Bhai Dilawar Singh Babbar

Bhai Dilawar Singh Babbar was the human bomb who killed Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh at the Civil Secretariat in Chandigarh on 31 August 1995. He died in the blast. Sri Akal Takht Sahib declared him a Qaumi Shaheed in 2012, and the SGPC installed his portrait in the Central Sikh Museum in 2022. Courts sentenced Balwant Singh Rajoana and Jagtar Singh Hawara to death over the killing, and the Congress, Beant Singh's party, has said those convicted should serve their full sentences.

Who he was. ThePrint describes him as a dismissed policeman, and The Tribune as a constable who acted for the Babbar Khalsa International. The Sikh memorial site 1984 Tribute gives his birth as 18 August 1970 at Panjgrain near Kotkapura, says he grew up in Patiala, served as a special police officer and was dismissed on 18 September 1994, and says the plan was discussed with Babbar Khalsa figures in November 1994. These details rest on that site alone.

Key moments

• 31 August 1995: in police uniform and carrying files, according to The Tribune, he walked up to the Chief Minister's car at the Civil Secretariat and set off the explosives. Beant Singh and 16 others died, three of them National Security Guard commandos.
• The back-up: Balwant Singh Rajoana, a constable, was to have been the second bomber. In his 1996 judicial confession he said he had tied the bomb on Dilawar Singh with his own hands. A special CBI court convicted Rajoana on 27 July 2007 (Supreme Court, 2023) and sentenced him to death on 31 July (High Court, 2012; The Hindu, 31 July 2007); The Tribune dates the death sentence 27 July. In October 2010 the High Court reduced the death sentence on Jagtar Singh Hawara, another convict in the case, to life.
• 23 March 2012: with Rajoana's hanging fixed for 31 March, Akal Takht Jathedar Giani Gurbachan Singh declared Dilawar Singh a national martyr, a Qaumi Shaheed, and Rajoana a living martyr. The hanging was later stayed after an SGPC mercy petition.
• 14 June 2022: SGPC president Harjinder Singh Dhami and Giani Jagtar Singh unveiled his portrait at the Central Sikh Museum at the Golden Temple, beside one of Giani Bhagwan Singh.

The honour and the objections. Dhami said Dilawar Singh had put an end to atrocities and gross human rights violations against Sikhs by the government of the day, and Giani Jagtar Singh said the community remembers those who sacrificed for it (ThePrint). An unnamed former SGPC official told ThePrint that murder was condemnable but that the reasons behind such acts needed examining. The Congress, as ThePrint reported in 2019, has said the killers should serve their full sentences.

What he is remembered for. The Akal Takht and the SGPC, which honour him, present him as a Shaheed who gave his life to end what they describe as atrocities against Sikhs by the government of the day. Others, the Congress among them, see the killing of an elected chief minister very differently.