Darshan Singh Baghi

Darshan Singh Baghi, who later called himself Darshan Khaira, was the founding general secretary of the Punjab Students Union (PSU), the Left student organisation that became a main recruiting ground of the Punjab Left in the 1960s. Babushahi reported on 30 August 2024 that he had died in Edmonton, Canada, at the age of 88.

• March 1963: according to his own book, the CPI leader Avtar Singh Malhotra conceived the idea of a Left student organisation and raised it at a first meeting in Jalandhar, saying that educated youths were not getting associated with the country's Left movement (The Tribune, January 2019).
• About four years of activity: in that time the PSU gained influence in the colleges, clashed with the police and won the government's acceptance of student council elections.
• September 1968: he was arrested under the Preventive Detention Act, and released about a year later.
• After his release: he says no one from the organisation contacted him for ten days, and that when he visited students at Guru Nanak Engineering College, Ludhiana, their rooms were locked. He concluded that the union had taken a "Left sectarian turn." Most of his colleagues went underground with the Naxalites, and he says a group led by Harbhajan Sohi did not meet him despite repeated attempts.
• He then left for Canada "under mysterious circumstances," avoided Left circles there, dropped the surname Baghi and became Darshan Khaira. Babushahi says he settled in Edmonton in the 1970s.
• By January 2019: his book History of Punjab Student Union (PSU), written in the third person, had appeared and broken about fifty years of silence. In it he blames the sectarian politics of the radical Left for abandoning the union at its peak (The Tribune). Babushahi calls it a credible source on the radical student movement in Punjab.

The two names, Baghi and Khaira, are one man in the Tribune and Babushahi reports. He is remembered as the founder-secretary of the Punjab Students Union and as a witness who explained, late in life, why its leadership went over to the Naxalites.