Who’s behind the arrest of Sikh philanthropist Navtej Singh Guggu?

CHANDIGARH, Punjab—On July 9, the Punjab police arrested Batala based renowned Sikh philanthropist Navtej Singh Guggu after occluding the pro-humanitarian charity hospital being run by him. He has been arrested in a case registered against him under sections 353, 186, 427, and 148 of the IPC for obstructing police cops to carry out “search” in his hospital.

What’s the matter?

On July 1, a large team of police cops from Dinanagar entered into the charity hospital being run by Navtej Singh Guggu under the garb of “search” while claiming that some criminals wanted in a robbery case were being treated inside the hospital.

Under the pretext of conducting “search”, the cops allegedly manhandled the hospital staff for three hours, and SHO (Batala City) Mukhtiar Singh openly depicted highhandedness.

During this, the public present inside the hospital gathered to oppose the high-handedness of police after which the cops ran away from the hospital.

On July 2, the cops registered a case against Navtej Singh Guggu and several others for obstructing the working of police.

It is noteworthy here that SHO Mukhtiar Singh had also booked Navtej Singh Guggu just for distributing ration to the poor people during the lockdown.

On accusations of giving medical treatment to a wanted criminal, Guggu says that the concerned person came to the hospital with a broken leg. “He told us that he came across an accident after which we started giving treatment to him. After receiving treatment for a night, he moved to Amritsar citing option to avail free of cost medical treatment under military quota,” he added.

Hospital Sealed

Soon after this incident, the Batala administration collected near about 70 samples from the hospital staff for testing coronavirus and declared a few of them “positive”.

Under this pretext, the Batala administration sealed the entire hospital on July 7 causing hindrance in the availability of free medical services to the poor and needy people.

Who’s behind all this?

The common masses of Batala say that the pro-humanitarian work by Navtej Singh Guggu in the form of free medical services has brought down the revenue of several local as well as nearby hospitals. They speculate that the businessmen running Hospitals could be behind all this.

However, several others say Guggu has always remained a target of establishment for his daring act of setting ablaze Ajit Poohla for his sins.