Forty years ago to­day, Har­bans Singh Man­chanda, the Pres­i­dent of the Delhi Sikh Gur­d­wara Man­age­ment Com­mit­tee (DS­GMC), was fa­tally shot at the ITO round­about in New Delhi. Along­side him, four in­di­vid­u­als, in­clud­ing his dri­ver, DS­GMC Vice Pres­i­dent Jagdish Singh Lamba, As­sis­tant Sub-In­spec­tor Pri­tam Singh, and se­cu­rity guard Gur­cha­ran Singh, sus­tained se­ri­ous in­juries dur­ing the in­ci­dent. Re­minded to­day by the In­dian Ex­press in its col­umn, ‘Forty Years Ago’, The World Sikh News re­vis­its the case.

HAR­BANS SINGH MAN­CHANDA, rec­og­nized for his staunch sup­port of the Con­gress party, faced the ire of the Panth as he en­dorsed the ban on the All In­dia Sikh Stu­dents Fed­er­a­tion (AISSF) on March 19, 1984, and taunt­ingly asked Sant Jar­nail Singh Bhin­dran­wale to leave Dar­bar Sahib Am­rit­sar. Apart from this, he was ra­bidly against the Pan­thic voice and fol­lowed the dik­tats of the Con­gress Party detri­men­tal to the Sikh cause.

Ac­cord­ing to the then news­pa­per and mag­a­zine re­ports, par­tic­u­larly In­dia To­day, two mem­bers of the AISSF were in­volved in the at­tack at a traf­fic cross­ing near ITO. A year fol­low­ing the event, re­ports sur­faced of AISSF ac­tivist Virsa Singh, un­der po­lice cus­tody, con­fess­ing to the as­sas­si­na­tion along­side Gurinder Singh Bhola, Amar­jit Singh Chawla, and oth­ers. It was al­leged that Virsa Singh and Amar­jit Singh fired at Man­chanda from close range be­fore flee­ing in a ve­hi­cle, which was later dis­cov­ered aban­doned.

How­ever, a city court ac­quit­ted the ac­cused, Virsa Singh and Amar­jit Singh Chawla, in 2004, cit­ing in­suf­fi­cient ev­i­dence to es­tab­lish their guilt con­clu­sively.

This event re­mains a sig­nif­i­cant chap­ter in the his­tory of the Sikh com­mu­nity in Delhi, mark­ing a pe­riod of po­lit­i­cal ten­sion and vi­o­lence.