Man Continues To Evade 70k Police Officers On A Motorcycle And Make 5 Stars On GTA Look Like Child's Play
On Tuesday, the high court in Punjab demanded to know how he had managed to escape arrest when so many police were searching for him.
"You have 80,000 police personnel. How has he not been arrested? This is an intelligence failure," the court said, as it ordered the state government to submit a report on the search operation within four days.
The court was hearing a plea filed by the legal adviser of Mr Singh's organisation Waris Punjab De (Heirs of Punjab), alleging that Mr Singh had been illegally and forcibly detained by the police, and seeking his release. The government said it had managed to arrest all other accused, except for Mr Singh.
Punjab police declared him "a fugitive" on Saturday after he escaped in a dramatic car chase which was live-streamed by some of his associates. Since then authorities have blocked internet services, restricted messages and deployed thousands of paramilitary soldiers to Punjab as they began a state-wide search for Mr Singh.
Six of his associates and an uncle have been arrested and charged under India's stringent National Security Act (NSA) - four of them were sent to a prison in the north-eastern state of Assam on Monday.
On Tuesday, the Punjab government said it had partially lifted the internet ban while retaining it in a few places until 23 March. Amritpal Singh claims to draw inspiration from Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, a preacher accused by the Indian government of leading an armed insurgency for Khalistan. Bhindranwale was killed in the Indian army's storming of the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine in the Sikh religion, in 1984.
SO a lot of you are probably wondering who the hell this guy is and why does he have a country shutting down the internet in a state of India the size of Texas, but this geopolitical problem has got one of the largest manhunts in history, and this guy is doing what tons of GTA players could only dream of.
To get the context of this situation, let me use an allegory Americans can understand in the context of America and is actually very similar in population and land mass size. Much like Texas kind of wants to be its own country, there is a state in India that also wants to be its own country, it's called Khalistan. Khalistan is a region in India that goes through many states (Think how Appalachia goes through many states). In this region live an ethnoreligious group called Sikhs, a minority in the Hindu-dominated country.
Now let me tell you about the Sikhs because they are some badass motherfuckers whose religion is intertwined with a Warrior culture like no other. Personally, I became infatuated with them at a young age due to some unfortunate circumstances in the tri-state area after 9/11. A girl in my Kindergarten class's father came in to explain Sikhism to us shortly after the invasion of Iraq because a lot of Islamaphobia was occurring in the proceeding years post-9/11. Sikh men have to wear the 5Ks, which are five things they always have to keep on themselves, one of which is a turban which very sadly made them the target of hate crimes in post 9/11 America, but also a good-sized sword that caught my attention as a 4-year-old. Sikhs have an ideology of being "Saint-Soldiers" in which they have items for their religious devotion and keep a piece on them at all times so that they can always be "truly Brave... Who fights for the deprived" the ideology is that they will always fight for the underdog.
Throughout the history of religion, Sikhs fought oppressive powers and empires. The British Partition of India in 1947 came with great strife between Hindus and Muslims as they polarized into the Majority Muslim and Hindu states of Pakistan and India. The Sikhs living in Pakistan's borderland also suffered greatly as the only religion in the area without a state with plurality rule. What ended up happening is the Sikhs became a minority in a gigantic country that, since its inception, has continuously oppressed them. This includes their language being erased in their homeland, resources being purposefully diverted from them, police brutality, and a large military backlash. With the manipulative forces of the Cold War in the background, The Indian army initiated "Operation Bluestar," which killed many Sikh activists and, in retaliation, led to the assassination of India's Head of State, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (I always thought she was related to Mahatma Gandhi the skinny mustache glasses dude, but apparently 0 relations) (seriously look)
In more violent history, the Indian government responded with terrible acts that I will leave for the professionals to handle in the Twitter thread, providing a way better description of what happened.
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Please check out this Twitter thread for the best explanation.
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(Go to Twitter for the rest of the thread since it won't embed for some reason).
So Amritpal Singh is wanted by India for basically exercising free speech, and he's been making their police look like fools in the process. The Indian government shut down the internet in a place the size of Texas in order to try to get one man who is fighting for the rights of his people, and he has evaded 70k cops trying to find him and the second largest country in the world that wants him dead.
Amritpal Singh is a dude who has inspired protests across the globe, protesting for his movement for a Khalistan-free state. He is literally living GTA with 5+ stars and has inspired many Warrior-Saints by religious law to only to fight for the righteous and underdogs.