IFFCO chief Jakhar dies in freak gunfire

Times of India, 18 January 2011

ABOHAR: Former Lok Sabha speaker Balram Jakhar's son and IFFCO chairman Surinder accidentally shot himself in the head and died on Monday when he was cleaning his revolver at his farm. The incident took place in Maujgarh village, 12 km from Abohar in Ferozepur district, police said. 

Surinder, 58, was an apolitical person and directors elected him chairman of the cooperative unopposed for four terms. The gun went off accidentally and the bullet pierced his head, police said, quoting Sandeep, son of Sat Narayan, a relative of the deceased. Superintendent of police Varinder Singh affirmed that the death of Surinder was accidental. 

The farmers' cooperative chief was dead by the time he was wheeled into the civil hospital at Abohar, senior medical officer Romesh Verma said. The police registered a case under Section 174 of the Indian Penal Code. The body was handed over to the family after autopsy. 

Surinder had asked his manager and an aide to leave for the farm office while he finished some work, a source said. His younger brother, Sunil Jakhar, who was in Ferozepur to attend a meeting of the Congress party when the incident took place, rushed to Abohar. Balram Jakhar, a senior Congress leader and also former governor of Madhya Pradesh, was in Delhi and left for Abohar immediately after he got to know of the tragedy. 

Surinder is survived by his wife, son Sandeep, who is district president of Youth Congress and a married daughter. He was involved with cooperatives for about three decades and is known for his work on agricultural and rural development. 

He was widely travelled and worked on ways to give farmers better financial returns through the cooperative movement. In 1987, he was elected managing director of the Fazilka Cooperative Society and became director of IFFCO, the country's biggest farm inputs cooperative, in 1988. He took over as the cooperative's youngest chairman in 1997. 

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