Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Mar 23: The Khalistani leader Amritpal Singh, who continues to remain yet at large, has escaped out of Punjab and was supposedly last seen in Haryana’s Kurukshetra, Punjab Inspector General of Police (Headquarters) Sukhchain Singh Gill said on Thursday.
Punjab Police shared a CCTV footage from Shahbad Markanda, Kurukshetra showing a man walking with an umbrella, who is suspected to be Amritpal Singh.
The footage showed the man believed to be Amritpal Singh leaving the home of a woman in Haryana who had sheltered him while he was fleeing from the police on Monday. The footage shows the wanted Khalistani leader, carrying an umbrella to hide his face, leaving the house in a white shirt and dark blue jeans.
“We cannot say where Amritpal might have reached by now. We are in touch with all central agencies,” he said, adding that the woman Baljeet Kaur, who sheltered Amritpal Singh and his aide Papalpreet Singh at her house in Kurukshetra, has been arrested.
“We have arrested the woman, Baljeet Kaur, who sheltered Amritpal and his aide Papalpreet Singh at her home in Shahabad on Sunday. She has been handed over to the Punjab Police,” Kurukshetra police chief Police Singh Bhoria said.
Amritpal Singh had changed five vehicles in 12 hours to escape arrest on Saturday. The Khalistani leader’s aide, Papalpreet Singh, has been with him since that day and both have been seen together in other CCTV footage.
Amritpal Singh leads “Waris Punjab De”, a radical organisation started by actor and activist Deep Sidhu, who died in a road accident in February last year. He is linked to a massive protest on February 23 against the arrest of his key aide and kidnapping accused, Lovepreet Singh. Six policemen were injured during the clash.
The driver of a motorised cargo rickshaw who gave a ride to Amritpal Singh and his aide on Saturday said he did not know who the passenger was at that time. Lakhveer Singh, the driver of the rehra – a noisy motorised rickshaw with a small trailer for carrying cargo said he was heading towards village Mehatpur, about 5 km from his village Udhowal in Punjab’s Jalandhar district, when he saw two men standing on the side of the road with a motorcycle.
“They told me they have a flat tyre. I saw the rear tyre was punctured. They asked me to take them to a tyre-repair shop and loaded the motorcycle on the trailer,” he said. “I didn’t know who they were at that time, never seen them before,” said the driver who frequents between villages Udhowal and Mehatpur for a living.
“I told them there’s a shop in another village nearby for which we need to drive back towards the side from where the two came. But they said there was no need to go towards that side. So we went onwards to Mehatpur. They got down at a puncture shop on the outskirts of Mehatpur,” he added.
Singh said he couldn’t recall the colour of the clothes the two men were wearing. “Only after the police talked to me I came to know who they were,” he said, adding he asked for a fee for taking them to the tyre-repair shop and they paid him ₹ 100. “I had headphones plugged in and this open vehicle makes a lot of noise, so can’t recall hearing anything they were talking. Police also asked me about the day and I told them everything. They did not harass me,” he said.
A fresh FIR has been filed against Amritpal Singh for extortion and rioting following a complaint by the ‘granthi’ of a gurdwara in Jalandhar where the pro-Khalistan preacher changed his clothes and fled on a bike to escape the police crackdown on his outfit. Police said the fugitive spent around 45 minutes at a gurdwara in Nangal Ambian village.
With the self-proclaimed social reformer, Sikh preacher and Waris Punjab De chief continuing on the run for five days now, investigators suspect that he was likely to have evaded the arrest to manage the “huge funding” he received for pushing the secessionist agenda of Khalistan in Punjab.
The incidents of denigration of the Indian flag and vandalising of Indian diplomatic missions instigated by Khalistani activists and sympathisers in foreign capitals says more about the Sikh diaspora, or a small section of it, than it does about Punjab.
It is widely believed that within Punjab there was no or very little support for the idea of a separate Khalistan. Though Punjab has its problems — the plateau and dead-ends of an unsustainable rice-wheat agricultural economy amid shrinking landholdings; declining prospects for employment generation; a widespread problem of addiction to alcohol and drugs in the young; a neighbour on the state’s international border ever willing to stir up trouble; and the political short-termism of ruling elites.
But Punjab knows only too well that Khalistan has zero answers to any of these questions and problems. The people want no repeat of the violence that raged in the state in the 1980s until the mid-1990s because of an armed uprising by Sikh militants, and the challenge posed by a movement fanned and fuelled by Pakistan’s ISI to the Indian state. It was Punjab’s youth that paid the highest price, and many in the state today have not forgotten that dark chapter.
Meanwhile, four persons were arrested on Thursday, a day after a rally was taken out in Chhattisgarh’s capital Raipur by a group of people allegedly in support of Amritpal Singh,
Based on the examination of CCTV footage and video clips of the statements given by people involved in the rally, a first information report (FIR) was registered at Civil Lines police station, Raipur Senior Superintendent of Police Prasant Agrawal said. Four Raipur residents, Diler Singh Randhawa (46), Manindarjeet Singh alias Mintu Sandhu (40), Harinder Singh Khalsa (44) and Harpreet Singh Randhawa alias Chintu (42), were arrested for allegedly taking out a foot march in support of Amritpal Singh on Wednesday, he said.
Earlier in the day, Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel said in the state Assembly that he had ordered police to probe the issue and take action against those found indulging in anti-national activities.