The political elites of Punjab have to do better by their constituents than engage in constant calculations on how to combine or divide Sikhs and Hindus for a winning ticket at elections.
His nefarious agendas have few takers in Punjab. Political class must draw the line harder around such characters and focus on real issues of governance
By: Editorial
April 24, 2023 06:28 IST
Amritpal Singh, the self-styled leader of a purported new movement for Khalistan, has finally been arrested, ending a 27-day long chase in Punjab and searches in Haryana and Delhi during which he seemed to pop up on cameras only to outwit the police at every step. The turning point seems to have come three days ago, when his wife was questioned at Amritsar airport and prevented from boarding a flight to London. In keeping with the rebellious bluster that marked his public style, Singh sought to leverage his arrest on Sunday morning as an act of defiance — he gave himself up at a gurudwara in Rode, the birthplace of Jarnail Singh Bhindrawale, who ran Sikh militancy for Khalistan until he was killed in an attack by the Army on the Golden Temple temple. Singh had anointed himself leader of the Sikh pride group Waris Punjab De at the same gurudwara some months ago. But in Punjab, where his sudden appearance from Dubai, his country of residence for several years, evoked more suspicion than admiration or reverence, his rhetoric has found hardly an echo.
It begs the question as to how and why the Bhagwant Mann government allowed a non-entity to become a person capable of roiling the state, in or out of jail. Another mystery is why no red flags went up in Delhi the entire time that Singh was building himself up, though the Modi government knows only too well Punjab’s importance as a border state. Now that the hunt for Singh has ended, it is time for the political leadership both at the state and Centre to take stock of their own long-standing failure to address public resentment in Punjab, especially among the youth, a failure that opportunistic rabble rousers seek to channel for their own ends. The short-sightedness of Punjab’s political parties has led to public cynicism with politics itself in a predominantly agrarian state beset by the decreasing returns from agriculture. The people in Punjab know better than to follow a pied piper who sells dreams of separatism. They have been there before, and are only too aware that such bluster isn’t the answer to any of the unaddressed imperatives of governance.
The political elites of Punjab have to do better by their constituents than engage in constant calculations on how to combine or divide Sikhs and Hindus for a winning ticket at elections. It would be unfortunate if the Amritpal Singh episode is used to open up religious fault lines for electoral needs in a sensitive state, bordering a country that is always looking for a chance to stir trouble in India. The Sikh clergy has to step up to the plate too, and must not allow itself to be guided by charlatans who seek to use religion to win a following for nefarious agendas.
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