Delhi Police officers manning the Singhu and Tikri borders on January 26, when a farmers’ tractor rally got out of hand, may have felt they had gone back in time, with mounted Nihang Sikhs armed with spears and swords leading the charge to disperse the police, paving the way for tractors to remove the barricades en-route to Red Fort.
A Nihang Sikh aboard a horse inside Red Fort on Tuesday. (Sanjeev Verma/HT PHOTO)
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Delhi Police has sent 30 notices to farmer leaders under various sections of IPC and CrPC, while 66 persons have been arrested. The police have also named the registration numbers of vehicles in the 25-odd FIRs filed by the concerned district police units.
Farm union leaders are now trying to blame the violence on a militant section within or on the Modi government – both without evidence, but top police officials directly involved in the matter are clear that the Republic Day raid was pre-meditated and planned in advance. As many as 271 police personnel were seriously injured on these two borders, with one 9 mm pistol and a gas gun snatched by the agitators from the West Delhi police.
According to eye-witness accounts from senior police officers, the barricade-breaking charge was led by squads of Nihang Sikhs from both the borders and carried out with tractors with either no or hidden number plates using specialised hooks to remove jersey barriers from the road. With Delhi Police under firm orders not to open fire, the armed Nihang Sikhs provided the cover for the tractors to roll towards Red Fort.
“We will be sending notices to all the farmer leaders on Singhu and Tikri borders for the Republic Day violence as all the undertakings agreed for the tractor rally were violated,” said a senior police official. As HT has reported, these include starting the rallies well before the agreed-upon time; deviating from the routes; and indulging in vandalism.
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Although para-military forces have been deployed on the two borders to maintain law and order, the Delhi Police’s main focus now is to ensure official engagements such as the beating the Retreat ceremony on Friday (also the first day of Parliament’s winter session) pass without trouble. Strict action is expected to follow after Republic Day ceremonies are complete for no less than 71 government vehicles were badly damaged.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
