CHANDIGARH, India -- Sikh militants attacked a car carrying a controversial Sikh leader Monday, wounding him and another man and killing two others in Punjab state in northern India, police said.
Gurcharan Singh Tohra, president of the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee -- the Sikh religious organization responsible for the care of Sikh temples -- is on a hit list of Sikh militants and was the likely target of the attack, police said.
The militants apparently believe that Tohra was involved in former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's June 1984 decision to order troops to enter the Golden Temple in Amritsar to flush out armed zealots using the temple as a base for their separatist drive in Punjab.
The assault, dubbed 'Operation Blue Star,' lasted three days and involved thousands of soldiers. It resulted in the deaths of more than 600 people, most of them Sikhs. Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards, who were angered by the attack, on Oct. 31, 1984.
Police said Singh and three companions were en route from Ludhiana to Patiala when their car was ambushed by militants about 12:15 a.m. near the village of Pawa, 75 miles southwest of the Punjab state capital of Chandigarh.
About a half-dozen armed militants riding in a jeep pulled alongside Tohra's vehicle and opened fire, killing the driver, Sardul Singh, police said.
Tohra, his bodyguard, Chand Khan, and H.S. Rajla, a former member of the Punjab legislative assembly, were injured and later taken to a hospital in Ludhiana where Rajla succumbed to his injuries, police said.
They said an escort car traveling with Tohra chased the gunmen's vehicle, but the assassins managed to escape.
Sikh extremists since 1983 have been waging a bloody campaign to establish an independent theocratic state of 'Khalistan,' or 'Land of the Pure.'
More than 7,000 people have died in violence related to the Sikh independence drive. Theextremists claim India's 16 million Sikhs need a separate nation to escape discrimination and repression by the overwhelmingly Hindu central government.
India has accused arch-rival Pakistan of encouraging the separatist movements in both Punjab and Kashmir. Islamabad has denied the claim.
