Amritpal’s induction into the movement was quickly done after a crash course on Khalistani ideology. Therefore, Amritpal Singh failed to become the real Bhindranwale 2.0.
A man not known to be more than a troll during the farmers’ agitation in Delhi in 2020-21 quietly flew from Dubai to Amritsar on August 20, 2022. Before he took this flight to fame and his arrest on April 23, he was one of the thousands of unknown Amritpal Singhs from Punjab. Last August, the much-maligned Punjab Police was busy in preparing the chargesheet in the rapper-cum-singer Sidhu Moosewala’s killing, while facing a lot of pressure. They would scarce have known the tumult that was to follow this Amritpal’s return.
Deep Sidhu And Amritpal
Amritpal Singh, who sought to be known as Bhindranwale 2.0, was working alongside his father Tarsem Singh in Dubai since 2012. He was active on Facebook for about 11 years. However, his posts revealed no hint of him being a Khalistani. It was during the farmers’ agitation that Amritpal became an ardent supporter of the lawyer-turned-model-turned-actor Deep Sidhu, and much like Deep, was clean-shaven and sported t-shirts and jeans.
If Amritpal’s emergence was sudden so was his one-time peer Deep Sidhu’s. To know about Amritpal and his emergence, it is important to know about the sudden surfacing of Deep Sidhu.
Deep Sidhu campaigned for BJP MP Sunny Deol in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Then quite suddenly from being a supporter of the Hindu right-wing party he became an adherent of the Khalistani movement, which showed that he was either clueless about ideologies or chose ideologies to serve his own interests.
ISI gave Amritpal Singh Bhindranwale training in Georgia before arriving in India in September 2022.