StatesPunjab
Protesters chase AAP MLA from Mansa hospital as Jhota panel plans to gherao ministers
Vijay Singla became the first ruling party leader to visit the men wounded in the shooting. The action committee will picket AAP legislators' homes and offices across Punjab on Monday.
Key points
- Protesters, Nihangs among them, chased Mansa MLA Vijay Singla as he left the civil hospital on Saturday.
- The action committee will gherao AAP MLAs' and ministers' homes and offices on 19 October.
- Mansa's Dussehra committee has called off the 20 October celebrations in mourning.
Protesters chased the Aam Aadmi Party’s Mansa legislator out of the town’s civil hospital on Saturday, four days after the anti-drug activist Parvinder Singh Jhota was shot dead, as the committee leading the agitation prepared to take its protest to the homes of AAP ministers and MLAs across Punjab on Monday.
Vijay Singla, the MLA for Mansa, went to the civil hospital to see two of the four people wounded in Tuesday’s shooting, accompanied by Deputy Commissioner Navjot Kaur and a group of police officers. He said doctors told him one of the men needed surgery and the other only a plaster cast. The other two injured are in hospitals in Bathinda and Ludhiana.
Singla entered through a gate that leads to the emergency ward. As he left, protesters, Nihangs among them, ran after him, shouted slogans against the MLA and the AAP government, and warned of serious consequences if he came back. A sit-in has been going on at the hospital’s main gate since Tuesday; the main protest is at Tinkoni, near the Deputy Commissioner’s residence on the Barnala-Sirsa road.
“We never entertained him”
Protesters accuse Singla of having shielded Ashwani Kumar, the chemist accused of shooting Jhota in his shop while the activist was on a Facebook Live. Singla denied it. “He (Ashwani) never came to us, and we never entertained him,” he said. “I challenge anyone to show if I had a meeting or conversation with him in the past five years.”
He is the first leader of the ruling party to visit the injured. No AAP leader has met Jhota’s family, and protesters have kept them away from the protest sites.
Monday’s gherao
On Friday the action committee said it would gherao the residences and offices of AAP MLAs and ministers on 19 October and paste “lahnat pattars”, letters of condemnation, outside them. It thanked the acting Akal Takht Jathedar, Kuldeep Singh Gargaj, for calling Jhota a martyr.
The committee wants a memorial in Jhota’s name, either a stadium or a trauma centre, which it says Mansa district has long needed, and ₹10 lakh in compensation from the state for each of the four injured. Its earlier demands stand: the resignation of Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann and Director General of Police Gaurav Yadav, and a CBI investigation. Jhota’s father, Bhim Singh, has said the family will not cremate his son until they are met.
Bhim Singh asked people in Mansa to go ahead with Dussehra, but the town’s Dussehra committee has decided not to hold celebrations on 20 October.
Pressure from the Centre
The Union government has written to Punjab’s Chief Secretary for “a comprehensive factual report” on the killing and the steps taken since, and on how the state has carried out the Home Ministry’s anti-narcotics action plan.
Kumar is in police custody for seven days and his wife, Neelam Rani, for six. Police have also registered two cases over arson, vandalism and inflammatory speeches during the protests. Bathinda Range DIG Harjit Singh said the suspects had been identified and arrests would follow.