Harkishan Singh Surjit

Harkishan Singh Surjit (spelled Surjeet in most English sources) was a Sikh Communist who led the Communist Party of India (Marxist) as general secretary from 1992 to 2005. He was the best known Sikh of the Indian Left, a man from a Punjab peasant family who opposed the Khalistan demand and helped assemble non-Congress and non-BJP coalitions in 1989, 1996 and 2004.

He was born on 23 March 1916 in a village of Jalandhar district (Wikipedia names Bundala; the Guardian obituary says Rupowal), into a small peasant Jat Sikh family. Moved by the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh, he hoisted the national flag at the Hoshiarpur district court in March 1932, aged 16, and was sent to a reformatory. He joined the Communist Party in the mid-1930s (the CPI(M) says 1934, the Guardian 1936). In 1938 he became secretary of the Punjab State Kisan Sabha and was externed from Punjab. He was arrested in 1940, held in solitary confinement in the Lahore Red Fort, and then kept at the Deoli detention camp until 1944. The CPI(M) counts ten years in jail and eight underground.

Punjab and the Panth. The Guardian obituary by Amarjit Chandan says that by 1944 he was putting forward his own thesis for a Sikh homeland, and that the British Communist leader Rajani Palme Dutt firmly quashed it. He became general secretary of the Punjab CPI in 1952, sat in the Punjab assembly in 1954 and 1967, and in the Rajya Sabha from 1978 to 1984. He led the 1959 struggle of Punjab farmers against the betterment levy. On Khalistan his party's own obituary says he took "a firm stand against Khalistani terrorism", and Wikipedia says he opposed the Sikh separatist campaign. He wrote Happenings in Punjab.

National politics. He was among the core leaders who formed the CPI(M) after the 1964 split and sat on its Polit Bureau from 1964 to 2008. After the 2004 election he helped form the UPA government; Manmohan Singh called him one of its architects (The Tribune). The Guardian says combating communalism, by religion, language, caste or region, was central to his beliefs.

Key moments

• March 1932: hoists the flag at Hoshiarpur court and is detained.
• 1938: secretary of the Punjab State Kisan Sabha.
• 1964: helps found the CPI(M).
• 1992 to 2005: general secretary of the CPI(M).
• 1 August 2008: dies at Metro Heart Institute, Noida, aged 92 by most accounts (the CPI(M) says 93).