Baba Kharak Singh

Baba Kharak Singh led the Sikhs' campaign to win back the keys to the Toshakhana, the treasury of Sri Harmandir Sahib, from the British in 1921 and 1922. He was born on 6 June 1868 at Sialkot, now in Pakistan, to a wealthy contractor and industrialist, graduated from Punjab University in 1889 and left his law studies at Allahabad when his father and elder brother died.

He is often called the first president of the SGPC. The record is a sequence. Sundar Singh Majithia was elected first president at the SGPC's first meeting at Sri Akal Takht Sahib on 12 December 1920 and resigned early in 1921 to join the Punjab government. Kharak Singh was then elected president, and again in the July 1921 elections, and led the body through its first great campaign.

Key moments

• 1912 to 1920: he enters Sikh public life in 1912, presides over the Sikh Educational Conference at Tarn Taran in 1915, and in 1920 becomes president of the Central Sikh League, taking Sikhs into Gandhi's non-cooperation movement.
• 7 November 1921: the government seizes the Golden Temple keys. Kharak Singh addresses a protest meeting on 12 November and, in late November, is among the Akali leaders arrested after the Ajnala divan, with Master Sundar Singh Lyallpuri and others. Tara Singh and Amar Singh Jhabal were also held.
• January 1922: on 11 January the government announces the release of all detained Sikhs. On 19 January an official hands him the keys, wrapped in red silk, at a divan at Sri Akal Takht Sahib. (The Encyclopaedia's entry on Kharak Singh himself gives 17 January.) The Tribune reports that Mahatma Gandhi sent him a telegram calling the result the first decisive battle of India's freedom won.
• 1922 to 1927: re-arrested in 1922, he was sentenced to one year for running a kirpan factory and three years for seditious speeches. At Dera Ghazi Khan jail, when told to take off his turban, he protested by refusing to wear his clothes. He was released on 4 June 1927.
• Later years: he opposed the Nehru Committee Report and the Communal Award, and opposed both the Muslim League's demand for Pakistan and the Akali proposal for an independent Punjab. President Rajendra Prasad presented him with the Abhinandan Granth in 1953. He died in Delhi on 6 October 1963, aged 95.

What he is remembered for. Kharak Singh is remembered as the leader who won back the keys, the first major victory of the Akali movement. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who was jailed with him, described him as firm and immovable like a mountain. The Tribune noted in 2018 that his 150th birth anniversary passed unmarked by the government, and quoted the historian Prof Mohinder Singh as doubting that today's Congress and Akali leaders have even heard his name.