Assassinations Decimating Candidates in Tense Punjab : India: Many of the slayings are blamed on Sikh secessionists trying to enforce a boycott of the elections.

Nearly five years before Rajiv Gandhi was killed May 21 by a suicide bomber in south India, a young terrorist named Karamjit Singh had the same idea. Crouched in the bushes near the New Delhi riverfront cremation shrine to India’s independence leader, Mohandas K. Gandhi, a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun by his side, Singh waited quietly that day for his victim to arrive.

It was 6:55 a.m. on Oct. 2, 1986, when then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi walked toward the memorial to pay birthday homage to the Mahatma, a near-saint who had lived and died for the cause of an independent, nonviolent India.

At that moment, Singh, a young Sikh fanatic from the war-torn Indian state of Punjab--a man who, like thousands of other Sikhs, had sworn to avenge Gandhi’s assault on Sikhism’s holiest shrine earlier that year--smiled and pulled the trigger.

The shotgun blast missed Gandhi, hitting a flowerpot nearby. Singh was quickly arrested and later tried and jailed for life.

But now, the 30-year-old Singh--confessed terrorist, secessionist and would-be assassin--is a candidate for the state legislature in Punjab.

In what is quickly becoming the most violent exercise in the history of electoral democracy, Karamjit Singh is just one of dozens of murderers, terrorists, hijackers, extortionists, smugglers and kidnapers who are campaigning from jail cells or in the company of armed gangs for seats in the Punjab State Assembly in voting scheduled for June 22.

In what has become an oddity of Punjabi politics, several activists who were elected to Parliament in 1989 while in prison were pardoned by the government to allow them to serve as lawmakers, although it has never become official policy. Today, Singh and other imprisoned candidates are counting on the same precedent of release after victory in the current legislative elections.

For many elsewhere in India, where more than 200 people have been killed during the crucial national and state elections that began weeks ago, Punjab has been little more than a sideshow to India’s bloodiest election.

In the 2 1/2 weeks since Gandhi’s assassination at a campaign rally focused world attention on this crisis in democracy, the death toll from political murders in Punjab has soared.

Nearly 20 candidates have been executed gangland-style in Punjab in the past eight days alone, forcing cancellation of the balloting in one-fifth of the state’s 118 constituencies. So violent is the campaign here that authorities set the election dates for Punjab well after the rest of the nation so they could saturate the state with paramilitary forces.

Punjab is no stranger to violence. With a decade-long secessionist rebellion by Sikh militants, the state’s average monthly death tolls routinely run into the hundreds. But the election campaign here is emerging as a macabre showpiece of India’s continuing legacy of assassination and social deterioration in the wake of Gandhi’s death.

Most of the assassinations are part of a bullet-not-ballot campaign strategy by Sikh insurgents trying to enforce a boycott of the elections, which resume next week. Rebel leaders say the elections run counter to their struggle to secede from India and create an independent Sikh homeland in Punjab, India’s richest and most fertile state.

“The militants have decided that elections should not be held, so they are trying to stall the process just by killing the candidates,” said Surjit Singh Narang, a prominent Sikh political science professor at Amritsar’s Guru Nanak Dev University, which is named for the first of nine gurus who created Sikhism five centuries ago as a synthesis of Islam and Hinduism.

“But it’s a selective sort of process. They are killing only in places where the strongest candidates do not support the militants. So, if the elections are held, it is a unique situation, because the militants will come to power.”

Clearly, some of the assassinations are not insurgency-related. Rather, they are more reminiscent of the electoral killing elsewhere in the country.

“You must understand, they are all gun-wielding candidates, and some candidates have been killed just so the competition could have an easy race,” said Punjab’s veteran Communist leader, Satya Pal Dang, whose wife, Bimla, is continuing to campaign for an Amritsar seat amid massive security after her name reached the top of the Sikh hit list.

“So I think many more candidates will be killed, and by the time elections can be held on June 22, perhaps 50% of the seats will be countermanded.

“It will be a farce of an election. . . ,” he continued. “In the greater part of Punjab, the election will not be free and fair. The election will be, quite simply, at the point of the gun.”

It is the insurgents’ campaign of “boycott or death” that has contributed the majority of the corpses on the campaign trail. Even the top two Sikh leaders participating in the elections, who are all but certain to control the next state government, are openly committed to secession and the creation of an independent Sikh homeland called Khalistan, or Land of the Pure, in the strategic border state. Both men, for example, support such candidates as Gandhi’s would-be assassin, Karamjit Singh.

Simranjit Singh Mann, who campaigned from jail after years of police torture and interrogation to lead his Akali Dal Party to parliamentary victory from the state in 1989, has vowed during recent weeks of campaigning that he will work toward Khalistan if, as is likely, his party comes to power this month.

Mann has promised to throw open Punjab’s border with Pakistan, India’s traditional foe, and enter into trade agreements as an independent nation with Afghanistan and Iran.

“After we come to power, our trucks will no longer be confined to Calcutta and Bombay but will transport food grain and vegetables all the way to Karachi port (Pakistan), Kabul (Afghanistan) and Tehran,” he vowed to a campaign gathering of Sikh farmers in rural Punjab last week.

As for the police, politicians and bureaucrats who participated in raids on the Sikhs’ Golden Temple shrine in Amritsar--the first and deadliest, in June, 1984, led to the assassination that year of then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Rajiv’s mother, by two Sikh bodyguards--Mann has vowed that they “will be put on trial on the line of the Nuremberg trial.”

Mann’s most powerful opponent espouses secession even more vehemently.

“We want our own home. Our demands are the same as before,” Manjit Singh, who leads a splinter Akali group, told The Times in an interview in Amritsar last month. Manjit Singh, who lives just 100 yards from the Golden Temple, was wearing a .38-caliber pistol on his hip and a bandoleer of 18 silver bullets--deliberate props that emulate Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who launched and led the Sikh secessionist crusade until he was shot to death by the Indian army during the 1984 Golden Temple raid.

If elected, Manjit Singh said, “We’ll open the gates of the prisons, close the interrogation and torture centers. We’ll lift the siege of the Golden Temple, and police officers who have abused their power will be punished.”

Asked about the violence tearing at Punjab and about the symbols of death he wears, Manjit Singh smiled and replied: “Without arms, you are like a duck or a goat. In our religion, we worship arms.” And, as he interviewed one prospective candidate on the roof of his home that day, he was overheard instructing him, “From this day forward, you keep a sword on your hip.”

For the state’s police force, which has ruled virtually as judge, jury and executioner under emergency powers granted after the last state legislature was dissolved four years ago, there are mixed opinions on the elections. Several officers said the polls are needed to co-opt the militants by bringing them into the system. And, they added, the police rule has led to massive abuses that can be eliminated only by an elected government. Others, however, are reluctant to cede power to terrorists and other extremists.

“Many of the terrorists . . . are very ambitious,” said Sanjiv Gupta, senior police superintendent of Amritsar. “Power, I think is a great motivator . . . and Khalistan is really just a public stand. None of them share that view in private.”

Gupta shares the view that there are inherent dangers in bringing to power would-be assassins and hijackers for whom the lust for power has replaced idealism.

“The line dividing politician, criminal and terrorist is now very thin,” he said. “The common man wants to avoid trouble. Only those people who want to create trouble come forward. Everyone is looking for respectability.”

Still, analysts such as Prof. Narang, whose university is seen by many Indian intelligence agents as a breeding ground for the militants, insisted that the overwhelming majority of Sikhs do want to see the militants come to power in Punjab--particularly the rebel leaders who are violently enforcing the boycott call.

“The Sikhs have lost faith in the Akalis (political leaders such as Mann and Manjit Singh),” he said. “They feel that the militants’ course of action is more effective, and they respect them for the sacrifices they are continuing to make for the Sikh cause. So, if the militants ask for the boycott, they will support the boycott.”

Come election day, most respected analysts such as local journalist Hargirat Singh confirmed, “voter turnout will be very low.” And yet, he added, most Punjabis nonetheless are looking forward to the elections, despite the orgy of violence they have spawned.

“If only just to have some degree of relief from police rule, people do want these elections,” said Hargirat Singh, the Amritsar bureau chief of the United News of India, who, like most journalists operating in Punjab, has received several death threats both from the militants and from police intelligence agents.

“People, you see, feel that the militants ruling through the ballot is much less dangerous than them ruling through the bullet as they are now. It may not be democracy’s ideal, but it is all we have left right now.”