Bhai Subeg Singh of Suroon

Subeg Singh of Suroon village in Patiala is one of the Sikh prisoners known as Bandi Singhs, for whose release the Shiromani Akali Dal pressed the Centre in 2014 and 2015. He is a different man from the eighteenth-century Shaheed Bhai Subeg Singh. He is treated here as a living person, so what follows keeps to what The Tribune and ThePrint reported.

The Tribune's list of 11 January 2015 gives his sentence as life imprisonment in a case registered on 13 February 1995 in Chandigarh, under sections 302, 380 and 392 read with 120-B of the Indian Penal Code. It says he was charged, with Nand Singh, with the murder of a man named Bachna Ram, that he was not said to be a militant, and that, like Nand Singh, he was linked to Jagtar Singh Hawara in the Burail jailbreak case.

Key moments

• 1995: he was taken into custody. The Tribune says he had been in custody since then and had availed regular paroles.
• 18 November 2014: after Chandigarh rejected his plea for premature release, the High Court ordered it reconsidered.
• December 2014: ThePrint reports that Parkash Singh Badal, then chief minister of Punjab, wrote to state governments forwarding a list of 13 prisoners and demanding their release. The Tribune's article of 11 January 2015 lists Subeg Singh as number 9 on it, held in the Central Jail at Ludhiana.
• September 2019: ThePrint reports that the Centre announced that eight prisoners lodged in different jails would be released, on the occasion of the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak. He was one of the eight.
• After the notification was issued: ThePrint's report of 23 January 2023 says that Lal Singh, Nand Singh and Subeg Singh were released subsequently. It gives no date.

His name stays in the record as one of the three men released after the Centre's September 2019 notification, together with Lal Singh and Nand Singh. The sources opened say nothing of his life before 1995 or after his release.