Parliamentary panel set up to grant leave to MPs, says Centre on Amritpal Singh’s petition
Chandigarh, Feb 25 (IANS) The Union government on Tuesday informed the Punjab and Haryana High Court that a 15-member parliamentary committee, led by BJP member Biplab Kumar Deb, has been constituted by the Lok Sabha Speaker to examine leave applications of all absent Members of Parliament, including jailed Amritpal Singh, from the ongoing Parliament session.
During the hearing of Amritpal Singh’s petition, Additional Solicitor General Satya Pal Jain told a bench of Chief Justice Sheel Nagu and Justice Sumeet Goel that the committee, formed on Monday, would review the cases of all such MPs.
After taking the Centre’s statement on record, the High Court adjourned the matter to next week.
The Centre’s submission came in response to the petition of Amritpal Singh, who had approached the High Court seeking direction to the Union and Punjab governments and other respondents to allow him to attend parliamentary proceedings in obedience to the summons issued by Lok Sabha General Secretary.
However, Amritpal Singh’s counsel, R.S. Bains, could not appear before the court and sought time for arguments.
In the previous hearing, the High Court had asked the Central government to inform whether the committee for granting leave to MPs from attending sessions of the House has been constituted.
Sikh radical Amritpal Singh has been locked up in an Assam jail under the National Security Act.
In his first electoral contest, Amritpal Singh, head of ‘Waris Punjab De’, won the Khadoor Sahib seat by 197,120 votes over his nearest rival, Congress candidate Kulbir Singh Zira. For supporters and sympathisers, Amritpal Singh is the next-gen of Sikh ‘separatist leaders’ like Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who was killed in the Indian Army’s Operation Blue Star in 1984. He also considers the late separatist an “inspiration” for him.
The fiery pro-Khalistan, self-styled preacher had been running ‘separatist’ propaganda through speeches before going to jail. On the radar of Central investigating agencies, he drew comparisons to Bhindranwale owing to his looks and donning a navy blue turban, a white chola and a sword-sized kirpan. However, unlike Bhindranwale, Amritpal Singh didn’t have any formal religious schooling. A dropout from a polytechnic, he cut his hair and shaved his beard while in Dubai. Police records say Amritpal Singh, who tied the knot with UK-based NRI Kirandeep Kaur in 2023, has been involved in scores of disputes, kidnappings and issuing threats.
Amritpal Singh, who hails from Jallupur Khera in Amritsar district, was not known till September 2022 when he returned to India from Dubai where he had been running his family’s transport business since 2012. After taking charge of ‘Waris Punjab De’, which means the heirs of Punjab, he was trying to position himself as a new fulcrum for the panthic cause by calling on the youth to “fight for the freedom” of the Panth. ‘Waris Punjab De’ was floated by lawyer-actor-turned-activist Deep Sidhu in 2021. One of the accused in Red Fort violence, Sidhu died in a road accident near Haryana’s Sonepat in February 2022.
–IANS
vg/vd
