Jathedar SantokhSingh

A Sikh leader in Delhi, active in the administration of the capital's gurdwaras and in the organisation of Sikh political activity in India and Britain.

Kot Badal Khan 1929–1942

Jathedar Santokh Singh was born at Kot Badal Khan, in Jalandhar district, on 20 March 1929. He was not given that name until he was twelve or thirteen years old.

The family had come from Kartarpur, the town Guru Arjan Dev established in the Doaba, nine or ten kilometres from Jalandhar, where they held twelve wells' worth of land and farmed it. His father, Sardar Buta Singh, had little taste for agriculture and a strong inclination toward trade; after visiting the surrounding villages and consulting people who knew the district, he settled on Kot Badal Khan — then a village of some four thousand, with a prosperous and politically influential Pathan Muslim population largely associated with the Muslim League.1

Buta Singh had been there about ten years when his wife bore their son. At forty days the parents carried the child to the village pandit, Ram Krishan, who named him Ram Lubhaya and told them what the boy would become: he would not go far in school, his mind would carry him past men with degrees, he would become a leader, he would go to prison, and at his death half the world would walk with him.2

Ram Lubhaya was the eldest. Several brothers and sisters died young; four brothers and two sisters reached adulthood — Harbhajan Singh, Sohan Lal, Mohan Singh, and Surinder Singh, and the sisters Bhagwanti, known as Bhago, and Sohan Devi. Harbhajan Singh would support his political work in its early years.

The village had two schools: one for girls through the eighth class, one for boys through the fifth. Ram Lubhaya took his primary education there and was fond of Master Telu Ram, who lived nearby — a teacher he made a point of visiting whenever he returned from Delhi, for the rest of his life. After the fifth class he was enrolled at Nurmahal. He was a capable student, and represented his primary school at the scholarship examination in Phillaur. The journey there was his first time on a train.3

The extended family included both Sikhs and Sehajdharis. A sadhu lived at the village dharamsala, and the boy went often to listen and to talk with him about religion. He attended recitations of the Gita and had memorised many of its verses by the third or fourth class; his voice was strong and his pronunciation exact, and when the sadhu was called away he left Ram Lubhaya to read to the women who gathered in the afternoon.

In time his attention turned to the village gurdwara. Taken by his father to Dera Baba Wadbhag Singh to have his hair cut, he refused. At about twelve or thirteen he received amrit, and Ram Lubhaya became Santokh Singh.4

The apprenticeship 1942–1945

The trade he learned in the next three years was chosen for him, and it was chosen because of politics.

When the call of Quit India went out in 1942, Santokh Singh and other students discussed setting off a bomb outside the village. The authorities learned of it, and the boys were released with an admonishment; their fathers kept them under watch afterward. Buta Singh withdrew his son from school, judging that a boy without a trade would only be drawn further in.5

He was sent instead to relatives who kept a cloth shop and a tailoring business, and there he trained in cutting and sewing. He took on the smallest tasks and helped with every kind of household work, set on being taught thoroughly. In five or six months he was proficient. He returned home at about sixteen.

That apprenticeship he spoke about only much later, to his youngest son: hard masters, a whip scar he still carried, water fetched from a canal, every household chore loaded onto him before he was let go for the day.6

In 1945 his father arranged his marriage to Bibi Satya Kaur of Bagrian, daughter of Sardar Hazura Singh and Gurdev Kaur. She had not attended school; at Chak Bagrian she learned Punjabi from Harbans Kaur, daughter of Rattan Singh Akali, and could read from the Guru Granth Sahib, perform its prakash, and carry out the nightly sukhasan.7

Lahore 1946–1947

He went to Lahore as a tailor and left it as an Akali.

Tailoring would find a larger market in a city, and his father wanted him out of the village. Santokh Singh went to Lahore and rented a shop in Dharampura, near Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha. Satya Kaur remained with her parents, as was customary, and came to him about two years after the marriage.

Living alone, his expenses were small. He did not drink; he ate neither eggs nor meat. He worked through the day and listened to kirtan at night, rose at amrit vela, completed nitnem, and went house to house to bring the sangat together. At the Dharampura gurdwara he did extensive seva, and led prabhat pheris on gurpurabs. People began bringing him their problems.

Lahore also brought him to the Akalis, whose freeing of the gurdwaras from the mahants he had heard about since childhood. Dharampura was a Congress stronghold. In the 1946 provincial election Santokh Singh planted the Akali flag over his own shop and turned it into an election office.8 Congress workers tried to have his tenancy ended. The owner, Teja Singh, came to see the young tenant, approved of what he was doing, and told him not to worry about the rent in a hard month.

When a Congress leader stood near a shop abusing Akali leaders, he confronted the man so forcefully that he left. When Master Tara Singh came to Dharampura he was pleased with the young worker, and told him:

Son, do not worry. Work with all your strength, and if anything is lacking, come to me without hesitation. Do not forget.9

The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee election came the same year. The Akali Dal put up Bakshish Singh of Dharampura against the influential Amar Singh, and Amar Singh's influence did not hold against the campaigning. Bakshish Singh won. Santokh Singh sought nothing for himself. He was not at that point even a member of the Shiromani Akali Dal.

Partition 1947

What he had built in Lahore lasted a year and a half. The city went to Pakistan, and there was no staying in it. He came home.

Hindus and Sikhs were few in Kot Badal Khan, and the family's account records repeated attempts on his life there, all of which failed. During the communal violence around Nurmahal Santokh Singh organised the Sikh youth of the district, brought exposed families to safety, planned the defence of the gathered population, and stayed at it until the crisis passed.10

Delhi 1948–1952

Delhi did not know him when he arrived. It knew him within two years.

Santokh Singh reached Delhi on 7 January 1948 and began business on Nai Sarak.11 He was later allotted a small premises on Hamilton Road, where he continued the military tailoring he had practised in Lahore. He worked long days at the shop and spent his evenings in seva at Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib. The household near Kashmere Gate filled with Panthic discussion, and their eldest son, Tajinder Singh, was born in these first Delhi years.

His first conspicuous intervention in the city's Sikh politics came at a gathering at Gandhi Ground, when Punjab minister Ishar Singh Majhail spoke of Master Tara Singh in objectionable terms. Santokh Singh answered with slogans; others rose with him, and the meeting broke up in disorder. He was new to the city and almost unknown.12

At the end of 1949 the Akali Dal planned a conference at Rakab Ganj Sahib. The government banned it and arrested Master Tara Singh at Narela station, and the political gathering became a martyrdom conference instead. The slogans Santokh Singh raised there drew the notice of senior leaders. After that conference he did not need introduction among Delhi's Sikhs.13

In 1951 Santokh Singh became head of the Chandni Chowk Akali jatha. His partnership with Avtar Singh Kohli, begun about then, would become one of the defining relationships of Delhi Akali politics — Kohli said later that the thirty-year history of the Delhi Akali Dal and Santokh Singh's work were a single fabric.14 In the 1952 Punjab elections he led a Delhi team campaigning for Akali candidates and raised funds for them. That became the pattern for the rest of his life: Delhi sent workers and money to Punjab for every election and every major morcha.

Ferozepur 1955–1962

A jail sentence he could have cut short made his standing in the Panth.

In 1955 the government banned the slogan Punjabi Suba Zindabad. Santokh Singh sent two Delhi jathas and led a third himself.

Police raided Guru Ram Das Sarai on the night of 3–4 July. The Delhi jatha resisted arrest inside the complex, prayed at the Akal Takht in the morning, and presented itself publicly outside the Darbar Sahib. He was imprisoned at Ferozepur, where some 2,200 Akalis were being held, and where he met Sant Fateh Singh for the first time. He took responsibility inside for organisation and the distribution of supplies.

The agitation ended on 12 July, and men began to be released. Santokh Singh was not, because he would not give a false statement to obtain it. Before the magistrate he admitted openly that he had broken Section 144 and raised the slogans, and he served the sentence out.15

He put the case of Delhi's Punjabis for a Punjabi-speaking state to the commission that followed. When it accepted linguistic reorganisation elsewhere and refused it for Punjab, he led a Delhi protest against the decision. For the Akali conference at Amritsar in 1956 he brought fifteen busloads from Delhi, besides cars and other vehicles, and the Delhi Akali Dal contributed ₹21,000.

That year the Delhi Akali Dal chose him its jathedar, unanimously, and he entered the Shiromani Akali Dal working committee. He was twenty-seven. The title stayed attached to his name for the rest of his life and beyond it.

He held the Delhi office three years and resigned it on 22 February 1959, after differences with the high command.16 He had already convened a Delhi procession in February 1958, after desecrations of the Guru Granth Sahib in Punjab, and another followed in March 1959. Elected to the Gurdwara Management Committee, Delhi State, for the first time in 1959, he sat on it until September 1961. A new committee was formed in April 1962. When its secretary resigned for reasons of health that October, Santokh Singh was elected in his place, unanimously, on 10 October 1962.17

Secretary 1962–1971

The title understates the position.

Santokh Singh held it for nine years, and everything the committee is now remembered for was done inside them: the Kotwali recovered for Sis Ganj Sahib, the land around Bangla Sahib, the schools, the recovery of gurdwara property across the city. He served under two presidents, Bakshi Gurbachan Singh and Giani Singh Abbottabadi. It was he who petitioned the Lieutenant Governor, he whom the sangat garlanded when the Kotwali was won, and he to whom six organisations addressed formal tributes between 1968 and 1977 — while other men held the presidency.18 One contributor, writing of these nine years, called them a golden period in the history of Delhi's gurdwaras.

The work began with the files. A detailed examination of committee records turned up houses, mills, factories, and private allotments sitting on gurdwara land, in some cases for decades. Santokh Singh set about regularising title and recovering what had been taken.

Mata Sundri. When he started a boundary wall in 1962 to stop further encroachment, officials objected that only the footprint of the gurdwara building belonged to it. The dispute went up to the Prime Minister. Officials produced a map marking the building alone as gurdwara property and everything out to the roads as government land. Santokh Singh asked one question: if the map were right, by what road did worshippers reach the gurdwara — did they fly across someone else's land? A valid map would have shown an access road. Nehru accepted the argument and ruled that the open land up to the road belonged to the gurdwara.19

Then he went back for more. A property case lost in 1924 was reopened and carried to the central government; the western ground, the boundary wall, the site for Mata Sundri College and later another three and a half acres for its expansion all followed.

Bangla Sahib had almost no room to grow. A valuable side plot beside it had been made over by cabinet decision to the yoga ashram of Dhirendra Brahmachari, who taught Indira Gandhi. Santokh Singh refused it, took the ground, and held it until the cabinet reversed itself and the registry was put in the gurdwara's name. His son dates the beginning of the quarrel with Indira Gandhi to that plot, in 1969.20 He obtained municipal closure of the road in front, which created the divan space and the approach the gurdwara has now. When the western barracks were allotted elsewhere, committee leaders occupied them and began an indefinite dharna until the government reversed the allotment, joining the land as far as Gole Dak Khana to the shrine. Baba Harbans Singh's jatha then did the kar seva for the sarovar.

Rakab Ganj. About two and a quarter acres of long-standing occupation were regularised and another eleven recovered, bringing the estate to roughly thirteen acres. On 17 January 1967 Master Tara Singh laid a foundation stone there for a Guru Gobind Singh Bhavan, a thousand-seat auditorium, a central library, a Sikh museum and study rooms, on plans by the architects Joseph Allen Stein and P. L. Varma.

Five other shrines were taken in hand in the same years.

Moti Bagh had been reduced by houses, shops, a flour mill and factories to a single room beside a public path where people stood smoking. The encroachments were removed and the path brought under control. When the ring road was widened in 1975 the alignment would have taken the site; he had a boundary wall built and would not move it, and the road still halts at the wall and picks up beyond it.21 Damdama Sahib, hemmed between Humayun's Tomb and the railway, had almost no recognised land; he obtained the surrounding property.

At Majnu ka Tilla the Yamuna was carrying away the bank, and the committee spent heavily on protective spurs against litigation from self-styled mahants. At Nanak Piao he had the seasonal drain redirected and covered, opening ground around the shrine, and later obtained another seven acres. At Bala Sahib, land was raised and recovered against the floods.

The Kotwali 1968

The claim began in his own mind, before either the committee or the wider community believed it could be won.

The building stood beside Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib in Chandni Chowk. Guru Tegh Bahadur had been held there before his execution; so had Bhai Mati Das, Bhai Sati Das and Bhai Dayala, and later the 740 Sikhs taken with Baba Banda Singh Bahadur. It had been in other hands for close to three centuries. Others had scarcely dared name the claim.

What started it was a nail. Crowds coming to see the historic shastars returned from Britain were reaching the well associated with Guru Tegh Bahadur's last bath through a narrow lane beside the Kotwali, and sevadars began fitting a gate to manage the crush. They drove one nail into the Kotwali wall, in 1966, and the station house officer arrested them.22 Santokh Singh came to the police station and said:

For one nail in that wall you have seized my men. Now we will take the Kotwali itself — the place where Guru Tegh Bahadur was held before martyrdom and where Banda Singh Bahadur's Sikhs were imprisoned. It is Sikh history, and we will recover it.23

Santokh Singh acted alone at first. He wrote to the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, Aditya Nath Jha, and met him on 3 February 1968 with historical material showing what the building was. Jha accepted the case. Santokh Singh judged that an announcement from himself would be dismissed as wishful thinking, and asked the Lieutenant Governor to make it instead. On 2 May 1968, presiding over a school prize-giving at Dev Nagar, Jha announced that the Kotwali would be given to the gurdwara. Only then did the wider community believe it possible. The committee passed its first resolution that September.

A preliminary ceremony was set for 2 October and could not proceed: opponents raised legal and departmental objections and proposed payment for only half the property. Santokh Singh consulted his colleagues and issued an ultimatum — unless implementation began by 13 October, the community would take direct action and make whatever sacrifice was required. The obstacles fell. More than six thousand square yards, about eighty per cent of the Kotwali, were assigned to the committee for ₹1,635,000. Jha laid the commemorative stone on 11 October 1968 and handed over two barracks that day. Further possession followed in November 1969 and February 1970. When Sikhs protested that the government had charged them for a memorial, the Government of India announced that the money would be returned.

More passed to the committee on 26 November 1976. The last portion was handed over on 14 June 1983, eighteen months after his death.

The schools 1965–1975

The other half of the work was schools, and it started with his own children being turned away.

Two of his sons had been enrolled at St Xavier's. The administrators told him the boys could not stay, because their parents did not speak English. A sympathetic figure at the school disclosed the other reason: Sikh boys there sometimes cut their hair and took up smoking, and the school was afraid that if this happened to Santokh Singh's sons he would arrive with an army of Nihangs.24

Guru Harkrishan Public School opened at India Gate in 1965. The first premises on Purana Qila Road were rented at ₹6,000 a month. He enrolled his own children on the first day, then drove to a friend's house, collected their children, and enrolled them too; when the father objected that a new school might fail, he answered: Why should it not run? We will work, and we will appoint good principals.25 Within three or four years it was competing with Delhi's established public schools. By his death there were ten.

Santokh Singh paid teachers above the government grades to get the ones he wanted. When a new principal arrived on a scooter, he told him to come by that evening — I am going to get you a car. I do not want the principal of my school to be regarded as less than the principal of any other school.26 He appointed without regard to caste or community, and the principal he chose for India Gate, Mrs Sengupta, was neither Punjabi nor Sikh.

His own children got no benefit from any of it. When Manjit was late for school his father telephoned the principal himself: My nawab is arriving late. Give him the same punishment as every other child. The boy was made to stand at the gate, and was caned more than once.27

Mata Sundri College for Women was established beside the gurdwara in 1967, on land he had spent five years recovering. His youngest son remembered the meeting where it was secured — a guard at Teen Murti announcing the fighting Sardar has come, and Nehru objecting that Sikhs wanted nothing but gurdwaras. Santokh Singh said the land was for a women's college. Nehru put down his pen. You want to educate our mothers? You will have the land.28 Getting the land was one fight and getting permission another: the Delhi Master Plan confined new university colleges to the northern and southern campuses, and his argument for a central site was that students drawn from every quarter of the city should be able to reach home before dark. Something over eight thousand women now study on the ground, counting the college's own students together with those of the University's non-collegiate board.29

He served two terms as the college's chairman, from 13 July 1967 to 2 June 1970 and from 11 September 1970 to 23 July 1971.30

A second Guru Harkrishan Public School opened at Vasant Vihar in 1975 on 9.75 acres provided by the Delhi administration. Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College began as an evening college in the Dev Nagar building. A technical institute was raised on land beside a gurdwara. A government senior secondary school was established in the Sis Ganj area with free admission; more than eighty per cent of its later pupils were girls from Muslim families.

He had left school after the sixth class.

Beyond Delhi 1964–1969

Sikhs elsewhere brought him their problems, and the pattern of his response was consistent: go, see it, then use Delhi.

After police firing at Paonta Sahib on 22 May 1964 killed eleven Nihang Sikhs, he visited the wounded first and then arrived with a large Delhi jatha. He helped build an eleven-member management committee for the shrine afterward, fought in court to recover roughly seven hundred bighas alienated by the mahant, and supported the survivors' families. The shrine then took five or six hundred rupees a month in offerings; he sent Delhi sangats by the busload and pressed principals to hold student camps there.31

When attackers tried to burn Gurdwara Bagmari in Calcutta in 1967, he travelled there with Avtar Singh Kohli and others to see it, came back, and led eleven people in a hunger strike outside Bangla Sahib. The Bengal chief minister, Ajoy Mukherjee, came to Delhi with Humayun Kabir, promised an inquiry, and expressed regret; his son recalls Jyoti Basu, then the state's home minister, coming to Bangla Sahib with him.32

In the Terai he repeatedly opposed attempts to displace Sikh and Punjabi farmers. Families who had come from Punjab after Partition had bought scrub and jungle cheaply at Bazpur, Kichha, Rudrapur, Kashipur and Khatima — an acre sold in Punjab bought several in the foothills — and had cleared it into farmland. Twice, once under Nehru and once under Indira Gandhi, the government moved to return the holdings to those who had sold them. His son says the army was called out on both occasions and sent back to barracks both times, and the families stayed.33 The U.P. Sikh Representative Board made him its director for Sikh issues at Lakhimpur in 1969, and renewed it at Lucknow after.

In Britain there were two campaigns, and he acted in both.

Manchester Corporation had refused since 1960 to let turbaned Sikhs work as bus conductors. Santokh Singh pressed the Government of India to intervene and organised a Delhi action on 6 April 1966; the Manchester transport committee voted to lift the ban that October, 71 to 23.34

The second began in June 1967, when Tarsem Singh Sandhu returned to his job as a Wolverhampton bus driver wearing a turban and a newly grown beard and was sent home without pay. Santokh Singh organised a march to the British High Commission in Delhi in solidarity with him; the historical record puts attendance at 50,000. In 1968 he convened a conference at Birmingham to bring Britain's Sikh organisations under one umbrella, and there he brought four divided groups into a common body. Sohan Singh Jolly, president of the Shiromani Akali Dal in Britain, announced in January 1969 that he would burn himself alive on 30 April if the ban stood. Wolverhampton lifted it that April.35

After the 1965 war, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri sent for him. Shastri took him to an army hospital and stood beside a Sikh soldier who had lost both legs attacking a tank, and who was weeping. Asked why, after such courage, the soldier said: The prime minister of my country stands before me, and I cannot rise to salute him. Shastri told Santokh Singh he wanted to do something for the Sikhs. Santokh Singh asked for the return of Guru Gobind Singh Ji's historic shastars, held in Britain. The Prime Minister wrote to the British government, and the shastars came back within his lifetime; the two men helped carry them off the aircraft at Palam themselves.36

Seventeen days 1971

Nine years of it ended in a locked gate.

On 5 May 1971, hostile forces took Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib, where the committee kept its office, locked the main gate and held the premises for seventeen days. The Delhi High Court ordered the committee dissolved and fresh elections held. On 20 May the Government of India issued an ordinance and installed a five-member interim board. Control of the gurdwara had passed to Nirlep Kaur, with government and court support.

The Akali Dal began a morcha in Delhi to recover it, with twenty thousand workers. Santokh Singh was its moving spirit. He was imprisoned with other leaders on 15 August and held for nearly four months, released on 3 December as conditions changed with the war.37

His opponents said his authority was broken beyond repair.

Barred from office 1975–1977

The first elections under the new Delhi Sikh Gurdwaras Act were held in 1975. His Akali slate won a record victory.

The Act carried an educational qualification. Section 10 provides that no person is eligible for election as President or other office-bearer unless he is at least a matriculate, has passed the Higher Secondary examination, is a Giani, or holds an equivalent qualification.38

He had left school after the sixth class.

Barred from holding formal office, he was chosen party leader by the elected members, unanimously, who said that no other political guide held their confidence.39 He ran the committee for the rest of his life without ever being eligible to head it. His son puts the clause down to Indira Gandhi and says its purpose was to finish him; it was removed by ordinance in 1980, after her return to office, and he was elected president in June 1981, six months before he was killed.40

A critic stated the absurdity most sharply. Sardar Kapur Singh, who opened his own contribution by stating plainly that he was neither a devotee nor a political supporter and that their personal relations had not lately been warm, asked why a qualification demanded of no president, prime minister or minister of the country should be demanded of a gurdwara secretary.41

During the Emergency he consulted senior Akalis, arranged meetings with Indira Gandhi, obtained agreement around a charter of Sikh and Punjab demands, and announced support for her government. Party leaders afterward expelled him for indiscipline, expecting him to collapse without them. Receptions were organised for him across Punjab and India instead.

After Master Tara Singh's death, Santokh Singh took up the leadership of the Bir Khalsa Dal as its Sardar-e-Azam, and set about reviving its scattered units.

The addresses 1968–1977

What his contemporaries thought he had done survives in six formal addresses of honour.

Delhi youth at Mori Gate on 30 June 1968; Gurdwara Akal Bunga Sahib at Ludhiana on 20 September 1970, alongside the SGPC president; the Greater Kailash sangat after the 1975 victory; the Jhelum Gazette fraternity on 21 October 1976; the U.P. Sikh Representative Board on 31 October 1976; the Sikh Association at Chandigarh on 6 January 1977, for twenty-five years of service.

What they credit him with is the estate: the Kotwali, Bangla Sahib's park, Alexander Chambers, the land at Rakab Ganj, Moti Bagh, Damdama Sahib, Nanak Piao, Majnu ka Tilla. And they credit him with Delhi itself — with making it the place Sikhs turned to when there was trouble in England, South Africa, Calcutta or Hazur Sahib.42

At the centre 1980

For a year he had the ear of the Prime Minister, and he used it.

The January general election returned Indira Gandhi to office, and she came to his home to thank him.

Santokh Singh put the case for Darbara Singh as Chief Minister of Punjab to her directly; Darbara Singh was sworn in on 6 June 1980. His son said he could approach her with unusual directness, and that the relationship combined closeness with mutual respect.43

Late that year, at a conference in Jalandhar, he delivered an address as party president that reads now as a political testament. It opened by naming the ground — Jalandhar, the land of the Babbar Akalis. It warned that the danger to the Panth came from within as much as from outside: atheism among the young, proliferating personality cults, institutional failure, decline in gurdwara administration. It recalled the founding of the Shiromani Akali Dal before the Akal Takht on 14 December 1920 and argued that the party had fallen away from that inheritance through division.

Then it set out what he wanted. Protection of Sikh identity first. Open access to the historic gurdwaras left across the border in 1947, and Panthic participation in their management. That the proportion of Sikhs in the armed forces not fall below what it had been at Partition. Defence of Sikh farmers' lands in Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh; Punjabi recognised as a second official language in six states and Delhi. Chandigarh, Bhakra, and the Punjabi-speaking territories, with the village as the unit of linguistic determination. A dedicated transmitter for uninterrupted kirtan from the Darbar Sahib. Fair crop prices, through an All-India Akali Kisan Dal, with separate organisations for women, students and workers.

We do not wish to take another's right, but we will not surrender our own.44

Khiala 1981

In his last year he went, repeatedly, to the places he was warned away from.

Opponents brought eleven or twelve allegations against him at the Akal Takht. He was strongly advised not to appear. He had already boarded the Frontier Mail when a message reached him through the railway telling him to turn back — Lala Jagat Narain had been killed and Punjab was dangerous. He went on, and presented himself.45

Santokh Singh was among the Sikh leaders at Chowk Mehta on 20 September when Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale surrendered, and outside Central Jail, Ferozepur, on 15 October when he was released. The Hindustan Times reported him there as Delhi Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee president, telling reporters at the jail that it was his effort at Delhi that had secured the release.46

On 19 December a family friend, an amateur astrologer, warned him to avoid public appearances for two months. He answered: Do not make me a coward. What is destined for Santokh Singh will strike Santokh Singh. Told to think of his young family, he said: You are here; all of you will look after them.47

On the morning of 21 December 1981 he came back from his walk as the household was sitting down to tea. Manjit's marriage had been arranged for 31 January, forty days off. He sent for an elderly relative and gave him cloth for four suits and two cream-coloured turbans for the wedding. As the man left, he wondered aloud whether his health would let him wear the clothes himself.48

That night he spoke at the gurdwara at Khiala. He was shot as he came out into the lane, hit three times, at point-blank range. His bodyguard, Dhanna Singh, shot the attacker, who died too. The bodyguard himself survived.49 He was fifty-two.

He was president of the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee at his death. The wire report filed the following day described the assailant as a former follower of his who had turned against him.50

The police commissioner telephoned the house after eight. The three elder sons left at once; the youngest came back from hockey to find the household in uproar and went with his mother to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, where Indira Gandhi, Giani Zail Singh and Rajiv Gandhi had already arrived. The police needed the bloodied clothes for the investigation and asked the family to bring clean ones. The youngest son and a friend brought a kurta-pyjama and, with great difficulty, changed the clothes on his father's body. He was unable to speak or cry for four days.51

The cremation was at Nigambodh Ghat on 22 December. Indira Gandhi came, with Buta Singh, Giani Zail Singh, Darbara Singh, cabinet ministers, senior Akali leaders and an immense crowd; when the congestion stopped the family moving, Rajiv Gandhi went to them himself. She returned to the house on 23 December. The ashes went to Kiratpur Sahib in a procession of 125 buses and hundreds of cars, with state honours from Delhi, Haryana and Punjab, and Harchand Singh Longowal and Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale were there. On 3 January 1982 the bhog of the Akhand Paath was held at the house, and the final ardas at Gurdwara Rakab Ganj Sahib.

His brother Surinder Singh had died in 1977, and Santokh Singh had taken in the widow and three children; the two families had lived as one for four years, and would go on doing so for seven more under Satya Kaur's care. The household never described itself as four brothers. It always said seven. After the killing, Satya Kaur said to Surinder's son:

Your father did not die in 1977. He died today, in 1981.52

The family came out of it badly. The businesses failed, the bank entanglements ran for years, and it was 1999 before they were clear. Manjit Singh, who became president of the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee in 2013, said there had been no comparable leader since: What he did for the community, the gurdwaras, and the schools — I am only walking in the footprints he left.53