Major General Shabeg Singh dismissed from the Army

Who: Major General Shabeg Singh, who had worked with the Mukti Bahini in 1971 and held the PVSM and AVSM; the Army during the Emergency of Indira Gandhi's government; and the CBI.

What: On 30 April 1976, the day before his retirement on 1 May, Shabeg Singh was dismissed from the Army without a court-martial. Wikipedia, citing Amandeep Sandhu's book Panjab, says that in 1975 Indira Gandhi asked him to suppress the Bihar movement by harsh means and arrest Jayaprakash Narayan, that he answered that the Army should stay out of politics, and that he was then given a post at the area headquarters in Bareilly. In a Telegraph interview in May 1984 he gave his own account: he was never tried, he was removed under a clause that had never been used in the British army, and his services were administratively terminated one day before they would have ended. He linked it to a remark he made during the Emergency that nobody was indispensable in the service of the country, and said the aim was to deny him promotion because he was a Sikh. He lost part of his pension. Two CBI charge sheets were then filed against him in an anti-corruption court at Lucknow. They concerned a vehicle bought in another person's name and a house that the charge put at Rs 9 lakh and that, he said, had cost Rs 1.75 lakh. He was acquitted of all charges on 13 February 1984.

Where: Bareilly, where he was posted, and Lucknow, where the CBI cases were heard.

Why it mattered: The acquittal came less than four months before Operation Blue Star. Shabeg Singh by then was at the Sri Harmandir Sahib complex, where a defence plan attributed to him guarded the camp of Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, and his body was recovered from the Akal Takht basement on 7 June 1984. The Caravan describes him as cashiered from the Army on corruption charges, and says he claimed he was discriminated against as a Sikh. The Army's own reasons are not set out in any published source we found, and the Bihar movement account rests on a single book, so the dispute over why he was dismissed is still open.