Namdhari sect’s aide shot dead,heir apparent booked

Ishwar Singh,Commissioner of Police (Ludhiana) said the investigators are looking into all the angles into the crime. While the body has been sent for a postmortem,empty shells recovered from the crime spot has been sent for forensic tests.

A small boy who works for the family of the person where Tari had stopped to drink water is the lone eye witness in this case.

Tari’s murder has once again brought to fore the war of succession going on within the sect. Since the ailing sect head Satguru Jagjit Singh does not have a son,there is a division on who will be the heir to the ‘gaddi”. A group led by Tari wants Satguru’s thirty-year-old grandson Jai Singh to succeed,but a large section of the “sangat” wants Dalip to become the next head of the sect. The two groups’ vehement and at times violent opposition against each other is quite well known. Dalip had even stopped going to the sect’s Bhaini Sahib headquarters.

It is said that Tari and his group comprising Jagtar Singh,the son-in-law of Satguru,and Thakur Uday Singh,the younger brother of Dalip,ruled the roost at Bhaini Sahib and they made all efforts to keep Dalip Singh out of the succession race.

At Bhaini Sahib,one can hear about the meteroic rise of Tari who after partition in 1947 has settled in a small village in Haryana. It is said that he and his five brothers owned some six acres of land. Tari,who was a devout follower of the sect,gave up all his land to a poor follower after the sect head asked him to do so. Pleased with this sacrifice made by Tari,Satguru Jagjit Singh took him under his wing and soon Tari became his right-hand man. While it is said that Tari rose both in power and money,he started making many enemies and in the end met a bloody end.