Jaitu is a small town in Faridkot district that was in Nabha state, and it gave its name to the longest of the Akali morchas.
When Maharaja Ripudaman Singh of Nabha was forced to abdicate in 1923, protest focused on Gurdwara Gangsar at Jaitu, where an akhand path was interrupted by the administration. The demand became the right to complete it.
Jathas of five hundred marched to Jaitu in succession for nearly two years. On 21 February 1924 a jatha was fired on outside the town.
Jawaharlal Nehru was arrested at Jaitu in September 1923 and held in Nabha jail, his third imprisonment.
The novelist Gurdial Singh was born at Jaitu in 1933, nine years after the firing, and became the second Punjabi to win the Jnanpith.
A town of a few thousand people held the longest civil resistance campaign in Punjab's colonial history and produced one of its major novelists.
The Nabha administration was taken over by a British agent after the abdication, so the morcha was against a directly administered state and the Government of India could not present it as an internal princely matter.
Jathas of five hundred marched to Jaitu from the Akal Takht at intervals for over a year. The firing on 21 February 1924 killed a number of marchers and the figures given differ widely.
Jawaharlal Nehru was arrested at Jaitu while going to observe. The morcha is the point at which the Akali movement and the national movement were most closely joined.