By the time Beant Singh took office as Chief Minister of Punjab in February 1992, the state had spent over a decade in an insurgency that was, by any measure, out of control: an average of roughly twenty-five people killed every day, a police force fighting a war it appeared to be losing, and a political class largely too frightened or too compromised to be seen fighting back. Three years later, the insurgency was effectively over. Three years and six months later, Beant Singh was dead — killed by men who believed the way it ended was itself a crime.
From Ludhiana's Cooperative Bank to the Vidhan Sabha
Singh's political career had nothing dramatic about its beginnings. Before entering electoral politics he was a director of the Central Cooperative Bank in Ludhiana, a solidly institutional starting point. He won his first Vidhan Sabha seat as an independent in 1969, joined the Congress the following year, and was returned repeatedly from the Payal constituency through the 1970s. It was a long, unremarkable rise through the machinery of state politics — nothing in it suggested the role he would eventually play.
The Crackdown
Singh became Chief Minister in February 1992 on the strength of an election that, by most accounts, only a small fraction of Punjab's electorate felt safe enough to vote in. What followed was defined less by Singh personally than by his partnership with Kanwar Pal Singh Gill, the Director General of Police he backed almost without qualification. Gill's approach combined intensive, sustained operations against militant networks with a system of cash rewards for officers who killed or captured wanted men — and it worked, in the sense that mattered most to a state exhausted by violence. Reported killings fell from thousands a year to a small fraction of that within a couple of years.
It is also the reason Singh's name still divides people who lived through the period. Human-rights organisations and journalists documented, through the 1990s and after, a pattern of staged "encounters," unrecorded cremations and disappearances that they attributed directly to the bounty system Gill ran and Singh defended. Singh himself, by the accounts of those close to him, treated the criticism as the price of ending a war — and stood by his police force publicly even as the allegations mounted.
Chandigarh, 31 August 1995
The insurgency Singh had broken did not forgive him for how he broke it. On 31 August 1995, a Punjab Police constable named Dilawar Singh Babbar, secretly a member of Babbar Khalsa International, approached Singh's bulletproof car outside the Punjab and Haryana Civil Secretariat in Chandigarh wearing a bomb strapped to his body, and detonated it. Singh, Dilawar Singh and seventeen bystanders were killed. A second man, Balwant Singh Rajoana, who had helped assemble the explosive and was meant to act as backup, was arrested before he could. He later told investigators, without apparent remorse, that the killing was payback for Operation Blue Star, the anti-Sikh violence of November 1984, and for the extrajudicial killings carried out under Singh's own crackdown.
Rajoana's death sentence has been stayed and appealed for years since, and in 2012 the Akal Takht formally honoured him as a "national martyr" — a decision that tells you, better than any single account of Beant Singh's tenure could, that the argument over how Punjab's insurgency ended was never actually settled. It was only stopped.