(This was compiled from various news reports) CHANDIGARH, INDIA: Chief Minister Beant Singh was getting into his bulletproof car outside government headquarters in the capital, Chandigarh, when the explosion went Off, Information Secretary S.S, Dawra said.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the blast, but Punjabi Police Chief K.P.S, Gill said suspicion fell on two Sikh separatist groups, the Babbar Khalsa and the Khalistan Liberation Force.
The daring attack in a heavily guarded building could embolden Sikh guerrillas to strike again and embarrass Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao’s ruling Congress Party ahead of national elections.
As night fell, police in Punjab and the neighboring state of Haryana and the federal capital, New Delhi, went on alert, setting up road blocks at the stale borders and checking all vehicles, Punjab suffered an insurgency in the 1980s that claimed about 20,000 lives, as Sikh groups fought for an independent Khalistan, “Land of the Pure” from Hindu minority India. Since was elected in February of 1992 after five years of central government rule. And although he restored peace in much of the state and helped Punjab reclaim its standing as one of India’s most prosperous states, few prominent Sikhs regarded him as a hero.
He was never seen in public without his elite commando bodyguards or his Ray Ban aviator sunglasses.
Scion of a landed family, Singh had fallen out of favor with the Akali Dal, the main Sikh political movement in Punjab. The group took a soft view 6f militants in the 1980s.
Rising through the ranks of the ruling Congress party instead, he was elected chief minister in February of 1992 in a vote that many considered a farce. Barely 20% of the electorate went to the polls and almost all of them were from the state’s Hindu minority.
Once in power, Singh dispatched security forces to capture or kill hundreds of alleged separatists, many of them without trial.
More than 100 cases of alleged police abuses are still pending in Punjab’s courts.
‘Singh was a controversial and often disliked chief minister, both for his ruthless approach to the militancy and for his family’s apparent abuse of State services, His grandson, Gur kirat Singh, was ‘arrested last year for allegedly kidnapping and molesting a French tourist while state security guards kept watch.
While initially successful, the crackdown against the militants also pitted Singh against Gill, his sometimes cavalier police chief who is said to disdain taking orders from politicians.
The assassination almost certainly deals a blow to Indian, Prime Minister P, V. Narasimha Rao, who counted Singh as an important politically and ranked peace in Punjab as one of his greatest achievements during four years in power.
With a fragile majority, Rao can ill afford to lose seats in Punjab as he prepares for a national election in the first half of 1996. After a series of defeats in local elections, Rao’s Congress party can count Punjab as one of the only major states in which it retains power India’s state politics may become even more unstable in the run up to the national election. In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, chief minister N,T. Rama Rao resigned after his son-in-law staged a political putsch, Rama Rao, a legendary Telugu-lan-guage film star, resigned from a hospital bed, where he was recovering from a collapse early Sept.t, at the height of the political crisis.
Article extracted from this publication >>September 8, 1995
