Non-ideological targeted gangster-terrorism emerging as serious threat in Punjab with latest case being RPG attack on Sarhali police station

 

Non-ideological targeted gangster-terrorism emerging as serious threat in Punjab

Ground Zero

Jagtar Singh

Chandigarh: Latest to come under RPG attack in Punjab is the Sarhali Police station near Patti on Ferozepur-Amritsar national highway in Tarn Taran district. This is part of the region that one time was the hotbed of militancy that was triggered in 1980 and came to be known as the “liberated zone”.

Earlier, the headquarters of the Intelligence wing of the Punjab Police had been targeted in Mohali and it was subsequently traced to gangsters linked to some militant leaders purportedly operation from abroad.

A group of gangsters had earlier gunned down Dera Sacha Sauda activist Pardeep Singh in Kotkapura town in Faridkot district who was on bail in the case of sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib at Bargari and had been provided police protection. He was killed in the morning in his shop on the highway.

Of late, Punjab has witnessed emergence of a new killer architecture that can be termed as the gangster-terrorism. The operators have been hired even from other states going by the investigations by the security agencies so far. And these players are non-ideological. They are just given a target.

Punjab witnessed militancy beginning April 1980 but it was fuelled by revenge psyche and rooted in ideological content. The active Sikh religio-political matrix over the years had provided the much needed space to this ideology to proliferate. That phenomenon did not remain confined to Punjab.

This politico-religious violence consumed both the main players – Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. No probe has ever been held either by the Centre or the Punjab government into that phenomenon. However, Pakistan came to be targeted as the villain and continues to be so.

Several dimensions of that period call for answers which are not there.

Violence was contained by police methods with last action being the killing of chief minister Beant Singh in 1995  at the main gate of the Punjab civil secretariat in Chandigarh by human bomb Dilawar Singh. That action was designed by the Babbar Khalsa.

Sporadic incidents, however, have continued.

Several persons whose names were linked to sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib at Bargari in 2015 have been targeted. The probe even in these 2015 cases is still to be taken to logical conclusion despite poll promises earlier by the Congress in 2017 and the Aam Aadmi Party before 2022 Assembly elections.

Both the Shiromani Akali Dal and the Congress have paid the price. The Bargari sacrilege is one of the main hurdles in the revival of the Akali Dal that stands completely marginalised for the first time in its history of more than a century.

The issue here, however, is the new phenomenon that has emerged in Punjab.

Concrete evidence would be available only when the main players are arrested. These players who are operating from abroad have been owning responsibility for such actions. Interestingly, the names of some gang leaders who are in jail in India are also linked to this narrative.

It is pertinent to recall here that at one stage, the security agencies used to give out that Babbar Khalsa chief Sukhdev Singh was operating Pakistan, till be was gunned down. He lived in Patiala under cover of a government contractor all those years.

The instruments of violence were crushed by the state through police methods but there was no ideological input. Militancy can be curbed but not wiped out by police methods alone.

There is thin line of demarcation between terrorism and militancy and that line mainly is ideology.

The people who bombed Beant Singh were inspired by ideology. So was Bhai Ranjit Singh who carried out the first action by gunning down Nirankari chief Gurbachan Singh in Delhi on April 24, 1980 after judicial system failed to deliver justice in case of killing on 13 Sikh activists by Nirankaris on April 13, 1978 in Amritsar as all the accused were acquitted and the state decided not to file appeal in the high court.

They were not hired killers.

Now the killers are mercenaries.

This makes all the difference.