Bhai Surinder Singh Sodhi

Surinder Singh Sodhi was one of the closest men around Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in the months before Operation Blue Star. Gurmit Singh's History of Sikh Struggles calls him Bhindranwale's right-hand man and his personal bodyguard. The Damdami Taksal's own page on him says he joined the Taksal from a young age and studied its Gurbani, and quotes a follower who recalls that Bhindranwale often called him his right hand, and said on the day Sodhi was killed that his right hand had been cut off.

How he died. UPI reported from New Delhi on 14 April 1984 that a Sikh woman and a male accomplice had shot him dead on the Saturday, at a tea shop in Amritsar. It says he was hit seven times and four other people in the shop were wounded, and that the woman shouted "I have taken revenge" as she ran into the Golden Temple complex. UPI quotes the police as calling him a well-known Sikh "terrorist" suspected in a number of murders, mostly of police officers, over the previous two years, and as wanting him for questioning over the killing of Harbans Lal Khanna on 2 April. The report mentions no charge or trial. Gurmit Singh dates the killing 17 April 1984 and places it in a restaurant outside the Golden Temple. He names the woman Baljit Kaur and her accomplice Chhinda.

Key moments

• Who was behind it: Gurmit Singh writes that the two were hired by the intelligence agencies through Gurcharan Singh, a close confidant of Sant Harchand Singh Longowal and Office Secretary of the Akali Dal. He says Bhindranwale's followers killed Baljit Kaur and Chhinda the next day, and killed Gurcharan Singh during Operation Blue Star, and that these killings brought Longowal and Bhindranwale to open confrontation. UPI's report says instead that Bhindranwale reportedly took no action against the woman.
• 25 April 1984: Longowal wrote to R.K. Dhawan, Indira Gandhi's personal secretary, that Gurcharan Singh's life was in danger, according to Gurmit Singh.
• The Government's White Paper, reproduced in Gurmit Singh's third volume, says Gurcharan Singh was among the seventy killed at the surrender of 6 June 1984, and that he had been accused by "extremists" of having plotted the murder of Sodhi and of Bagga Singh.

Surinder Singh Sodhi is remembered by the Taksal and its followers as an early Shaheed of the struggle who stood closest to Bhindranwale. The two accounts of who arranged his killing come from opposite sides, and none of the sources opened reports a court finding on it.