Baba Wasakha Singh

Baba Wasakha Singh (the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism writes Vasakha Singh) was born on 13 April 1877 at Dadehar in Amritsar district. His parents were Dial Singh and Ind Kaur. He was schooled at the village gurdwara and took the Sikh initiatory rites at twelve. He joined the army at nineteen and left it in 1907 for China, and from there went to the United States.

In California he and Baba Jawala Singh leased a 500-acre ranch at Holtville near Stockton. Income from the farm funded the Guru Nanak Educational Society, which helped needy Indian students in America. The two men are described by the University of California, Davis Punjabi diaspora project as founders of the Stockton gurdwara, which the Pacific Coast Khalsa Diwan Society opened in 1912. Jawala Singh was the one nicknamed the "Potato King" and the first granthi of the gurdwara. Later the two donated their farm to the Ghadar Party.

Key moments

• 31 December 1913: he went to the Ghadar Party meeting at Sacramento and was elected to its central executive committee.
• 7 January 1915: answering the party's call to return for the planned rising, he reached Madras and was taken into custody.
• 13 September 1915: tried in the Lahore Conspiracy Case I, he was sentenced to transportation for life and forfeiture of property. In the Andamans he held a hunger strike of over a month against the treatment of political prisoners.
• 14 April 1920: released under a general amnesty, he reached his village in very poor health, after about five years in custody.
• 1920s and 1930s: he led a jatha of 100 volunteers to court arrest in the Guru ka Bagh morcha. He was one of the Panj Piare at the kar seva of the sarovar at Tarn Taran, which began on 10 January 1931, and one of the Panj Piare who laid the foundation stone of the new Gurdwara Panja Sahib on 14 October 1932.
• 1934: he was appointed Jathedar of Sri Akal Takht Sahib at Amritsar.
• Under the British he was restricted to Amritsar city in 1931, detained in his village for two years from 1932, and jailed again in 1940 and 1942. He was president of the Desh Bhagat Parivar Sahayak Committee, which supported the families of political prisoners.

He died in a hospital at Tarn Taran on 5 December 1957. He is remembered as a man whose farm income went into the gurdwara and the revolution, and who then served the Panth at its morchas and at Sri Akal Takht Sahib.