SSP Vigilance Jagatpreet Singh, who issued summons to Congress Ludhiana West bypoll candidate Ashu, suspended
The Punjab government Friday suspended Jagatpreet Singh, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Vigilance, Ludhiana, a day after he issued a summons to Congress leader Bharat Bhushan Ashu.
Alok Shekhar, Additional Chief Secretary, Department of Home Affairs, issued the suspension order. The order says that Jagatpreet Singh has been placed under suspension with immediate effect under Rule 4(1) (a) of the Punjab Civil Services (Punishment and Appeal) Rules, 1970, for his 'grave misconduct and dereliction of duty'.
The Punjab Vigilance Bureau summoned Congress leader and Ludhiana West bypoll candidate Bharat Bhushan Ashu in connection with a five-month-old school land misuse case. The summons relate to a First Information Report (FIR) filed on January 8, 2025, at Ludhiana's Division Number 5 police station, accusing Ashu and others of cheating, criminal breach of trust, forgery, and conspiracy. The investigation was transferred to the Vigilance Bureau owing to suspected involvement of government officials. At least 25 others, including current and former school management committee members, were also summoned.
Government sources alleged that the SSP Vigilance issued the summons in connivance with Ashu to give him the benefit in the ensuing by-poll slated for June 19. However, Congress leader Raj Kumar Verka trashed the allegations and said it was just an excuse of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government.
'Does the AAP want to say that Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, who is also the state home minister and to whom the Vigilance Bureau reports, is so helpless that he does not know what is happening right under his nose?' Verka told media persons.
Reacting to SSP's suspension, Ashu, while speaking to The Indian Express, said it was a 'cheap tactic of the ruling AAP government' and yet another U-turn which it has taken after facing widespread criticism.
On allegations that he was 'in touch with the SSP' and 'got summons issued to himself', Ashu said: 'Did I send the case file to the vigilance and ask them to send summons to me? Is Ashu so powerful in the AAP government that he can get summons issued to himself? They make police officers scapegoats as per their whims and fancies. Earlier, they had suspended Chief Director Vigilance SPS Parmar in a similar way. The AAP's cheap politics cannot get dirtier than this.'
Ashu further said that since the past two weeks as the campaigning for Ludhiana West by-election gathered pace, a 'message' has been sent to all 28 police stations in Ludhiana 'to dig out if any previous/old complaints' are pending against him so that he can be 'implicated and harassed again.'
'Ashu nu phasao (implicate Ashu) is the only motive of this government,' said Ashu.
Responding to the school land misuse case in which he was sent fresh summons, he said: 'It has been over a decade since I had resigned from that school's management committee. Twenty-seven others who also left the committee several years ago have been summoned just because they know me. This is the height.'
Ashu also refuted allegations of any meeting being held between him and the suspended SSP in recent times.
Meanwhile, addressing a press conference in Ludhiana, Ashu, along with other senior Congress leaders, released the photographs of a meeting, purportedly showing AAP Ludhiana West bypoll candidate-cum-Rajya Sabha member Sanjeev Arora addressing a group of officials, including Jagatpreet Singh.
Kapurthala Congress MLA Rana Gurjeet Singh said, 'This photograph is clear evidence of how the entire administration and the police machinery are working on the orders of the AAP candidate. He has no authority to address or order government officials or the police, but he is doing that. What the AAP is doing to win this election is morally and ethically wrong.'
Divya Goyal is a Principal Correspondent with The Indian Express, based in Punjab.
Her interest lies in exploring both news and feature stories, with an effort to reflect human interest at the heart of each piece. She writes on gender issues, education, politics, Sikh diaspora, heritage, the Partition among other subjects. She has also extensively covered issues of minority communities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. She also explores the legacy of India's partition and distinct stories from both West and East Punjab.
She is a gold medalist from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Delhi, the most revered government institute for media studies in India, from where she pursued English Journalism (Print). Her research work on 'Role of micro-blogging platform Twitter in content generation in newspapers' had won accolades at IIMC.
She had started her career in print journalism with Hindustan Times before switching to The Indian Express in 2012.
Her investigative report in 2019 on gender disparity while treating women drug addicts in Punjab won her the Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity in 2020. She won another Laadli for her ground report on the struggle of two girls who ride a boat to reach their school in the border village of Punjab.
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In the foreword to the book, Matthai's daughter-in-law Syloo (married to Ravi Matthai) describes the man: 'Daddy was seen as being a formidable person, a man with a serious demeanour and an eminence which many thought precluded intimacy or even small liberties. But, at home, he was an entirely different person." In other words, Matthai, like everybody else, was human with the usual flaws and frailties. Dadabhoy provides a brief glimpse of the man's faultlines by recounting the episode where Matthai seeks Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's intervention after Matthai's son reportedly runs over and kills a pedestrian in Allahabad. This is the only instance when readers catch sight of the great man's feet of clay; Dadabhoy's hands may have been forced here by an earlier book which first recounted the incident. But barring this single incident, there is scarce little to sketch out the man's personality. This shortcoming is perhaps born out of necessity. While Parliamentary records and inter-ministerial archives have become much more accessible, we do not know if Dadabhoy had similar luck with John Matthai's personal documents and letters. Also, to be fair to Dadabhoy, many of the people who knew Matthai personally have all passed on, adding another layer of insurmountable constraints. This biography, therefore, apart from being a valuable document for understanding how some of India's policy contours unfolded in the first decade after independence, adds little to the mystique of John Matthai as one of India's leading post-independent policy architects. The author is a senior journalist and author of Slip, Stitch and Stumble: The Untold Story of India's Financial Sector Reforms. He posts @rajrishisinghal 'Honest John: A Life of John Matthai': By Bakhtiar K. Dadabhoy, Penguin Random House India, 396 pages, ₹999 Also reads: India's growth and urban planning: On different planets
