Partap Singh Kairon

Partap Singh Kairon (1901 to 1965) was Chief Minister of Punjab from 1956 to 1964. He was born on 1 October 1901 at Kairon village into a Dhillon Jat Sikh family and studied at Khalsa College, Amritsar, and then at Berkeley and Michigan in the United States. He returned in 1929, was jailed for civil disobedience, and moved from the Akali Dal to the Congress. After Partition, as Rehabilitation Minister, he oversaw the resettlement of over three million migrants from West Punjab.

He is a contested figure. Admirers credit him with building post-Partition Punjab. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism calls his government severely repressive towards the Akalis during the Punjabi Suba agitation, while noting that he gave Sikhs a dominant place in the administration and was himself a supporter of Punjabi, shaped by the Singh Sabha movement.

Key moments

• He became Chief Minister on 23 January 1956 according to Wikipedia. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism dates his term from 3 April 1957, after the 1957 election. He made primary and middle schooling free and compulsory, consolidated landholdings, took electricity to every village, and helped found Punjab Agricultural University, Kurukshetra University and the PGI.
• Punjabi Suba, 1960 to 1961: he opposed the Akali demand. Master Tara Singh was arrested on the night of 24 to 25 May 1960, and the morcha ran for seven months. Official figures put those jailed at 30,000, Akali figures at 57,129. Sant Fateh Singh fasted for 22 days, from 18 December 1960 to 9 January 1961, and Kairon released Master Tara Singh on 4 January on the advice of Bhai Jodh Singh. Master Tara Singh fasted again for 48 days in 1961. The Punjabi-speaking state came on 1 November 1966, twenty-one months after his death.
• Das Commission: in 1962 Devi Lal petitioned the President over alleged corruption, and a commission under a retired Supreme Court judge, S R Das, inquired into charges that Kairon's sons and relatives had misused his office. Justice Rajindar Sachar writes that it held he "must be held to have connived" at their doings through inaction. He resigned in the second half of June 1964, after Nehru's death (21 June in Wikipedia, 23 June in The Tribune).
• 6 February 1965: he was shot dead on the Grand Trunk Road near Rasoi, in Sonipat district, on the way from Delhi to Chandigarh. Sucha Singh, Baldev Singh and Nahar Singh were hanged (1969 in one account, 1970 in others), and Daya Singh's death sentence was commuted to life by the Supreme Court in April 1991. The motive found was Sucha Singh's belief that Kairon had helped secure the murder conviction of Ajit Singh and his father Bir Singh. His family has asked for an inquiry into a wider conspiracy; The Tribune reports that the government did not act.

Remembered for: the roads, schools, canals and factories of the Kairon years, and for his hard line against the Punjabi Suba movement, which won its state only after he was gone.