Roping in Nihangs: Another attempt at derailing farmers' stir fails

It is unclear why the agriculture minister and his deputy were hobnobbing with a Nihang leader instead of re-engaging in a dialogue with farm leaders

The murder of Lakhbir Singh at the farmers' protest site on the Singhu border between Haryana and Delhi had the potential to disrupt the movement by implicating its leaders. The incident, according to a report by The Tribune newspaper, is the latest in what now appear to be acts of deliberate provocation. Each such attempt in the last ten months has come unstuck pretty quickly.

The first such attempt was to suggest that Khalistani separatists had infiltrated the farmers' agitation. It unravelled within hours of a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) sympathiser, Deep Sidhu, hoisting the Sikh religious flag (Nishan Sahib) on a flagpole meant for the national flag at Red Fort on Republic Day. The emergence of Sidhu's photographs with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP's Gurdaspur MP Sunny Deol put paid to the canard that extremists were manipulating the agitating farmers. The Lakhimpur Kheri incident was also initially portrayed as lynching by violent farmers. This, too, was soon turned on its head by a series of videos establishing that it was the SUVs in the cavalcade of a Union minister's son that had run down peaceful protestors.

Read | Singhu lynching: Tomar's photo with Nihang triggers row

The latest attempt to paint the agitators as unstable religious zealots has also failed miserably. One can be sure that further revelations in the days to come will shed more light on the murder at Singhu and the role of the Nihangs in it.

A new spin on the crime has been put by a media expose that the leader of the Nihang Sikh group responsible for mutilating and murdering a Dalit Sikh, Lakhbir Singh, ostensibly for disrespecting the Sikh holy book, was part of 'behind the scene efforts' by the Centre to end the farmers' agitation. Prima facie, it seems to vindicate the position of the leaders of the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) that the crime was a conspiracy by government agencies to defame and derail the farmers' stir.

The link between the government and the Nihang group responsible has been revealed by photographs published by The Tribune of the Nihang leader Baba Aman Singh with BJP leaders where he is being honoured with a saropa (scarf) by Union Minister for Agriculture, Narendra Singh Tomar. The meeting, ostensibly to end the farmers' stir, took place in late July this year at the residence of Minister of State for Agriculture Kailash Choudhary in New Delhi. It was reportedly also attended by BJP Kisan Morcha leader Sukhminderpal Singh Grewal and a dismissed Punjab policeman and murder convict Gurmeet "Pinki".

Baba Aman Singh is neither a farmers' leader nor has he ever been a part of their negotiations with the government. He is the head of one of many Nihang Sikh groups and also one based in Ontario, Canada. However, some members of his group have been camping at the protest site of their own accord. The Nihangs are groups of self-styled Sikh militia bands habitually armed with swords, daggers, spears, steel arrows, chakrams (war-quoits) and other sundry medieval weapons. They live off donations from the faithful to the gurudwaras they control. The weapons they carry make them intimidating, and their behaviour is unpredictable. Their presence at the site of protest could imaginably have been threatening to protestors.

After the media expose, Baba Aman Singh has claimed that he was offered "Rs 10 lakh and horses for vacating the Singhu border site." Some of the farmers' leaders have claimed no sacrilege at the site, and the entire incident was engineered. The victim's presence at the Singhu border where he was staying with the Nihangs is itself inexplicable. His family claims that he was an alcoholic and a drug addict who never strayed far from home. The last they knew of him was that he left his village to look for casual work at the local grain market. People in his village are sceptical that he would go all the way to Singhu, near Delhi, to commit sacrilege or participate in the farmers' sit-in. They suspect that he was taken there rather than having gone by himself.

Other questions also deserve credible answers. It is unclear why the agriculture minister and his deputy were hobnobbing with a Nihang leader who is neither a farmer nor associated with the farmers' agitation. Shouldn't they have re-engaged instead with the collective leadership of the farmers in a dialogue? At whose instance then was the Nihang leader there, and was the mutilation and murder of an innocent person a deliberate act of provocation to vacate the protestors forcibly? Unless he is lying, it is also unclear who among those present in the meeting allegedly tried to bribe Baba Aman Singh to vacate the site.

The farmers' agitation is perhaps the longest such agitation in the world. A handful of Nihangs leaving the protest site would have made little difference to the ongoing agitation even if they had made the kind of noises that the establishment might have wanted them to make. Nothing would have worked short of implicating the SKM leaders in the gruesome murder. That, too, did not happen. It would, therefore, seem that using the Nihangs was one more attempt to somehow erode and discredit the farmers' agitation.

(The writer is a journalist based in Delhi)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.

Watch latest videos by DH here: