Relief and revelations

Rajesh Ramachandran

Relief. In a word, that is the mood in Punjab. The state that suffered unbearable misery over decades of religious secessionist violence heaved a huge sigh of relief after the crackdown on Khalistani separatist and fancy dresser Amritpal Singh, proving conclusively that he wasn’t and he never will be Bhindranwale 2.0. In that sense, the Punjab Police action that culminated in Amritpal running for his dear life was indeed revelatory. Firstly, the incident revealed Punjab’s intense dislike for more bloodshed in the name of religion. There is no more appetite for mindless killings, police repression and anarchy. For a state that saw it all, Amritpal was a bitter reminder of the dark days of militancy and a warning of what can happen if things went out of hand.

A self-assured Punjab wants moderation, modernity and prosperity, not narco-corruption wrapped in opportunistic politics of religious identity.

Then, the bigger revelation was that the people reacted as if they were waiting for Amritpal to be picked up — that Amritpal was an enigma wrapped in a mysterious intelligence operation was there for all to see. A clean-shaven, well-built Dubai trucker with Punjabi good looks overnight being called a ‘radical preacher’ was obviously suspicious. He never preached anything apart from threatening Union Home Minister Amit Shah with former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s end. He was no religious scholar, no rabble-rousing reformer, no fire-breathing preacher, nor an inheritor of the gaddi of an old Sikh seat of reverence like Damdami Taksal. He was a nobody who suddenly burst onto the Punjabi horizon like a meteor.

But the difference in Amritpal’s case is that wise Punjabis did not believe that he was a religious separatist meteor; instead, they thought he was more of a paratrooper dropped into Punjab to create trouble. In a previous column (‘For Punjab’s sake’), one argued why the native wisdom of Punjabis about Amritpal is that he was a plant. In a fertile soil hoed and watered by the successful farmers’ protest against the Centre, someone thought an agent provocateur could be seeded to create secessionist unrest. The question was, whose stooge was he? It was easiest to point fingers at the Centre. So, at least one section of the Punjabi intelligentsia — which is perennially suspicious of the Centre — wanted to believe that Amritpal must have been planted by Central intelligence agencies to destabilise the state government in order to impose the President’s rule.

The catch in this easy proposition was the state government’s inactivity. Now, with the state police cracking down on the Khalistani separatist and imposing the National Security Act and the Centre offering all support and spiriting away Amritpal’s aides to the Dibrugarh jail in Assam, fingers can no longer be pointed at the Central intelligence agencies or the state government. They have done, though belatedly, what needed to be done. Then, had Amritpal been picked up before the Ajnala incident, there would have been plenty of people sympathising with a youngster trying to address the drug issue — so what if he dressed like Bhindranwale or his friends carried some weapons with dubious licences from Jammu! In that sense, the government waited for Amritpal to expose himself thoroughly.

Yet, the Punjab Police’s failure in arresting him has, unfortunately, given a fillip to wild theories of ‘some powerful people’ allowing him to escape. His escape notwithstanding, the police crackdown has a salutary effect on all those who believed that he is a force of evil: he was moving around in a drug lord’s Mercedes Benz; his associate is supposed to have raised Rs 35 crore from donors abroad; there are reports of innumerable calls made by this fund-raiser to contacts in Pakistan. If all these are added up, Amritpal seems to have been propped up by foreign intelligence agencies, particularly when Punjab’s response is posited with the violent reaction of the diaspora in London. When it comes to hosting, nurturing and promoting religious secessionism in India, the British authorities have always hidden behind the fig leaf of ‘freedom of expression’ — something that is not offered for the Taliban or the ISIS, but is reserved for Talibanesque Indian secessionists!

One of the biggest revelations of the Amritpal incident is the diaspora’s overreaction. Punjab always had a fringe dabbling in various types of extremist political belief systems, from Maoism to religious secession, with some of these groups surprisingly feeding into each other. So do many other Indian states, as it ought to be in any democratic society. But what makes the Punjabi fringe different from the others is the patronage of the diaspora and the Western governments. The British government had a policy of offering asylum to Khalistani separatists on the basis of letters of recommendation written by secessionists, whose party actually used to collect money to sign these letters claiming grave religious repression in Punjab. This skewed asylum policy, which became an easy but illegitimate migration tool to the First World, has kept the logic of separatism alive, kicking and screaming in London.

But even by old colonial standards, the Briton who scaled the High Commission’s balcony to pull the Indian flag down doth protest too much — much more than expected of a loyal citizen. Since when has scaling someone else’s property and disfiguring it amounted to freedom of expression? Or was it an attempt at the kind of free speech that led to the murder of Indian diplomat Ravindra Mhatre in Birmingham in 1984? An Indian official pushed down the balcony could have become Ravindra Mhatre 2.0. The British and Canadian governments should understand that these violent protesters, like the Kanishka bombers, are their citizens and their problem, not Punjab’s.

Back home, Punjabis have shown zero tolerance to religious secessionist provocation, and the Shiromani Akali Dal should understand that it will only gain further notoriety in trying to fish in troubled waters by offering legal help to those arrested. A self-assured Punjab wants moderation, modernity and prosperity, not narco-corruption wrapped in opportunistic politics of religious identity.