Chapter 27
THE ASSASSINATION OF BEANT SINGH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
History is replete with examples of messiahs, kings and leaders meeting a violent death. In the context of the immediate past, three names come to mind: Indira Gandhi (who was assassinated by her own bodyguards on 31 October 1984); Rajiv Gandhi (who was blown to bits by a woman suicide bomber on 21 May 1991); and Sant Harchand Singh Longowal (who fell to terrorists’ bullets on 20 August 1985 after signing the Rajiv—Longowal Accord hardly a month before).
Beant Singh, who restored peace and stability in Punjab after more than a decade of terrorist violence, met the same fate when he was killed in a bomb blast on 31 August 1995 evening just outside the main entrance gate of the high-security zone of the Punjab and Haryana Civil Secretariat at Chandigarh. His untimely death shattered the confidence of a majority of the people in Punjab. Call it sheer luck or coincidence, I had left the Secretariat (after meeting an official) barely minutes before the bomb went off.
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Surprisingly, differences arose among the Akali top brass over an unlikely topic. At a meeting of half-a-dozen top Akali leaders held to decide whether or not they should attend Beant Singh’s funeral at Chandigarh on 2 September 1995, Surjit Singh Barnala and Parkash Singh Badal expressed reservations. Ultimately, it was decided that all of them should attend the funeral because it was the party’s policy to oppose violence and to fulfil its objectives through democratic means by following Punjabiat. The reservation expressed by the two seniormost Akali leaders was due to the fear that some anti-Akali elements might hold a demonstration, creating security problems for them. Punjab’s DGP (Intelligence), A. Sharma, welcomed the Akali leaders’ decision to attend the funeral and assured them full security. At the cremation site, the people appreciated the gesture of the Akali leaders.
Beant Singh’s killing sparked a heated debate in the Akali Dal about its future course of action. Two prominent Akali leaders Captain Kanwaljit Singh (the Akali Dal’s ideologue and one of the party’s general secretaries) and Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa (another general secretary) wanted the party to implement its new policy of uniting all Punjabis. According to them: ‘If the new CM [calls] a meeting of all parties on Punjab issues, the Akali Dal will attend it although the party’s future plans depend on the decision of its Working Committee.’
Captain Kanwaljit Singh, however, was unhappy that the Akali Dal had become a victim of internal squabbles. A case in point related to senior leader Gurcharan Singh Tohra (president of the SGPC) telling his followers that he would not allow Badal to become chief minister if the Akali Dal won the next Assembly elections. Four main reasons could be attributed to the party getting isolated:
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In November 1995, intelligence agencies reported that Badal was on the terrorists’ hit list. (A small section of terrorists was still active.) They considered him ‘a symbol of the Akalis’ moderate policy’. Youngsters who had clandestinely gone to Germany, Canada and the USA were being lured by offering them huge sums of money. Intelligence sources revealed that one such youngster (born a Sikh, but now clean-shaven) had already reached India to kill Badal. For his part, Badal became more cautious and the intelligence agencies more vigilant. However, nothing happened after that. Except for occasional incidents of terrorist activities, normalcy prevailed in Punjab.
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After the assassination of Beant Singh, Harcharan Singh Brar was chosen by the state Congress Legislature Party to head the government. A landlord belonging to the Akalis’ stronghold – the Malwa region of Punjab – Brar took over as chief minister on 31 August 1995. But some months later, Lieutenant General B. K. N. Chibber (governor of Punjab from 18 September 1994 to 27 November 1999) claimed at Chandigarh, in the presence of some bureaucrats, that it was on his suggestion that the Centre had appointed Brar as officiating CM after the assassination of Beant Singh.
A senior bureaucrat said that Chibber, who became disillusioned with the chief minister’s functioning, sarcastically commented at a meeting that ‘Brar wears a nice turban but he is indecisive and easy-going, the qualities a chief minister should possess’.
After taking over as chief minister, Brar quickly removed Beant Singh’s photographs from the rooms of the Civil Secretariat.
In his speeches on various occasions, Brar started eulogizing his father-in-law, the late Partap Singh Kairon (chief minister of Punjab from January 1956 to June 1964), ignoring Beant Singh’s contribution in bringing peace to terror-hit Punjab.
Brar was laid back and his performance was lacklustre. He would ignore the complaints of even senior Congress leaders about the functioning of various government departments. During some of my meetings with him, I often found him carefree, hardly bothering to hear out the Congress leaders, including MLAs, who met him in my presence, to seek solutions to the problems that their constituencies were facing.
After a few days into his chief ministership, Brar declared that he had a two-point agenda: to check corruption and to curb separatism. But his actions contradicted his lofty promise of checking corruption. Like feudal era landlords, he had a great liking for sycophants. This weakness later branded him with the stigma of appointing Ravinder Pal Singh Sidhu (Ravi Sidhu), the Chandigarh-based correspondent of the Hindu newspaper, as chairman of the Punjab Public Service Commission. At this stage, it would be in order to describe Sidhu’s modus operandi and how he set an unsavoury precedent.
Sidhu’s write-ups on Punjab used to be full of praise for Brar. He had an intriguing knack of cultivating ruling political bosses and senior bureaucrats.
After the Akali Dal came to power in Punjab in February 1997, Sidhu, whose term as PPSC chairman was to end soon, was able to establish a close rapport with Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal. In 2001, Badal wrote three letters to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, talked to him over the telephone and even met him personally to request him to appoint Sidhu as a member of the Union Public Service Commission (based in New Delhi). In his last letter to Vajpayee on 26 December 2001, Badal wrote that ‘Sidhu’s appointment as member of the UPSC would be very much in the interest of the people of Punjab and [a] border state, particularly at this critical juncture.2 I hope you will consider my request sympathetically, as it is personally and politically important to me’.
It was during Sidhu’s tenure as chairman of the PPSC that the country witnessed its first big money-for-jobs scam. Reports soon started circulating in the corridors of power that, under Sidhu, the PPSC would select candidates even for top government posts usually on considerations other than merit.
The unprecedented scale on which Sidhu’s money-for-jobs scheme was being operated came to light during March 2002, when the Captain Amarinder Singh-led Congress Government (February 2002 to March 2007) was in power in Punjab (details given later in this chapter).
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After assuming chief ministership on 26 February 2002 in the wake of the Congress victory in the Punjab Assembly elections, Captain Amarinder Singh sent one of Punjab’s retired chief secretaries to meet Ravi Sidhu and request him to resign from the chairmanship of the Punjab Public Service Commission. Sidhu refused to do so. He pulled out a copy of the Indian Constitution from his bookshelf and showed the relevant Article to the chief minister’s emissary. Sidhu insisted that he could be removed from the PPSC’s chairmanship only through impeachment by Parliament and not under state government pressure.
The chief minister, who had been regularly receiving complaints against Ravi Sidhu, was annoyed by the latter’s ‘insulting’ response to his emissary’s request to resign. Sidhu was arrested by the Vigilance Bureau in March 2002 for allegedly accepting an illegal gratification to the tune of Rs 5 lakh from an assistant excise inspector as part of a Rs 35-lakh deal to select him as a Punjab Civil Services (PCS) officer.
When Sidhu’s official residence in Chandigarh was raided, the police claimed that they had recovered movable and immovable assets worth Rs 25 crore! The amount included Rs 8.15 crore in cash that the bureau found in Sidhu’s five bank lockers. TV viewers will never be able to erase from their memory the images of wads of high-denomination currency notes tumbling out of one of Sidhu’s bank lockers when the Vigilance Bureau men opened it. A corruption case was registered against him and he was arrested. It was alleged that Sidhu pocketed huge amounts for selecting candidates for government jobs. He also obliged the ruling political bosses by selecting their nominees, many on considerations other than merit.
In its June 2013 order, the five-judge full bench of the Punjab and Haryana High Court found ‘the entire selection process [undertaken during the chairmanship of Ravi Sidhu] of the Punjab Civil Services executive branch and allied services 1998 examination to be vitiated, filled with manipulations and fraud’. Dismissing a bunch of 81 petitions challenging the termination of services of the selected PCS members, the court noted it was the ‘first case in the history of the Public Service Commission in India where such a huge amount of money [Rs 22 crore alleged to be illegal gratification taken to help candidates in the selection] has been recovered from the fictitious bank account [of Sidhu] after recording the statement of one of the accused, Jagman Singh [who later turned approver]’.
Sidhu was eventually sentenced by court to a six-year jail term in July 2013.
Sidhu’s innovative cash-for-jobs scheme ushered in a trend among the country’s ruling politicians to get their favourites appointed as members of the state public service commissions, thus turning this important constitutional institution into an instrument of corruption for securing government jobs for undeserving candidates.
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Let us now get back to the main narrative. Annoyed by Harcharan Singh Brar’s style of functioning, Punjab Congress MPs brought to Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s attention that the Congress would suffer severe setbacks in the state in the 1996 Lok Sabha elections if Brar continued as CM. The PM too was unhappy with Brar. But he asked the MPs to wait till the Lok Sabha elections were over as his immediate removal could create problems for the party at the hustings.
A majority of the Punjab Congress MLAs also were greatly disillusioned with Brar’s functioning. Out of the 34 ministers in Beant Singh’s Government, 23 were retained by Brar. Resentment was building up among those who had been dropped. They, along with other disgruntled Congress MLAs, were waiting for an opportunity to raise the banner of revolt. Led by Rajinder Kaur Bhattal (a woman), they camped in Delhi to pressurize the party high command to remove Brar from the chief ministership. Ultimately, the PM yielded to their demand. The revolt by the party MPs and MLAs led to Brar’s ouster within five months of his taking over as chief minister.
Rajinder Kaur Bhattal, who hailed from a freedom fighter’s family, took over as chief minister of Punjab on 21 January 1996. She, however, could stay in office only for little more than a year as the Congress was defeated in the February 1997 Punjab Assembly elections. On 12 February 1997, an Akali Dal—BJP coalition government came to power with Parkash Singh Badal as chief minister once again.
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1 Sehajdhari refers to a person who has chosen the path of Sikhism, but has not still become an Amritdhari (a baptized Sikh). A Sehajdhari believes in all the tenets of Sikhism and the teachings of the Sikh Gurus, but may or may not adorn the five symbols of the Sikh faith, namely, kachha (shorts), kanga (a wooden comb), kara (an iron bangle), kes (hair, which is supposed to be uncut) and kirpan (a small sword or dagger).
2 In 2001 and 2002, there was a standoff between India and Pakistan and troops faced each other on either side of the international border and along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir.