...