Chandigarh: Kanwar Pal Singh Gill, the Super Cop of our times, was cremated with full state honors at Delhi’s Lodhi Garden Crematorium on Sunday. He breathed his last on Friday at Delhi’s Sir Ganga Ram Hospital. KPS Gill, as he was popularly known, died of a sudden cardiac arrest and had been suffering from Peritonitis since long.
The former DGP of Punjab was posted as Punjab top cop twice during his career. He was a unique personality, perhaps the only one of his kind in the annals of Indian police history. I had an opportunity to meet him once in 2003, when he was serving as an anti-terrorism expert with the Sri Lankan government. I was working with a national newspaper at that time and had accompanied a senior journalist, who was working on a story on the turmoil in Sri Lanka. It was some experience meeting Gill.
What struck me most about him was his unblinking gaze coming from a pair of deep set eyes, which were piercing and appeared cold. One got the impression that he had the knack to see through you, which was enough to send shivers down your spine. We realized then that Gill was the man born to deal with serious homeland security issues, which he did effectively through out his life.
Gill lived his life to the fullest. He could allegedly pat bottoms and pump bullets into hardcore militants with equal ease. He was brought to Punjab to tackle militancy, which had grown out of proportions after more conventional cops like Julio Rebeiro had failed to check the growing ranks. And Gill knew exactly what to do.
He was a Jat Sikh, who perfectly understood the psyche of the militants – the majority of whom came from that community. He worked on a simple policing doctrine: an eye for an eye. He spoke to the militants in their own language, and gave absolute freedom to his team of officers to do whatever it took to achieve the objective. In the process, he was blamed for violating human rights time and again. But there are others who say that his hard-nosed approach was the need of the hour to bring Punjab back from the brink.
Gill was no stranger to controversies, and some of his officers are still in the thick of court cases for their alleged actions. He enjoyed his drinks and was never afraid of speaking his mind whether it be in admiration, of Bollywood stars like Sridevi, or in condemnation of many others who crossed his path. Gill was a lion among men who roared through his life. We wish him peace in the ultimate policing grounds.
But how will the world remember KPS Gill – the man, the supercop, the sports administrator, the Governor, and the strategist? We gleaned through some of the prominent publications to find out where history will place this Lion of Punjab? Will it be among the good, the bad, or will it be the ugly.
Writing in The Times of India, Julio Rebeiro, Gill’s predecessor in Punjab during the militancy period calls him a colleague but not a friend. He says that ‘KPS will always be remembered as the terminator of Khalistani terror’. Rebeiro says that Gill’s appropach to tackling militancy was diametrically opposite than that of his own. He points out that only a Jat Sikh like Gill could handle other Jat Sikhs both in the force and those against whom they fought.
‘His image was such that no one, including me, would dare to count amomg his opponents a man called KPS Gill. Every police officer and man I met in Punjab during my three and half years in Punjab was afraid of him, to a greater or lesser extent.
Rebeiro says that Gill enjoyed his job and will be remembered as the principal terminator of radical elements who engaged in terror activities in the name of Khalistan.
Quoting the BBC, the paper says that Gill had the reputation of being a tough police officer. The officer had become a household name across the country for his role in ending insurgency in Punjab. It that Gill had the ability to script a success in a situation that was deteriorating fast.
Financial Express recalls that the brave heart police officer was known as the ‘Lion of Punjab’ and his finest moment came in May 1988, when he commanded Operation Black Thunder to tackle militants holed up in the Golden Temple. The police action, and the decision to switch off water and electricity connections, led to the surrender of 67 people. The paper credits Gill with using his presence of mind to ensure that the Sikh shrine was untouched.
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Gill was no stranger to controversy, and was convicted of sexual harassment in 1966 for molesting a civil servant at a party in Chandigarh on July 18, 1988, it adds.
Writing in The Statesman, retired DGP (prisons) Shashi Kant, who worked with Gill in the 90s, calls him a legend and a Supercop in the real sense. Kant says that he had the good fortune of working under Gill’s leadership during his second tenure in Punjab starting 1992. Gill had a no-nonsense, daring style of functioning and was man of few words. He took his time trusting his colleagues around him, but once he knew them he stood behind them like a rock. Kant says that the trust placed by Gill on him won him over. Kant was posted as DIG (Intelligence) Punjab, which was the center of strategic decision making. Kant says that Gill was an adept administrator and ensured that even the politician did not overstep their limits.
KPS was ruthless when it came to combating militancy. He was harsh and took some extreme steps because of his commitment to the nation and also due to his basic nature of having extreme likes and dislikes.
Gill was a multi-talented person. He was a writer, a philosopher and was fond of Urdu poetry. He was extremely knowledgeable on Kashmir, on Naxals, and such issues even beyond the Indian territory. Kant signs off saying that history will remember Gill as a tall and iconic personality, and an institution unto himself who will be impossible to emulate.
The Tribune’s Editor-in-Chief Harish Khare finds Gill as ‘decisive and devisive’. Writing in his Sunday column KaffeeKlatsch, which lilterally means an informal or social gathering for coffee and conversation, Khare finds that Gill’s detractors outnumber his admirers.
In his inimitable style Khare says that “KPS” represented a recurring dilemma of our times: an ugly mess gets created because the politicians and diplomats fail to do their job of reconciliation and it is left to people like Gill to clean their dirty mess.
He says that men like KPS are leaders, who motivate their men and officers to cast doubts and diffidence aside; they take offence and have no qualms in giving offence; they have clarity and conviction; they achieve success and their goals by unconventional methods and unrestrained mandates; and, they invariably end up thinking they can take liberties with the laws and men and women (including a Rupan Deol Bajaj). Such men inevitably get tagged with a “controversial” dhobi-mark and Gill sahib was no exception.
In Khare’s own words: It is never a happy augury in a democracy when a man in uniform gets put on a pedestal, but let there be no mistake: If Punjab has known peace it is because out there was a man called KPS Gill.
NDTV.com goes on to mention that though Gill had retired from IPS in 1995 he was often called to help state governments control difficult situations. As Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2002, Narendra Modi had appointed him as security adviser to end the post-Godhra riots in the state and restore confidence in the administration. He delivered on his mandate, within a week.
Many years later, Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh also leaned on KPS Gill’s experience to control the expansion of Maoists in the state. But KPS Gill didn’t stay around for long. In 2013, he told NDTV that Chief Minister Raman Singh wasn’t really serious about curbing Maoist violence.
Ajay Sahni, executive director of the security think-tank Institute for Conflict Management that KPS Gill headed, sums it up saying, “This is a man who not only defeated the Khalistani movement which none of the other leaders in the country had the courage to confront. He did not just save Punjab from separatism, he ensured no state in this country in a situation of enormous political mismanagement would think of separation and no terrorist movement would really have a real possibility of success.
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