Car­ry­ing a dead con­science for a long time, since he started killing peo­ple of his own ilk with­out re­morse and with full im­punity from the In­dian state struc­ture, Kan­war Pal Singh Gill -the eu­phemistic su­per-cop of In­dia, died of heart fail­ure at the age of 82 in Delhi. One of the last im­ages of the man that will haunt the Sikhs will be that of the pre­sent Chief Min­is­ter of Pun­jab -Ma­haraja Amarinder Singh, who soon af­ter tak­ing oath of of­fice, es­pe­cially vis­ited his res­i­dence to greet him know­ing fully well as made out in a sub­se­quent dis­clo­sure as to how he was privy to the ex­tra­ju­di­cial mur­der of 21 Sikhs which was a legacy of KPS Gill.

One can­not es­cape com­par­ing KPS Gill with Hitler. The Nazis of Hitler wanted to ex­ter­mi­nate the Jews to es­tab­lish the su­premacy of the Ger­mans; KPS Gill wanted to ex­ter­mi­nate Sikh youth so that he could please his mas­ters in Delhi to up­hold su­premacy of In­di­ans over the Sikhs. In no other coun­try would such a per­son be granted an ho­n­our like the Padam Shri af­ter his con­vic­tion in a case of moral turpi­tude in­volv­ing a lady IAS of­fi­cer Ru­pan Deol Ba­jaj. Lest you for­get that in 2002, the pre­sent Prime Min­is­ter of In­dia -Naren­dra Modi ap­pointed him a Spe­cial Ad­viser while he was the Gu­jarat Chief Min­is­ter.

One can­not es­cape com­par­ing KPS Gill with Hitler. The Nazis of Hitler wanted to ex­ter­mi­nate the Jews to es­tab­lish the su­premacy of the Ger­mans; KPS Gill wanted to ex­ter­mi­nate Sikh youth so that he could please his mas­ters in Delhi to up­hold su­premacy of In­di­ans over the Sikhs.

Across the board, ex­cept for some die-hard Con­gress­men, some shame­less Akalis and a few cho­sen friends in the me­dia en­am­oured with his brute per­son­al­ity, the Sikh world is over­whelmed with an omi­nous feel­ing, “Oh God! He has died a nat­ural death.” While it may sound macabre to some, each and every Sikh has felt that he should have died at the hands of the Sikhs, in a rep­e­ti­tion of the his­tor­i­cal tale of Massa Ran­garh and Ahmed Shah Ab­dali -the Mughal tyrants whose hands were soaked in Sikh blood. KPS Gill was drenched in Sikh blood, be­ing re­spon­si­ble for the ex­tra­ju­di­cial mur­ders of hun­dreds of Sikh youth, de­stroy­ing fam­ily af­ter fam­ily.

The en­tire In­dian es­tab­lish­ment and a good cross sec­tion of the me­dia was very up­set that he was con­victed for moral turpi­tude by a lo­cal court, but sig­nif­i­cantly, “be­cause of his con­tri­bu­tion to the coun­try”, the higher courts par­doned the sen­tence and the gov­ern­ment of In­dia con­tin­ued show­er­ing the “hero sta­tus.”

A per­son who till his very end was not apolo­getic or re­morse­ful for all the Drac­ula killings that he car­ried out, a man who would go af­ter hu­man rights de­fend­ers in the same way as if he was go­ing af­ter hard­ened crim­i­nals, KPS Gill sur­ren­dered his con­science to the In­dian state and then was a can­non let loose on the Sikhs whose prize and pro­mo­tion was de­ter­mined by the num­ber of Sikh heads he would kill or sim­ply erad­i­cate them from the face of Pun­jab -leav­ing no trace of their ex­is­tence. Sikh his­tory will chron­i­cle how he killed my as­so­ci­ate and hu­man rights ac­tivist Jaswant Singh Khalra who doc­u­mented thou­sands of cases of Sikh youth who were cre­mated as “un­known” in the dis­tricts of Am­rit­sar and Tarn Taran in Pun­jab. KPS Gill never ac­knowl­edged this bar­baric prac­tice, even af­ter the In­dian ju­di­ciary re­luc­tantly ac­cepted the de­tails and or­dered a de­tailed en­quiry into it.  Hu­man Rights ac­tivists still con­tinue to tena­ciously pur­sue the cases de­spite an ar­chaic laid-back ju­di­cial sys­tem.

WSN salutes all Sikhs, who de­spite all the sto­ries of re­pres­sion and bru­tal­ity, con­tin­ued their war of re­sis­tance against KPS Gill and the In­dian po­lice and para-mil­i­tary forces. WSN em­pathises with all the vic­tim fam­i­lies who have borne pain and mis­ery over the decades and what­ever any­one may say, they would not be happy at his death, but would cer­tainly heave a sigh at some kind of heav­enly clo­sure to their pain. WSN com­mends and sup­ports the work of all hu­man rights de­fend­ers who re­sisted and fought KPS Gill dur­ing his term and even af­ter.

He has the du­bi­ous dis­tinc­tion of lead­ing Op­er­a­tion Black Thun­der into Dar­bar Sahib -The Golden Tem­ple, the “suc­cess” of which op­er­a­tion was much touted then, but ac­tu­ally it was a scripted story in­volv­ing rene­gades from within the ranks of the re­sis­tance and in­sur­gency forces. As the chief of the In­dian Hockey Fed­er­a­tion he nearly gilled (read killed) In­dian hockey in an at­tempt to In­di­anise it, till he was re­moved from the post.

How hate­ful he was of the Sikhs can be gauged from his writ­ten or­der to ex­ter­mi­nate known re­sis­tance fight­ers and his call to spe­cial po­lice of­fi­cers (a band of vig­i­lantes es­pe­cially trained by KPS Gill and other ju­nior po­lice of­fi­cers un­der him) who were told to rape, maim and kill in the guise of mil­i­tants to de­fame the Sikh youth and the cause of their move­ment.  He is on record to hav­ing said this.  As far as the writ­ten ex­ter­mi­na­tion or­der is con­cerned, the courts ac­cepted the with­drawal of the said or­der with­out any re­marks or pun­ish­ment to him or those un­der him.

Re­spon­si­ble for taint­ing Sikhs as ter­ror­ists, he led the cam­paign to de­fame Sikhs across the coun­try, while In­dia eu­lo­gised him as the sav­iour of In­dia. Like In­dira Gandhi, the name of KPS Gill would re­main tied up with the his­tory of the Sikhs.  Notwith­stand­ing, what­ever In­dia, some In­di­ans and a sec­tion of the me­dia may say, these two will for­ever re­main the butcher of the Sikhs and I am sure that his­tory too would not for­give them.

WSN salutes all Sikhs, who de­spite all the sto­ries of re­pres­sion and bru­tal­ity, con­tin­ued their war of re­sis­tance against KPS Gill and the In­dian po­lice and para-mil­i­tary forces. WSN em­pathises with all the vic­tim fam­i­lies who have borne pain and mis­ery over the decades and what­ever any­one may say, they would not be happy at his death, but would cer­tainly heave a sigh at some kind of heav­enly clo­sure to their pain. WSN com­mends and sup­ports the work of all hu­man rights de­fend­ers who re­sisted and fought KPS Gill dur­ing his term and even af­ter.

Colum­nists and In­dian lead­ers would have us be­lieve that he sup­pressed the move­ment for up­hold­ing Sikh iden­tity.  Ac­tu­ally, the strug­gle waned for a mul­ti­plic­ity of rea­sons, but In­dia needed a hero and who else than a Sikh face! Is the strug­gle over be­cause KPS Gill and his men killed so many? They for­got the quip that Sikhs have re­peated through the ages:

Mannu saadhi Daa­tri
Assi Mannu de soye
Jeo jeo mannu vad­hda
Assi Doon sawaye hoye!

Trans­lated thus,

“The ex­e­cu­tion­er’s blade is upon us
We are his can­non fod­der,
The more he kills
The more we grow and mul­ti­ply.”

http://www.theworldsikhnews.com/