The Politics of 
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Once Sardar Partap Singh Kairon had been able to marginalise his political opponents effectively he discovered that the greatest challenge to his public life would come from the accusations against his family. Kairon’s political opponents had begun to force on the public quite an unflattering picture of the family. As we saw in the previous chapter, the attacks began soon after Kairon was elected to the office of chief minister. Many newspapers carried all sorts of salacious news about the wrong doings of various family members. A particular target was Sardar Partap Singh’s elder son, Surinder. Most of the accusations were in the form of mere insinuations, made mostly in public speeches or in the Vidhan Sabha. Mr. Virendra’s speech in the Punjab Legislative Council on 16th February, was typical. In the course of the discussion on the Governor’s address, Virendra accused the state administration of corruption and nepotism and said that nothing tangible could be achieved in rooting out these evils unless action was taken against the top men in the bureaucracy. He went on to inform the house that smuggling was rampant across the Punjab border and accused ‘influential’ persons of backing this anti-national racket. Many from the opposition then insisted on an enquiry into the alleged accumulation of wealth by ministers and their relatives during the past four years.
Such charges would then be reported in the newspapers widely and tend to gain a life of their own. The frequent insinuations, each feeding on the others, seemed to suggest that there was some truth in the accusations against the Kairon family. It has always been difficult to ward off insinuations. Then, Sardar Partap Singh Kairon decided to escalate matters. The chief minister challenged the accusers formally. On July 22nd, 1957, a press release was issued on his behalf asking those who were making such accusations to come forth with details or face consequences.
The only person who rose to the challenge was Harbhajan Singh, the Chairman of the Punjab Praja Socialist Party. For long the PSP had hoped, as the reports about their annual meetings would suggest, to ‘finish off’ Kairon. Political rivalry and Kairon’s unbending attitude towards his rivals seemed to be the only visible reasons for the strong hatred against Kairon that Harbhajan Singh harboured. Harbhajan Singh now made public his opinion that it was Surinder Kairon from the Kairon family who was in league with smugglers. Surinder (b. 1930) was currently a professor of political science at Ludhiana.
Harbhajan Singh’s press statement was quite explicit in naming Surinder Singh Kairon. “As one of those who have been naming that son of the minister as one of the leaders of the smugglers… I hereby name … Surinder Singh Kairon son of S. Partap Singh Kairon, Chief Minister”, Harbhajan Singh’s statement read. “And I do so determined to face consequences of the charge being openly levied by me. I further allege that the son of our Chief Minister is not only a leader of smugglers but is responsible for a large number of crimes being committed in the Punjab. But because the culprit happens to be Chief Minister’s son the cases are always shelved up.”
The charges by Harbhajan Singh could not have been clearer. Newspapers, fed on stories being constantly released by Kairon’s political opponents, had a field day. The Blitz, a left wing weekly, made much of it. Other newspapers quickly began to repeat the charges and add their own bits of salacious details, suggesting that the smuggling racket run by Surinder had been busted with the arrest of his henchmen by the Amritsar police.
The only small detail worthy of note at this distance removed is that everyone was eagerly repeating the charges, quoting each other, without providing any further detail. There were stories galore, of phone calls having been made to Pakistan, of people having been murdered by or at the behest of Surinder.
Eager to prove that there was nothing to hide, Sardar Partap Singh Kairon had all the charges investigated by the police.
The police repeatedly came to the conclusion that there was no substance to the charges, they were completely false. But that would not stop the spreading stories. For, somehow, it was widely believed in India of those times, that Sardar Partap Singh Kairon’s family was hand in glove with all sorts of wrong doers and that he would have been removed from his post had it not been for the particular support coming from Jawaharlal Nehru himself. Even S. Gopal said so in his biography of Nehru. Gopal’s words needed to be taken with some seriousness considering that he was one of the most respected of historians of India, close to the Nehru family, employed by the Ministry of External Affairs and the son of Dr. Radhakrishnan, the Vice President of India in the late 50s who later became the President of India.
Harbhajan Singh was so sure of the charges that he was making against Surinder Kairon that he went on to create an open challenge. If nothing else, the fact that he was putting himself at stake, Harbhajan Singh must have thought, would convince people of the correctness of the charges. “If the Punjab Government accepts this challenge”, he would write in his press statement, “it should (appoint) an independent committee of impartial judges from outside the Punjab and then let us see who has to face the consequences. If the Punjab Government dare not do so, I would not mind serving a term in jail for having had the courage to come out with the truth. May I bring it to the notice of Punjab government that Chief Minister’s son is being discussed in almost every Punjabi house, but people are afraid of talking about him in public lest they be punished for that”.
As the accusations acquired a life of their own, Surinder Kairon decided to challenge the accuser in court by filing a criminal defamation case. He filed a defamation case in the court of the magistrate at Tarn Taran. Harbhajan Singh responded by insisting that the case would be unduly influenced by the Kairon family and requested for a transfer of the case to Delhi. The Supreme Court ordered a transfer of the case to Delhi.
In Delhi, the Additional Sessions Judge, P D Sharma heard out the details, looked at all the evidence produced and concluded that Harbhajan Singh was being economical with the truth in describing Surinder Kairon as a leader of a gang of smugglers or even as someone close to the smugglers. Harbhajan Singh had summoned the who’s who of the government to testify in his defence: a total of 350 persons. The judge allowed 35, in the end Harbhajan managed to get only 20 to testify in his favour. Effectively Harbhajan Singh wanted the entire top leadership of the Congress to attend court and testify in his favour. The judge concluded that Harbhajan’s performance in court showed that he was more of a sensation monger than a devotee of truth and that he made wild accusations for which he had no basis. Considering all circumstances, the judge, on the 27th of August 1959, ordered a year in jail for Harbhajan Singh. It was already two years since the case had been originally filed. Lasting harm had been done to the image of the chief minister. So much so that the normally judicious S. Gopal, an eminent historian, son of the Vice President of India S Radhakrishnan, in his biography of Nehru could make the bland statement that Kairon’s sons in Punjab
With matters reaching a conclusion that he had not hoped for, Harbhajan Singh approached the with a request that the decision of the lower court be overturned. The High Court observed that even though Harbhajan Singh had produced a humungous mass of evidence before the court, none of it had any bearing on the matter of proving that Surinder Kairon was a leader of smugglers or was involved in any of the activities of which he was being charged.
Harbhajan now approached the Supreme Court and argued that he should be spared the sentence since the charges that he had been making were made in good faith, with the objective of preserving the integrity of public life, that many more had been making a similar charge against Surinder Kairon but that he, Harbhajan alone, had been ‘reckless’ enough to name Surinder. The Supreme Court took note of the drama that Harbhajan had been creating to tarnish the image of Sardar Partap Singh Kairon and his family but then accepted his plea that whatever he was saying was done in good faith. The basis for good faith, the Court said, lay in the fact that there was ample evidence on record to show that Surinder Kairon did use his influence over government servants, time and again, to expedite things in favour of certain people or to promote certain people, even though he had no official standing in this regard. The Supreme Court’s observations had failed to exonerate Surinder Kairon entirely. That would give hope to Kairon’s detractors that they still had a weapon to be used to harm the chief minister.
Pic. shows Rajagopalachari, Vallabh Bhai Patel, S. Partap Singh Kairon, S. Sohan Singh Josh, Sant Nidhan Singh Alam.
