Kanwar Pal Singh Gill, who passed into immortality today (26 May), shall always be remembered as one of the greatest sons of Mother India. A super cop committed to the integrity of the nation and safety of her citizens, K P S Gill was largely responsible for quelling the spread of separatism in Punjab.

Created by vote-bank politics of myopic Indian politicians who valued immediate political gains over the unity of India, the Khalistan problem was later turned into a full-blown terrorist phenomenon by Pakistan. Indira Gandhi allowed the growth of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his group to terrorise the non-Sikh Hindus. Massacres, and the resulting bitterness, built up slowly between the two communities which have stood by each other historically and nurtured each other spiritually and culturally.

The Congress created anti-Sikh apartheid rules during the 1982 Asian Games held at New Delhi. The situation was allowed to escalate in such a way that, at last, the Indian Army had to enter the Harmandir Sahib. The event turned into a permanent scar in the psyche of the Sikhs.

Then, the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. She became a victim of the bullets fired by her Sikh bodyguards as well as her political game of divide and rule. The 1984 anti-Sikh riots executed by the storm-troopers of Congress was then followed by terrorist activities carried out by Sikh extremists in Punjab.

It was at this juncture, with the emotional alienation of Sikhs almost complete and Pakistan overtly supporting Sikh secessionists, that Gill appeared on the scene.

An officer of the Indian Police Services batch of Assam cadre (1957), Gill had field experience in dealing with politically linked secessionist terrorism of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) in the 1980s. He and his men in uniform put themselves in the line of fire of the terrorists. They fought not only the terrorists but also the human rights mafia who tactically supported the terrorists, who, in turn, also received support from across the border.

By 1993, the secessionist terrorists were dealt a decisive defeat. And then began the media witch-hunt against the very people who ended terrorism in Punjab.

As Gill himself wrote in a moving letter to then prime minister of India, I K Gujral, “The ultimate irony is that the instruments and institutions of democracy are, today, arrayed against the very people who made democracy possible in Punjab. For those who were comprehensively defeated in the battle for ‘Khalistan’, ‘public interest’ litigation has become the most convenient strategy for vendetta.”

Gill was a thinking cop, a visionary who analysed and understood the problem of religious terrorism. He saw terrorism as low-intensity war being waged against India. He always went beyond the physical infrastructure of terrorism and prophetically zeroed in on the ideological heart of the phenomenon from which terrorism takes shape. For instance, he points out in his book on Khalistani terrorists, Punjab, the Knights of Falsehood, how the myth of Brahminical conspiracies forms the basis for Sikh separatism. He writes,