Dismissed AIG Rajjit Singh Hundal Surrenders After 6 Years: The Man Who Once Cited His Family's Martyrdom

Dismissed AIG Rajjit Singh Hundal surrendered to Patiala police after 6 years on the run. Full case history — the ₹13.8 crore assets probe, the Inderjit Singh drug nexus link, and the martyr-family backstory.

North Desk Correspondent

Chandigarh, September 24

Rajjit Singh Hundal, a Punjab Police officer dismissed from service in April 2019 over his alleged links to a drug-smuggling and extortion racket, surrendered to the Patiala police on Thursday ending nearly six years as a fugitive. Top police sources confirmed the arrest, closing one of the longest-running absconder cases tied to Punjab’s police-drug nexus investigations.

The surrender followed a Supreme Court hearing on September 10 where a bench of Justices M.M. Sundresh and Augustine George Masih recorded a submission from Rajjit Singh Hundal’s counsel stating his client’s willingness to surrender, and directed him to do so. It was, by that account, a court-compelled end to the manhunt rather than a voluntary walk-in — and it came roughly two weeks before he actually appeared before Patiala police, a gap that remains unexplained so far.

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Who is Rajjit Singh Hundal

Rajjit Singh Hundal joined the Punjab Police as an inspector in 1992 and rose through the ranks to Assistant Inspector General (AIG), at one point commanding the 4th Battalion in Mohali and serving as SSP Moga. In 2013 he was awarded the President’s Medal for meritorious service.

That record sat alongside a family history Rajjit Singh Hundal has invoked repeatedly in his pleadings. Rajjit Singh Hundal has been claiming he belonged to “a respectable family of martyrs”: his father, a police officer, was attacked by militants in an assault that killed his mother and sister; his brother-in-law was killed by terrorists while serving in the Army in Jammu and Kashmir and was posthumously awarded the Shaurya Chakra.  

How the case began — the Inderjit Singh trail

Hundal’s troubles trace back to a 2013 Punjab and Haryana High Court proceeding after retired IPS officer Shashi Kant flagged rampant drug addiction and official complicity in the state. The court supervised the matter for over a decade, drawing on inputs from the Narcotics Control Bureau, the Enforcement Directorate, the CBI and state police forces.

Out of that broader inquiry came a specific thread: dismissed Inspector Inderjit Singh, caught by the Special Task Force with drugs in June 2017, was accused of taking ₹17 lakh to turn a drug case’s main accused into an approver instead of prosecuting him — allegedly while Rajjit Singh Hundal, then SSP Moga, was aware of the arrangement. In December 2017, the High Court ordered a Special Investigation Team, comprising senior IPS officers Sidharth Chattopadhyay, Parbodh Kumar and Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh, to examine Hundal’s connection to Inderjit Singh. The SIT’s findings, filed before the court between January and May 2018, formed the basis for a Vigilance Bureau case registered against Hundal on April 20, 2023, under the Prevention of Corruption Act.

The money trail

The Vigilance Bureau’s investigation found bank credits of over ₹13 crore in Hundal’s accounts between 2016 and 2022 — against a stated salary of roughly ₹74.2 lakh over the same period. The order lists a string of large, unexplained deposits, including ₹39.6 lakh in a single January 2022 transaction and several deposits exceeding ₹10 lakh clustered around June 2021.

The SIT’s earlier property chart documented a pattern the investigators flagged as under-valuation: a residential plot in Mohali’s Eco-City-1, recorded on paper at ₹20 lakh, was assessed by the Income Tax Department at an actual value of ₹1.25 crore. An industrial plot bought for ₹55 lakh was valued by the same department at over ₹1.15 crore. Sellers of some properties told investigators the sale-deed figures understated what was actually paid in cash.

Rajjit Singh Hundal has been claiming that it was basically a civil dispute over asset valuation rather than a criminal matter, and that the properties named in one part of the status report had already been declared in his assets filings (a point the court accepted for those two specific properties).

The Punjab government countered that the scale of the transactions, given Hundal’s position as a government employee whose wife was not independently in business, pointed to proceeds from the drug trade the SIT had originally been formed to investigate.  

The politics of the timing

The arrest lands roughly five months ahead of the 2027 Punjab Assembly elections. The ruling AAP government has pointed to the arrest as evidence of its anti-drug enforcement record; opposition parties have separately questioned why it took years to apprehend an officer whose case had been in the public domain since 2019.

Rajjit Singh Hundal now faces two cases — the Vigilance Bureau’s disproportionate-assets case and a separate Special Task Force case alleging extortion and the shielding of drug smugglers. Details of the circumstances of his surrender, and what happens next in both cases, are still emerging.

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