Chandigarh: Six-feet tall Kalwinder Singh is a towering figure wherever he goes. A Punjab Police-appointed gunman follows him at all times, adding to his aura. For the last two years, Singh has been receiving phone calls from dreaded gangsters holed up in Canada, against whom he has been vocal on his Facebook page.
“Stop speaking out or you’ll regret it,” he has been told.
Singh says the intensity of these threats has increased since June, forcing him to take down his videos from Facebook. The gangsters seem to know everything about him, and he feels he was being followed wherever he went. On 26 June, he filed a police complaint, and an FIR was lodged. But the calls haven’t stopped.
Singh is among countless beleaguered people in Punjab who have been receiving threatening phone calls, mostly traced to dreaded dons operating from Canada.
Since January, the Punjab Police’s Anti-Gangster Task Force has received 207 complaints about such calls, and registered 172 FIRs. The callers have been traced in 116 of these cases, and 174 people have been arrested.
Extortion calls from ganglords have become a major law and order issue in Punjab. In late August, a businessman in Amritsar was shot at for refusing a demand of Rs 5 crore. On 1 September, shots were fired outside performer A.P. Dhillon’s Vancouver home in Canada.
Back in India, three people, including a woman who was soon to be married, were shot dead in Ferozepur two days later. The assailants fired 36 times at the car they were in.
The issue was also raised in the Punjab assembly’s monsoon session last week. Congress leader and Dinanagar MLA Aruna Chaudhary said extortion calls have become a daily affair.
Meanwhile, Punjab Director General of Police (DGP) Gaurav Yadav was summoned by Speaker Kultar Singh Sandhwan, seeking a report on a Faridkot assistant sub-inspector accepting a bribe from a ‘categorised gangster’. According to an Indian Express report, the Speaker later changed his mind.
Leader of Opposition (LoP) Partap Singh Bajwa also sought the formation of a committee, akin to a joint parliamentary committee, to probe the involvement of police in facilitating an interview of Lawrence Bishnoi to a private news channel while he was in Punjab Police’s custody. The gangster had claimed responsibility for performer Sidhu Moosewala’s murder.
Speaking to ThePrint, Bajwa said increasing incidents of extortion calls and firing in Punjab indicate a complete breakdown of law and order, reminiscent of the militancy era in the state. “Forget businessmen and singers, there is not a single top politician who has not received such extortion calls,” he said.
Bajwa added, “They are not reported and taken care of in a hushed-up manner. I believe senior-most people in Punjab Police are involved in this. Especially in property dispute cases in which policemen are involved, they use criminals lodged in jails. The criminals are handed over a list of people to contact. Everyone gets scared if a gangster calls.”
Asked to comment on Bajwa’s claims, a senior Punjab Police officer said the allegations of police involvement in the extortion calls was “absolute rubbish”.
“There have been encounters of almost 16 gangsters in the last one year. High profile gangsters have been put behind bars. We’re risking our lives and taking on gangsters on a daily basis. It is not an easy thing to do,” the officer added, not wanting to be named.
Assistant Inspector General (AIG) of Punjab’s Anti-Gangster Task Force Gurmeet Chauhan told ThePrint that most of these cases could be traced to “criminals wreaking havoc from foreign soil”. While some cases are not reported, where parties “settle for a lesser amount,” in others, tracing the callers becomes a tough task as they use VPN (Virtual Private Network). A VPN masks one’s IP address, basically concealing the user’s digital footprints.
Chauhan added that there was a spurt in such calls after Moosewala’s killing in May 2022, and the numbers have plateaued since.
According to police data, 65 extortion calls were reported in Punjab between January and May 2022. Moosewala was killed on 29 May that year. In June alone, 116 extortion calls were reported. Meanwhile, 228 calls were reported between July and December that year.
Punjab Police sources further said that overall, around 400 calls were reported in 2022, and more than 500 in 2023. This year, 207 calls have been recorded since January. Over a thousand such calls have been reported since 2022 in Punjab, sources added.
Incidentally, Moosewala too received extortion calls before his murder.
A small business owner from Punjab’s Doaba region told ThePrint: “There is constant fear among Punjab’s businessmen since the assassination of Moosewala. Gangsters have become emboldened since his killing. All of us are getting calls. I settled a case with a don myself. These are not conducive times to do business in Punjab.”
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‘Foot soldiers’ for recces, threat calls via VPN
Dreaded gangsters are recruiting people in Punjab’s villages to carry out recces, issue threats and even carry out shootouts.
For example, Kalwinder Singh’s extortionists had information on his movements, minute details about his life such as phone numbers of his family members, the car he drove and where he stayed. This information was passed on to them by residents of Singh’s native village.
“A big gangster claimed to have called me himself and told me my activities are being monitored. They had all the information on me,” Singh said. Even though he has deleted the videos from his Facebook page, he continues to strongly critique the separatist sentiment in Canada. “They’ve corrupted our youth. I think it is very important to speak against them (gangsters in Canada), they want to tear Punjab down,” Singh added.
Anti-Gangster Task Force AIG Chauhan said, “We’re arresting a lot of people who go to a victims’ homes to fire shots and scare them, threaten them in one way or another. These ‘foot soldiers’ are the modus operandi of threatening people in India by criminals wreaking havoc from foreign soil.”
“Some cases are not reported to us. For example, a small businessman may get a call of extortion of say Rs 10 lakh, they’ll settle it for a lesser amount. Such cases are not reported to us. We work on tracing the calls reported to us, but they’re made via VPNs, and technically we hit a dead end. The origin of numbers have hopping IP addresses from Malaysia, Portugal … or any other country,” he told ThePrint.
Chauhan said some calls have been traced to gangsters like Canada-based designated terrorists Arsh Dalla and Goldy Brar, so taking action against them is difficult. The task force has also got four gangsters deported to India and one extradited in the last year—Sachin Thapan (Moosewala case), Vikram Brar (death threats to Salman Khan and Moosewala cases) and Manpreet Singh Pita (Moosewala case). Ramanjit Singh alias Romy, involved in 2016 Nabha jailbreak, was extradited from Hong Kong in August.
Since 2022, the task force claims to have neutralised 16 gangsters in encounters, while 78 have been injured in cross-firing. “This problem (of extortion) is not exclusive to Punjab. In August there was a high-level meeting of NIA on how to solve this problem plaguing other states such as Delhi-NCR, Haryana and Rajasthan,” said Chauhan, maintaining that almost all such threat calls can be traced to foreign soil, and are not originating from Indian jails.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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