Punjab Students Union

What it is: The Punjab Students Union (PSU) is the main Left student organisation of Punjab. A Panjab University thesis traces it to a meeting on 15 March 1963 at the Desh Bhagat Yadgari Hall in Jalandhar, where Avtar Singh Malhotra of the CPI met Darshan Baghi and other young men to form a students' body. A meeting at Panjab University, Chandigarh, then formed the Chandigarh Students Union, later renamed the Punjab Students Union. After the CPI split in 1964 its Marxist members joined the CPI(M). The Times of India calls the union "1972-born", counting from the Moga agitation. The two accounts can both stand: the thesis says Harbhajan Sohi's group reorganised the PSU in 1971.

Leaders named in the sources: Darshan Baghi in the 1960s, who was arrested under MISA after the December 1968 strike and held for a year. In 1972 Iqbal Khan was president and Pirthipal Singh Randhawa general secretary. In 2022 the Times of India named Ranbir Singh Randhawa as state president of the PSU itself.

Key moments

• 1967 and 1968: the PSU leadership broke with the CPI(M) and joined the Naxalites. On 15 March 1968 Baba Bujha Singh proposed dissolving the union so that its leaders could join the party's armed struggle, and the leadership was unwilling.
• 12 December 1968: a statewide college strike followed police beatings of students at Amritsar. Jagtar Singh of Sudhar College, Ludhiana, was shot dead, the first PSU martyr. Darshan Baghi was arrested, and the leaders then agreed to disband the union and went underground. Of the 83 dead of the Naxalite movement, 19 were from the PSU.
• 1971: Sohi's group reorganised the PSU around work through mass organisations.
• 5 October 1972: police fired on a PSU and All India Students Federation march outside the Regal Cinema, Moga, over the black marketing of tickets. Two students, Harjit Singh and Swarn Singh of Charrik, and two passers-by, Gurdev Singh and Kewal Krishan, were killed. This began what is known as the Moga agitation.
• 1974: the Moga Sangram rally challenged Indira Gandhi's government. The Times of India calls it the biggest event in the history of Punjab's student movement. The PSU refused to back Jayaprakash Narayan's movement.
• 17 July 1979: Randhawa was murdered at Ludhiana, according to the thesis; one other account says 18 July.

Where it stands: The Times of India says the union was pushed onto the back foot in the years of "extremism" in Punjab, came back into view in the 2019 protests against the citizenship law and joined the farm-law protests of 2020 and 2021. It has split three times, into the PSU, the PSU (Shaheed Randhawa) and the PSU Lalkar. The sources we opened give no count of members.