The Sikh Face BJP Protected For a Month Went All-In on Khalra, Khalistan Rhetoric — Then Got Dropped Anyway
Ravneet Bittu Resigns: Bittu’s exit from the Union Cabinet followed a month of unusually aggressive Khalra and Khalistan-linked rhetoric — the same month BJP was reportedly protecting him as its Sikh face in Punjab. North Desk examines the timeline.
Arvind Chhabra
Chandigarh, July 24
Union Minister Ravneet Singh Bittu’s resignation, accepted by President Droupadi Murmu on July 24, was on paper a formality: his Rajya Sabha term from Rajasthan lapsed on June 21, he wasn’t renominated, and Article 75(2) doesn’t allow a minister to sit in the Council without a seat in either House. It’s the exact same technicality that removed Minister of State George Kurian within two days of his own RS term ending on the same date.
Bittu wasn’t removed within two days. He was allowed to sit as a minister without a seat for a full month — a gap wide enough that North Desk wondered whether the PM intended to move against him at all, given his standing as BJP’s most visible Jat Sikh face in Punjab ahead of the 2027 Assembly polls.
How Bittu responded
What Bittu did with that month is the more interesting part.
Rather than keep a low profile through a period when his position was constitutionally uncertain, he spent it doubling down on exactly the identity terrain that was supposedly buying him the protection. When “Satluj” — the Diljit Dosanjh film built around human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra — was pulled from ZEE5 amid accusations that Bittu had engineered its removal, he broke his silence with an on-the-record defence of his grandfather Beant Singh’s legacy, arguing the film gave only a “one-sided narrative” of Punjab’s militancy years that ignored violence by militant groups.
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He invoked Khalra directly, questioning where Dosanjh’s activism had been “when Jaswant Singh Khalra was fighting for human rights in Punjab.” He called Dosanjh a “bahurupiya” cashing in on Punjab’s pain for commercial gain.
That wasn’t a one-off. It sat alongside his long-running pattern of pushing Khalistan-adjacent accusations at Punjabi cultural figures — from an earlier demand that police book Dosanjh, singer Jazzy Bains, and Akal Takht Jathedar Giani Harpreet Singh for “openly supporting” Khalistan sympathiser Gurpatwant Singh Pannu, to his running feud with Rahul Gandhi over remarks on Sikhs that drew an FIR against him in Karnataka.
In other words: the minister BJP was reportedly holding onto because of his value as a Sikh-community voice spent his final weeks in office campaigning harder than ever for precisely that role. It didn’t save him.
Ravneet Bittu Resigns But Satluj not behind it
None of this means the Satluj row caused the resignation — the constitutional clock had been running since June 21, independent of anything Bittu said about Khalra or Dosanjh. But the juxtaposition raises the question: was Bittu’s Sikh-face positioning ever really worth protecting, or was the delay just optics that expired on its own timetable regardless of how loudly he auditioned for the part? With Punjab heading into a charged 2027 election cycle, how BJP fills — or doesn’t fill — the vacancy he leaves may be the more telling answer.
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He got
What he deserves,
soon will be out of politics too.
An individual like him should be kept away from populace.