A once-proscribed Sikh outfit known for its pro-Khalistan stance castigated on Friday the Congress government in Punjab, saying “nothing except faces” has changed under the present regime of the five-river state that has “completely failed” to check socio-economic menace like use of drugs and illegal mining of sand.
The four-decade-old Dal Khalsa, which strives to form a sovereign State for members of northwest India’s majority religion, further deplored “rising incidents of sacrilege” against the Sikh community amid “lawlessness” under the regime of chief minister Amarinder Singh.
The administration, which assumed power 15 months ago, has failed on all fronts, said the Amritsar-based Khalsa head Harpal Singh Cheema. “It’s a free-for-all in Punjab. Nothing has changed with the change in government except faces,” he said in Doaba region’s Hoshiarpur, 140 km northwest of the state capital Chandigarh. “Does a government exist in Punjab? Only the reins of power have passed on from the Akali Dal to the Congressmen. The ground situation, the police functioning, the bureaucratic attitude has shown absolutely no difference in content and style.”
Advertisement
Particularly disturbing has been the “different kinds of alcohol and drug abuse”, leaving “all parts of Punjab in an octopus-like grip”, claimed the Sikh nationalist, also a human rights lawyer who was in May 2016 made the working president of the Khalsa that was banned for ten years from 1982 at the peak of the separatist Khalistan movement. “It is a sad irony that the Punjabi youth is today leaning on loneliness, misery and stress. People are dying, suffering unending pain of seeing their near and dear ones collapsing into the malaise of drug abuse without reprieve and reform.”
Referring to the state seeing a “sudden increase in the deaths of such addicts due to drug overdoses”, he said the administration never actually implemented the counter-measures it announced. “There is only just talk of strict action. Else, drug suppliers as well as their mentors in the police and administration continue to have a field day without any let-up,” said Cheema, whose Dal Khalsa had two years ago fused with the Panch Pardhani, another Sikh radical organisation. “The CM has to catch the bull by its horns; otherwise nothing substantial will happen.”
Advertisement
Dal Khalsa leaders H.S. Dhami and Kanwar Pal Singh said it’s almost a month that a section of the state’s population was protesting through sit-in demonstrations to book the culprits involved in Faridkot’s Bargarhi and Behbal Kalan violence of October 2015, triggered by an instance of sacrilege of the Sikh holy book Guru Granth Sahib in July that year.
Even today, the government’s attitude to probing those incidents of theft and police firing is “thoroughly non-serious and casual”, Dhami said, noting that none of the demands of the agitators has been accepted.
Added Singh: “We hope that the people of Punjab will get to see the findings of the Justice Ranjit Singh Commission on the sacrilege incidents. They are expected to be out in a day or two.”
