Mansa: Lying in a hospital bed at the Mansa district civil hospital, Kulwinder Singh has been trying to make sense of the past 48 hours. On Tuesday, he was among the people who accompanied anti-drug campaigner Parvinder Singh Jhota on one of his routine rounds “raiding” chemists who allegedly sell regulated drugs without prescription, playing a not-so insignificant role in Punjab’s drug abuse crisis.
Cut to the present, and Jhota, in his 40s, is dead while Kulwinder, known to friends as Sukhi, is recovering from a bullet injury. Two other members of Jhota’s raid team are recovering from bullet injuries sustained when Ashwini Kumar, a local chemist with a history of run-ins with Jhota, opened fire on them Tuesday morning.
The memory of his childhood friend dying before his eyes will haunt him forever, Sukhi says, recalling Jhota’s commitment to the campaign against drug abuse in Punjab.
“‘Mai marte dam tak nashe virudh hi bolke marna (I will keep speaking against drugs till my death),’ Jhota used to always say,” Sukhi tells ThePrint from his hospital bed. “And it has come to be true unfortunately.”
An Army man’s son, Jhota did his graduation from Khalsa College in Jalandhar, where he emerged as a promising player in cricket and boxing. Jhota’s crusade against drugs, friends say, was rooted in his own experience as a former addict.
“He was very aggressive in his college days and was passionate about things he loved, such as boxing,” his friend Baljinder Singh tells ThePrint at the hospital. It was during his college days, he adds, that Jhota got addicted to drugs.
However, friends say, this chapter of Jhota’s life had been over for a few years. He had beaten the addiction and gotten his life back on track.
Jhota’s killing has sparked anger among his friends, family, and supporters. On Wednesday, his supporters ransacked Kumar’s shop and set it on fire. Jhota’s father, former Army man Bhim Singh, meanwhile, has blamed the state government. He has sought the resignation of Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann and Director General of Police (DGP) Gaurav Yadav, saying their failure to rein in the drug menace had led to his son’s death.
Since 13 October, Jhota’s friends and family have been organising a sit-in on the Barnala-Sirsa Road in Mansa to seek, apart from Mann and Yadav’s resignation, a CBI probe into his death.
Disillusioned with politics
By the 2022 assembly elections in Punjab, friends say, Jhota had repaired his life and embarked on a mission—to free his district of the drug menace.
“It was with that idea that he supported the local candidate from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Vijay Singla, who was advocating for curbing the drug menace,” Jhota’s friend Jitendra Singh says.
The AAP went on to win that election, and formed its first-ever government in the state under Mann. Disillusionment, however, was quick, Singh says, adding that Jhota had grown apprehensive about the objective of Singla and the AAP in the state. “Jhota used to complain that the AAP was not working as they had promised, to crack down on drugs, and hence he started moving away from them,” he adds.
Over time, Jhota grew close to the Waris Punjab De (WPD), founded by jailed MP from Khadoor Sahib and Sikh separatist Amritpal Singh. Present at the Mansa hospital with Jhota’s friends, a member of the WPD’s youth wing, Balwant Singh Sirsa, said Amritpal’s father had recently met Jhota and discussed various issues. But Jhota’s friends say the relationship and convergence is purely on the issue of drugs.
“He never wanted to join politics but he was a vocal worker and supporter for the campaign against drugs,” Jitendra Singh says.
Still reeling
It may be a tired cliche but Jhota’s friends struggle to find any other way to express the immense shock of what happened Tuesday. It really did start as just another day for Baljinder Singh and Sukhi, who frequently accompanied Jhota during his “raids” at pharmacies in Mansa over the last four to five years.
As part of their campaign, they used to catch hold of people abusing prescription pills and confront them to reveal the source. Prescription pills in India are heavily regulated under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940, and can’t be sold without a valid prescription. Drug abusers have been known to turn to these pills to mimic the effects of narcotics, from sedation to stimulation.
“There is no other way to reach the source of the sale than the people who are buying it,” one of Jhota’s teammates says.
Baljinder Singh adds, “Our fight is not against young and poor people who are addicted to these dangerous substances… Instead, we have fought against those who have been doing this dirty business in the name of clean pharmaceutical and chemist business.”
After getting the information, the team would visit the shop in question to confront the pharmacist, and make complaints to the local drug inspector and police. Each of these “raids”—the team claims to have conducted over 100 in Mansa—was streamed live on Jhota’s Facebook page, which is how the confrontation that led to his death went viral.
Early morning Tuesday, Baljinder tells ThePrint, he was working at his farm when Jhota called him up, and asked him to come to Mansa town. Jhota, he adds, had come across “some new information”. By 10 am, Jhota’s team of five people had assembled in a car in Mansa.
“We waited in the car and saw a 50-year-old [in the Mansa town market] with prescription pills,” Sukhi says. “We asked him where he got it. He said he got it from Ashwini Kumar’s shop and took us there,” Sukhi adds.
When Kumar rejected the allegation, a confrontation ensued, which was livestreamed through Jhota’s Facebook page. “We just asked him to show us his CCTV footage to prove he was telling the truth. Then he brought out his pistol and called a group of chemists who are in the same business [of illegally selling prescription drugs],” Sukhi says.
A garland of shoes
Jhota’s campaign against drugs can be traced through the videos he routinely posted. One of these videos shows him confronting a youth consuming heroin, commonly called Chitta in Punjab, on a road leading up to village farmland in Mansa last October.
A day before he was shot dead, he had uploaded a video to suggest “hotspots of sale and purchase of drugs” in Mansa as a guide for police.
It’s, however, a video shot in July 2023 that police say lies at the heart of Jhota’s killing.
In the video, Jhota and his supporters claimed to have caught an alleged drug peddler who was selling capsules for abuse by youth. The man then took them to Ashwini Kumar’s shop in Mansa town. The entire episode culminated in Jhota and his team garlanding Kumar with shoes in the market. a video of which went viral.
Kumar is currently under arrest for Jhota’s murder. He was arrested Wednesday from Rajasthan, having fled Punjab after the killing.
Edited by Sunanda Ranjan