Anti-gun drive pays dividends in three border police districts

Ravi Dhaliwal

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Pathankot/Gurdaspur, Dec 12

In the three border police districts of Pathankot, Batala and Gurdaspur, where officers say possessing a gun is embedded in the area’s culture, the cops have come down with a heavy hand and have cancelled 833 arms licences in the last one month.

The Gurdaspur parliamentary constituency comprises these three police districts. There is a misleading notion in all its nine major cities that keeping a gun in your house adds a couple of inches to your social stature.

‘Filters’ applied to cancel a licence

• Pathankot SSP Harkamal Preet Singh Khakh said licences of those against whom FIRs were registered or those involved in heinous crimes were put on hold
• Then came the people who had licences registered in their names but had passed away
• In the last category were people who themselves wanted to surrender their permits for many reasons, the most prominent being infighting among family members over possession of a gun

Officers admit that flaunting arms had become the rule rather than the exception before the police cracked the whip. On November 12, the Punjab Government had ordered a review of all arms licences issued in the state in the past. Even though Punjab has 2 per cent of the total population in the country, it holds 10 per cent of the total gun licences.

“In these border districts, which bore the brunt of terrorism in the eighties and nineties and now where being associated with a group of gangsters adds to your social standing, possessing arms is a normal thing, rather the in-thing. This was having a cascading effect with one crime leading to the other. This ‘gun culture phenomenon’ had to come to an end somewhere,” said a police officer.

Pathankot by recommending the cancellation of 477 licences has topped among the three districts, followed by Batala with 189 and Gurdaspur with 167.

Officers engaged in the scrutiny of licences were, at times, pressured by the political class. “However, we used to tell these people that we were under government orders following which they would agree to surrender their licences which would later be cancelled,” he said.

Among the many “filters” that were applied to cancel a licence was whether a person had a criminal case or cases registered against him after he got the authorisation for possessing a weapon.