Chandigarh, Apr 24 (PTI) Radical preacher Amritpal Singh should have been arrested a month back, but it is good that he is behind bars, former Punjab chief minister and BJP leader Amarinder Singh said on Monday.

The Punjab Police arrested Amritpal Singh in Rode village in Moga district early Sunday, ending an over a month-long manhunt against the preacher who styled himself after Khalistani militant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.

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"I want to know why he was caught after so long. He should have been caught 30 days earlier," the BJP leader said while interacting with reporters in Jalandhar.

He was in the city in view of the May 10 Jalandhar Lok Sabha bypoll, necessitated following the death of Congress MP Santokh Chaudhary.

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The former chief minister said anybody who breaks the law of this land who does things like what he did in Ajnala or has links with Pakistan, he should have been put behind bars the first day itself.

Whether he surrendered or was arrested, it is good that he is now behind bars, Amarinder Singh said to a question.

He also took a dig at Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann over his accusation that the previous Congress government in the state had provided a "comfortable stay" to UP gangster-politician Mukhtar Ansari in the Rupnagar jail.

"The CM should understand first how governments work," said Amarinder Singh, who switched to the BJP from the Congress ahead of the 2022 assembly polls.

Amarinder Singh said Mann has just spent nine months in office while he had been at the helm for over nine years, suggesting that he has more experience than Mann in running a government.

"Whenever any police investigation takes place, somebody who is in Tihar or any other jail, the investigating officer has every right to call for that man to come for investigation if he has committed any crime in Punjab and under the system, then he is brought on transit remand," he said.

"If Ansari was sitting there (Rupnagar jail) for two years, an investigation is going on and once that is done, they will decide. This is a system which works. This system is not a new thing. I think Mr Mann should understand this and first he should understand (the issue), then he should speak," the BJP leader said.

Mann had slammed the previous Congress government for providing a comfortable stay to Ansari in the Rupnagar jail and had said he was seeking advice on recovering Rs 55 lakh legal fee from the then ministers for hiring advocates to keep Ansari in the state.

Ansari remained in Rupnagar jail from January 2019 till April 2021 in an extortion case in Mohali.

The Uttar Pradesh Police had approached the Supreme Court to get the custody of Ansari, who remained in a jail in Rupnagar.

Awarding his custody to UP Police, the top court had said it was being denied to them on trivial grounds under the guise of medical issues.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)