Avtar Singh Sandhu, who wrote as Pash, was born at Talwandi Salem in Jalandhar district in 1950 and was part of the Naxalite movement in Punjab. He was jailed for two years on a murder charge and acquitted.
His four collections, beginning with Loh Katha in 1970, made him the most quoted political poet in Punjabi. Sabh ton khatarnak, the most dangerous thing, is the death of our dreams, is quoted in demonstrations across India in several languages.
He worked as a farmer and edited small magazines. He spent time in the United States in the 1980s organising against Khalistani politics among Punjabis abroad, and wrote against religious politics of every kind.
He was shot dead at his village on 23 March 1988, the anniversary of Bhagat Singh's hanging, by militants. He was thirty-seven.
He was killed by people who claimed to be fighting for Punjab, for writing in Punjabi about what Punjab was becoming.
In 1970, at about twenty, he published his first collection, was jailed under the Naxalite prosecutions, and wrote through and after it.
His prose, the letters and diaries published after his death, is as good as the verse and is almost unread. It is the clearest first person account of what the Punjab left thought it was doing in those years.
He was shot dead at his village in 1988 at thirty-seven. He had been living in the United States and had come back for a visit.