Badal Senior Turned Pale

I took it to the CM and briefed him. He turned pale, the colour draining from his face as he read the list and then came the whispering snarl, “kake ji…” He held on to the list for some time as a hushed silence fell over the room. He then ordered me to leave. Since that meeting, the list has not seen the light of the day. The frequency of meetings with the CM reduced before I was booted out of the department.

Unless destroyed, the list must be tucked away in some file. It remains the most sought after document in Punjab, with even the Punjab and Haryana High Court seeking it. Strange statements have emanated from the Punjab government, ranging from ‘The list does not exist’ to ‘It is not traceable’ to ‘It has been tampered with’.

And ‘The curious case of a missing list’, which sounds like a Sherlock Holmes mystery, goes on. Had the list been acted upon and the drug smugglers ‘restrained’, almost a generation could have been saved in Punjab. It would not have become a hub of drugs and narcotics trafficking, there would not have been terror infiltrations, there would not have been the ISI’s ‘sleeper cells’ and there would have been no Dinanagar and Pathankot.

(The writer is a former additional director-general (intelligence), Punjab Police)