Who is Balwant Singh Rajoana? Why has he been on death row for 15 years?

Who is Rajaona? Why was he convicted and sentenced to death? Why has he been on death row for 15 years?

Beant Singh’s assassination

In 1992, after almost five years of President’s rule during the height of Punjab’s militancy years, Congress’ Beant Singh became the Chief Minister of Punjab. He did not, however, enjoy the popular mandate: the Akali Dal boycotted the polls and the turnout was an abysmal 24%.

Many in Punjab saw Beant as a puppet in the hands of New Delhi, and blamed him for overseeing the “massacre of Sikh freedom fighters”. As one pro-Khalistan blog titled ‘Assassination of CM Butcher Beant’ puts it, “Everyday under rule of Beant Singh, Sikh youth were hunted and killed… Punjab had been flooded with fake police encounters.”

The brewing resentment against his rule eventually got Beant killed by a suicide bomber named Dilwar Singh on August 31, 1995. With explosives strapped to his person, Dilwar approached Beant inside the secretariat complex; 17 others were also killed in the blast.

The man who strapped the explosives onto Dilwar, and also waited as backup in case his comrade’s attempt failed, was Balwant Singh Rajoana. Both Dilwar and Rajaona were affiliated to Khalistani outfit Babbar Khalsa International, and blamed Beant for “extrajudicial killings” of Sikh youth.

Rajaona was arrested by Punjab Police in December 1995. In his judicial confession recorded in January 1996, he said: “Judge Sahib, Beant Singh assumed himself [to be the] angel of peace after killing thousand innocent people, compared himself with Guru Gobind Singh Ji and Ram Ji, thereafter we had decided to kill Chief Minister Sh Beant Singh.”

Rajoana also expressed deep anguish over Operation Blue Star and the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. He was angry about the “full liberty” given to agencies and police to “kill” young innocent Sikhs in Punjab, and blamed the CM for acting on behalf of “agencies in Delhi”.

On death row for 15 years

A special CBI court in Chandigarh awarded Rajaona the death penalty on July 27, 2007. Rajaona, now 58, did not hire a lawyer to plead his case and famously refused to repent. He had said: “Yes, I was involved in this murder. I have no repentance of involvement in this murder. I and Bhai Dilawar Singh prepared this bomb.”

While his co-accused, Jagtar Singh Hawara, Gurmit Singh, Lakhwinder Singh and Shamsher Singh, challenged their conviction in the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Rajaona refused to budge. In a letter to the HC, he said the death sentence “for this act is justice” was a “blessing”. “How can I say that I am innocent and why should I engage any advocate when my conscience does not allow me to do so,” he had written.

His hanging was scheduled on March 31, 2012. But the Punjab government headed by Akali patriarch Parkash Singh Badal, backed by sections of the electorate, strongly opposed Rajaona’s execution. Three days before it was set to take place, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee filed a mercy petition before the President, after which the Union Home Ministry (MHA) ordered a stay on the hanging.

In September 2019, the MHA wrote to Punjab proposing the commutation of his death sentence to life imprisonment to commemorate the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak, but the proposal was never implemented.

In September 2020, Rajoana moved the apex court requesting that his long-pending mercy petition be taken up for immediate disposal, and that the MHA’s 2019 proposal be implemented. The court then directed the Centre to make a decision. The MHA, however, said that it “has decided to defer taking any decision on the mercy plea” as it “has a serious potential of compromising the security of the nation or creating a law and order situation”. In 2023, the SC rejected Rajaona’s plea and left it up to the Centre to decide his fate.

Rajaona then filed a fresh plea, which is now before the court. At the heart of this delay are competing pressures on the government, and lingering wounds from the militancy years. On one hand, many in Punjab continue to be sympathetic to Rajaona’s plight. At the same time, there are also influential figures, including members of Beant Singh’s family, who do not want him to be treated with mercy.

In December 2019, Congress MP Ravneet Singh Bittu, the grandson of Beant Singh, questioned the MHA’s decision to pardon Rajaona. Home Minister Amit Shah, however, promptly clarified that no such pardon had been granted.

Punjab’s militancy years

From the late 1970s onwards, a movement for a sovereign Sikh state started to intensify in Punjab. By this time, the demands made in the 1973 Anandpur Sahib Resolution for greater provincial autonomy, were being construed as a call for an independent Khalistan by Sikh nationalists as well as the Indian state.

Under the leadership of a young Sikh preacher named Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, Sikh nationalist politics became increasingly violent. Bhindranwale, who had settled in the Golden Temple in Amritsar, was by the early 1980s openly calling for violence against Hindus and government officials. Political murders and kidnappings became commonplace.

In 1984, the Indira Gandhi government took the fateful decision to storm the Golden Temple and flush Bhinderwale out. The operation was successful in its objectives — Bhindranwale and his armed supporters were killed — it turned out to be much more violent than previously anticipated: some estimates posit that more than 3,000 innocents were killed during the operation.

Operation Bluestar was a pivotal moment in the history of Punjab — and India. The Army’s “descecration” of the holy Sikh shrine was a grave insult to the proud community. And while Bhinderwale was dead, the Bluestar galvanised the demand for Khalistan and led to more than a decade of violence whose wounds continue to fester till date.

On October 31, 1984, Indira was assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards; this was followed by brutal anti-Sikh communal violence in which, even according to conservative estimates, more than 8,000 people lost their lives. A year later, Canada-based Khalistani militants belonging to the extremist Babbar Khalsa group blew up Air India Flight 182 to avenge Bhindranwale. All 329 people onboard were killed.

But it was the state of Punjab, which was under President’s rule for long stretches between 1980 and 1992, which witnessed the worst of the violence, becoming a hub of a long drawn out insurgency that lasted till 1995.

Veteran journalist Terry Milewski wrote in his book Blood for Blood: 50 years of the Global Khalistan Project (2021): “…the Punjab police recorded 21,469 deaths in twelve savage years of Khalistani violence from 1981 to 1993. Using a shorter period, The Tribune logged 17,582 deaths from 1988 to 1995 — that’s nearly seven deaths a day, every day, for seven years.”