A young man shot dead in a busy market. A family still waiting for answers. On Monday, October 19, 2026, Congress leader and general secretary Sachin Pilot travelled to Batala, Gurdaspur to meet the family of the late Kanav Mahajan, killed in October 2025 — and turned a condolence visit into a sharp demand for accountability from Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann's government.

A Killing in Broad Daylight — and the Questions That Remain

Pilot's message was direct: 'The killing of a young man in a busy market is a grave failure of public safety.' Registering FIRs and ordering inquiries, he argued, is not justice — it is paperwork. The harder question, which he posed publicly, is who supplies the weapons and who in the system enables that supply chain to keep running.

The killing of Kanav Mahajan in a public marketplace a year ago has remained a flashpoint for his family and for Opposition politicians who argue that such incidents reveal a deeper rot — not just criminal boldness, but institutional failure. Pilot named it plainly: 'Police and intelligence failure, corruption and collusion must be thoroughly investigated.'

Punjab's Border Vulnerability and the Illegal Arms Question

Punjab shares a sensitive frontier with Pakistan, a geography that has long made it a corridor for cross-border arms and narcotics trafficking. Opposition parties, Congress among them, have consistently pressed the Aam Aadmi Party government — which swept to power in the 2022 assembly elections on an explicit anti-corruption, law-and-order mandate — on whether it has delivered on those promises. Pilot's visit and his public questions about weapons reaching criminals fit squarely into that pattern of accountability.

His post tagged a string of senior Congress leaders active in Punjab, including Partap Singh Bajwa, Charanjit Singh Channi, Raja Warring, and Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa — signalling a coordinated party stance rather than a lone voice. The collective tagging underlines that Congress intends to keep this issue alive in the public domain.

Pilot's Warning to Mann: No Free Run on Law and Order

Pilot's closing line carried the sharpest edge: 'CM Bhagwant Mann and AAP cannot be allowed a free run while Punjab's safety remains under threat.' It is a formulation designed to frame the state's law-and-order record as an electoral and moral liability — and to place Congress as the primary opposition holding the government to account.

The demand for identifying the 'bigger fish' behind illegal weapons networks goes beyond the Mahajan case. It is a call for the kind of investigation — one that follows the chain of supply and corruption upward — that is rarely completed quickly and even more rarely completed without political resistance.

With Punjab's security record back in the spotlight, the pressure is now on official agencies to show that the investigation into Kanav Mahajan's killing has moved beyond its first steps — and that the networks enabling such violence are genuinely under scrutiny.