P.C. Sethi

Prakash Chandra Sethi, known as P.C. Sethi, was a Congress politician and the Union Home Minister during the Dharam Yudh negotiations of 1983 and the months before Operation Blue Star. Wikipedia's article on him says he was born on 19 October 1919 at Jhalrapatan in Jhalawar State, was Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh from 1972 to 1975, and died at Indore on 21 February 1996. Wikipedia's list of Home Ministers gives his term as 2 September 1982 to 19 July 1984 in Indira Gandhi's government.

Key moments

• 8 January 1983: Gurmit Singh says he sent a written invitation to open negotiations to Sant Harchand Singh Longowal, who accepted but proposed Chandigarh instead of Delhi as the venue.
• 24 and 25 January 1983: tripartite talks were held in Delhi under his chairmanship, with the Akali Dal represented by Surjit Singh Barnala, Ravi Inder Singh and Balwant Singh, and ended inconclusively.
• 3 to 6 February 1983: Longowal accepted a fresh invitation from him, but the Akali High Command decided on 6 February not to join talks at which the chief ministers of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan, or the opposition leaders, were present.
• 21 June 1983: Longowal rejected his invitation for further negotiations.
• Late 1983: Kuldip Nayar writes that Swaran Singh took his formula to a Cabinet subcommittee of Pranab Mukherjee, R. Venkataraman, P.V. Narasimha Rao and Sethi, which accepted it. The statement later placed before Parliament differed from the draft the Akalis had seen, and they called it a betrayal.
• 1984, before the army entered the Golden Temple: Gurmit Singh records him telling Parliament that the Government had never favoured sending the police into the Golden Temple.
• 19 July 1984: P.V. Narasimha Rao took over the Home Ministry, according to Wikipedia's list.

One discrepancy: Gurmit Singh's account of 27 February 1983 calls Buta Singh the man who had succeeded Sethi as Union Home Minister, yet the same book still names Sethi as Home Minister in June 1983 and in 1984, and Wikipedia's list shows him in office until July 1984. He is remembered as the Home Minister who chaired the Government's side of the 1983 talks with the Akalis, which produced no settlement before June 1984.