While Khalsa Aid and other bod­ies are work­ing round the clock in pro­vid­ing re­lief and suc­cour to the flood-af­fected peo­ple of Pun­jab, with the Pun­jab and In­dian gov­ern­ment dis­as­ter re­lief teams con­spic­u­ous by their ab­sence, the NIA raid on Khalsa Aid and its In­dia chief Amarpreet Singh raises many fears, in­clud­ing the ap­pre­hen­sion of sub­vert­ing hu­man­i­tar­ian ef­forts. A WSN re­port.

Without any no­tice of any kind, the Na­tional In­ves­ti­ga­tion Agency (NIA), in the early hours of the morn­ing to­day, raided the In­dia head of­fice of renowned hu­man­i­tar­ian aid agency Khalsa Aid in Pa­tiala along with si­mul­ta­ne­ous raids at the nearby res­i­dence of its In­dia head Amarpreet Singh.

In an ironic sit­u­a­tion, the Khalsa Aid of­fices have been in­un­dated due to heavy rain­fall in Pa­tiala, but that has not de­terred the vol­un­teers to carry out their mis­sion for re­lief.

The head­quar­ters of Khalsa Aid serves as the piv­otal point for the col­lec­tion and dis­burse­ment of aid across Pun­jab for the flood-af­fected re­gions, in­clud­ing those in Pa­tiala, Mansa, Am­rit­sar, Tarn Taran and Ja­land­har. De­spite this, there has been no let up in the re­lief ren­dered by the scores of vol­un­teers of Khalsa Aid, es­pe­cially in ar­eas of Sar­dul­garh, Pa­tiala and San­grur, which are still sub­merged un­der wa­ter.

Ac­cord­ing to in­for­ma­tion made avail­able to the me­dia by Khalsa Aid vol­un­teer Gur­preet Singh, the NIA team ac­com­pa­nied by Pun­jab po­lice raided the Khalsa Aid of­fice and also in­ter­ro­gated Amarpreet Singh and his fam­ily mem­bers too. He fur­ther added that an of­fi­cial state­ment will be shared later in the day.

 

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Gur­preet Singh also in­formed that they had no idea as to what were the rea­sons for this raid. It is re­li­ably learnt that the mo­bile phone of Amarpreet Singh has also been con­fis­cated by the NIA team. Though not con­firmed, it is learnt that some records were taken away by the NIA raid­ing team.

One me­dia re­port says that there were raids by NIA -re­lated or un­re­lated to Khalsa Aid is not known in Vil­lage Sarawan Bodla of the Mal­out area of Muk­t­sar Sahib and in two houses of Vil­lage Dalle­wal in Goraya, near Ja­land­har.  The re­port says that Bal­winder Singh and Lavshin­der Singh were in­ter­ro­gated dur­ing the raid early morn­ing to­day.

This is the sec­ond such raid on Khalsa Aid In­dia head Amarpreet Singh, in­clud­ing one which was af­ter the con­clu­sion of the Farm­ers’ ag­i­ta­tion.

Up­dated at 1550 Hours IST