Supreme Court lawyer Pranshant Bhushan was attacked in his office on Wednesday by three young men. Mr Bhushan was allegedly attacked because of his recent comments on Kashmir. The attack is described as a barbaric act. Having met Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga, one of the three attackers, I would not describe him as a person capable of a ‘barbaric’ attack. To me he was just another young man, perhaps slightly lost in life, perhaps  with too much time on his hands.

“I can pay you for all the work you have done for me, if you give me your bank details,” I suggested. But after four days of taking me around Delhi and translating my interviews , Tajinder refused the offer. “I do this, because I am driven by my beliefs. Not because I need the money,” he answered.

This was in March, while I was in Delhi to interview widows of the 1984 Sikh riots. Through a contact in the city I was introduced to Tajinder (this is how he writes his name, though some media reports refer to him as Tejender).

I remember liking the fact that he chose beliefs over a cheque. Little did I know then, that Tajinder Pal Bagga’s beliefs were strong enough for him to use them to justify violence.

Tajinder was a pleasant and in fact, moderate character.  When faced with the usual tricks of Delhi rickshaw drivers refusing to use the meter, I was the one who lost my temper and started yelling, and Tajinder the one trying to calm the situation.

After Wednesday’s attack he sent out a tweet that read: ‘He tries to break my nation, I tried to break his head’.  And this was written by the same person who didn’t want me to yell at rickshaw drivers? What happened to him in the months after I left Delhi?

Looking back

We spent four days listening to heartbreaking stories of people who’d directly suffered from the backlash against the Sikkh community after the assassination of Indira Gandhi:  from mothers who had lost their children, women who had lost their husbands, and children who had lost their fathers – all to communal violence.  Tajinder acting as translator, was visibly affected by these stories.  For him,  a Sikh living in Delhi, such stories would have hit close to home .

Now I wonder, was this one of the (many) moments that fueled his anger?

And with the clear vision of hindsight, I can suddenly remember things that seemed odd then, but add up to something much more sinister now: he had money, but didn’t seem to work, he had time enough to spend most of the day helping me out. The only time he abandoned his duties with me was to watch the Indian team playing during the cricket World Cup. 

Now I have to wonder if he didn’t need money because he was being bankrolled as a thug for hire by an extremist organization.  Was he rooting for the Indian team just out of a normal modicum of national pride, or was it another expression of a bizarre nationalism?

Family
He told me that he and his mother ran a clothes shop but she didn’t need his help, he said. He even took me to the shop to meet her. On another occasion he took me to meet his uncle whose family was kind enough to cook non-spicy food for the Dutch guest.  Did his family know that he was involved with an extremist group?  They seemed so kind, so normal – surely they weren’t the kind of family who’d want their son beating up people for having an opposing political view?

Eye opener

It was not until Tajinder added me on Facebook, a few days after I came back from my trip that I started to get a glimpse of another side to him.  On his Facebook I saw a picture of him being dragged away by police.

There is also a front-page scan of the Indian Express . It shows Tajinder jumping on the hood of a car. The caption read: ‘Members of the youth wing of the BJP vandalise a car of Kashmir separatist Mirwaiz Umer Farooq’.

I unfriended him on Facebook and never heard from him again, until I opened the website of Zeenews this morning and saw his picture.

In the article, Tajinder is mentioned as the leader of the ‘Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena’ .  On their Facebook page, their self description reads:   “A group of guys ready to take any action to teach anti-nationals and traitors.”

So while certain dots are connecting now, I’m still finding it hard to believe that this friendly guy, who seemed to have so many opportunities available to him, would be swept up in something as tawdry as attacking a prominent lawyer in his own Supreme Court chamber.  That he had to run away from  an act that was not only disgraceful but also pointless and futile.