Chandigarh: In a series of interviews given to various YouTube channels since his release on bail in August 2018, former militant Narain Singh Chaura, 68, had admitted that he was “trained” in the use of firearms and had been to Pakistan as well. He even claimed to have bribed the Punjab Police in 1997 to be let off.
Chaura was arrested by the Amritsar police Wednesday for shooting at former Punjab deputy chief minister Sukhbir Badal, 62, while he was doing penance as a guard at the gates of the Golden Temple complex in the city.
Active during the Punjab militancy in the 1980s and 1990s, Chaura is the founder of militant group Khalistan Liberation Army and convener of a now defunct radical think tank Akal Federation. A former pracharak (religious preacher) of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), he was on duty at Pathankot when Operation Blue Star took place in June 1984.
An Amritsar court Thursday remanded Chaura to three days in police custody.
In an interview given in 2022, Chaura said that he was among 20 people who had together got training during the time that he went underground after Operation Blue Star in 1984.
“It was a record that for the first time 20 people, all of them young educated students, went to get trained… we were trained and also got weapons,” he said, without specifying where they were taken.
In another conversation with the press at the opening of the Kartarpur Sahib corridor in 2021, Chaura said he did not have a passport and would not be able to go through the corridor but that he had been “blessed enough” to have served at the Kartarpur Sahib Gurdwara in Pakistan several times.
The Kartarpur corridor is a visa-free religious corridor between Dera Baba Nanak gurdwara in Punjab to Kartarpur Sahib in Pakistan to allow pilgrims from India to visit the Darbar Sahib Gurdwara at Kartarpur Sahib. Guru Nanak, the first guru of the Sikhs, spent the last years of his life at Kartarpur Sahib and the gurdwara built there has huge religious significance for the Sikhs.
In another interview in September this year, Chaura claimed that in 1997 he had “bribed” his way out of police custody while they were shifting him from court to jail.
The police, he said, had to face a departmental inquiry (in the matter) and even sought his help but he refused.
“I am a militant and they are the police. How can we ever come together? They paid for their lust for the bribe money,” he said, adding that the officer he had bribed later became his relative through his son’s wedding.
Sources in the Punjab Police told ThePrint that Chaura was among the staunch militants and was considered a master planner of several militant activities since the early 1980s.
“During his stay in Pakistan, we had information that he was using fake names and speaking on an (Pakistani spy agency) ISI-run radio programme in Punjab, called Punjabi Darbar,” said a senior police officer, not wanting to be named.
‘Wrote constitution of Khalistan’
Interestingly, some of Chaura’s interviews were given to radical Sikh preacher Papalpreet Singh, who is a close associate of Sikh separatist Amritpal Singh.
Papalpreet and Amritpal were arrested by the Punjab Police along with seven other associates in 2023 and booked under the National Security Act. They are currently in detention in a jail at Dibrugarh, Assam.
Before his association with Amritpal in 2022, Papalpreet was running a YouTube channel for which he had interviewed several former militants and radical leaders.
Claiming to have written more than a dozen books on Sikh history, Chaura said in another interview to Papalpreet that his earliest works as founder of the ‘Akal Federation’, was the “Constitution of Khalistan”.
“That time there were only three organisations which were actively pursuing the cause of Khalistan: Dal Khalsa, Babbar Khalsa and Akal Federation,” said Chaura.
The police officer mentioned earlier told ThePrint that “the books he (Chaura) has written include one on guerrilla warfare, one is called ‘Lalkaar’, one ‘Khalistan de Sangharsh ki Samiksha’ and another is called ‘Sikh Goonj’”.
In many interviews, Chaura has claimed to be close to Sikh militant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. “In 1982, we wanted to name the Akal Federation the Akal Students and Youth Federation but Santji (Bhindranwale) was of the view that it should be called Akal Federation,” he said.
Chaura went on to relate how he was almost arrested by the police in 1999 when his village (Chaura Bajwa in Gurdaspur) was surrounded by joint teams of the Border Security Force and the Punjab Police.
“Three of my cousins were with me and we were planning to carry out an operation against the SHO. While my cousins managed to escape, I could not run because I was not well. I somehow made it out of the village, after which the police party tortured almost every person in my village,” he alleged.
Within a few months of coming out of jail in August 2018, Chaura started attending the martyrdom gatherings of former militants in Punjab where he would give lectures about the Sikh struggle.
When Giani Harpreet Singh, the jathedar of the Akal Takht, pardoned SAD leader Sucha Singh Langah, revoking his excommunication from the religion in 2022, Chaura criticised the move in an interview.
Langah was excommunicated by the Akal Takht after a sleaze video of his had surfaced on social media.
“The Akal Federation was aimed at ensuring that the Akal Takht is strengthened and its traditions are strengthened and there’s nobody to define the orders issued from the Akal Takht,” Chaura had said in another interview.
In a Facebook post in July this year, Chaura stated that the SAD and Badals had been de-legitimised by the Sikh community which was constantly rejecting them in elections.
He went on to caution the Sikh community, saying the rebel group within the SAD was as notorious as the Badals. He alleged that the move by the rebel group to complain to the Akal Takht against the Badals was nothing but an attempt to revive them politically.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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