THE GHOST OF KHALISTAN
The team from Punjab police’s counterintelligence wing drove through the night to Lucknow on February 8. They were following a tip-off from Jagroop Singh, a gangster arrested the previous day from Veroval village in Amritsar district. The team had recovered five Chinese pistols from Jagroop and, more importantly, the whereabouts of his accomplices. Among them, the counterintelligence sleuths caught up with Jagdev Singh Jagga, who was travelling from Lakhimpur in Uttar Pradesh to Lucknow, and brought him to Punjab. Another Punjab police team arrested gangster Gurpinder Singh in Nanded, Maharashtra. With this, police said they had busted a module of the Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF) plotting assassinations in India allegedly on the instructions of Paramjit Singh Pamma, a UK-based militant of the Babbar Khalsa International (BKI).
The arrests weren’t one-off. On December 7, the Delhi police special cell nabbed Gurjeet Singh and Sukhdeep Singh, criminals allegedly hired by gangster Sukh Bhikhariwal to murder Balwinder Singh Sandhu, an anti-Khalistan activist from Punjab’s Bhikhiwind, in October 2020. Sandhu had received the Shaurya Chakra, India’s third-highest peacetime gallantry award, in 1993 for his fight against militants in Punjab’s Tarn Taran district in the 1990s. Bhikhariwal, who was deported from Dubai and arrested this January, alleges that instructions for the murder had come from Lakhbir Singh Rode, the Lahore-based chief of the International Sikh Youth Federation (ISYF).
BKI and ISYF are among the militant groups that, in the 1990s, were at the forefront of the violent separatist movement