Chandigarh: Sarabjit Singh Khalsa, son of Beant Singh — who was one of two assassins of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi — will be contesting the forthcoming parliamentary elections from Faridkot constituency.
A resident of Mohali, the 45-year-old will contest as an Independent from the reserved constituency. This will be his fourth election. He is yet to register a win.
Speaking to ThePrint Saturday, Khalsa said he was initially not very keen on contesting the elections this year, but was asked by several residents of Faridkot to throw his hat in the ring. He added that this time he has decided to not join any party and go it alone because, in his experience, joining a political party was “not appropriate” for a member of a “family of his stature”.
On 31 October, 1984, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh — who served as bodyguards to Indira Gandhi — had assassinated her at her official residence in New Delhi. Beant Singh was killed on the spot by her other guards, while Satwant Singh was arrested. In 1989, Satwant Singh, along with his accomplice Kehar Singh, was hanged.
That year, Beant Singh’s widow Bimal Kaur Khalsa went on to win the Lok Sabha polls from Ropar and his father Sucha Singh won the Bathinda seat.
“Our family suffered a lot after the 1984 incident,” Sarabjit Singh Khalsa said to ThePrint. “My family spent days in police stations in Delhi, and after we returned to Punjab, we had to hunt for a house and start a new life. But the community helped a lot, and in 1986, we managed to get a house in Mohali. My mother became an MP in 1989, but she passed away just two years later in 1991. For another eight to nine years, we suffered but finally our family settled. There is a lot of sympathy for my family in the Sikh community and I am grateful for the manner in which they have stood by us. We started as a simple Dalit family but my father’s sacrifice gave us the status of a family of a shaheed (martyr),” said Khalsa.
He started his political journey in 2004 when he contested the Lok Sabha elections from the Bathinda seat as a candidate of the Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar). He managed to get more than 1.13 lakh votes, but lost the seat. He was fielded again by the party in the 2007 assembly elections from Badhaur in Barnala, but he could only muster a little over 15,000 votes. He contested from the reserved Fatehgarh Sahib seat in 2014 as the BSP candidate but lost again.
“I have never hankered after any political party to launch me into politics. In 2004, I was approached by the Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar) to contest. Later, the BSP game me a ticket,” he said
In the upcoming elections, Khalsa will face singer-turned politician Hans Raj Hans, the BJP’s candidate from Faridkot, and AAP’s Karamjit Anmol, an actor-comedian. The Congress is yet to announce a candidate on the seat, which is currently held by party MP Mohammed Sadiq, a renowned singer.
“I was approached by many people from Faridkot who said that singers and comedians were in the fray from Faridkot and they wanted a serious candidate, which is why I agreed to contest. The stature of a shaheed family, the family of a martyr, among the Sikh community is far higher than the stature of entertainers and performers,” said Khalsa.
Voting in Punjab for the state’s 13 Lok Sabha seats will be held on 1 June.
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‘Sacrilege incidents top issue’
Khalsa said that he will be fighting on the issue of the sacrilege of the Guru Granth Sahib in 2015. “It is going to be almost 10 years and yet there is no justice in sight,” said Khalsa.
In 2015, during the Akali-BJP regime, there were a series of incidents of sacrilege of the Guru Granth Sahib, considered to be a living Guru by the Sikhs. During protests across the state over the incidents, two protesters were killed in police firing at Behbal Kalan. The sacrilege incidents became a major poll issue in the 2017 Punjab elections, in which the Akalis suffered a humiliating defeat.
When the Akali regime could not nab the culprits, they shifted the cases to the CBI, which were later returned to the Punjab Police during the Congress regime under Capt Amarinder Singh.
The sacrilege incidents are under probe by various special investigative teams and multiple charge sheets have been filed in the cases.
“The sacrilege incident issue is my top priority. Second, I will also be talking about farmers, and third, I will focus on the rampant abuse of drugs in Punjab, especially in Faridkot, which is a border district. The problem of drugs is closely related to the problem of unemployment, which lies at the core of it,” added Khalsa.
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)