In 30 Seconds
At a few minutes past five in the evening of August 31, 1995, Chief Minister Beant Singh settled into his bulletproof Ambassador in the VIP porch of the Punjab Civil Secretariat in Chandigarh, the most heavily guarded complex in the state. A young man in police uniform standing beside the car detonated the explosives strapped to his own body. The blast killed the chief minister, the bomber, and fifteen others, secretariat staff and security men among them, in the heart of the government quarter of the modernist capital. The organised militancy this series has watched collapse had been reduced, by that evening, to the capacity for a single spectacular act, and it spent that capacity on the man who had signed its defeat.
The Operation
The assassination was claimed by and traced to Babbar Khalsa, the movement’s most doctrinaire surviving organisation, whose international wing this series has followed since the Kanishka. The human bomb was Dilawar Singh, a dismissed Punjab Police constable, his uniform the operation’s key that turned every gate; a second volunteer, Balwant Singh Rajoana, stood by as backup bomber, a role he confessed to with a completeness that shaped everything after. The investigation and the long trial established the conspiracy’s chain, the explosives run through the border pipeline this series has mapped, the Chandigarh module around Jagtar Singh Hawara, and the operational direction from the organisation’s Pakistan sheltered leadership, and produced convictions across the 2000s: death sentences for Hawara, later commuted to life by the High Court, and for Rajoana, whose case became a national argument this article must complete.
The Rajoana Question
Rajoana refused to appeal, refused counsel, and refused clemency in his own name, declaring the state illegitimate and his act just, and thereby handed independent India one of its hardest capital cases: a confessed assassin whose execution was stayed in 2012 amid mass mobilisation in Punjab, whose mercy petition, filed by the SGPC over his objection, sat undecided for over a decade while the Supreme Court repeatedly pressed the Centre, and whose sentence, as this journal’s readers will know from recent coverage, the Supreme Court itself finally commuted to life imprisonment in 2025 on the ground that the endless official indecision had itself become inhuman. The case’s meaning has been contested exactly along the era’s fault line: to the state and the victims’ families, a terrorist’s due process extended past all reason; to a substantial current of Sikh opinion, including entirely non violent opinion, a man whose crime answered crimes the state never tried anyone for, the disappearances of precisely the 1995 season in which he acted. This series, having documented both ledgers, records the argument without pretending it is resolved.
What the Bomb Did Not Do
Strategically, the assassination changed nothing, and the nothing is the historical point. Punjab did not rise; the militancy did not revive; the panchayats elected in 1993 kept meeting; and the state passed to the ordinary succession of Congress chief ministers and then, in 1997, to the Akali government whose election completed the normalisation. The contrast with 1985 is exact and instructive: the murder of Longowal had killed a peace because the peace was a single signature; the murder of Beant Singh could not kill the endgame because the endgame’s real author, the population’s turn, does not travel in an Ambassador. The bomb of August 31 was the militancy’s confession that it had been reduced from an insurgency to an epilogue.
Beant Singh’s memorial stands in Chandigarh, and the sixteen who died with him are, as this series has insisted for every category of the era’s dead, entitled to their names in the ledger rather than their inclusion in his. With his assassination, the era’s last act closes; what remains for this series is the accounting, the numbers, the courts, and the reckoning cut short, to which the following articles turn.
