Pakistan’s ISI is increasingly making efforts to control the management of Sikh shrines in Pakistan and Sikh affairs in India, top intelligence sources told CNN-News18 on Wednesday.
In January, the Pakistan government appointed an ISI officer as CEO of the Project Management Unit. He was tasked to oversee the Gurdwara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur, said the sources.
ISI launched Khalistan separatist Amritpal Singh in India after coaching him in Sikh religion and history, they added. He’s learnt to have visited Georgia, and may have been tutored there, before his launch in India from Dubai.
The ISI wanted a cult figure in “flesh and blood” to fan the flames of Khalistani separatism in Punjab, said the sources.
The Pakistani agency is building a “brand and cult” around Amritpal and also bankrolling his campaign being run on social media, they added.
Officials say Amritpal Singh is promoting a fundamentalist form of Sikhism. He and his followers vandalised a gurdwara in Jalandhar by bringing out the sofas and chairs put in the Gurdwara Darbar Hall for senior citizens.
Opposition parties have hit out at Punjab’s Aam Aadmi Party government for not registering a case against Amritpal and his 40-50 followers despite the gurdwara management giving a written complaint.
Chief minister Bhagwant Mann recently said that “1,000 people” (followers of Amritpal Singh, who besieged the Ajnala police station to free a jailed fellow member of radical outfit Waris Punjab De) do not represent Punjab, adding that they were funded by Pakistan in a bid to disturb peace in the state.
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