Major General Narinder Singh

Major General Narinder Singh (1919 to 2005) was a retired army officer of Chandigarh and a close associate of Sardar Jagjit Singh. He is known from the books of Bhai Ajmer Singh on twentieth-century Sikh politics, whose forewords record his part in them.

Ajmer Singh writes in the foreword of Sikh Rajniti Da Dukhant: Kis Bidh Ruli Patshahi (Singh Brothers, 2007) that in February 1997 Sardar Jagjit Singh asked him to take on a work answering the attacks on the ideology of Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Sardar Jagjit Singh counted Major General (retired) Narinder Singh and Colonel (retired) Bhagat Singh among his closest companions and consulted them first (p. ix). After Jagjit Singh's death, Ajmer Singh says, General Narinder Singh put all his abilities and resources into keeping the promise he had made to Jagjit Singh (p. x). His encouragement and many-sided help, Ajmer Singh says, let the first volume reach readers in January 2003 as Vihveen Sadi Di Sikh Rajneeti. After consulting him, the plan was widened from two volumes to three, so that the Kharku rise could be set against the whole Sikh heritage (p. xi).

In his own opening words to Vihveen Sadi Di Sikh Rajneeti, signed at Chandigarh on 20 November 2002 as Major General (retired) Narinder Singh, he says his part was limited to getting some needed books and reading the draft and giving his views and suggestions, with moral encouragement for the task Jagjit Singh had entrusted. He judges the work to have been written with hard labour and complete honesty, free of emotional bias and factional lean.

Key moments

• 1919: born.
• February 1997: consulted by Jagjit Singh about the project.
• 20 November 2002: signs his opening words to the first volume.
• 9 October 2005: dies. Ajmer Singh writes that he went to sleep that night and never woke, and that the work might have come earlier and been better had he not been lost.

Remembered for: Ajmer Singh dedicated the second volume to his memory, under the words "Mard-e-Mujahid" and the years 1919 to 2005. In the foreword of 1984: Unchitviya Kehar (2009) he writes that it was General Narinder Singh's intense wish that four questions be answered: why, after the attack on Darbar Sahib, the Indian rulers carried out Operation Woodrose, why they brought the killings of November 1984, why the process did not stop there, and why the Sikhs went on fighting and dying for a decade. The first two chapters of that volume take up those questions.