A man was lynched for attempted sacrilege in the Golden Temple in Amritsar on December 18. Another was lynched for sacrilege in a village in Kapurthala on December 19.
Even before Punjab police could investigate how the attempted sacrilege in Golden Temple unfolded on December 18, another man was lynched for attempted sacrilege in a village in Kapurthala on December 19.
The incident happened on December 19 in the wee hours in a Gurdwara in Nizampur village of Kapurthala district. The victim was caught alive and handed over to the police. But, before police could move out, the crowd swelled, and demand for instant justice grew.
The Granthi Amarjit Singh alleged the youth tried to disrespect the Nishan Sahib. There are other instances of lynching for attempted sacrilege.
On October 15 this year, when the farmers were protesting at Delhi borders for the rollback of three farm laws, a Dalit Sikh from Punjab, Lakhbir Singh, was hacked to death. His hands were chopped off, and his chopped body was hung near a police check-post at the border. Nihang Sikhs claimed responsibility for the lynching. The police made some arrests in the case.
In October 2015, some pages of Guru Granth Sahib were found torn and scattered near Ghawaddi Gurdwara. Balwinder Kaur, a 48-year-old woman, was the prime accused in the case and was shot dead by Gurpreet Singh and Nihal Singh on July 26, 2016. Her son, Ranjodh Singh, survived the attack.
Then Police Commissioner Jatinder Singh Aulakh had said, “They called the woman to the Gurdwara on the pretext of helping her out with money. When she got in at 8 AM, Jagowal and Nihal, who had been waiting for 30 minutes, sat in Ranjoth’s three-wheeler. After a while, they took out what seemed like country-made pistols and shot the woman in the chest and got away on a white motorcycle parked a few metres away.”
On June 22, 2019, Mohinder Pal Singh Bittoo, prime accused in the 2015 Bargari sacrilege case, was murdered by Gursewak Singh and Maninder Singh in high-security Nabha prison in Patiala. He was arrested on June 9, 2018, and has been lodged in jail since.
On the intervening night of July 1 & 2, an army man, Deepak Singh, was lynched near a Gurdwara in Gurdaspur. The victim, a GREF personnel, was posted in Arunachal Pradesh. The same night, Deepak got off at Amritsar airport and travelled to Pathankot by bus. He mistakenly got off at the Kahnuwan Chowk. In the night, he called his father to inform him that some people beat him on suspicion of theft.
