Sufi tunes in a Punjabi drama

The son of a former prime minister Indira Gandhi’s killer will run as an independent from the Punjabi seat of Faridkot in the Lok Sabha elections.

Sarabjit Singh, forty-five, is the son of Beant Singh, who on October 31, 1984, killed Indira Gandhi at her New Delhi home alongside Satwant Singh. The prime minister’s bodyguards at the time were Satwant and Beant. Both shot her about thirty times at close range, allegedly in retaliation for the Golden Temple’s destruction and the Sikhs’ humiliation during Operation Blue Star in June 1984.

In addition, Justice Jora Singh (retd), who oversaw a committee tasked with looking into sacrilege events in Punjab, declared her intention to run as an independent from Faridkot. Comedians and singers make up the other candidates. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is led by Punjabi actor-turned-com comedian Karamjit Anmol, while the BJP is represented by Sufi singer Hans Raj Hans. Party sources indicate that the Congress is expected to provide incumbent MP Muhammad Sadique a ticket from this seat.

Folk singer Sadique is from Punjab. With 1.33 lakh votes, Sarabjit Singh had an unsuccessful campaign in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections from Bathinda. He ran on the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) banner in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections from Fatehgarh Sahib and received 12,683 votes. In the 2007 Punjab assembly polls, he ran from the Bhadaur constituency in Barnala and received 15,702 votes. His grandpa Sucha Singh had won from Bathinda in 1989, and his mother Bimal Kaur had been elected as an MP from the Ropar constituency.

According to Singh, he chose to run for office because a lot of the people pushed him to, and he wants to punish those who committed the desecration of the Guru Granth Sahib.

“There is a widespread drug issue and successive administrations have failed to provide justice in the desecration events. The problems facing farmers are still unresolved. I chose to run for this election after the people of Faridkot contacted me, Singh informed this publication. “I’ll start my own party if I win,” he said. When asked what motivated him to run for office once again after having done so three times before, Singh said, “That time SAD were strong and dominant, thus I lost.” People are now tired with both political parties. Nothing has changed even though they elected the AAP administration in an attempt to bring about change. Since the field is now open, anybody may play.

Under the SAD-BJP administration, a panel led by Justice Jora Singh (retd) looked into the sacrilege occurrences that had occurred in Punjab. After joining the AAP in December 2018, he ran as the party’s Jalandhar candidate in the 2019 parliamentary election but was unsuccessful.

For two years, he oversaw the AAP’s legal branch. Following that, he left the AAP and is now running against a Faridkot-based independent.

“Public release of my findings on sacrilege occurrences is necessary to ensure that those responsible do not escape punishment. Both the current AAP administration and the SAD-BJP and Congress regimes ignored the findings, according to Justice Zora Singh, who spoke with this publication. He said, “The AAP’s top leadership did not find time to address the legal fraternity’s grievances.”

Five sacrilege events that occurred in Faridkot in 2015 caused demonstrations throughout the state. The occurrences of sacrilege began on June 1, 2015, when the Burj Jawahar Singh Wala village gurdwara’s “bir,” or the whole volume of a Sikh scripture as a single corpus, was taken. Later, on September 24 and 25, 2015, three disparaging posters threatening sacrilege were put near the villages of Bargari and Burj Jawahar Singh Wala. Torn pages of the “bir” were discovered strewn in front of a gurdwara in the nearby town of Bargari on October 12, 2015.

In 2015, there were incidents in Faridkot involving the destruction of the Guru Granth Sahib and police fire at demonstrators against sacrifice at Kotkapura and Behbal Kalan. The police gunfire claimed the lives of two persons. The problem was also a significant blow to SAD, which contributed to its demise in the 2017 Assembly elections that saw the Congress win.

On June 1, elections will take place in thirteen Lok Sabha seats located in Punjab.