In 30 Seconds
The government that presided over the militancy’s destruction was headed by a seventy year old Congress veteran whom almost no one, in February 1992, expected to survive his term in either the political or the literal sense. Beant Singh took charge of a state under army saturation, on the mandate this series has just examined, with predecessors’ examples before him of what Punjab did to its chief ministers’ authority and what the militancy did to their allies’ lives. Three and a half years later the organised insurgency was dead and so was he, and the two facts are related, which is why his tenure requires its own accounting.
The Man and the Wager
Beant Singh was a Jat Sikh of old Congress stock from Ludhiana district, a former sarpanch and soldier risen through the party’s rural machinery, unglamorous, untheatrical, and possessed of the specific conviction his moment required: that the militancy was not a national liberation to be negotiated with but a predation to be destroyed, and that a Sikh chief minister saying so aloud changed what the campaign meant. His wager was political cover, extended completely and publicly, to the police campaign under KPS Gill that this series has already weighed: resources without precedent, interference withheld, and the answerability for the methods accepted, in the constitutional sense, by the elected head of government. Admirers call this the tenure’s spine; critics call it the indemnity under which the disappearances peaked; the record, as the Gill article set out, obliges the reader to hold both.
The Restoration
What is not contested is the sequence. Killings that had exceeded five thousand in Punjab in 1991 collapsed across 1992 and 1993 to the low hundreds and then the dozens; the leaderships of the KCF, KLF, BTFK, and Babbar Khalsa’s domestic wing were killed or captured man by man; and by 1994 the state’s evenings, curfewed for a decade, had reopened. Beant Singh spent the recovered normalcy deliberately: the panchayat and municipal elections of 1992 and 1993, held on turnouts that repudiated February’s, rebuilt the political layer the terror had razed; administration returned to districts run for years as police fiefs; and the government’s public liturgy, the chief minister addressing unguarded rural gatherings, was itself policy, a daily demonstration that the gun no longer set Punjab’s calendar. The economic reopening followed, and the state that in 1991 was discussed in the language of Lebanon was, by 1995, hosting investment summits.
The Costs Carried Forward
The tenure’s other ledger has filled this series’ preceding batch: the endgame’s methods, the encounter counts, the cremation registers, ran through exactly these years, and the Khalra abduction, the era’s emblematic state crime, occurred weeks after the events the next article records, under the police apparatus this government shielded. Beant Singh’s defenders note, accurately, that he answered for the campaign to an electorate and the militancy answered to no one; his critics note, as accurately, that the answering never extended to the disappeared, whose files his government contested rather than opened. Both notes are true, and this series has declined throughout to let either cancel the other.
What can be said in summary is this: Beant Singh took a wager that a legitimate government could end the terror and survive the ending, won the first half, and paid for the second with his life, in the assassination the next article recounts. Punjab’s peace has many authors, the exhausted village first among them, but its political signature is his, and the signature was written in the knowledge, which he voiced often and accurately, of what it would cost him.
