Indian police have launched a hunt for a Sikh preacher who has revived talk of an independent Sikh homeland and stoked fears of a return to violence that killed tens of thousands of people in 1980s and early 1990s.
Police in the northwestern state of Punjab, where Sikhs are in the majority, said they had arrested 114 supporters of the preacher, Amritpal Singh, 29, and seized 10 guns and 430 rounds of ammunition and other equipment.
Top Punjab police officer Sukhchain Gill told Reuters that Singh had set up a militia called Anandpur Khalsa Fauj. Its logos were found on the gate of his house and on the rifles and bullet-proof jackets recovered there, Gill said. "We all are still slaves ... We have to fight for freedom," Singh said in the home village of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the Sikh insurgent leader killed in a 1984 Indian army operation.
India’s then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, sent the military into the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine for Sikhs, in 1984 to root out Bhindranwale and his supporters in a bloody episode that infuriated Sikhs around the world.
Singh had become popular through social media during drawn protests in 2020-21 by thousands of farmers from Punjab, many of them Sikh, against agricultural reforms.
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