How farmers took on Khalistanis

Protesting farmers seen at Singhu border in New Delhi. Pic/PTI

It is time to retell the story of the many battles that Sikh farmer leaders waged against Khalistani militants in the 1980s and 1990s. Many died; some lived to tell the tale, as for instance Jamhoori Kisan Union leader Kulwant Singh Sandhu, whose Maruti van, on April 19, 1988, came under a hail of bullets in Jalandhar's Sang Dhesian village. The driver slumped dead; the escort sitting in the front, with bullets in his thighs, crouched to hold the steering wheel with one hand and pressed the accelerator with the other. The car careened out of the firing range of the militants, who fled instead of chasing them.

Sandhu succeeded Sohan Singh Dhesi as general secretary of the Shaheed Bhagat Singh Naujawan Sabha, after the latter was assassinated on September 18, 1989, for organising a massive youth meeting against militancy. Thereafter, Sandhu and his armed escorts, all volunteers, engaged a carload of shooters in a ferocious gunfight over four kilometres of chase, trapped them in a village and compelled them to surrender. Their leader was an assistant sub-inspector whom the militants had paid money to bump off Sandhu. "We had organised defence committees to protect villages. Not a single Hindu family migrated from our area," Sandhu said to me.

Or talk to Nirbhai Singh Dhudike, Punjab state president of the Kisan Kirti Union, who will tell you about the 1988 assassination of KKU president Jaimal Singh Padda, who loved to raise that Punjabi slogan which, in English, translates to: "Neither Hindu rule, Nor Khalistan, farmers and labourers will rule." Two years later, Padda's successor, Sarabjeet Singh Bhitewind, was killed. So was, in 1992, Gian Singh Sangha, who had taken over from Bhitewind. "You will find Khalistanis only in America," Dhudike said.

Among the groups providing artistic expressions at the farmer protest in Delhi is the Punjab Lok Sabhychark Manch, a cultural front established by the legendary playwright Gursharan Singh and Amolak Singh, who was then the editor of Surkh Rekha, a radical magazine, and convenor of the Front Against Communalism and State Repression. On April 9, 1991, at Sewewala village, Faridkot district, a large crowd had assembled to watch a play. Amolak was three or four minutes into his introductory speech when militants, in military uniform, attacked with grenades. The Front's Meghraj Bhagtuana, holding a rifle, chased the marauders. He was later found dead in the fields. The death toll: 18.

Surkh Rekha's editorial position prompted militant leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale to declare in Chhandrha village, Ludhiana, that gold equivalent to the weight of Amolak would be paid to whoever caught him alive. For years, Amolak lived wearing disguises, battling communalism, as he still does now, even as he bats for farmers. Ask memory: How did Nidhan Singh Ghudiani, president of the Punjab Kisan Union, die? He was abducted one night, tortured, and found hanging from a tree the next morning. Ask: Why was revolutionary poet Avtar Singh Pash mowed down? Memory will stutter to say he had floated the anti-'47 Front, its name an allusion to both the Partition and the AK-47 assault rifle, and for likening militants to "parasitic weeds growing in the wheat."

Go ask Bhupinder Singh Samber, working president of the All-India Kisan Sabha, who is all of 84 years, about those darkled years. He will speak of his comrade Arjun Singh Mastana, who popularised the slogan: "We will not let Hindus and Sikhs fight, we will not let 1947 to be repeated." On March 27, 1986, in Gharyala village, Amritsar, a few policemen took to battering a peasant, who screamed, "Chachaji, Chachaji," as Mastana was called, for help. He rushed out of his house. They were militants, not cops. Mastana was gunned down. Samber will tell you about Darshan Singh Canada, who, on September 24, 1986, said at a rally, "We shall fight these cowards who love neither Sikhism nor India." He was assassinated the next day. At his cremation, his wife shouted, "We are neither Hindus nor Sikhs but Indians. Long live India!"

You will not know of Baldev Singh Mann, a Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) activist, who vigorously campaigned against the Khalistanis in and around Amritsar. On September 10, 1990, he was informed his wife had given birth to a daughter. On that day, Mann wrote a letter to his daughter, to tell her about his battle against the "evil storm" of communalism, unsure whether he would survive the militants stalking him and see her. Yet Mann exhorted her, "Even if we are unable to win in our battle, my darling, try you must to be at the head of the caravan engaged in the battle for truth." Mann was killed on September 26. His daughter is actor Sonia Mann, who came down to Delhi to support the farmer protest.

These stories need to be retold in the backdrop of Attorney General KK Venugopal's claim in the Supreme Court that the government has information about Khalistanis having infiltrated the farmer protest. When he puts out the information in an affidavit to the court, Venugopal should add a coda: Doubt not the patriotism of Sikh farmers.

The writer is a senior journalist. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com. The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper