ਬਾਬਾ ਖੜਕ ਸਿੰਘਬਾਬਾ ਖੜਕ ਸਿੰਘ

Early life and education in Sialkot

Baba Kharak Singh was born on 6 June 1868 at Sialkot, in what is now Pakistan, into a Sikh Ahluwalia family. His father, Rai Bahadur Sardar Hari Singh, was a wealthy contractor and industrialist, and the family was prosperous enough for education to come first. Kharak Singh passed his matriculation from Mission High School in Sialkot and his intermediate from Murray College in the same city, then went to Lahore, where he graduated in 1889 among the first batch of graduates of the newly established University of the Punjab. He went on to join the Law College at Allahabad, but the deaths of his father and his elder brother in quick succession forced him to abandon the law and return to Sialkot to manage the family property. He served for a time as secretary of the Municipal Committee of Sialkot and then gave up the post. The young man who returned to run an estate was, by the standards of colonial Punjab, made for a comfortable life of local standing. He spent the rest of his long life working against the system that offered it.

From Sikh conferences to the Central Sikh League

His public life is conventionally dated from 1912, when he chaired the reception committee of the fifth session of the Sikh Educational Conference at Sialkot. Three years later, presiding over the conference session at Tarn Taran in 1915, he walked to the venue instead of arriving in the stately carriage drawn by six horses that custom expected, and he refused permission for a resolution wishing victory to the British in the First World War. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 turned a reforming public figure into a political leader. Disgusted by the pro British slant of the Chief Khalsa Diwan, he helped build an alternative, the Central Sikh League, formed in 1919. He presided over the League's historic Lahore session in 1920, attended by Mahatma Gandhi, the Ali brothers and Saifuddin Kitchlew, where under his direction the Sikhs resolved to join Gandhi's Non-Cooperation Movement and to throw in their lot with the national struggle.

The SGPC and the Akali movement

In November 1920 a Sarbat Khalsa at the Akal Takht constituted the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, a 175 member body created to take the management of historic gurdwaras out of the hands of government backed mahants, and the Shiromani Akali Dal was formed the following month as its volunteer task force. Kharak Singh has been described as the moving spirit behind both bodies. He became the SGPC's president in August 1921, succeeding Sundar Singh Majithia, and he is remembered as virtually its first president, the man who gave the new committee its direction before its legal form was settled. He served a first term until February 1922. After the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925 created a statutory board, he was elected its president unanimously and in absentia while he was still in prison, and he held a second presidency from October 1926 to October 1930. The Akali movement's later campaigns at Guru ka Bagh and Jaito were fought while Kharak Singh himself was behind bars, which is its own measure of how much of the movement's early direction had been set in its first years.

What was the Keys Morcha, and why did Gandhi call it a first decisive battle?

The Keys Morcha, or Chabian da Morcha, began on 7 November 1921, when the Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar seized the keys of the Toshakhana, the treasury of the Golden Temple, from the house of its manager. For the Sikhs, a colonial official holding the keys of Darbar Sahib was a symbol of exactly the control the SGPC had been created to end. Kharak Singh addressed the protest meeting at Bagh Akalian in Amritsar on 12 November, and on 26 November he was arrested at Ajnala, where SGPC leaders had gone to continue a diwan. On 2 December he was sentenced to six months in prison for an anti government speech. The government, facing a widening agitation, gave way: it announced the return of the keys and then the unconditional release of the detained Sikhs. The Akalis refused to go and fetch the keys, so an official had to deliver them, wrapped in red silk, to Kharak Singh at a diwan at the Akal Takht. He was released on 17 January 1922. Gandhi's telegram became the morcha's epitaph: First decisive battle for India's freedom won. Congratulations. Within weeks, in February 1922, Kharak Singh was chosen president of the Punjab Provincial Congress Committee in place of the imprisoned Lala Lajpat Rai, an appointment Gandhi praised in Young India as an excellent choice.

Why did he spend years in jail wearing only a kachera?

His freedom after the Keys victory lasted weeks. On 4 April 1922 he was sentenced to one year in jail for running a factory that manufactured kirpans, with a further three years added for seditious speeches, and he was sent to the distant jail at Dera Ghazi Khan. There, when the authorities forcibly removed the turbans of Sikh prisoners and the Gandhi caps of non Sikh political prisoners, Kharak Singh discarded all his clothing except his kachera, the Sikh undergarment, and refused to dress again in protest. According to Hazara Singh's account, it was in this protest that fellow prisoners began addressing him as Baba Ji, the name that stayed with him for life. His sentence was twice extended for disobedience, and he remained bare backed through the harsh seasons until his release on 4 June 1927, walking out of jail still wearing only the kachera, to processions in Amritsar and Lahore. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who shared that imprisonment, later wrote of him: Kharak Singh was a powerful man, firm and immoveable like a mountain. Nobody could order him. In spite of all the suffering, he never lost his courage. The jail terms did not end in 1927: he was jailed again for six months in 1931, served another nineteen months from 1932, was taken into custody in 1935 for his scathing criticism of the Communal Award, and was jailed once more for individual satyagraha in 1940, in his seventies, being released in January 1942.

Simon, the Nehru Report and the flag question

Released in 1927, Kharak Singh returned at once to the front rank. In 1928 he organised a mammoth demonstration at Lahore against the Simon Commission. Through 1928 and 1929 he opposed the Nehru Committee Report, which offered Dominion Status with no safeguards for the Sikhs, until Congress shelved the report and undertook to seek Sikh concurrence in future constitutional proposals. Presiding over the All India Sikh Conference at Lahore in December 1929, he told his audience that a disciple of the Gurus must face the bullet in the chest and not in the back. He also pressed a demand that caused real friction with Congress: that the national flag carry a distinct Sikh colour. When Gandhi launched the Civil Disobedience Movement in March 1930, Kharak Singh, as SGPC president, refused to bring the Sikhs in unless the Sikh colour was included in the flag. He remained a key Akali figure until about 1935, when Master Tara Singh eclipsed him, and in 1947 he travelled across Punjab opposing the planned partition of India, having opposed both the Muslim League's demand for Pakistan and the Akali proposal for an Azad Punjab.

Retirement in Delhi, death and legacy

After Partition, Kharak Singh settled in Delhi and lived in virtual retirement, an elder statesman who took no office in free India. In the early 1950s a commemoration volume in his honour, the Baba Kharak Singh Abhinandan Granth, was presented to him by the President of India, Rajendra Prasad. He died in Delhi on 6 October 1963, aged 95. Nehru's tribute, quoted in accounts of his life, praised a passion for freedom and courage and fearlessness. He is remembered as the uncrowned king of the Sikhs and as the Grand Old Man of Punjab, titles that capture what he was: not simply the holder of a list of offices, but the man whose personal defiance, in the Keys Morcha and in Dera Ghazi Khan jail, set the moral tone of the Akali movement. A radial road from Connaught Place towards Gurdwara Bangla Sahib in New Delhi carries his name, Baba Kharak Singh Marg, and in 1988 India issued a postage stamp depicting him. The Tribune observed in 2018 that his legacy had been largely forgotten by the parties that inherited his politics, a judgement that says more about them than about the man who once received the keys of the Toshakhana at the Akal Takht.