Simranjit Singh Mann

Simranjit Singh Mann is the president of Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar), a former Indian Police Service officer and a former Member of Parliament. The Quint describes him as supporting Khalistan while wanting it pursued by democratic, non-violent means.

He was born in Shimla in 1945. His father, Lt Col Joginder Singh Mann, was an Akali Dal leader and Speaker of the Punjab Assembly in 1967. Mann joined the IPS in the 1960s (The Tribune says the 1966 batch, other reports 1967) and served as SSP of Ferozepur and Faridkot and as a CISF Group Commandant in Bombay.

Key moments

• June 1984: resigned from the IPS in protest at Operation Blue Star.
• 1984 to 1989: jailed for about five years. Penguin's description of Stolen Years, a memoir of this time by his daughter Pavit Kaur, says he was charged, among other things, with conspiracy to assassinate Indira Gandhi, and that all charges were dropped.
• 1989: won the Tarn Taran Lok Sabha seat while held in Bhagalpur jail, with 527,707 votes (ETV Bharat), about 88 percent of the vote (The Tribune). His party won six of Punjab's 13 seats that year (The Quint). He never took his seat in Parliament, because, The Tribune reports, he wanted to enter the House with a sword.
• 1999: won the Sangrur seat, defeating Surjit Singh Barnala (The Tribune); he was MP until 2004.
• June 2022: won the Sangrur by-election, vacated by Bhagwant Mann on becoming Chief Minister, with 253,154 votes to AAP's Gurmail Singh's 247,332 (ETV Bharat).
• June 2024: lost Sangrur, finishing third with 187,246 votes, behind AAP's Gurmeet Singh Meet Hayer and Congress's Sukhpal Singh Khaira (indiavotes).
• November 2025: after the Tarn Taran by-election, called on the divided Akali factions to unite before the 2027 election (The Tribune).

Statements and controversies: In July 2022 Mann called Bhagat Singh a "terrorist" at a press conference, and the BJP's Manoranjan Kalia asked for an FIR over it (The Tribune). The same month he defended his maternal grandfather Arur Singh, then sarbarah of the Golden Temple, who honoured General Reginald Dyer with a siropa after the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Mann says Arur Singh acted to pacify Dyer and spare the Golden Temple from bombing, on the advice of Khalsa College principal G.A. Wathen; The Tribune notes that many Sikhs remember the act as a black chapter.

Remembered for: resigning from the police over June 1984, winning a Lok Sabha seat from a jail cell in 1989, and a long run of comebacks and defeats since. The Tribune counts five defeats from Sangrur alone. It calls him a known hardline Sikh leader.