Baba Surat Singh Khalsa dedicated his entire life to the nation after June 1984 and fought a battle with the Indian government that can only be achieved by a special person in old age. His last struggle was related to the release of Sikhs who were spending their lives in jails for decades. Before him, Gurbaksh Singh Khalsa had also sacrificed his life for the nation but the Indian government did not release the Sikhs.
Baba Surat Singh started the “Release the Prisoners” movement with a hunger strike in January 2015. Within two months, the Morcha started receiving support from the Sikhs, and at that very moment, the Indian State took Baba Surat Singh into illegal custody and forcibly admitted him to the Dayanand Hospital in Ludhiana, where he was subjected to inhuman torture, having “food pipes” sewn into his nose and forehead and given liquid food and “high-strength” steroid medicines through them. This was done to keep him alive. He was confined to a single room in the hospital for about 8 years and forced to lie on a bed. During this time, he was kept under strict guard by the Indian Police for the entire time. No Sikh could meet him without prior permission from the police.
After 8 years, he ended his hunger strike after being given a written order by the Jathedar of the Akal Takht, Bhai Jagtar Singh Hawara, who was imprisoned in Delhi’s Tihar Jail. Despite this, the oppressive government did not release him from the hospital and he was kept under police guard. The government wanted to punish him severely for his struggle for the release of detained Sikhs and the government did this successfully. With the intervention of Sikh organizations, he was released from illegal detention in 2023, but the height of oppression is that even after his release from the hospital, he was kept under house arrest in his native village ‘Hasanpur’. After the hospital detention, he was also under house arrest for one and a half years.
Baba Surat Singh’s struggle to get the detained Sikhs released continued continuously. In June 2024, he came to America with his family. But by now it was too late. Baba Surat Singh could not digest any form of food. The oppressive government had given him various types of steroid medicines through doctors to keep him alive, which had now started having a fatal effect. His health deteriorated day by day and despite this, he continued to join the struggle for Khalistan. Finally, his body gave up completely. But the desire for the freedom of his nation always shone in his eyes. His dream was to die and be reborn and fight until independence in the national struggle. During this entire struggle, due to the torture done by the police and the steroid medicines given by the doctors of Dayanand Hospital, Baba Surat Singh Khalsa’s body became exhausted. But he always remained in the forefront of his mental state like a Sikh warrior. Finally, a warrior was determined to escape from this world while fighting.
After coming to America, he realized that the release of the detained Sikhs could not happen until Khalistan became independent, so he loudly declared ‘Khalistan Zindabad’. He said that Sikhs in India are slaves and the Indian state will not release Sikh detainees without table talk. Although he himself believed that ‘hunger strike’ could not be a part of the Sikh spirit and ideology, he also said that whatever he could do considering his age and means, he did it in a great way – “I could do this much, accept it!”
The essence of Baba Surat Singh Khalsa’s long struggle that lasted for 10 years is that he single-handedly defeated the ‘Indian State’, and the ‘Badal’, ‘Amarinder’ and ‘Bhagwant Mann’ puppet governments of Punjab with his struggle, showing that the time for peaceful struggles is over. The nation will always remember him for participating in the wars fought in various ways for the freedom of Khalistan. The next generations of Sikhs will continue to draw inspiration from his ideological approach. Let us take into account the struggle of Akal Purakh Baba Surat Singh Ji!
