Puzzled Punjab follows the journey of an IPS officer from AAP to BJP

Kunwar Vijay Pratap, former Inspector General of Police, resigned as MLA from Amritsar North this week and within hours was at the BJP headquarters in Delhi, along with two other AAP rebels, Chetan Singh Jouramajra and Harmeet Singh Pathanmajra, and joined the saffron party.

The BJP has now inducted six Rajya Sabha MPs, one Lok Sabha MP and four MLAs from poll-bound Punjab—and all of them from AAP—into the party. It shows the party’s dilemma and desperation in the state, where it is hard put to field ‘winnable’ candidates. Among the three AAP MLAs who joined the BJP, Kunwar Vijay Pratap is a former IPS while Harmeet Singh Pathanmajra, related to Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann’s wife, is a political veteran. Both of them have courted controversies. Pathanmajra absconded for some time in 2025 after a case of rape, cheating and criminal intimidation was filed against him, before obtaining bail from the High Court.

The former IPS officer sees himself as the indispensable crusader against injustice, corruption and wrongdoing with a messianic belief that only he can restore order and deliver justice. He has built a reputation of being a scholar-cop. A 1998 batch IPS officer from Gopalganj in Bihar, he holds an M.A. in Sanskrit, a PhD on the human rights of prisoners from GNDU and has written on Kabir. But the image he cultivated was that of a dabang officer. 

He is said to have registered an FIR against his own superior, a DIG, back in 2004; he dismissed erring junior policemen in Ludhiana; he appointed SHOs without “consulting” the local halqa in-charge (political appointees in the force); and Amritsar still trades stories of him driving trucks incognito to catch the mafia red-handed. Add a busy Facebook page and his self-styled “Amritsar Model of Policing”, and the legend was complete. Most of all, he became the face of the investigation into the 2015 beadbi (sacrilege) and the police firing at Kotkapura and Behbal Kalan , the open wound of Punjab’s politics.

Yet in a democracy the role of hero is reserved for the politician, who alone faces the voter. An officer who plays to the gallery is seen as poaching on the neta’s turf. KPS Gill is the exception that proves the rule. The supercop was tolerated, even celebrated, only because Punjab was a conflict zone and the state needed a strongman. Once the guns fell silent, the system had little use for him.

For most of his 23 years in uniform Kunwar was shunted from post to post. As SSP Amritsar, his exit in 2009 came after BJP MLA Anil Joshi sat on a hunger strike demanding his transfer under the Akali-BJP government. As Jalandhar Police Commissioner in 2014 he lasted just 69 days, moved out after arresting a BJP worker. When Captain Amarinder Singh came to power in 2017 and made him Ludhiana Police Commissioner amid much fanfare, local Congress leaders ganged up and he was gone in 38 days. Every party took its turn to kick him out of play.

The sacrilege probe was meant to be his redemption. Instead, the Punjab and Haryana High Court quashed the SIT’s report on the Kotkapura firing, found the probe politically motivated and ordered a fresh SIT without him. His charges against the Badals, including Sukhbir, collapsed in court. Kunwar put in his papers; He quit anyway and within weeks joined AAP in Amritsar in the presence of Arvind Kejriwal. To his critics, the timing said it all: the investigation had been a launch-pad.

AAP had perfected a simple strategy: borrow famous individuals and their “image” for political ends, extract the maximum juice out of them, and then throw them away like the bagasse left behind after sugarcane passes through the village belna. Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav were thrown out in 2015; Dr Dharamvira Gandhi was suspended the same year; Sucha Singh Chhotepur was expelled; Sukhpal Khaira was ousted; H.S. Phoolka walked out; Kumar Vishwas was sidelined. The list reads like a who’s who of used napkins.

Kunwar has walked straight into the trap. He was useful to AAP on two counts, as the avenging angel of the sacrilege cases for Panthic voters, and as a tough-cop face to shed the “soft on Khalistan” tag that had hurt the party in 2017. The carrot of “home minister”, even “chief minister”, was dangled. His induction was splashed across hoardings all over Punjab to create a wave. He won Amritsar North comfortably in 2022 with nearly 47 per cent of the vote and, as poetic justice would have it, his old tormentor Anil Joshi, by now on an Akali ticket, was among the vanquished.

Then the music stopped. AAP had 92 MLAs and no use for a 'Singham'. He was kept out of the cabinet. Nothing moved on the Kotkapura and sacrilege cases that had brought him into politics. In January 2023 he resigned as chairman of the assembly’s committee on government assurances in protest. When he kept raising the issue, chief minister Bhagwant Mann brushed him off by saying an MLA “can have a personal opinion”.

Kunwar grew louder. After the Amritsar hooch tragedy that killed 27 people in 2025, he alleged that the liquor mafia had become part of the government. When he questioned the timing of Bikram Majithia’s arrest, it was the last straw. In June, 2025 AAP suspended him for five years for “anti-party activities”, and handed his constituency to a new halqa in-charge. For sixteen months he remained an MLA without a party. On Monday, 2 November, he finally resigned, claiming to have achieved 90 per cent of his targets and to have ended the mai-baap culture in politics, before bowing his head at Gurdwara Bangla Sahib and walking into the BJP office.

The irony is hard to miss. Kunwar has fled a one-man party for an even more centralised one, the very party whose MLA once fasted to get him out of Amritsar. In Punjab, the BJP already has a queue of imported heavyweights, from Captain Amarinder Singh to Manpreet Badal, who have learnt that in Modi-Shah’s BJP one waits for one’s turn and speaks only when spoken to. Patience and silence have however never been Kunwar’s strong suits.

Kunwar Vijay Partap wanted to be the hero of Punjab’s story. Twenty-five years later he has neither the khaki nor the kursi.

(Harjeshwar Pal Singh teaches history at SGGS College, Chandigarh, and is a director with Punjab Thinks, a political consultancy)