Punjab, the land of five rivers, of Bhagat Singh’s revolutionary fire, of the farmer who stood for months on the borders of Delhi demanding justice, is now generating a very different kind of headline. Critics, journalists, opposition politicians, and civil liberties advocates are increasingly asking whether the state under the Aam Aadmi Party government of Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann is sliding toward a pattern of policing that suppresses legitimate dissent rather than protecting the public. Incident by incident, FIR by FIR, detention by detention, a picture is emerging that many find deeply troubling , and the case of a young man from Faridkot is only its latest and most symbolic chapter.
The incident is stark in what it represents. A young man publicly questioned Faridkot Police officials reportedly on camera or in a public setting and was subsequently taken into preventive detention roughly a month later. The official justification offered by the DSP of Jaito was that there had been complaints from college students alleging that this young man was “creating a ruckus.” Strip away the bureaucratic language and what remains is this: a citizen asked uncomfortable questions of police officers, and weeks later he was locked up. No charge. No trial. No conviction. Just detention the most extraordinary power the state possesses outside of war deployed against a man whose apparent crime was speaking up.
Legal scholars call this the punitive use of preventive detention, and it is a well-documented abuse. The Supreme Court of India has repeatedly described preventive detention as “repugnant to democratic ideas” and has stressed that it must be applied within the narrowest possible limits, reserved for genuine threats to state security or public order. The law was never designed to punish embarrassment. It was never designed to silence a young man who made a police officer squirm in front of a camera. Yet across India, and with increasing frequency in Punjab, it is being used in exactly this way. According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s Crime in India 2023 report, over 33,000 persons were held under preventive detention laws in a single year, and roughly half of them were released by administrative review boards without ever reaching a court meaning the state itself quietly acknowledged the detentions were unsound, long after the damage of imprisonment had already been done. Studies of habeas corpus cases before the Madras High Court covering more than two decades found that detention orders were quashed in nearly 88 percent of cases. The law is being used, and then abandoned, leaving ruined months and shattered confidence in its wake.
When AAP swept Punjab’s 2022 elections, it did so on a wave of genuine public hope. Bhagwant Mann had himself stood in Parliament and argued passionately that social media was essential precisely because mainstream media faced government pressure. AAP leaders had opposed media bans, criticized FIRs against journalists, and positioned themselves as champions of the ordinary citizen against a corrupt and high-handed establishment. That rhetoric now sits in increasingly uncomfortable tension with what is happening on the ground. In January 2026, FIRs were registered against ten individuals including RTI activist Manik Goyal, several social media influencers, and the digital media platform Lok Awaaz TV for allegedly posting “distorted and unverified content.” Their actual offence? Tracking the movements of the Chief Minister’s official helicopter during his foreign visit to Japan and South Korea and posting questions about it online. RTI activist Manik Goyal described what happened plainly: the FIRs included non-bailable sections, and routine accountability questions were being projected as matters of security. This is the kind of journalism and civic engagement that any functioning democracy should welcome. Under the AAP government in Punjab, it has become a criminal act.
The press has felt this pressure acutely. In a dramatic episode that drew national attention, sixteen BJP and Congress leaders in Jalandhar were taken into police custody for hours simply for protesting against the demolition of part of a hotel owned by a vernacular media house. Punjab BJP president Sunil Jakhar was pointed in his criticism, saying the problem was not where the police were deployed, but where they were not that the state’s coercive machinery was being turned against the media rather than against those who actually threatened public safety. Critics noted that the same police force that moved swiftly to detain opposition politicians and journalists often appeared far slower to act against the well-connected. The symbolism was impossible to ignore.
The most dramatic test came in March 2023 during the police operation against Amritpal Singh. Punjab witnessed one of its longest internet shutdowns during that period, and while the crackdown on a figure accused of promoting militancy was widely considered justified, what accompanied it was not. Police raided the homes of journalists and lawyers and seized their mobile phones. Social media accounts of critics and independent commentators were blocked. Those who had no connection whatsoever to Amritpal found themselves caught in a dragnet that seemed designed less to prevent extremism and more to prevent reporting on how the government was handling the crisis. The security operation became a cover under which dissent far beyond any reasonable definition of a threat was silenced.
None of this means that Punjab Police are without genuine achievements or that the state’s security environment is simple. The government has launched real anti-corruption operations within the police itself. Senior officials, including a Special DGP, have been suspended in corruption probes. Drug enforcement operations particularly Operation Yudh Nashyan Virudh have been credited with thousands of arrests. Punjab borders Pakistan, has a complex history with militancy, and faces active gangster networks with overseas connections. Under Operation Prahar, the Faridkot Range police alone conducted nearly 800 raids and arrested over 300 gangsters and their associates. These are not trivial accomplishments. The police operate under real pressure in a genuinely difficult environment. The problem is not that Punjab Police exist or act the problem is that the same machinery built to confront criminals is increasingly being aimed at citizens who do nothing more than ask questions, file RTIs, post videos, or show up at a protest.
A police state is not always born in a single dramatic moment of tyranny. More often it arrives gradually, through the normalization of fear. It arrives when citizens learn not from any official announcement but from watching what happens to others that asking questions of officials carries risk. That filming police in a public space can lead to detention a month later. That filing an RTI about a helicopter flight can land you in a non-bailable FIR. That showing up to protest a demolition can mean hours in custody. Each individual incident may be explained away there were complaints, there was a ruckus, the content was distorted, public order was threatened. But when the pattern repeats itself across cases involving journalists, RTI activists, social media commentators, opposition politicians, and ordinary young men from Faridkot, the explanations begin to sound less like law enforcement and more like a system protecting itself from scrutiny.
The young man from Faridkot, whoever he is, asked the police a question. That is all the record suggests he did. And a month later, the state put him in a cell. Whether or not any technical legal justification was offered, the message that act sends to every other young person watching in Punjab is clear: know your place. Do not ask. Do not film. Do not embarrass a man in uniform. That message, multiplied across dozens of similar incidents, is not law and order. It is the slow extinguishing of civic courage. And that is how a democracy even one born in the spirit of Bhagat Singh, who gave his life precisely because he refused to know his place begins to hollow out quietly from within. Punjab’s government owes its people not only roads and anti-drug drives, but the unambiguous assurance that speaking truth to power remains, as it always was for its greatest sons, a right and not a risk.Want to be notified when Claude responds?
This article is based on verified reports from The Quint, The Tribune, The Wire, Article-14, Oxford Human Rights Hub, and government data from the National Crime Records Bureau.