Gurbachan Singh

Gurbachan Singh (10 December 1930 – 24 April 1980) was the third guru of the Sant Nirankari sect, considered to be heterodox by mainstream Sikhs. He was declared Satguru by his father and predecessor Baba Avtar Singh in 1962.

Gurbachan Singh was born to Avtar Singh and his wife Budhwanti. He completed his middle school education in Peshawar, and then matriculated from the Khalsa School in Rawalpindi. He had to abandon his higher studies due to the violence during the partition of India in 1947. He married Kulwant Kaur, the daughter of Bhai Manna Singh, 22 April 1947.

In 1947, the Singh family migrated from the present-day Pakistan to present-day India. Gurbachan Singh established an auto parts business, first in Jalandhar and then in Delhi. Later, he started taking interest in the congregations of his father.

Gurbachan Singh was declared as the Satguru ("True Master") by his father on 3 December 1962 at Paharganj in Delhi. At the two conferences of the mission in Mussoorie (1965 and 1973), he made important changes to the organisation and established a code of conduct.

In 1978, the Nirankari mission from Delhi and other parts of the Indian sub-continent gathered a congregation at Amritsar. A few orthodox Sikhs of Akhand Kirtani Jatha and Damdami Taksal marched from the Darbar Sahib to protest the Nirankari congregation, whom they considered heterodox. In the resulting violence, 15 individuals including thirteen Khalsa Sikhs and two Sant Nirankaris were killed. The Jatha leader Bhai Fauja Singh was one among the killed.

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