The near-unanimous support for a call to shut down a state spoke volumes of the raw sentiments festering behind the immediate cause. A number of political parties, farmer organisations and religious bodies joined the call for a Punjab bandh on Thursday following the killing of anti-drugs activist Parvinder Singh Jhota on Tuesday. Jhota’s family had called for the bandh after he was allegedly killed by a pharmacist selling substances used by abusers in Mansa, a town close to the Rajasthan border.
Jhota, which translates to ‘bull’, had been added as a title to his name by the popular activist who had cured himself of addiction and had become a dedicated crusader against drugs. His modus operandi in this mission was to record the illegal sale of drugs on his mobile and share it on Facebook Live. Ironically and shockingly, his own killing, too, was recorded during one such session.
A wave of protests followed in this southern Punjab district. Mobs set the accused person’s shop on fire. The district authorities demolished a portion of his house while purportedly searching for shop owner Ashwani Kumar, who belonged to Rajasthan and was eventually arrested there. Jhota's father indignantly refused to cremate his son's body while calling for a state-wide bandh, which the Congress, BJP, Shiromani Akali Dal, BJP and Waris Punjab De supported.
The event added fuel to a long-burning fire ahead of the state Assembly polls early next year. Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann vowed strict punishment for the accused as opposition leaders accused the ruling party for a breakdown of law and order in the state. A meeting has been scheduled for Friday to review the implementation of the state’s various anti-narcotic drives.
Punjab Congress president Pargat Singh stepped up his criticism of the Mann-led Aam Aadmi Party administration in a sharp statement that the state seems to be without “political leadership as well as a lack of will among the police”. Recent times have also seen killing of policemen with two assistant sub-inspectors shot down in the span of two weeks in Tarn Taran and Amritsar districts. The latest victim, who was returning home on a motorcycle Sunday evening, was the fifth policeman to be shot dead this year.
Amid all this, local newspapers reported another telling story on page one—of a Punjab police constable, Karandeep Singh, being arrested with a large amount of heroin allegedly smuggled from across the Pakistan border at Tarn Taran. It underlines the depth of the rot Punjab faces today.
The blame-game has become personal, too. Although accused of being addicted to liquor himself, Mann has often pointed fingers at well-known political families and police officials in the ongoing narcotics' crisis through satirical phrases consisting of words like ‘chitta’, synonymous with ‘white’, indicating heroin and cocaine.
The truth is that the state’s drug mafia continues to flourish no matter which government is in power. Illegal smuggling has been a constant feature in this border state not far from the Golden Crescent area near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border notorious for large-scale production. And with job opportunities few and far between, the state’s younger generations often fall prey to the menace.
The drug war is at its peak in Punjab at a time job opportunities are stifled and the only choice available to youths is to migrate abroad by hook or crook as their own land has little to offer. Tilling the fertile fields of Punjab is a new generation of migrant labourers from Bihar, while local residents exclaim in distress, “What will they do here, apart from falling prey to drugs?”
A study conducted by Chandigarh's Institute of Development and Communication on a sample of 1,527 respondents from the border districts had revealed that as much as 70 percent of drug abusers in the state in the age group of 15-35 years had a rural background and mostly were hooked to drugs and opium that they procured from village chemists.
This is the crisis Jhota tried to address. His tragic death—allegedly in the hands of a peddler who is reported to have cried out, “He is creating a lot of mess here”—is a sad reflection of the story of Udta Punjab, the 2016 film.
One hopes that the state, which has seen much violence over decades, would not return to the ‘Chitta-ve’ days when heroin and cocaine became a regular habit for younger generations. It’s no wonder that parents remain eager to send their children abroad at any cost for survival, as their own land seems lost.
The Punjab election will surely add to Mann’s challenges in the months to come. The AAP administration has a two-pronged plan to curb supplies and reduce demand through greater de-addiction efforts. But it has failed a series of deadlines to make the state drug-free that party leaders themselves set time and again.
Before more blood flows in the streets, a serious review of the situation is required by all concerned—the state and central governments along with social and religious organisations. It’s a wound that must be closed.
Nirupama Dutt | Senior journalist and cultural writer based in Punjab
(Views are personal)