Sukhdev Singh Babbar killed; Talwinder Singh Parmar killed

Who: Sukhdev Singh Babbar, Jathedar of the Babbar Khalsa, and Talwinder Singh Parmar, chairman of the Babbar Khalsa Sikh Society of Canada. The 1984 Tribute website, which calls Babbar a Shaheed, says he was born on 9 August 1955 at Dassuwal village near Amritsar (also written Dasuwal), took amrit in 1977 at an Akhand Kirtani Jatha smagam, and was chosen Jathedar when the Babbar Khalsa was announced as a separate body in 1981. Parmar, according to the Supreme Court of British Columbia, came to Canada on 31 May 1970 and was considered a priest in the practice of the Sikh religion.

What: Babbar died on 9 August 1992. Police announced that he was killed in an encounter near Ludhiana. The 1984 Tribute page, which gives the Sikh account and treats the police version as a claim, says he had been arrested at his Patiala house days earlier and tortured, that his body was taken to Ludhiana Civil Hospital and cremated quickly to prevent a large funeral, and that a curfew with shoot-to-kill orders followed on 20 August to stop Akhand Path bhogs.

Parmar was killed in India on 14 October 1992, the date in the court's judgment; other accounts say 15 October. Wikipedia's article on the Air India case says a Punjab Police report described a gunfight, while the magazine Tehelka alleged that he was executed after interrogation.

Where: Punjab. The Babbar Khalsa Society that Parmar led was incorporated in British Columbia on 1 November 1984, its stated purposes including a struggle for a Sikh homeland.

Why it mattered: Within about ten weeks the Babbar Khalsa lost its Jathedar and its Canadian chairman. Parmar's name is also tied to the bombing of Air India Flight 182. In the 2005 Air India trial the indictment accused Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri of conspiring with Parmar and others to murder the passengers and crew of Air India Flight 182, which carried 329 people, and of a flight leaving Narita Airport, where a bomb killed two baggage handlers. The judge called Parmar an un-indicted co-conspirator. Malik and Bagri were found not guilty on 16 March 2005. Parmar was never indicted, so what the Crown alleged about him was never tested against him in court.

His case holds two accounts that this timeline keeps side by side: the Sikh account of leaders killed by the state in 1992, and the Canadian account of an attack that killed hundreds of passengers and crew.