Ajay Bhardwaj
The Punjab Police touched an abysmal low on the day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his Punjab visit, found himself stranded on a flyover on way to Ferozepur. It was a reflection of a spineless force that played a dubious and a jabbered role to let the unruly hands take a better of them.
Was it a political call for the cops or their pathetic failure as professionals?
It may not be the question of the prime minister’s security but the force and their captains played a second fiddle to their political masters in such a craven manner, close to the Pakistan border, would surely go as a black chapter in the archives of the Punjab police.
The last we saw such low of the Punjab police was during the pre-KPS Gill days when the blood-soaked years of militancy left the force aghast which did not know which way to go because there was no political direction and the officers were at a loss to make sense of the circumstances.
Enough evidence is emerging to prove that the Congress government, in its effort to fail the Ferozepur rally of the BJP, engineered the blockade not just on the flyover where the PM was supposed to move on, but also at many other points leading to the spot of the rally.
The police officers confide that they were told categorically by the powers that be not to use force against the protestors. The purpose was to fail the BJP rally. Politically, it sounds well. The police officers were given the brief not to let BJP supporters reach the rally spot. The very correct and apt political approach of a ruling party in a state.
But when it comes to the security of the prime minister of a nation, a nation which has already seen the blood of PM office incumbents like Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and to an extent dubious death of Lal Bahadur Shastri, the Punjab police should have held its chin high to defy the political gameplan of the party in power in the interest of the nation.
One often asked KPS Gill, who was a staunch Jat Sikh, why are the Sikhs falling to police bullets as terrorists, he would quip contemptuously ” it’s a matter of nation, not of community”.
Wish police officers on the ground on the day PM was stranded on the road had the resonance of these words to deliver professionally rather than supinely.
(First Published in Punjab Story)
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