Veer Chandra Singh Garhwali

At Peshawar on 23 April 1930, Havildar Chandra Singh of the Royal Garhwal Rifles told his men not to fire on an unarmed crowd of satyagrahis. That refusal, unheard of in a colonial army, made 'Garhwali' a national name and cost him more than a decade in prison.

Born in 1891 in a village near Peethsain in Pauri Garhwal, he joined the Garhwal Rifles as a teenager and served in the First World War from France to the frontier. Contact with Gandhi in the 1920s turned the soldier into a nationalist.

When the Qissa Khwani Bazaar demonstrations filled Peshawar in April 1930, his platoon was ordered to shoot. His words, remembered as 'Garhwali, cease fire', stopped the volley; the men grounded arms and were court-martialled together. Chandra Singh's death sentence was commuted and he served around eleven years, the British never quite daring to make a martyr of him.

Released, he joined the freedom movement fully, went underground in 1942, and after independence lived simply in Garhwal, briefly in communist politics, until his death in 1979. The hills remember him as Veer, the brave, the sepoy who chose the people over the order.