Hindu Suraksha Samiti

The Hindu Suraksha Samiti was the name of the protection squads that young Hindu men formed in Punjab in the early 1980s, as Hindu and Sikh suspicion of each other grew. Gurmit Singh, the Sikh lawyer and historian whose volumes of narrative and documents are the main source here, writes that groups of both communities appeared. In his account the Sikhs had the All India Sikh Students Federation, and the Hindu young men formed their own protection squads, which he calls "all too ready to take up the cudgels" for their community. The sources found give no statement from the Samiti itself.

Key moments

• 26 April 1983: Gurmit Singh says the Samiti took out a procession at Patiala whose participants waved tridents, and that tension had been high since that day.
• 2 and 3 May 1983: communal clashes broke out at Patiala. Gurmit Singh writes that they began when a Hindu shopkeeper cut the wires of loudspeakers broadcasting Gurbani on the eve of Guru Tegh Bahadur's martyrdom day, that Sikh youths then set a Hindu's shop on fire, and that mobs of both communities looted and burned about two dozen shops. He says the Samiti organised the Hindu mobs. A curfew was imposed.
• 3 May 1983: the Samiti called a strike across Punjab. Gurmit Singh says fresh violence broke out that day and the police fired in the air to disperse the mobs.
• 14 February 1984: the Home Minister told Parliament on 28 February that the call for a bandh in Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh on 14 February was given by the Hindu Suraksha Samiti, "supported by certain other organisations". His statement says clashes and violence followed, including vandalism by a mob at Amritsar railway station, and that 11 lives were lost and 76 people injured, 18 of them policemen, in the clashes of that day.
• 17 April 1984: Gurmit Singh writes that the president of the Samiti in a Punjab town, Inderpal Gupta, was murdered along with his three bodyguards by "Sikh terrorists", in his words. He adds that rivalry between the groups of the two communities was growing.

Where it stands: The sources found say nothing of the Samiti after April 1984, and they name no leader other than the town president killed that month.