Were the Kharkus “terrorists”? The state’s label and the Sikh view

The claim: The Indian state and much of the Indian press call the armed Sikh groups of 1984 to 1995 “terrorists”. In a letter refusing Amnesty International access, the Indian Embassy wrote of “violence by terrorists who have been indiscriminate in their butchery of innocents”, and in a 2002 filing Punjab said it must ensure “terrorists do not become role models for the impressionable youth” (both quoted by Human Rights Watch). Ajai Sahni, writing in The Tribune in 2019, puts the deaths of 1981 to 1995 at 21,532, among them 11,696 civilians “almost all killed by the Khalistanis, but including some who lost their lives in ‘crossfire’”, 1,746 security personnel and 8,090 “categorised as terrorists”, and cites 38 bus passengers killed in July 1987 (his figures are given without citation). Human Rights Watch itself says armed groups committed “numerous human rights abuses”, including killing Hindu and Sikh civilians and political leaders and setting off indiscriminate bombs.

The sourced facts:

• What the label covered. The “Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act”, TADA, let a confession made to a senior police officer be used in court and lapsed in 1995 (Human Rights Watch). Punjab supplied 15,269 of the 75,000 or more people held under it; nationally the conviction rate was about 1.5 per cent of cases brought to trial, and The Tribune wrote in 2000 that the law “perverted the concept of rule of law into rule by law”.
• Who was counted as a “militant”. Ensaaf and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group found that the Tribune’s reports of encounters mostly involved “a lone killing of an alleged ‘militant’ or a ‘civilian’” and few security officials killed, which they link to faked encounters, and that people who “had no known connection to the militancy” were also disappeared and extrajudicially executed. In 2011 the Supreme Court said Punjab Police were “eliminating the young persons under the pretext of being militants” (ThePrint).
• The slogan case. In 1995 the Supreme Court overturned the sedition convictions of two men who had shouted slogans including “Khalistan Zindabad” on 31 October 1984, holding that no offence of sedition or of promoting enmity was made out (a case brief by The Legal Lock).
• Civilians and the groups. Official estimates, which Human Rights Watch calls disputed, give 11,690 civilians, 1,714 police and 7,946 “militants” killed. The 1984 Sikh Archive records that police blamed the Khalistan Commando Force for the July 1987 bus killings at Lalru (38 dead) and near Fatehabad (32), and that its leader, General Labh Singh, disowned them as “the handy work of the same state agencies”.
• How a scholar puts it. Birinder Pal Singh of Punjabi University notes in a 2004 conference draft that the Indian government labelled the movement “separatist”, “disintegrationist”, “fundamentalist” and “terrorist”, while the Akali Dal and later the armed groups considered themselves “fighting for a just cause”.

The Panthic answer: Sikh institutions do not accept the label. In 2012 Sri Akal Takht Sahib declared Dilawar Singh a “Qaumi Shaheed” and Balwant Singh Rajoana a “Jinda Shaheed” (ThePrint). The SGPC has kept Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale’s portrait in the Central Sikh Museum since 2007. When it added Dilawar Singh’s in June 2022, its president, Harjinder Singh Dhami, said the portraits were installed “keeping in view their services” and that Dilawar Singh “put an end to the atrocities and gross human right violations committed against the Sikhs”; an unnamed former SGPC official told ThePrint that murder is “condemnable” but the reasons behind such acts “are worth pondering over” (ThePrint; The Tribune). The Sarbat Khalsa of 26 January 1986 set up a five-member Panthic Committee “to lead the struggle” and said named Singhs who attained martyrdom would be “recognised as martyrs of Khalistan” (Sikh Siyasat News). Dhami said in July 2026 that police “tortured and killed thousands of innocent youth and burned their bodies by saying they were unclaimed”, which is the Panthic case in one sentence: the label was used to cover the killing of people whose guilt was never tried (ThePrint).