A man who stood up to Punjab's drug syndicates is dead — and Union Home Minister Amit Shah travelled to Tur Banzara village in Sangrur district on Tuesday, October 20, 2026 to sit with the family he left behind. Shah alleged that anti-drug activist Gulzar Singh was driven to suicide by sustained pressure from narcotics networks, and turned the visit into a sharp political indictment of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Punjab.

Gulzar Singh's story and the Sangrur visit

In his post, Shah described Gulzar Singh as a man who fought the drug trade and paid for it with his life. 'Nashe ke karobaar ke khilaf sangharsh karne wale' [one who fought against the narcotics trade], Shah wrote, Singh was subjected to so much pressure that he died by suicide. After meeting the family in Tur Banzara, Shah wrote: 'What this family has lost cannot be compensated.' The four photographs accompanying the post showed the Home Minister seated with grieving relatives.

Sangrur is a district long synonymous with Punjab's drug crisis. It sits in the heartland of a state where heroin — locally called chitta — has carved through a generation of young men, leaving mothers, sisters, and daughters with wounds Shah described as ones that 'can never heal.'

The 'chitta' crisis and Shah's charge against AAP

Shah was unsparing about the ruling party. 'The AAP government has shut its eyes to the dark trade of chitta,' he wrote, using the Punjabi street term for heroin. The charge is not new — BJP leaders have levelled allegations of lax narcotics enforcement against successive non-BJP state governments since at least 2017 — but the context of a sitting activist's death sharpens the accusation considerably.

The AAP swept to power in Punjab in 2022 partly on the promise of cleaning up the state's drug problem. That promise, Shah argued, has gone undelivered. The contrast between that campaign pledge and the alleged fate of a grassroots anti-drug fighter gives the critique its edge.

BJP's countdown pledge and the 2027 Punjab election

Shah closed with an explicit electoral warning: 'The moment our government is formed in the state, the countdown for these chitta traders will begin, and Punjab will be completely free from this dark trade.' The Punjab assembly elections are due in 2027, and the drug issue has already emerged as a defining fault line.

The visit is consistent with the BJP's strategy of using field outreach — meeting affected families in their villages rather than holding press conferences — to anchor its Punjab narrative on ground-level human cost. The Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyan, launched by the central government in 2020, provides the policy scaffold; visits like Tuesday's supply the emotional register.

For Punjab's families still counting their losses, the question is no longer whether politicians will talk about the drug crisis. It is whether any of them will end it.