Sardar Bahadur Mehtab Singh

Sardar Bahadur Mehtab Singh was a lawyer and legislator who became closely associated with the Gurdwara Reform movement. He acted as president of the Shiromani Committee while Baba Kharak Singh was in jail, and he is the fourth name on the SGPC's own list of presidents, which gives his term as 16 July 1922 to 27 April 1925. He is not the eighteenth-century Mehtab Singh of Mirankot.

The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says he was born in 1879 at Hadali in Shahpur district, now in Pakistan, to Hazur Singh and Karam Kaur, passed the Entrance examination from the Central Model School, Lahore, in 1895, and came back from England in 1898 as a barrister-at-law. The government made him Sardar Sahib in 1915 and Sardar Bahadur in 1918.

Key moments

• 1920: elected to the Punjab Legislative Council and became its vice-president.
• July 1921: in the SGPC's new elections, the Encyclopaedia says, Baba Kharak Singh was elected president, Captain Ram Singh vice-president and Mehtab Singh secretary; his own entry says he was made vice-president of the SGPC.
• 11 November 1921: he resigned both the vice-presidency and his seat on the Council in protest at the seizure of the keys to the Golden Temple treasury.
• 26 November 1921: arrested at Ajnala at an Akali diwan on a charge of making a seditious speech, and sentenced to six months in prison and a fine of Rs 1,000.
• 14 September 1922: arrested again in the Guru ka Bagh morcha.
• October 1923: after the SGPC and the Akali Dal were banned, the principal Akali leaders, Mehtab Singh among them, were arrested.
• 25 January 1926: he was one of the first batch of twenty Akali leaders released after endorsing a statement, read in court, that renounced any further direct action and offered to implement the provisions of the Gurdwara Act.
• 18 June 1926: the Encyclopaedia says the first election under the Act was fought between his moderate group, which had won release by accepting the Act, and a group led by those who refused conditional release and were still in jail, and that the result was a landslide for the latter, who claimed to be the Shiromani Akali Dal.
• 1933 to 1936: president of the committee of the notified Sikh gurdwara at Nankana Sahib.
• 23 May 1938: he died of a heart attack while arguing a case in the High Court at Lahore.

The SGPC's list does not say why the presidency passed to Mangal Singh on 27 April 1925, and the sources opened do not explain it. Mehtab Singh is remembered as the lawyer who gave up a seat in the Council over the keys, served time in jail for it, and led the moderate side in the elections of 1926.