The Bhindranwale-loving, Constitution-hating preacher’s decision to contest as an independent from the Khadoor Sahib parliamentary constituency, which goes to polls on June 1, has spiced up the contest.
Khadoor Sahib/Chandigarh: Khalistan sympathiser Amritpal Singh, who roiled Punjab politics last year with his outlandish utterances and ended up in an Assam jail, may be down, but not out.
That Amritpal has been brazen enough to test poll waters while cooling his heels in Dibrugarh jail shows that radicalism still has slivers of support in the state that was upended by a bloody insurgency in the 1980s.
Khadoor Sahib was a hotbed of militancy during the dark days of terrorism in Punjab. The constituency has been a traditional stronghold of the SAD (Badal), with people voting for the SAD a record nine times in previous elections. It is being said that Amritpal’s entry is likely to dent SAD’s Panthic vote bank.
The jailed leader, booked under the National Security Act (NSA), is garnering support; his supporters say the outcome on June 4 will surprise Punjab. And the source of their confidence? A series of realignments that have taken place this year.
In the 2019 election, Paramjit Kaur Khalra, wife of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, who was abducted and forcibly disappeared in 1995, contested the elections unsuccessfully.