Sant Fateh Singh

Fateh Singh was born in Badiala village in Bathinda district and spent his early life as a preacher and a builder of schools and gurdwaras among the Sikh settlers of Ganganagar, in the Rajasthan desert.

In 1960 he took over the leadership of the campaign for a Punjabi-speaking state from Master Tara Singh. He argued for it as a matter of language, not religion, and fasted for it in 1960 and 1961. In 1965 he vowed to burn himself alive unless the demand was met, and called the protest off when war broke out with Pakistan. A year later the Punjab Reorganisation Act made the Punjabi Suba real: on 1 November 1966 the old East Punjab was divided into Punjab, Haryana and the hill districts that went to Himachal Pradesh.

He spent his last years fighting to have Chandigarh, left as a shared capital, handed to Punjab. He died in Amritsar in 1972.