Harminder Singh Sandhu

Harminder Singh Sandhu was general secretary of the All India Sikh Students Federation (AISSF) in the early 1980s, in the years of the Dharam Yudh Morcha. Sant Harchand Singh Longowal described him and two others as Sant Bhindranwale's men, and the charge sheet filed after Operation Blue Star named him among the accused. The sources we opened say nothing of his life before 1982 or after the charge sheet.

Key moments

• 6 February 1982: the police raided the Khalsa College hostel at Amritsar. Gurmit Singh writes that students were dragged out and beaten, that the AISSF leader Amarjit Singh was arrested, and that Sandhu, the Federation's general secretary, threatened to kill the children of the Punjab Chief Minister, Darbara Singh, if Bhindranwale was touched. Reduced to Ashes, the 2003 report on disappearances in Punjab, also calls him the Sikh Students Federation's general secretary.
• June 1984: in an interview with Kuldip Nayar, published in Sunday on 31 March 1985 and reprinted by Gurmit Singh, Longowal recalled that Sandhu and two other men of Bhindranwale's had been sitting with the Akali volunteers in Teja Singh Samundri Hall until the evening, before the Army arrested the volunteers on 6 June. He said that if they had wanted to harm the volunteers they could have done it at any time, and called the story that they would a rumour spread by the RAW.
• After Blue Star: the charge sheet against the Sikh detainees later held at Jodhpur, which Gurmit Singh reprints in his third volume, names him among the accused. It alleges that Bhindranwale, Bhai Amrik Singh, Baba Thara Singh, Harminder Singh Sandhu, Kuldip Singh Kohla and Major General Shahbeg Singh, with others, fortified the Golden Temple complex with the aim of setting up an independent state, Khalistan. The charges were filed under section 121 of the Indian Penal Code, which covers waging war against the Government of India, and under the Arms Act. A report in the same volume gives 15 January 1985 as the date the first charges were brought.

An allegation in a charge sheet is not a finding, and the sources we opened record no verdict in the case.

Remembered for: being the Federation's general secretary at the time of the Khalsa College hostel raid, and a name that the Jodhpur charge sheet put among the accused.