BJP Demands Mann Resign After Second Sangrur Poisoning

BJP national spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia on Monday asked Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann to resign after Jagseer Singh, a resident of Namol village, swallowed a poisonous substance outside the Sangrur deputy commissioner’s office. The bid came 13 days after Gulzar Singh died in the same district, Mann’s home base, following a public clash over chitta, the street term for synthetic drugs.

Bhatia, speaking at the party’s New Delhi headquarters, also asked for a CBI inquiry and called the state “drugs wala Punjab.” Jagseer, also known as Jagga, is under treatment at Rajindra Hospital in Patiala. Sangrur police say his condition is stable, and that they have both booked the village sarpanch on his wife’s complaint and listed nine earlier criminal cases against him.

Poison Outside the Sangrur DC Office

Jagseer swallowed the substance at about 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, September 20, at the gate of the district complex. His friend Manjinder Singh snatched the bottle and took him first to Civil Hospital, Sangrur, then to Patiala after the family pressed for the shift.

Namol sits in the Sunam Assembly seat, held by AAP Punjab president Aman Arora, inside Sangrur district. Jagseer had posted a video saying chitta was being sold near his house. He later said he deleted that clip after the village sarpanch, Sukhbir Singh alias Sukhi, came to the house, assaulted the family, and damaged CCTV gear, including the DVR.

fed up with the system

Jagseer Singh, in a video recorded as he consumed the substance, Sangrur

Cheema police station SHO Yogesh Kumar said doctors at the civil hospital first called him out of danger, then moved him at the family’s insistence. Manjinder said Jagseer still had footage of neighbours selling chitta and that no one had acted on the complaint. A group of villagers, meanwhile, gathered behind the sarpanch and said Jagseer himself dealt in illicit liquor and drugs.

Namol has more than 5,000 voters, around 2,000 of them from the Scheduled Caste community, local estimates given to reporters in the village show. The fight there is already a caste-tinged panchayat quarrel as much as a state drug story.

Nine FIRs and a Fresh Case Against the Sarpanch

Sangrur SSP Ravjot Kaur Grewal briefed reporters on Monday with two files, not one. On the complaint and medico-legal report of Jagseer’s wife, Manpreet Kaur, police registered FIR No. 125 dated September 20 at Police Station Cheema against Sukhbir Singh alias Sukhi, Sabar Mistri, Aman Singh, Mukarti Singh and others, under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections 115(2), 126(2), 324(4), 331(6), 190 and 191(3), for alleged assault and vandalism.

The same briefing set out Jagseer’s own record. Grewal said he is a habitual offender with nine FIRs at stations across the state, and that a September 12 social-media video in which he threatened self-harm over a family dispute had already produced a daily diary report under BNS section 226 at Cheema.

THE RECORD GREWAL READ OUT

• Four convictions: One case under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act and three under the Excise Act, all with sentences already passed.
• Four more trials: Further Excise Act cases still before the courts.
• One rape FIR: Booked at Police Station Thuliwal, later ending in acquittal, the ninth matter in the tally.
• Panchayat claim: The village board told police he was politically pushed toward a public suicide bid to pressure them, and that he blocks local action against drugs.

Grewal said the CCTV-damage claim is under investigation, that facts are not yet closed, and that Sangrur police would work “strictly in accordance with the facts.” AAP’s Punjab unit circulated the same briefing.

Punjab | Sangrur SSP Ravjot Kaur Grewal’s Statement

SSP Sangrur Ravjot Kaur Grewal reveals that Jagga Singh, who allegedly consumed a substance at the DC office, has 9 FIRs against him, with convictions in 4 cases, including Excise and NDPS offences. He is also an undertrial in… pic.twitter.com/44i4TMJO6W

— AAP In News (@AAPInNews) September 21, 2026

WHERE THE TWO SIDES DISAGREE

• Opposition line: Leader of Opposition Partap Singh Bajwa, SAD’s Bikram Singh Majithia and BJP leaders say a man who filmed drug sales was beaten, ignored by police, and driven to the DC gate.
• Police and panchayat line: Grewal and the Namol board say Jagseer has convictions on liquor and narcotics, was already on a suicide-threat DDR, and was put up to the act.
• AAP campaign line: Akashnoor Singh Gadri, who ran AAP Punjab’s 2022 digital campaign, called him a known peddler, locally a “blackiya,” and said the village night-watch group, not the sarpanch’s goons, had clashed with him.

Those three versions can sit in one police station file. A conviction under the NDPS Act does not cancel an assault FIR against a sarpanch. It does mean the person now held up in Delhi as a pure complainant is not a blank slate in Cheema.

Gulzar Singh Died After He Questioned Cheema

On September 6, farm labourer Gulzar Singh stood up at a public programme in Toor Banjara, in Finance Minister Harpal Singh Cheema’s Dirba seat, and asked what the government was doing about chitta. His eldest son, 26, a daily wager who makes about Rs 800 a day, spends most of it on drugs. Relatives said the young man had sold Pal Kaur’s gold earrings, the LPG cylinder, utensils, even bathroom buckets, and then the wheat Gulzar had harvested for a landlord.

Family members said Gulzar was then threatened, humiliated, and told to apologise to Baljit Singh, husband of sarpanch Baljinder Kaur. His son Sehbaz Singh, 23, said his father left home about 10:30 a.m. on September 7 and came back around noon having already swallowed Sulphas. He died that night at Dayanand Medical College and Hospital in Ludhiana, after stops at Sangrur, Patiala, and a private Sangrur hospital.

Cheema, who was not named in the FIR, said he had heard the grievance and asked police to act against suppliers. Police arrested five people, sarpanch Baljinder Kaur, her husband Baljit, panchayat members Vicky Singh and Gona Singh, and Sukhdev Singh alias Sukha of the gurdwara committee, under BNS section 108 for abetment of suicide and under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. A four-member SIT is examining the role of police officials as well.

Sehbaz, a second-year BA student at Ranbir Government College in Sangrur, is filling papers for the government job offered as compensation, likely in the deputy commissioner’s office. A relative in the house, Prabhjot, put the local market in one line: getting a dose is as easy as getting salt. A nephew had already died of addiction at 30; another relative died in July.

On September 10, commission chairman Kishor Makwana met the family in Toor Banjara. The constitutional body under Article 338 had already told Punjab’s chief secretary and director general of police to send a detailed report. Opposition parties that week wanted Cheema sacked. He stayed in office. Thirteen days later another man from the same district was on a Patiala ward.

Why the 2022 Drug Promise Still Binds Mann

AAP took Punjab in 2022 on a blunt pledge to end the drug trade, the same pitch Arvind Kejriwal and Mann later wrapped into Yudh Nashean Virudh, the state’s named war on drugs. Congress general secretary Sachin Pilot, who holds the Punjab brief, said on Monday the party had promised to wipe out the menace within three months of forming the government, and that the government now stood “completely exposed.”

The more awkward sentence came from inside the ruling party. On September 1, Assembly Speaker Kultar Singh Sandhwan told a Lok Milni gathering in Kotkapura that most poll promises had been met, then said the chitta guarantee had not.

Standing among mothers and sisters, I must confess that we could not fulfil our guarantee to eliminate chitta

Kultar Singh Sandhwan, Punjab Assembly Speaker, Lok Milni in Kotkapura

Sandhwan added that, unlike earlier regimes, no councillor, MLA, minister or the chief minister was protecting peddlers, and he floated public boards naming people who stand surety for them. Opposition leaders treated the confession as the campaign ad they had been waiting for. It is also the yardstick now being laid against Sangrur, because Mann cannot say the test was never his.

YUDH NASHEAN VIRUDH, MARCH 2025 TO EARLY SEPTEMBER 2026

• Heroin seized: 3,757 kg, plus 964 kg of opium, nearly 45 tonnes of poppy husk, 1,288 kg of ganja and 71 kg of ICE.
• Pills and cash: Around 62 lakh tablets and capsules, and about Rs 22 crore in alleged drug proceeds.
• Arrests: 25,339 people taken in under the campaign window.
• Treatment: Government de-addiction admissions rose from 9,577 in 2024 to 25,290 in 2025, with more than 14,000 more by July 2026.

Those are large enforcement numbers. They have not stopped a father in Dirba or a man at the Sangrur DC gate from treating the village sarpanch, not the task force, as the person who actually decides whether a complaint lives or dies.

Village Boards Hear the Complaint First

In both live cases the first collision was not with Chandigarh. It was with a sarpanch, a panchayat, and the men around them. Gulzar was told to apologise to the sarpanch’s husband after he spoke in front of the finance minister. Jagseer says the Namol sarpanch came to the house with associates after a video. Police in Namol have now put that sarpanch in FIR 125. Police in Dirba put another sarpanch in an abetment and atrocities case. The pattern is local power, not a missing press release from the chief minister’s office.

Opposition leaders have tied a third Sangrur episode to the same thread. Earlier in September, Mohanjeet Singh of Sheron village in Sunam said he was tortured in custody after showing a black flag and shouting slogans at a Mann programme. That case is a custody allegation, not a poisoning, and it sits on a separate police track. Majithia still names the three men in one breath as proof that Sangrur, the chief minister’s home district, punishes people who talk about drugs.

THE 16 DAYS THAT REOPENED THE MANDATE

1. September 6, 2026: Gulzar Singh questions Cheema about chitta at Toor Banjara in Dirba.
2. September 7, 2026: Gulzar swallows Sulphas around noon and dies that night in Ludhiana.
3. September 8, 2026: Police book five villagers, including the sarpanch; BJP asks Mann to quit over that death.
4. September 10, 2026: NCSC chairman Kishor Makwana meets the family and the commission seeks a state report.
5. September 12, 2026: Jagseer posts a self-harm threat; Cheema police log a DDR under BNS section 226.
6. September 20, 2026: Jagseer swallows poison at the Sangrur DC gate; FIR 125 names Sarpanch Sukhbir Singh alias Sukhi and others.
7. September 21, 2026: Bhatia repeats the resignation demand; Grewal reads the nine-FIR record; BJP’s Karun Kaura visits the Patiala bedside.

AAP’s Punjab digital network argues the sequence is a script, addicts and peddlers pushed into public view so national media can run the same clip. The counter is simpler and does not need a conspiracy: if village boards are the real filter, then every complaint that ends in poison will land on Mann, because he sold the filter as already fixed.

Seizures Climb as Complainants Land in Hospital

The state can point to kilograms and admissions. Sangrur can point to two hospital files. They are not the same ledger, and treating them as one is how the government keeps losing the argument in Delhi even when the Anti-Narcotics Task Force is busy.

TWO SANGRUR COMPLAINTS, TWO HOSPITALS

Cheema remains finance minister. Mann remains chief minister. The people named in the two FIRs are sarpanches and panchayat men, the layer that actually meets a complainant at the gurdwara gate or the night-watch round. Seizure totals do not travel down that lane in Toor Banjara, the one with open drains and a two-room unplastered house at the end.

BJP Asks for a CBI Probe With 2027 in View

Bhatia’s Monday demand was not the first resignation call of the month. The party asked Mann to go after Gulzar’s death as well. What changed is the location repeating: same district, same drug complaint, same sarpanch-shaped clash, a second body on a government threshold. BJP MP Tarun Chugh, campaigning in the party’s Nasha Mukt Punjab Abhiyan with Union agriculture minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, folded Jagseer into a four-word attack, chitta, crime, corruption and cash for extortion, and said people who report sales are the ones left unsafe.

Bajwa asked how many such warnings AAP needs in Mann’s home district before the “Drug-Free Punjab” line is retired.

Another man has attempted suicide in Sangrur, the home district of CM @BhagwantMann .

Jagga Singh of Namol allegedly consumed poison outside the DC office after claiming that he was threatened and assaulted for speaking out against drugs. He says he had approached the police,… pic.twitter.com/wv6J4hK1dq

— Partap Singh Bajwa (@Partap_Sbajwa) September 20, 2026

Pilot said he sensed “a stir for change” with the Assembly election due in 2027. That is the political use of a Patiala bedside, and it will continue. It does not settle the Namol facts. Grewal has a conviction list. Manpreet Kaur has an FIR. Jagseer has not yet given a full statement because doctors have not cleared it.

BJP leader Karun Kaura went to Rajindra Hospital on Monday to see the man whose case Delhi is already using as a resignation notice. The investigation Grewal promised will have to hold both of the files he opened, the sarpanch’s and Jagseer’s, or Sangrur will send a third one.