Jathedar Avtar Singh Kohli

Jathedar Avtar Singh Kohli was President of the Delhi Akali Dal. He is remembered as the Sikh leader killed in Delhi on 4 November 1978 during the Sikh protest against the convention of the Sant Nirankari Mandal.

Background: According to the Sikh panel's report quoted below, Delhi's Sikhs were demonstrating against the Government's permission to Gurbachan Singh, head of the Sant Nirankari Mandal, to hold his samagam at a public place like the India Gate grounds in the capital, on 4, 5 and 6 November. ThePrint says the Union Government under Morarji Desai let the Nirankaris hold a three-day samagam in Delhi and that the Delhi Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee planned a protest march against the decision.

What happened: Gurmit Singh writes that on 4 November 1978 the Nirankaris took out a procession in Delhi in connection with their annual conference, and the Sikhs held a counter-protest march that ended in violence. In his account Kohli was hit on the head by a police tear-gas shell and killed. Darshan Singh and a 13-year-old boy, Maninder Singh, were also killed, and nine Sikhs were injured. ThePrint says that following clashes between the Sikhs and the police, in which three persons were killed, a curfew was imposed around Gurdwara Bangla Sahib.

The Sikh panel's account: A five-man panel appointed by the SGPC and the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee and headed by Hukam Singh, a former Speaker of the Lok Sabha, said the Delhi Police burst tear-gas shells into police vans where arrested Sikh demonstrators were huddled together and thereby deliberately killed Jathedar Avtar Singh Kohli, which it called "cold-blooded murder". Its report is reproduced in Gurmit Singh's history. These are the panel's words, not the finding of a court, and the sources we opened record no court or commission finding on his death.

He is counted among the Sikhs who died in the protests of 1978 that followed the killing of Sikhs at Amritsar in April of that year.