How Khalistani terror pushed Punjab Police to brutal retaliation after over 1800 personnel were killed
· OpIndia
At 12:12 pm on 10th January 1990, a powerful explosion tore through the office of Commandant Gobind Ram at the headquarters of the 75th Battalion of the Punjab Armed Police in Jalandhar.
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The bomb had not exploded at an isolated checkpoint or beside a police vehicle passing through a vulnerable village road. It had been planted inside a heavily guarded police establishment, close enough to the commandant to kill him at his desk.
Three personnel working alongside him were also killed. Sub-Inspector Prem Kumar, Head Constable Chhotu Ram and Constable Madan Lal. At least four others were seriously wounded, and a substantial part of the office building was destroyed.
Investigators examined whether the explosive had been concealed inside an object and whether it had been detonated remotely or through a timer. However, the immediate significance of the attack went beyond the method used.
The terrorists had demonstrated that they could reach the commandant of a Punjab Armed Police battalion inside his headquarters. After that, no police station, office, barrack or guarded compound could automatically be considered secure.
The bombing did not transform Punjab Police by itself. The force had already spent years watching officers being assassinated outside religious places, attacked near their homes, ambushed during patrols and killed while acting on intelligence. The attack inside Gobind Ram’s office was another step towards an institutional breaking point.
The brutality later associated with Punjab’s counterterrorism campaign did not emerge in a vacuum. It developed within a force whose personnel were being killed at work, on leave and inside their homes. Their parents, spouses and children were increasingly being dragged into the conflict.
Understanding that progression is essential to understanding what happened during the insurgency. It does not absolve unlawful killings, torture, disappearances or fake encounters. It does, however, explain why sections of the police had stopped viewing the insurgency as a conventional law-and-order challenge by the beginning of the 1990s. For many within the force, it had become a struggle for institutional and personal survival.
A DIG was murdered after offering prayers
On 25th April 1983, Deputy Inspector General of Police for the Jalandhar Range Avtar Singh Atwal visited the Golden Temple in Amritsar. He was in plain clothes and had gone to offer prayers.
At around 11:10 am, as the 40-year-old officer stepped out of the complex through the entrance facing Ghanta Ghar, an armed terrorist opened fire. Atwal died on the spot. A young boy was also fatally wounded, while another person suffered serious injuries.
In a statement in Parliament, then Union Home Minister PC Sethi said the attacker had reportedly emerged from inside the Darbar Sahib complex, fired at Atwal and escaped back inside. Sethi stated that the state authorities’ request for the terrorist to be handed over was not accepted. The investigation was subsequently transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation.
Atwal was off duty when he was attacked. He was neither commanding an armed operation nor leading a police convoy. He had just offered prayers at Sikhism’s holiest shrine.
He was also a Sikh officer, a fact that exposed the falsehood at the heart of Khalistani terrorism. The terrorists did not represent Sikhs as a whole. They were prepared to kill Sikh officers, politicians, journalists and civilians who opposed their methods or stood between them and their separatist objective.
According to media reports, Atwal’s body remained near the entrance for more than two hours because fear had paralysed those present. His bodyguards reportedly fled, as did policemen positioned nearby. KPS Gill later wrote that more than 100 policemen were present in the vicinity, many of them armed, but nobody intervened when the attack occurred.
It was more than the murder of one officer. The killing showed that terrorists could assassinate a senior police official in full public view and remain confident that the state machinery would hesitate to respond.
Contemporary media reports described the murder as a serious blow to police morale and an exposure of the government’s inability to confront armed extremists operating from within the religious complex. Atwal had reportedly been warned that he was under threat. He nevertheless maintained that, as a Sikh, he had every right to visit the Golden Temple and offer prayers.
For police personnel across Punjab, the lesson was devastating. A senior officer had followed the law, entered the shrine without conducting a police operation and returned unarmed from prayer. He had still been killed, while those responsible escaped into a space the government appeared reluctant to enter.
The force had seen one of its most senior Sikh officers murdered. It had also seen the limits of the state’s response.
Headquarters could be breached and uniforms copied
Three years later, terrorists entered another supposedly secure police establishment. On 3rd October 1986, armed terrorists wearing police uniforms arrived in a jeep at the Punjab Armed Police headquarters in Jalandhar. They passed through the main gate and opened fire on Punjab Police chief Julio Ribeiro and his wife while they were walking near the officers’ mess.
A paramilitary guard was killed. Ribeiro’s wife and several police personnel were wounded. Ribeiro survived with minor injuries after dropping to the ground as the firing began.
Ribeiro was the intended target, but the guard paid the price of standing beside a senior officer whose assassination would have delivered a major psychological victory to the Khalistani terrorists. Like many guards and drivers killed during the insurgency, his death became a subordinate detail in accounts centred on the prominent officer who survived.
The use of police uniforms made the attack particularly damaging. The appearance of authority had itself been weaponised. A jeep and khaki uniforms had enabled armed terrorists to approach the centre of Punjab’s police establishment before opening fire.
Walls and sentries were no longer sufficient. Terrorists could study police routines, imitate police personnel and enter a compound under the protection of the uniform they intended to attack.
Officers were followed to their homes
By January 1987, even senior officers’ residences had become hunting grounds. On 10th January, Inspector General of Prisons Trilok Chand Katoch was returning to his Chandigarh home after visiting a market when two terrorists confronted him. Katoch attempted to escape but was shot. The attackers fled on a scooter. Media reports described the 57-year-old as the highest-ranking police official killed by terrorists until that point.
Katoch’s murder extended the threat beyond offices and official movements. A policeman did not become a private citizen after leaving his workplace. His residence, local market, route home and family routine could all be studied. The distinction between duty and personal life was disappearing.
The same pattern later reached constables who had neither Katoch’s rank nor the security ordinarily attached to a senior officer. Chandigarh Police records the case of Constable Shamsher Singh, who returned home at around 11 pm on 25th January 1991 after completing duty. Armed terrorists wearing khaki clothes entered the house, threatened his family and took him away.
They then went to the nearby home of his cousin, Punjab Police Constable Mohan Singh, and abducted him as well. Their arms were tied together. Gunshots were heard later, and Shamsher Singh was found dead the following morning. Chandigarh Police linked the abductors to the Khalistan Liberation Force.
Shamsher Singh was not killed in an encounter or while guarding a police post. He was taken from his home after finishing his duty. By then, wearing the uniform could endanger a policeman even after he had removed it.
The figure of 1,784 represents a force under prolonged attack
Punjab Police has repeatedly stated that 1,784 of its officers and personnel lost their lives during the terrorism period. In 2016, then Punjab DGP Suresh Arora said that 1,784 officers and officials had died while the force was fighting terrorism in the state.
The same year, Punjab Police began preparing individual citations for the dead because adequate written accounts of their stories did not exist. Teachers from Police DAV schools were given FIRs and other records to document personnel across ranks, from DIGs to Special Police Officers.
These were not casualties from one disastrous operation or a single particularly violent year. The toll accumulated through assassinations, bombings, patrol ambushes, raids, encounters, attacks on police facilities and murders committed while personnel were travelling or staying at home.
The dead included senior commanders whose assassinations reached national newspapers. They also included ASIs, head constables, constables, drivers, guards, Punjab Home Guards and locally recruited Special Police Officers whose stories rarely moved beyond an FIR or district memorial page.
The policemen who entered the doors first
On 17th July 1988, Inspector Jagjit Singh of Chandigarh Police led a raid at a house in Sector 45 after receiving information that armed terrorists were sheltering there.
According to the official Chandigarh Police memorial, Jagjit Singh broke open the door and entered the building. Three terrorists were killed in the encounter, but the inspector suffered fatal gunshot injuries. The official record notes that he was posthumously awarded the President’s Police Medal for Gallantry.
Intelligence-led raids were among the most dangerous assignments undertaken by local police. Information could be incomplete. The number of terrorists inside might be unknown. Officers entering a house had no certainty about its layout, escape routes, weapons or explosives. The first policeman through the door was often exposed before those behind him could respond.
Jagjit Singh’s case represents the operational risk borne by station-level officers acting on local information. Their deaths did not always result from elaborate assassination conspiracies. A routine raid could become a close-range gun battle within seconds.
ASI Amarjit Singh faced a different but equally routine danger. On 8th December 1989, he was patrolling near Kajheri village when two terrorists riding a motorcycle ambushed him. Chandigarh Police records state that Amarjit Singh was pursued and attacked while travelling on a scooter during patrol duty.
Such personnel spent their shifts on roads, village tracks and at exposed police posts. They did not have fortified offices or large escorts. Their work required predictable movement through areas where an attacker could watch, wait and disappear. For lower-ranking policemen, everyday duty created repeated opportunities for assassination.
Bombs entered offices and travelled beneath convoys
The January 1990 bombing that killed Gobind Ram carried another layer of fear. His son had reportedly been assassinated only months earlier.
Media reports described the commandant as a controversial officer accused of ruthless methods, including serious abuse of detainees and relatives of suspected terrorists. Those accusations form part of the record and cannot be erased. They also do not diminish what the bombing revealed about the terrorists’ ability to penetrate a police institution and kill everyone standing near their chosen target.
The accused apprehended in connection with the case were later acquitted. It therefore remains unclear who was responsible for the attack on Gobind Ram.
Barely a month later, another bomb reportedly exploded inside a police establishment. Inspector Harcharan Singh Soori and ASI Ram Moorti were killed on 11th February 1990 in an explosion at the Police Training College in Phillaur. Two other personnel were reportedly wounded. Several Khalistani organisations were said to have jointly claimed responsibility days later.
The location was significant. A police training college was supposed to prepare and protect the personnel through whom the force would replenish itself. Killing officers inside such an institution demonstrated that even training establishments and guarded rooms could be reached.
On 24th November 1990, SP Operations Harjit Singh was travelling near his home in Tarn Taran when an explosive placed beneath or along the route of his vehicle detonated. Harjit Singh and three bodyguards were killed. The driver was seriously wounded. Police attributed the bombing to the Bhindranwale Tiger Force (BTF), which had reportedly threatened the SP a month earlier.
A later Supreme Court judgment referred to the FIR registered on 24th November 1990. It was based on the statement of Head Constable Hardev Singh, who had been posted as Harjit Singh’s gunman. The FIR recorded that the jeep carrying the SP and other police personnel was blown up, killing Harjit Singh and several officers accompanying him.
The attack showed why ordinary road travel had become terrifying. Terrorists did not need to confront an officer directly. They could study his route, plant an explosive and wait for the convoy to arrive. Harjit Singh received the headline. His three bodyguards largely disappeared into the phrase “and others”.
Drivers and guards died in somebody else’s assassination story
The guard killed beside Ribeiro was remembered chiefly as the man who died during an attack on Ribeiro. Harjit Singh’s bodyguards became supporting casualties in the account of an SP’s assassination. Drivers killed or injured in convoy bombings were frequently mentioned only after the senior officer’s name.
ASI Lalu Ram and ASI Amin Chand provide a rare case in which official memorial records preserve the roles of the men accompanying a senior officer. On 29th August 1991, an explosive booby trap targeted the vehicle of Chandigarh SSP Sumedh Singh Saini. Lalu Ram was serving as the SSP’s personal security officer, while Amin Chand was his driver.
The official account states that the convoy was travelling from police headquarters towards the SSP’s residence for lunch when a remote-controlled device containing approximately five kilograms of RDX exploded inside a parked Ambassador car.
Lalu Ram and Amin Chand were killed. Saini suffered minor injuries, while several others were wounded. Both ASIs occupied the positions most exposed during an attack on a protected vehicle. The driver had to remain with the car. The security officer had to remain close to the principal target.
Their deaths were not less consequential because another officer had been the intended victim. Their families did not lose “supporting personnel”. They lost Lalu Ram and Amin Chand.
District memorial pages preserve those national memory forgot
The Barnala Police memorial shows how much of the force’s loss survives only through names, dates, villages and FIR references.
Havaldar Bhupinder Singh was killed on 5th March 1991 while fighting terrorists at Sudhar. The memorial connects his death to a case registered at Police Station Sudhar. Twelve days later, on 17th March, Sepoy Karnail Singh was killed during an operation at Maur. A case was registered at Police Station Sehna.
Sepoy Baldev Singh, who had joined the force in November 1989, was killed at Rureke Kalan on 22nd March 1992. He was around 22 years old. The official memorial states that a case was registered at Police Station Tapa.
ASI Jarnail Singh was killed while fighting terrorists at village Phool on 29th April 1992. The memorial identifies his parents as Nihal Kaur and Veer Singh and refers to an FIR registered at Police Station Phool.
Constable Gurjit Singh was killed at Bakhtgarh on 9th August 1992. The memorial names his mother as Har Kaur and his father as Khion Singh. The corresponding case was registered at Police Station Sehna.
Jarnail Singh had served since 1964. Baldev Singh had been in uniform for less than three years. Gurjit Singh had joined in 1971. They belonged to different generations, but each died in district-level operations far removed from the national attention given to a DIG or SP.
Special Police Officers carried the danger into their villages
Special Police Officers were recruited locally to assist the regular force in areas affected by terrorism. Their familiarity with local families, village routes and social networks made them useful for guarding, intelligence gathering and identifying unfamiliar movement.
That local knowledge also made them vulnerable. Unlike senior officers, many SPOs lived close to the people against whom they were expected to provide information. Their homes, relatives and daily routines were known. They had limited institutional protection and could not disappear into a distant cantonment after completing duty.
The Barnala memorial records several such deaths. SPO Mukhtiar Singh and SPO Rajwinder Singh were killed on 26th February 1992 during an operation at Guram. Other local personnel, including SPOs and Punjab Home Guards, appear across the memorial with little more than dates, locations and FIR references.
Special Police Officer Balwant Singh was killed during an encounter at Bhadaur on 21st May 1995. His death came after the insurgency’s most violent phase had passed, showing that local police personnel continued to die even as the state moved towards normalcy.
Local recruitment strengthened police presence in the villages. It also brought the conflict to the homes of men who had few resources to shield their families.
When terrorists began killing police families, the conflict changed
The most consequential shift came when terrorists stopped limiting themselves even notionally to armed personnel. They began threatening policemen’s parents, wives, children and siblings. The objective was not merely revenge. It was to make the force collapse from within.
KPS Gill later wrote that policemen, Home Guards and SPOs were ordered to resign or face death along with their families. According to his figures, 506 policemen were killed in 1990, most while at home on leave. He stated that 19 members of police families were killed that year and 134 in 1991.
These numbers come from Gill’s account and should be treated as his institutional record rather than an independently audited dataset. According to an India Today report, Khalistani terrorists killed 26 relatives of policemen on 2nd October 1991 alone. Families began leaving villages for cities. Some published notices in Punjabi newspapers seeking forgiveness from terrorist organisations and pleading that their relatives in uniform had committed no wrongdoing.
Those notices reveal the emotional turning point more clearly than any official statement. The families were not defending police operations. They were begging armed organisations not to punish parents, wives and children for the profession of one household member.
Police service no longer endangered only the person drawing a salary. A constable’s posting could determine whether his father remained safe in the village. An SPO’s cooperation could place his siblings at risk. An officer’s participation in a raid could be answered with an attack on somebody who had never entered a police station except to meet him.
The force was being told that it could neither work nor withdraw safely. Resigning did not necessarily erase what a policeman knew. Abandoning a posting did not remove his family’s connection to the state. Leaving the village meant uprooting an entire household, often without secure accommodation elsewhere.
The pressure was intended to break morale, obstruct intelligence gathering and make personnel refuse dangerous assignments. It also changed the psychology of the force. A policeman facing an armed terrorist during duty could understand the encounter as an occupational risk. A policeman whose relatives had become targets would see the conflict differently. Fear became personal and could rapidly turn into vengeance.
That did not make vengeance lawful. It did mean that the emotional distance required for restrained policing was collapsing.
Punjab Police was pushed from fear towards retaliation
The police did not move from ordinary law enforcement to aggressive counterterrorism in a single moment. The transition was built through accumulated shocks.
Atwal was murdered after offering prayers, while the state appeared unable to retrieve his killer. Terrorists wearing police uniforms entered the PAP headquarters and nearly assassinated Ribeiro. Katoch was followed to his home. Gobind Ram was bombed inside his office. Jagjit Singh died entering a terrorist hideout. Amarjit Singh was ambushed on patrol. Harjit Singh and his guards were blown up on a road. Shamsher Singh was abducted after duty. Lalu Ram and Amin Chand died beside the officer they were protecting. Then the terrorists went after police families.
Taken individually, each incident was an assassination, bombing, abduction or encounter. Taken together, they formed a campaign intended to convince the force that no location and no relationship remained outside the conflict.
Headquarters were penetrated. Uniforms were imitated. Homes were entered. Officers on leave were killed. Relatives were threatened. Guards and drivers were treated as expendable extensions of senior targets. By the early 1990s, sections of Punjab Police began retaliating with a ferocity that would later become inseparable from accounts of the insurgency.
Fear hardened into institutional rage. Colleagues were no longer merely colleagues. They were men whose funerals officers had attended. Suspects were not always seen as defendants to be processed through a slow legal system. They were increasingly viewed as participants in a network capable of killing an investigating officer or his family before a trial could begin. This was the dangerous emotional turning point.
A police force that believes the legal process cannot protect its personnel may begin treating procedure as an obstacle. A force that sees its families being killed may begin confusing punishment with prevention. Counterterrorism can then cross into retaliation, and retaliation can become collective or indiscriminate.
Sikh policemen disproved the terrorists’ claim to represent Sikhs
The dead also expose attempts to frame Punjab’s insurgency as a simple conflict between Hindus and Sikhs.
Avtar Singh Atwal was Sikh. Jagjit Singh, Amarjit Singh, Shamsher Singh, Harjit Singh, Jarnail Singh, Gurjit Singh, Karnail Singh, Bhupinder Singh and numerous SPOs commemorated on district police pages carried Sikh names and came from Punjab’s villages.
They were targeted because they wore the uniform of the Indian state, resisted separatist violence, participated in police operations or helped the authorities gather local intelligence. Their service weakened the Khalistani claim that the separatist campaign spoke for the Sikh community. Consequently, Sikh police personnel were not treated as members of a community to be protected. They were treated as obstacles to be eliminated.
Khalistani terrorists killed Hindus, but they also killed Sikhs who rejected their authority. The divide was not between Hindus and Sikhs. It was between armed separatist organisations seeking to impose their command through violence and those, including large numbers of Sikhs, who refused to submit.
Explanation cannot become absolution
The scale and nature of the campaign against Punjab Police help explain why the force hardened. They cannot become a blanket defence for everything done in the name of defeating terrorism. There have been reports of serious human rights violations that require separate examination.
Explaining the pressure that produced a brutal police response is not the same as declaring that response legal or morally justified. Terrorism cannot legitimise the killing of an innocent person by the state. Nor can police excesses erase the deliberate campaign of assassinations, bombings, abductions and attacks on families that preceded and accompanied them. Both truths must be documented.
The police force that eventually crushed the insurgency was not operating from a position of emotional neutrality. It had been wounded repeatedly and personally. Ignoring that history produces an incomplete account of why Punjab’s counterterrorism campaign became so severe.
For years, the uniform exposed not only the policeman wearing it, but also his guards, driver, home and family. Eventually, a force that had been hunted in all those places began hunting back.