Ajnala mayhem

A COUPLE of unpardonable own goals by the Punjab Police led to the storming of Ajnala police station by armed supporters of radical preacher Amritpal Singh on Thursday. First, the cops showed overzealousness in arresting Lovepreet, a close aide of Amritpal, in a kidnapping case. Then, they failed to stop Amritpal’s supporters, some of whom were wielding swords and guns and raising pro-Khalistan slogans, from breaking through the barricades and barging into the police station in protest against Lovepreet’s arrest. Inexplicably, the police relied on the evidence furnished by the protesters in Lovepreet’s support to secure his discharge from the court. It is clear that the law enforcers succumbed to radicals’ pressure and failed to follow the due process of law. The Ajnala incident is symptomatic of the breakdown of the law and order machinery in the border state. It comes just a fortnight after protesters went on the rampage on the Chandigarh-Mohali border, damaging police vehicles and attacking cops.

The state government is at fault for being lenient with rabble-rousers such as UAE-returned Amritpal, who is being projected as a 21st-century avatar of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and who is veritably a law unto himself. Some Opposition parties, in a desperate bid to stay politically relevant, have no qualms about fanning the flames – a throwback to the turbulent days of the 1980s. The NIA, the Central counter-terrorism probe agency, is not taking action against Amritpal despite his secessionist rant and his threat that Union Home Minister Amit Shah will meet the same fate as that of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

The state’s political and religious leadership needs to take an unambiguous stand on the hardliners and affirm the supremacy of the rule of law. The bid to whip up religious secessionist sympathies is nothing but a ploy by vested interests based in India and abroad to destabilise Punjab all over again. It’s the responsibility of all stakeholders to expose the troublemakers and ensure that the state’s peaceful progress and economic resurgence are not derailed. A replay of the blood-soaked era of terrorism will be catastrophic for Punjab. 

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