Suicide by Haryana IPS officer: Cong to stage candle marches today, BJP says issue politicised

The Congress will hold candle marches across Punjab on Monday, upping the ante against the Haryana’s BJP government over the suicide by senior IPS officer Y Puran Kumar.

The move comes as Dalits held a congregation in Chandigarh against the incident on Sunday.

Reacting to the developments, BJP’s Punjab media cell head Vineet Joshi accused the Congress and state’s ruling AAP of making it a “political issue” for their vested interests.

“The parties whose own credentials on Dalit rights are questionable are pointing fingers at the BJP,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Punjab Congress sought the arrest of Haryana DGP Shatrujeet Kapur in the suicide case.

The party blamed polarisation of society on religious and caste lines by the state’s ruling BJP for the incident.

“Remove the DGP, handcuff him and put him behind the bars,” said state Congress president Amrinder Singh Raja Warring.

A Haryana-cadre IPS officer, Y Puran Kumar, had shot himself dead at his Sector 11 home in Chandigarh on October 7. He left behind an eight-page note, accusing senior IPS and IAS officers of caste-based harassment and humiliation. Kumar’s bureaucrat wife Amneet P Kumar had demanded that Kpaur and other officers named in the note be mentioned as accused in the complaint.

Warring wondered what would be the plight of ordinary Dalits if a senior IPS officer belonging to the community “could not get justice”. Warring said in such cases, all names mentioned in the final note were generally included in the FIR. “But the Chandigarh Police, which is directly under the control of the BJP-led Centre, has not named all accused,” he said.

Warring said the BJP was getting such things done “deliberately” to polarise people along communal and caste lines so that it could stay in power.

Former Punjab CM Charanjit Singh Channi blamed the ‘Manuvadi’ ideology for the incident. Manuvaad refers to the ideology based on Manusmriti, a Hindu text attributed to sage Manu. The text is often blamed for caste-based discrimination in Indian society. Channi said the suicide wasn’t an isolated case as Dalits had consistently faced bias under the BJP, which “seeks inspiration” from the text.