"Weaponizing Security in a Democracy Is a Constitutional Betrayal": Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa

Chandigarh, April 15, 2026: Former Deputy Chief Minister of Punjab and Member of Parliament from Gurdaspur, Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa, has issued a sharp and unequivocal condemnation of the Punjab government's decision to withdraw the security cover of AAP leader Raghav Chadha. Randhawa described the move as a disturbing misuse of state machinery and a direct affront to the democratic principles that govern the responsible exercise of governmental authority.
Speaking with characteristic directness, Randhawa asserted that in any functioning democracy, the apparatus of personal security must remain insulated from the currents of political rivalry. "Security is not a privilege to be granted as a reward or revoked as a punishment. It is a solemn institutional responsibility, governed by intelligence assessments — not by political convenience or factional score-settling," he said.
Randhawa posed a question that strikes at the heart of the matter: "If there exists no credible threat today, what justified the deployment of such extensive security cover in the first place? And if a genuine threat did exist — as the government previously acknowledged through its own actions — then what has so fundamentally changed that this protection has been stripped away overnight?" He demanded that the Director General of Police, Punjab, place on record the precise intelligence basis on which this consequential decision was made.
Drawing from his own tenure as Home Minister of Punjab, Randhawa emphasized that decisions of this nature were never taken arbitrarily or under political pressure. Every grant or withdrawal of security was rooted in verified Intelligence Bureau inputs and CID threat assessments, processed through established institutional channels. "That is not merely best practice — it is constitutional obligation," he stated firmly.
The senior Congress leader also trained his sights on the broader pattern of the current government's functioning, accusing it of reducing matters of grave public consequence to instruments of political theater. "The taxpayers of Punjab are not funding a government to settle internal scores or choreograph political optics. Every rupee spent or withheld in the name of security must be accounted for — and justified before the public, not before a party high command," Randhawa declared.
He further warned that when elected governments begin treating sensitive security decisions as levers of partisan advantage, they do not merely compromise an individual's safety — they corrode public faith in the very institutions tasked with upholding law and order. "This is not a matter of one man's security. This is a matter of whether this government respects the sanctity of constitutional processes," he added.
Randhawa concluded with an unambiguous demand: the Punjab government must immediately institute a transparent, impartial, and procedure-bound framework for all decisions pertaining to the granting and withdrawal of security cover — one that is governed solely by objective threat assessment and is entirely beyond the reach of political interference.