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Friday April 25, 2025

The gangs of Rajanpur

By our correspondents
April 15, 2016

The police action we are getting right now in Punjab is very different to that which was originally envisaged. The Lahore park attack was supposed to have shocked the conscience so much that the government and military were no longer going to tolerate the presence of hardened militant groups in the country’s most populous province. The implication was that the various lashkars that have operated unimpeded for decades would finally be tackled, both for their support to the TTP, and for their own violence – particularly against minority groups. Since then there have been scattered arrests of militants but the main action seems to be a shootout in Rajanpur, a district of southern Punjab that has barely over a million people. It is a shootout the police seem to be losing. The previously unheard of Chhotu Gang, which now seems to have become the number one enemy of the state, was not only able to kill 10 police officers but capture another 25. The little we know of the Chhotu Gang suggests that it controls a lot of land in Rajanpur and is involved in extortion and kidnapping. All of this would make it a prime target of the police but let us not pretend it has anything to do with the militancy plaguing the land. The police had even asked the military and Rangers to take part in this action but they refused, not because they felt such police operations are beyond their remit but because they thought the terms of reference weren’t clear enough.

Should we accept the premise that the Chhotu Gang is such a serious threat to national security that the military may even get involved in the form of air strikes, two simple questions must be asked. Why was nothing done about this threat before it was allowed to metastasize to the point where it has become more than a fair match for the might of the Punjab police? And why did it take a militant massacre in Lahore for this unrelated threat to be tackled? Reports indicate that the Chhotu Gang

enjoys the support of numerous tribes in Balochistan and Sindh. Now, with 25 of their men kidnapped, the police will have to devote even more resources to the Chhotu Gang. Before it does so, the Punjab government must explain to the public what its aims are and why it never thought to mention the Chhotu Gang before. It may well turn out that this gang is as dangerous as it is being portrayed to be but until the government can explain itself, scepticism will abound. One also must wonder if the greater media scrutiny given to this police action has something to do with location. After all, numerous such operations are taking place daily in the tribal areas and few question their efficacy and the identity of the targets. The greater scrutiny in Punjab may lead to answers but we must be always questioning, no matter how ‘important’ the area.