Sikh separatist Amritpal Singh arrested in India

RELIGIONS NEWS AGENCY (REDNA) – Singh and his supporters raided a police station in February after one of the preacher’s aides was arrested.

Indian police have arrested Sikh separatist Amritpal Singh after searching for him for more than a month during an operation in the state of Punjab bordering Pakistan.

The rise of Singh – a preacher in the northwestern state of Punjab, where Sikhs are the majority – has revived talk of such a homeland and stoked fears of a return to violence of the 1980s and early 1990s.

“Amritpal Singh has been arrested from the Rode village in Moga district, Punjab, on the basis of specific intelligence,” Sukhchain Singh Gill, a top official in the Punjab police, told reporters on Sunday.

Singh and supporters armed with swords, knives and guns raided a police station in February after one of the preacher’s aides was arrested for assault and attempted kidnapping.

They arrested more than 100 of his followers, transferring them to jails hundreds of kilometres away, and banned gatherings of more than four people in some areas.

Police have accused Singh and his supporters of attempted murder, obstruction of law enforcement and creating disharmony and said he had been on the run since mid-March.

Punjab, which is about 58 percent Sikh and 39 percent Hindu, was rocked by a violent separatist movement for a state called Khalistan in the 1980s and early 1990s, in which thousands of people died.

The Indian government conducted a botched 1984 raid on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest site in Sikhism. Hundreds of people were killed in what was called Operation Blue Star, which led to the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh security guards a few months later.

Her assassination sparked an anti-Sikh pogrom in New Delhi and elsewhere that lasted several days and killed thousands more people, including children who were shot, beaten and burned to death.

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