Chief Minister Beant Singh

Beant Singh was a Congress politician and Chief Minister of Punjab from 25 February 1992 until he was killed on 31 August 1995. His years in office were the last and fiercest phase of the state's fight against the Kharku movement. He is a different man from Beant Singh, the bodyguard who shot Indira Gandhi in 1984.

The Tribune says he was born on 19 February 1922 in Bilaspur village near Doraha, Ludhiana, into an agricultural family, and graduated from Government College, Lahore. His father and two brothers served in the army; he briefly joined, then left for politics. He won a Vidhan Sabha seat as an independent in 1969, joined the Congress in 1970, was re-elected from Payal in 1972, 1977 and 1980, and won Jalandhar Cantonment in 1992.

His government: He became Chief Minister after the February 1992 election, held under a boycott call from the Kharku groups, with most Akali leaders staying out. Turnout was 21.6 percent, against 67.6 percent in 1985, and Congress won 87 of 115 seats (The Tribune). ThePrint reports that the state was then averaging about 25 deaths a day and that, working with Punjab Police chief K.P.S. Gill, he took a firm, no-nonsense approach that quickly curbed the Kharku movement. The Tribune records that he backed the police through criticism from rights activists and the media; ThePrint adds that critics say innocent young Punjabis died in crossfire.

The rights record in those years: Human Rights Watch reports that security forces arbitrarily detained, tortured, killed and "disappeared" Sikhs, staged encounters and secretly cremated bodies. It says that in the early 1990s Gill expanded a system of rewards and incentives for police "to capture and kill militants", in its words. Human Rights Watch and Ensaaf say Jaswant Singh Khalra used cremation records to expose more than 6,000 secret cremations by the police in one of Punjab's then 13 districts; his press note of 16 January 1995, as Reduced to Ashes prints it, counted about 2,000, 700 and 400 at three cremation grounds. He was abducted in September 1995 and killed in October 1995. The CBI's final report of 9 December 1996 listed 2,097 illegal cremations at three Amritsar crematoria, and the Supreme Court called it a flagrant violation of human rights on a mass scale. Human Rights Watch does not name Beant Singh.

Key moments

• 25 February 1992: sworn in as Chief Minister.
• 1994 and 1995: Khalra documents the cremations.
• 31 August 1995: at about 5:12 pm, constable Dilawar Singh of the Babbar Khalsa International detonated himself as the Chief Minister left the Punjab and Haryana Civil Secretariat in Chandigarh. Beant Singh and 16 others, including three NSG commandos, were killed (The Tribune, 2019); another Tribune account counts 17 others.
• 27 July 2007: a special CBI court convicts Balwant Singh Rajoana, the back-up bomber, and others (Supreme Court, 2023). On 31 July it sentences Rajoana and Jagtar Singh Hawara to death (The Hindu, 31 July 2007). In September 2019 The Tribune reported that the Home Ministry had approved commuting Rajoana's sentence to life; the Supreme Court recorded on 3 May 2023 that the Ministry had deferred the decision, and declined to commute the sentence itself.

Two memories: Rajoana justified the killing by blaming the Chief Minister for extra-judicial killings of Sikh youth and citing anger over Operation Blue Star and the 1984 killings of Sikhs (The Tribune). In June 2012 the Sikh clergy at Sri Akal Takht Sahib gave Rajoana the title Zinda Shaheed (The Tribune). Amarinder Singh, by contrast, called him the late Beant Singh, who gave his life for peace in the state (The Tribune). His supporters credit him with ending the violence; his critics remember the disappearances and cremations of those same years.