Twice Entangled: The Unraveling Web of Deceit Around a Former Top Punjab Cop

You know, it’s quite something when a police officer, someone entrusted with upholding the law, finds themselves behind bars. But it's another thing entirely when that same officer, already in judicial custody for one murky drug-related scandal, gets arrested again for his alleged involvement in yet another fabricated drug case. And that, in truth, is the unfolding saga of former Punjab Police Assistant Inspector General (AIG) Raj Jit Singh.

He was already lodged in prison, awaiting trial for one serious charge, but now the legal noose has tightened considerably. The Punjab Police have, quite dramatically, taken him into three-day custody to dig deeper into his purported role in a 2017 case—a case where, it seems, evidence was tampered with and an innocent man’s life, you could say, was nearly ruined.

This particular episode dates back to the Phase-1 police station in Mohali. A man named Sukhwinder Singh, known as Bitta, was supposedly caught with drugs. But here’s the rub, and it’s a big one: the actual quantity recovered was, allegedly, much higher than what was officially recorded. ASI Harjinder Singh, who himself was arrested just last October, spilled the beans, laying bare the chilling details. He told investigators that he had seized a substantial 4 kg 700 grams of heroin from Bitta, only for Raj Jit Singh, his senior at the time, to reportedly instruct him to register a paltry 500 grams. Imagine that – nearly 4.2 kilograms simply vanishing into thin air, or rather, into someone’s pockets.

And what became of Sukhwinder Singh alias Bitta in all this? Well, the courts, bless them, acquitted him in 2021. Justice, in his specific case, was eventually served, but one has to wonder about the anguish, the sheer terror, he must have endured during those years. The Special Investigation Team (SIT), formed by the Punjab and Haryana High Court precisely to unravel such tangled webs of deceit, had, in its diligent work, already named Raj Jit Singh as an accused in this specific case. This new arrest, then, isn't really a surprise; it's a consequence, a step further in a long, drawn-out process.

It’s worth remembering, too, that this isn’t an isolated incident for Raj Jit Singh. His name had previously surfaced in connection with another, equally unsettling case involving former Moga SSP Raj Jit Singh and Inspector Inderjit Singh. That was a scenario where, it’s alleged, individuals were falsely implicated in drug cases, their lives turned upside down for what can only be described as nefarious motives. Inderjit Singh, dismissed back in 2017, was eventually arrested, while Raj Jit Singh had, for a time, absconded before finally surrendering. Now, with this second major entanglement, it truly feels like a pattern is emerging, one that paints a rather grim picture of corruption reaching into the very heart of law enforcement.