It is time to retell the story of the many battles that Sikh farmer leaders waged against Khalistani militants in the 1980s and 1990s. Many died; some lived to tell the tale, as for instance Jamhoori Kisan Union leader Kulwant Singh Sandhu, whose Maruti van, on April 19, 1988, came under a hail of bullets in Jalandhar’s Sang Dhesian village. The driver slumped dead; the escort sitting in the front, with bullets in his thighs, crouched to hold the steering wheel with one hand and pressed the accelerator with the other. The car careened out of the firing range of the militants, who fled instead of chasing them.

Sandhu succeeded Sohan Singh Dhesi as general secretary of the Shaheed Bhagat Singh Naujawan Sabha, after the latter was assassinated on September 18, 1989, for organising a massive youth meeting against militancy. Thereafter, Sandhu and his armed escorts, all volunteers, engaged a carload of shooters in a ferocious gunfight over four kilometres of chase, trapped them in a village and compelled them to surrender. Their leader was an assistant sub-inspector whom the militants had paid money to bump off Sandhu. “We had organised defence committees to protect villages. Not a single Hindu family migrated from our area,” Sandhu said to me.