Why India banned 9 Khalistan-linked terrorists in 5 countries

Indian Express
Dated : July 04, 2020
By Shishir Gupta

The Centre moved this week to designate nine men accused of promoting terrorism in Punjab as terrorists under India’s anti-terror law amended last year letting the Union home ministry ban individuals and not just organisations. The nine, the ‘nasty nine’ as one Punjab Police officer described them, have been trying to revive militancy in Punjab from their homes in five countries including Pakistan.
The provision was first invoked last September to designate Jaish-e-Mohammed founder Maulana Masood Azhar, Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafeez Saeed, its operational commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi and Dawood Ibrahim, as terrorists under Indian law. That order was more symbolic. The four have already been designated as terrorists by the United Nations Security Council; Hafiz Saeed as far back as in 2008.
“Monday’s notification is important because this is the first time that this provision of the anti-terror law has been invoked to initiate a crackdown on promoters of Khalistan living in foreign countries,” a senior counter-terror official told Hindustan Times. Since the terrorists are operating from foreign countries, he said, the police would seize any assets that can be linked to them in India and ask their counterparts abroad also to act against them.
The security establishment got down to work soon after. Punjab Police has filed FIRs against one of the nine, Gurpatwant Singh Pannu and his associates in Amritsar and Kapurthala for sedition and secessionism. Pannu is legal adviser to the US-based Sikhs for Justice that was designated a terror group last year. A third case was registered by Haryana Police in Gurugram, adjacent to national capital Delhi.
The group has launched a campaign on the internet called Referendum 2020 that asks people to vote for carving out a sovereign Khalistan out of India. The group has announced that registration would start from today. The campaign, according to the police, has been engineered and backed by Pakistans’ ISI that has been working for years to revive terrorism in Punjab.
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