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In April last year, Chand Kaur, matriarch of the Namdhari sect of Sikhs, was shot dead inside the sect HQ compound in Bhaini Sahib village near Ludhiana. The case remains unsolved. Three weeks on in the same month, Durga Prasad Gupta, a local Shiv Sena leader, was shot dead in Khanna, again in Ludhiana district. It was first seen as a result of local rivalry.
But it was the 6 August killing of Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) Punjab vice-president Brig Jagdish Gagneja (retd) in Jalandhar that pointed towards this being a chain set in motion.
And now the police are surer than ever that this is part of a larger gameplan to “upset the peace of Punjab”.
So far since April last year, nine religious or religio-political leaders have been killed in Punjab in eight attacks – five of the victims being Hindu right-wingers, two followers of the Dera Sacha Sauda and a Christian pastor, besides the Namdhari matriarch.
While the police have since delinked the Namdhari murder from this chain as it is widely believed to be part of a succession battle within the sect, the modus operandi in other cases is similar – two bike-borne assailants fired pistol shots from close range and disappeared into the crowd.
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The pattern could have been detected earlier when there was an attack on RSS leader Naresh Kumar in Ludhiana in February last year, and he was fortunate to survive.
Gosain’s murder case has been handed over to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) that usually probes terror-related incidents, while the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is already probing the Namdhari sect murder and the killing of Gagneja.
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The Congress had little option but to move the NIA as, while the murders began during the SAD-BJP regime that went out of power early this year, Capt Amarinder Singh now faces the same allegations that he levelled then – that the police are incompetent and the government is clueless as well.
Former BJP minister Manoranjan Kalia has said:
The chief minister has cited “international ramifications” behind handing over the Gosain case to the NIA. This is largely due to the fact that Pakistan is considered as the sanctuary and financier for the Khalistani groups, besides separatist elements settled in Canada and other parts of the West, particularly after nearly two decades of organised militancy ended in the state by the mid-1990s.
Meanwhile, the state government has given Rs 5 lakh to Gosain’s kin and promised a job to one of his sons. “We just want justice,” says his son Deepak who works for a hosiery mill.
The trails at present are running cold, say police officers who do not want to be named.
A common link to Ludhiana also comes across in all the cases.
But it could just be trivia. Being a bustling, crowded, unplanned industrial city, it is the perfect hideout too.
DGP Arora has been candid. “I admit that this gang has posed a serious challenge for us... Sometimes we get very hopeful, and sometimes our investigations reach a dead end,” he was quoted as saying by HT.
He remained incommunicado to us, while the NIA officers did not want to talk to the media either.
The RSS has been cautious in its response.
“We have been told not to speak to the media individually,” said a fellow RSS worker of Gosain. “But all I can say is that there is panic among some groups due to the new (BJP-led) regime in power at the Centre. We are only doing our work of holding morning exercise drills!”
RSS’s pranth karyavahak, number two in its state hierarchy, Vinay Sharma, said:
There have been skirmishes between radical Sikhs and Hindus, and even radical Sikhs and Christian propagators in villages, over “danger to Sikhism”.
The sentiment was manifested and even heightened in the latest function by the RSS wing, Rashtriya Sikh Sangat, which organised a function in Delhi to mark the 350th birth anniversary of the 10th Sikh Guru Gobind Singh. The event was attended by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat .
It was decreed against by the Sikh temporal seat Akal Takht after pressure from radical groups that believe the RSS wants to “subsume” Sikhism into Hinduism and enter its institutions. The BJP’s ally Shiromani Akali Dal – which holds levers to Sikh religio-politics – abstained itself as a result. The BJP has since dared the Akalis to break up and fight alone.
As for what’s the RSS strategy now, Vinay Sharma said:
Gosain’s son Deepak echoes this sentiment:
(The author is a Chandigarh-based journalist.)
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Published: 03 Nov 2017,01:20 PM IST