He’s a “Khalistani”, a self-proclaimed separatist who has set himself on the path of baptising, arming and organising Sikh youth to fight drugs and what he terms the “injustice” of Delhi and its “cohorts” in Punjab have inflicted on the state. In the dress code prescribed for the Khalsa, he is a Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale doppelganger, complete with the gole dastaar (round turban) and the bana (gown). He’s Amritpal Singh, a 30-year-old engineering dropout who burst on Punjab’s religious-political scene on his return from Dubai last year.
Punjab Police booked Amritpal and 30 of his supporters on February 17 for allegedly kidnapping and thrashing Varinder Singh, a Sikh preacher and resident of Chamkaur Sahib in Rupnagar district. Singh, in his complaint, alleged that Amritpal’s associates abducted him from Ajnala and took him to an unknown place where he was brutally beaten for criticising the state’s “favourite” new preacher for his radical speeches and spreading false propaganda.
Tension spiked after Amritpal announced on Wednesday that he, along with his supporters, would stage a protest outside the Ajnala police station, where the case was registered. The police clamped restrictions on all roads leading to Ajnala to prevent the gathering, but to no avail. By afternoon, thousands of supporters led by the “Waris Punjab De” chief clashed with police personnel, broke through barricades, fought pitched street battles, and then laid siege to the police station. It was only after the police agreed to discharge Amritpal’s key aide Lovepreet Singh that the protesters lifted the dharna. Lovepreet Singh, known as Toofan, was released on Friday.
And suddenly, everyone was talking about Amritpal.
Punjab has a long history of radical politics, with the momentum of such movements usually displaying an inverse correlation with socioeconomic conditions. These have deteriorated in recent years, creating grounds for crime, militancy, and religious experimentation. There’s real fear that the state could become a happy hunting ground for niche but active separatist groups overseas pushing for a separate Sikh state, Khalistan.
Amritpal is a separatist (by admission), and while the crowds he attracted this week suggest that his popularity remains high, there are those that claim that the effects of the spell he initially cast (on his return to India) are waning. He celebrates Bhindranwale but dismisses comparisons with the militant leader of whom he speaks in present tense. “Santji never died in this area, he’s very much alive. You’ll find his picture in every village, every Gurdwara here,” he insists. “I respect him, but I can’t be like him. He’s a religious teacher. You learn many things in later life but you can’t learn the way of worship, the dedication he perfected early in his life.”
Similar, but different
Born in 1993, Amritpal never met Bhindranwale, who died in 1984. His childhood introduction to the slain leader, whose lore sustains in parts of Punjab’s countryside, was through locally spun music eulogising the separatist leader’s “martyrdom”. Yet, at 6-feet-plus, Amritpal’s gait, the way he sits or carries his slender frame with an anterior tilt, is reminiscent of the face of 1980s insurgency. “My height and slim build aren’t made to order,” he counters. “The dastaar I wear was given by Guru Gobing Singh ji and worn by Santji’s predecessors and successors in the Damdami Taksal (which Bindranwale headed). I’m sticking to tradition. What others wear might go out of fashion, not my attire.”
Tradition, religion, spiritualism and pursuit of justice are keywords in the narrative Amritpal weaves around rampant drug abuse, joblessness, and lack of formal education. Not one to tiptoe around issues, he is quick-witted, speaks fluent English and Punjabi with an aggressive Majha accent. Some of these traits are similar to Bhindranwale, who had a corny sense of humour. What sets them apart perhaps was the latter’s complete lack of familiarity with the English language and his fearsome demeanour, which his self-styled torchbearer hasn’t yet acquired or can smartly hide. It is evident in Amritpal’s ability to hold his own.
Sample this.
Are you funded by the ISI (Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence)?
“If I’m funded by the ISI, I should know as it involves money (laughs). Someone should tell me where that money is going; maybe the ISI is giving it to somebody but it isn’t reaching me. [But] funds aren’t an issue with Sikhs. If you’re honest with them they’d give you everything they have. We don’t take on-line transfers or large amounts of cash.”
Are you a separatist?
“Of course, I am a separatist. I’m a Punjabi and a Sikh; every Punjabi is separate from the rest of India. If we cannot live together peacefully, we must separate to live peacefully. Peaceful separation isn’t an evil thing. It should be discussed.”
What’s the basis of his claim of Punjab’s youth being against Delhi? His (paraphrased) counter-queries: What otherwise could inspire them to carry Bhindranwale’s photos to the Kisan Morcha on Delhi’s borders; why were they speaking about religion and Khalistan? The energy of Sikh youth wasn’t against the farm laws, he argues. It was about injustice against Sikhs. The built-up sentiment merely exploded when the triple-legislation came.
As evidenced by his staccato replies, Bhindranwale’s Dubai-returned lookalike from a family of baptised Sikhs is fiercely opinionated. At his frills-free Jhallupur Khera home, some 40km off Amritsar city, a pair of lanky gunmen kept watch in late January as this writer walked up to Amritpal, who lay wrapped in a blanket, a la Bhindranwale, on a cot in an open space facing a first floor room.
Through the conversation lasting over two hours, a small crowd that included parents of drug-afflicted youth waited their turn in a courtyard downstairs. Holding forth on a host of questions, he was alternatively mirthful and intensely assertive. Much of his ire was against what he termed the Indian state, in defence of the Punjabis (including Hindus who he said got misused against Sikhs). But his antidote for drug addiction is too simplistic.
“Drug addicts don’t need medicines; they need the Guru by their side. That works,” he reasoned. The other part of the “cure” was to insulate them from the social circle where they picked up the habit. In a sweeping conclusion, he thereafter used strong words (some of which are unprintable) to indict the state for pushing the young to drugs by not addressing historical wrongs, the painful reality of injustice: “Intoxication instead has been made part of our culture through songs like Apna Punjab hovey, ghar di sharab hovey (wish we have our own Punjab, our own alcohol).”
Recent turmoil
As we talked, an electric heater warmed his side of the bed. He said his return to Punjab was triggered by the 2015 Bargari sacrilege which gravitated him to Sikhi (religion) and the off-staging of Sikh youth — coupled with Punjabi actor Deep Sidhu’s arrest — in the Kisan Morcha (farm protest) controlled by the Left. “There was no Sikh leadership at the morcha. The Leftist/Communists looked like Sikhs but were against religion; they allowed namaz but asked Sikhs to take down Sikhism’s ensign, the Nishan Sahib.”
Independent observers agree that the Bargari episode hasn’t been credibly investigated. The sacrilege and the police action that followed against protestors were as much of a wound as the events of 1984, when the Indian army entered the Golden Temple to root out separatists hiding there. Adding insult to injury is the frequent release on parole by the authorities in Haryana of the Dera Sacha Sauda chief, some of whose followers were suspected of the desecration.
As much as Amritpal may protest the imputations of being a Bhindranwale clone, his stake in the latter’s legacy is hard to miss. It was at the Sant’s village, Rhode in Moga district on September, 2020 that he gained association with Deep Sidhu’s celebrity by assuming control of Waris Punjab De, an organisation the actor floated before his death in a car crash last year. Its charter: uniting the youth on farm issues and denial of federal rights.
The benefaction at Rhode was extraordinary. Neither was Amritpal part of the Kisan Morcha nor had he ever met Sidhu. He admitted as much to this writer: “I never met him personally. When he was jailed after the Red Fort incident, my people asked me to break the establishment’s narrative; they wanted me to go live (from Dubai) to explain why Sidhu wasn’t wrong. We supported him. He made a thank you phone call on coming out of jail…”
There was a method in the manner Amritpal tried to establish himself as the “people’s voice and interlocutor”. Popular sentiment attached to Bhindranwale and Sidhu clearly helped as he initiated his makeover with baptism at Anandpur Sahib on arrival from Dubai. His rousing oratory at venues of traditional Sikh gatherings facilitated early strides on Punjab’s landscape cratered by joblessness, a chronic sense of injustice, festering agrarian distress and the resultant despondency that drew the young to drugs.
The ground situation was somewhat similar when the Sant rose on the scene amid shrinking work opportunities in the primary (agriculture) sector with limited openings in the under-developed secondary (manufacturing) and tertiary (services) sectors. There were numerable instances of educated couples dropping out of joint families to join militancy. Through baptism and provision of weapons, Bhindranwale gave them a religious halo. The concomitant state excesses, the peak of which was the army action in the Golden Temple, pushed the border province into a deeper quagmire of violence, communal conflict and distrust abetted in no small measure from across the India-Pak border.
That past experience and what a local journalist termed as Amritpal’s “fan following” seems to be holding back the establishment from moving against him. Until the recent case against him, he has pretty much had a free run. That said, Amritpal has as much to learn from the tumultuous 1980s. Regardless of his promise to check vigilantism, his declamation that he will sort out wrongdoers among his followers, there’s a risk of history repeating itself, what with his worrisome ideological bent and call to arms. He seeks to fill the vacuum resulting from the ostensible decline of traditional parties he criticises for breaching promises and creating maladies that have come to dog Punjab. In his perception, most Sikh leaders expediently used the word “Khalistan”.
It’s dangerous, he insists, to not allow “civil” discussion in a democracy: “The January 26 (face-off) in 2021 was directly related to injustice and violence against Sikhs, the Lal Qila (Red Fort) being a symbol of the Indian State. They don’t want to recognise that there’s a problem involving a large segment of the society.” On that day, farmers who were part of the farm protest against three laws that have since been repealed, drove into Delhi, clashed with police, and even hoisted the Sikh flag at Red Fort.
Power and politics
Amritpal says he can never support the Congress because of its history with the Sikhs but that he respects the BJP for being open about what the Congress did behind closed doors: “I respect enemies who’re open.” Recognising the Akali Dal’s track record of struggle, he said the party has dissipated under the Badal family: “There is no Akali Dal. Every Sikh leader stands discredited. That has caused a huge and dangerous vacuum. There’s an army but no general.”
Amritpal’s views on the Akali Dal’s decline and its possible fallout resonate across the political spectrum. For instance, former MP and national commission of minorities chairman, Tarlochan Singh advocates a quick “healing touch” to neutralise exploitable anger on issues galvanising protests in Punjab: the Bargari morcha (in Malwa region), the agitation that has turned humongous on Chandigarh’s border for the release of Bandi Singhs (Sikhs serving jail terms for militancy) and the overarching drug abuse linked to joblessness. Claiming to have drawn the Prime Minister’s attention to possible solutions, he nevertheless trashed Khalistan as a “bogus idea” that made no political, religious or economic sense.
Indeed, the K-word appears to be a lost cause to even former militant Ranjit Singh Kuki Gill, who served long years in the US and Indian jails for the assassination of Congress leader Lalit Maken and his wife Geetanjali. Son of noted agriculture scientist Khem Singh Gill, he’s a potent voice against Amritpal, seeing the latter’s quick-fire rise in the context of past instances of political forces or the state creating space where none existed, to secure political dividends. A regular YouTuber, he asks Sikh youth to modernise, de-radicalise, and to steer clear of fake emotive narratives: “They should stay away from the politics of confrontation, build a narrative of self-assertion to get lingering issues concerning Sikhs and Punjab addressed politically.”
To charges of being a political prop, Amritpal says the Akalis and the Congress blamed each other for supporting him; and that the state’s ruling Aam Aadmi Party considered him a BJP-backed disruptor of their regime: “The worst part of this blame game is that they’re failing to understand the ground situation.” The one politico for whom he has a good word and with whom he admits being in touch with, is Sangrur MP Simaranjit Singh Mann. He identifies with the latter’s pro-Khalistan stand of over four decades. For him, Mann is an “inspiration” for his patience and his ability to stay the ground.
But he caveats this by pitching his anachronistic-sounding claim to building a social movement to influence politics rather than doing politics. “He’s (Mann) a political guy which I’m not. I’m too straight. I can’t mould my tone to secure votes like Mann and others who never talk about conversions to Christianity in Punjab.”
Amritpal rejects the widely held perception of a Congress hand in Bhindranwale’s initial projection to marginalise the Akalis. The militant leader never got used even when the Akali leaders beat a retreat on the Anandpur Sahib resolution, he argues. And if at all it happened, the establishment wouldn’t try that game again, he insists: “The state spent billions of dollars in eliminating the idea of Khalistan, separatism or anything we say. They’re not experimenting anymore.”
No matter what he says, there are questions galore about his rise and the free run he has had so far, and whether some significant force has his back.