Sardar Baldev Singh, Defence Minister

Sardar Baldev Singh was an industrialist and Akali leader who sat for the Sikhs in the Punjab ministry of 1942 and the interim government of 1946, and became India's first Defence Minister. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says he was born on 11 July 1902 at Dumna in Ropar district, the son of Inder Singh, a steel magnate at Jamshedpur. He studied at Ambala and Khalsa College, Amritsar, and joined his father's firm. He is not Bhai Baldev Singh Wadala.

Key moments

• 1937: he won a Punjab assembly seat for the Panthic (Akali) Party.
• 1942: he was one of four Sikhs chosen to represent the community before the Cripps Mission. Under the Sikandar-Baldev Pact, an understanding between the Premier, Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, and the Akalis, he was sworn in as Development Minister on 26 June 1942. A footnote in the published Viceroy's papers says he undertook to support the Unionist Government in the interest of communal unity and the defence of the country.
• 1946: he was a member of the Sikh delegation to the Cabinet Mission. The Encyclopaedia says he favoured a united India with safeguards for minorities but, if partition came, wanted the Rawalpindi and Multan divisions cut off from the Punjab. The Sikhs rejected the plan at Amritsar on 9 and 10 June and set up the Panthic Pratinidhi Board, of which he was a member. Gurmit Singh writes that the Board directed him not to join the interim government when the Viceroy invited him after 16 June, and that he asked Prime Minister Attlee to give the Sikhs the same provision the plan gave Hindus and Muslims. The Board withdrew its boycott on 14 August, and on 2 September 1946 he joined Nehru's Cabinet as the Sikhs' nominee, taking the defence portfolio.
• 1947: as Defence Minister he handled the division of the armed forces with Pakistan. In his report of 8 May 1947 Mountbatten wrote that, a day after the Maharaja of Patiala, Baldev Singh had appealed to him to draw the partition line by Sikh landed property, sacred buildings and interests.
• 17 March 1948: Gurmit Singh writes that the Akali Dal's Working Committee met at his residence in Delhi and advised the Panthic Akali Party's members to join the Congress assembly parties. After Sardar Patel wrote on 30 December 1948 that his attitude was the same as Master Tara Singh's, he replied, in a letter Gurmit Singh prints, that he had been "pushed into politics against my wish".
• 1952 to 1957: he was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1952 on Congress nomination, without opposition from the Akalis, and re-elected in 1957, but Nehru did not include him in the Cabinet.
• 29 June 1961: he died in Delhi after a long illness and was cremated with full military honours in his native village.

He is remembered as the Sikh who held the defence portfolio at Independence, and, in the Encyclopaedia's words, as one who failed to win the guarantees the Congress had promised the Sikhs.