Darshan Singh Pheruman was an Akali leader who had spent a total of about seventeen years in prison across the Gurdwara Reform Movement, the freedom movement and the Punjabi Suba agitation.
In August 1969 he began a fast demanding the transfer of Chandigarh and the Punjabi-speaking areas to Punjab, as had been announced and not carried out.
He fasted for seventy-four days and died on 27 October 1969. He did not break it.
Sant Fateh Singh had undertaken fasts on the same demands and had broken them, and the contrast is the reason Pheruman is remembered as he is in Punjab.
Chandigarh has still not been transferred, fifty-six years later.
A man starved himself to death over an administrative decision that had already been announced, and the decision has still not been implemented.
He had been a member of the Punjab Assembly and of the Lok Sabha and had led Akali agitations since the 1920s. He was seventy-four when he began the fast.
The state did not force feed him and the central government did not concede. He was moved to hospital in the final weeks and died there.
A memorial stands at his village and the anniversary is observed each October. The demand he died for remains the central unresolved item in Punjab's relationship with the centre.