CRIMES AGAINST SIKHS — 1900 THROUGH 2025

A Sikh-Centered Historical and Legal-Analytical Manuscript

Prepared as a public-education dossier

January 11, 2026

DISCLAIMER

This manuscript is a historical and legal-analytical draft prepared for public education, advocacy, and scholarly discussion. It does not constitute legal advice. Where the text describes allegations of abuse, corruption, or wrongdoing, it does so based on publicly available reporting, commissions, court records, and documented testimony; where attribution is uncertain, the text explicitly labels claims as allegations. The purpose is to preserve memory, contextualize trauma, and support accountability through nonviolent, lawful means.

TABLE OF CONTENTS (Manual)

·         Executive Summary

·         Method and Evidentiary Discipline

·         Part I: The Colonial Architecture of Managed Religion (1900–1947)

·         Part II: Post-Independence Promises and the Long Federal Fracture (1947–1978)

·         Part III: Escalation, Sacred-Space Violence, and the 1984 Catastrophe (1978–1984)

·         Part IV: Counterinsurgency and Institutionalized Disappearance (1984–1995)

·         Part V: Aftermath, ‘Slow Violence,’ and the Globalization of Risk (1995–2025)

·         Annexure A: Chronology of Key Events

·         Annexure B: Glossary of Key Terms

·         Annexure C: Mechanisms Matrix

·         Annexure D: Affidavit-Style Witness Summaries

·         Annexure E: Legal and Human-Rights Framework

·         Annexure F: Ajit Singh Sandhu as Prism

·         Annexure G: Policy Recommendations

·         Bibliography, Videography, and Source Notes

Executive Summary

This manuscript presents a Sikh-centered, evidence-disciplined account of repression, mass violence, institutional capture, and long-term trauma affecting Sikh communities from 1900 through 2025. It is written in a hybrid register: part historical narrative, part legal-analytical dossier, and part human-rights report. Its anchor is the figure of Ajit Singh Sandhu as a prism for understanding how states can manufacture ‘order’ through coercion, normalize illegality through security narratives, and convert institutional life into a contested battlefield. The text aims to restore chronology, context, and proportionality—especially around the securitization of Sikh political claims—and to assemble a structured record suitable for education, advocacy, and further research.

Crimes Against Sikhs (1900–2026): A Historical Analysis through the Lens of Ajit Singh Sandhu

Over the past century and a quarter, the Sikh community has endured a continuum of traumatic events marked by mass violence, state repression, and profound injustice—episodes that recur with such grim familiarity that they resemble less a series of isolated tragedies than a single long historical mechanism resetting itself whenever Sikh sovereignty, dignity, or truth becomes inconvenient to those in power. This is not simply a claim about “repeated suffering.” It is a claim about repeated method. Again and again, when Sikhs have insisted on the integrity of their institutions, the legitimacy of their political voice, or the sanctity of their collective memory, the response has followed a recognizable choreography: Sikh autonomy is narrowed, Sikh motives are questioned, Sikh demands are re-coded as threats, and Sikh bodies become expendable in the service of a larger narrative—“unity,” “security,” “order,” “national interest.”

From the late-colonial era of British “managed religion” and coercive order, through the cataclysm of Partition in 1947, and into the post-independence decades that repeatedly demanded Sikh loyalty while withholding Sikh rights, a pattern emerges that is deeper than party politics or regional dispute. It is the recurring attempt to turn Sikh distinctiveness into something that must be supervised—something permitted only when it is quiet, symbolic, and politically harmless. When Sikh identity asserts itself as ethical responsibility, collective sovereignty, or historical truth, it is often treated not as a legitimate civic presence but as a destabilizing force. Sikh institutions are constrained, Sikh voices are delegitimized, Sikh demands are reframed as a security problem, and Sikh grief is urged—sometimes commanded—to become forgetfulness.

This pattern does not merely belong to the past. Its aftershocks ripple into the present—from Punjab’s unresolved wounds and the persistence of enforced silences to the killing of a Sikh dissident in 2023, which jolted the diaspora into confronting a frightening truth: the geography of Sikh vulnerability has expanded, while accountability has remained elusive. The Sikh experience of danger is no longer local and provincial, confined to one Indian state and its policing culture. It has become transnational, dispersed across the very geographies where Sikhs once imagined refuge. This is not only about the fear of violence; it is about the fear of a familiar logic traveling—an old habit in new terrain: that those labeled “undesirable” can be managed through intimidation, surveillance, and elimination, and that the machinery that produces plausible deniability will remain intact.

This work proceeds from a premise that is simple but often suppressed: history is not neutral when the dead are uncounted, when archives are curated by the powerful, and when the language of statecraft is repeatedly used to launder cruelty into “necessity.” Neutrality becomes a mask when it refuses to name structural power—when it treats a people’s mass trauma as unfortunate collateral rather than a predictable outcome of a political system that rewards impunity. Sikh suffering has too often been narrated through frames designed to diminish it—recast as “communal unrest,” “law-and-order problems,” or “terrorism”—while the structural conditions that produced violence, and the institutions that enabled it, are left unexamined. Even the vocabulary becomes a battlefield. “Riot” replaces “pogrom.” “Encounter” replaces “execution.” “Militant” replaces “disappeared youth.” “National security” replaces “collective punishment.” And in that linguistic substitution, the moral burden shifts: the victim becomes questionable, the perpetrator becomes necessary, and the witness becomes inconvenient.

The result is not only an injury of flesh but an injury of memory: a people repeatedly asked to move on without truth, to forgive without justice, and to accept official narratives that convert victimhood into suspicion. The injury of memory is more corrosive than it appears. It does not merely deny closure; it forces communities into spiritual and psychological contradiction. Sikh tradition teaches that remembrance—simran as moral consciousness, history as responsibility—is integral to spiritual life. Yet the modern state often treats remembrance as provocation: it demands a Sikh community that remembers only what the state finds safe. This produces a cruel paradox: to grieve honestly is to risk being labeled radical; to demand truth is to be accused of disloyalty; to insist on justice is to be framed as destabilizing. In response, this analysis adopts a Sikh-centered lens that does not romanticize pain, but refuses to let suffering be trivialized. It seeks to restore moral proportion: to name coercion as coercion, impunity as impunity, and the disciplined pursuit of justice as a legitimate political and ethical demand rather than a provocation.

At the hub of this narrative stands Ajit Singh Sandhu, a Punjab police officer who rose to infamy during the militancy and counterinsurgency of the 1980s–1990s. Sandhu is not presented here as a solitary villain who conveniently absorbs a system’s guilt; nor is he reduced to a caricature that allows institutions to escape scrutiny. Rather, Sandhu’s life and actions function as a prism—revealing how a state can manufacture “heroes” out of brutality, how incentives can reward coercion, how “encounter” logic can normalize extrajudicial killing, and how the line between policing and predation can dissolve when the law becomes a weapon instead of a restraint. Sandhu matters because he makes visible what polite governance hides: that violence, when institutionalized, becomes a career ladder; that fear, when bureaucratized, becomes policy; that legality, when selectively applied, becomes camouflage.

If the Sikh story across 125 years resembles a wheel, then Sandhu is the axle through which we can observe its mechanics. He helps us see how violence is rationalized—through the rhetoric of emergency and the cult of the “tough administrator.” He helps us see how dissent is criminalized—through the expansion of suspicion from armed actors to entire communities, where speech itself becomes incriminating and association becomes guilt. He helps us see how communities are fractured—through informant systems, collective punishment, and the deliberate erosion of trust between neighbors and even within families. And he helps us see how, afterward, silence is enforced as the price of peace—how the cessation of gunfire is made to substitute for reconciliation, and how “normalcy” is declared while the graves remain unmarked and the disappeared remain administratively unresolved.

His personal downfall—culminating in suicide—does not cleanse the system that produced him; it underscores the corrosive effects of unchecked power on both the perpetrators and the society forced to live under their shadow. A system of impunity eventually devours even its enforcers—not out of conscience, but out of convenience. When political tides shift, the same apparatus that once praised brutality as patriotism can abandon the brutal actor as a liability. The system remains; the individual becomes expendable. That is one of the wheel’s cruelest efficiencies: it preserves itself by shedding its most visible instruments at the moment accountability threatens to surface.

Around that hub, the “spokes” are the defining episodes that repeatedly reconstituted Sikh grief into Sikh resistance and Sikh resistance into state suspicion. We begin with the early twentieth-century Gurduara reform struggles, because a Gurduara is not merely a site of worship but a community institution where Sikh spirituality, education, collective deliberation, and public responsibility converge; control over Gurduaras meant control over Sikh public life itself. To govern a people, one can seize their land, police their streets, censor their press—but to govern their future, one must also control the institutions where they define meaning. The Gurduara reform movement reveals an early template: the state’s intervention in Sikh religious affairs is rarely neutral. It becomes decisive when Sikh institutions become politically alive.

We then move through Partition, where Punjab’s soil was soaked in mass slaughter and dislocation—an event that shattered social fabrics and implanted enduring anxieties about abandonment, betrayal, and survival. Partition is not only a historical event; it is a psychic baseline. It teaches the lesson that sacred geography can be severed, that promises can dissolve overnight, and that a people’s security can be sacrificed as an administrative necessity. From that trauma emerges a modern Sikh consciousness marked by both fierce resilience and a recurring fear: that when national projects require scapegoats or sacrifices, Sikhs will again be asked to pay.

Post-independence, we track the accumulation of grievances as promises were made and broken, federal power expanded and contracted opportunistically, and Sikh political demands were alternately courted and crushed depending on electoral needs. Here the wheel turns through subtler means: not only through open violence but through structural extraction and political containment—water disputes that shape economic destiny, capital disputes that symbolize diminished autonomy, administrative decisions that signal whose interests matter. It is in this period that Sikh political assertion is increasingly treated as inherently suspect: demands that resemble ordinary federalist arguments in other contexts are framed as uniquely dangerous when voiced by Sikhs, because Sikh political coherence is read as a threat rather than a constituency.

The narrative then turns to 1984’s twin tragedies—the assault on Sikh sanctity and the mass killings that followed—events that did not merely injure Sikh bodies but assaulted Sikh metaphysics: the sense that a people’s sacred spaces, symbols, and lives could be violated without consequence. The assault on the Golden Temple complex becomes, in Sikh memory, not only a military operation but a statement about what the state believes it is permitted to do to the most sacred center of Sikh collective life. The pogrom violence that followed becomes not only a massacre but a collapse of civic trust: the perception that political mobilization, police complicity, and targeted identification could converge to turn a minority into prey.

From there unfolds the decade-long insurgency and the counterinsurgency crackdown—a period of disappearances, torture, extrajudicial executions, and a culture of fear in which Sandhu became emblematic. This is the era in which repression becomes fully bureaucratized: killing is not merely done; it is processed. Bodies are not only removed; they are made administratively ambiguous. Families do not merely lose; they are forced into a permanent limbo—unable to mourn conclusively, unable to seek justice effectively, compelled to negotiate with the very institutions that caused the loss. The violence here is not only physical but epistemic: it attacks the possibility of knowing, proving, and remembering.

And finally we confront the modern echoes—Punjab’s continuing social and political stresses, the diaspora’s renewed trauma, and the emergence of transnational intimidation and violence that suggests unresolved state habits can migrate beyond borders. The wheel does not stop; it adapts. Its methods can become less overt while remaining coercive: institutional capture through pliable leadership, narrative inversion through global propaganda, selective legality through strategic prosecutions, and intimidation through surveillance and threats. The world may see “stability.” The community may feel ongoing vulnerability.

This study is chronological, but it is not merely a timeline. It is an argument about continuity—about how each rupture fed the next, how each unresolved injustice became tinder for later conflict, and how “order” was repeatedly purchased through coercion rather than reconciliation. The narrative is intentionally continuous and interconnected—less a chain of separate chapters than a web of causes and consequences—because Sikh experience over the last 125 years cannot be understood as a set of disconnected emergencies. Fragmentation is not an innocent reading error; it is one of impunity’s greatest allies. When events are isolated, each can be dismissed as aberration. When patterns are traced, the system becomes harder to deny.

The same recurring moves appear across eras: institutional capture, narrative inversion (victims reframed as perpetrators), selective legality, collective punishment, and the conversion of Sikh identity into a political problem to be managed. Institutional capture controls the spaces where Sikhs create collective meaning. Narrative inversion controls the moral story, ensuring that power appears defensive even when it is predatory. Selective legality ensures the law is applied as discipline rather than protection—harsh toward dissent, generous toward state violence. Collective punishment turns entire communities into targets, erasing the line between individual act and group guilt. And the conversion of Sikh identity into a “problem” ensures that ordinary democratic claims—about rights, federalism, dignity, memory—are treated as exceptional threats when voiced by Sikhs.

To read these events in isolation is to accept the very fragmentation that impunity depends on. To read them as one rolling wheel is to see the deeper pattern—and to understand why the wounds persist. Wounds persist not because communities are trapped in the past, but because the conditions that created the trauma—impunity, denial, narrative manipulation—remain active. What was never acknowledged cannot be resolved. What was never documented honestly cannot be healed publicly. What was never prosecuted cannot be deterrence.

Ultimately, this work is not written to inflame, but to insist on clarity: that truth is not extremism, that remembrance is not sedition, and that justice is not a threat. It treats Sikh testimony, historical record, and institutional analysis as essential sources of understanding, while remaining disciplined about what can be established, what is alleged, and what remains contested. That discipline is not weakness; it is moral seriousness. A people whose dead were erased cannot afford careless claims—because careless claims are used to dismiss careful truth.

In tracing this wheel’s rotation from 1900 to 2026, we will see how the past mirrors the present, how the language of power repeats itself with new costumes, and why the pursuit of accountability—legal, moral, and historical—remains as urgent now as at any point in this long and unfinished story. The demand at the heart of this work is not vengeance. It is the demand that any society claiming justice must eventually confront: Who was harmed? By whom? Under what authority? Where are the missing? Where are the records? Where is accountability? Until those questions are answered without evasion, the wheel remains not merely history, but structure—and structures, left intact, continue to turn.

Colonial Rule and Sikh Resistance (1900–1947)

The Colonial Paradox: Praise as Possession, Respect as Strategy

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Sikhs in Punjab lived inside a contradiction that shaped modern Sikh political consciousness more than any single proclamation ever could. The British Raj praised Sikhs with a flattering vocabulary—“martial,” “loyal,” “hardy,” “dependable”—and elevated Sikh regiments as symbols of imperial strength. Sikh soldiers were recruited in large numbers, showcased in ceremonies, and deployed across imperial frontiers, and many Sikh families carried real pride in military service, understanding it through an older ethic of courage, discipline, and protection of the vulnerable. But colonial admiration was never the same thing as respect for Sikh sovereignty. It was a method of control: a way to harness Sikh manpower for empire, to convert a community’s historic tradition of defense into an imperial resource, and to split society by selectively rewarding those who served the Raj while politically constraining those who demanded self-rule.

The Raj’s “martial race” narrative was not merely descriptive; it was administrative. It turned living communities into categories on a ledger and then governed those categories as instruments of policy. The same state that celebrated Sikh soldiery could treat Sikh political aspirations with suspicion, interfere in Sikh civil institutions, and reduce Sikh religious life into manageable bureaucratic compartments. Loyalty, in the colonial imagination, was never a partnership. It was a test—constantly administered—and Sikhs were expected to pass it by remaining useful without becoming autonomous. When Sikhs organized outside imperial permission, or when their institutions began to resemble independent moral power rather than harmless religiosity, the Raj’s patience thinned and the machinery of surveillance, censorship, coercion, and selective prosecution became visible.

This paradox—honor in uniform paired with humiliation in civic life—trained a generation in a hard literacy: to recognize the difference between symbolic recognition and real autonomy. It produced Sikhs who understood sacrifice, but also learned that promises could be elegantly worded and quietly betrayed. In that crucible, Sikh consciousness sharpened. Discipline was no longer only a battlefield trait; it became a civic necessity. Resistance was not romantic rebellion; it became moral self-defense. And a wariness took root that would echo far beyond 1947: that rights offered as favors can be withdrawn, that “respect” bestowed by power is conditional, and that Sikh dignity would have to be protected by Sikh institutions rather than outsourced to imperial goodwill.

Managed Religion: Why Controlling Gurduaras Meant Controlling Sikh Public Life

One of the Raj’s most consequential strategies was what can be called “managed religion”—the attempt to neutralize Sikh collective power by controlling the institutions through which Sikhs gathered, educated themselves, distributed resources, and cultivated leadership. This is where many outside observers misunderstand the Sikh story by misreading the Gurduara as a mere “temple” in the priest-centered sense. A Gurduara is not an enclosure for ritual appeasement. It is a community-centered public institution anchored in Gurbani, governed—at its best—by the sangat, expressed through seva and langar, and historically intertwined with literacy, ethics, mutual aid, and deliberation.

To understand why the Gurduara became a battleground under colonial rule, one must understand how it actually functions when it is alive in Sikh terms. A Gurduara is, first, the place where the Guru is present as Shabad—where the Guru Granth Sahib is not “displayed,” but installed as sovereign, treated with a dignity that is both devotional and political: not the politics of elections, but the politics of moral authority. The daily rhythm is structured around this presence. In the early hours, the day begins with the opening ceremony—prakash—when the Guru Granth Sahib is brought into the darbar with reverence, the sangat standing, heads covered, hands folded, the air filling with the first shabads of the morning. At night, there is sukhaasan—the closing—when the Guru is escorted to rest. This is not theatrical ritual for its own sake. It trains a community in a certain kind of consciousness: that authority is not embodied in a hereditary priest, not owned by the state, and not up for capture by any single faction. Authority resides in the Guru’s Word, and the sangat gathers not to consume religion but to submit ego to a shared discipline.

A granthi’s role, in this living ecology, is not the role of a priest with monopoly power. The granthi reads, recites, and tends to the practical responsibilities of the Guru’s presence; kirtanis sing Gurbani in prescribed raags or commonly used melodies; kathavachaks offer katha—explication—linking shabad to ethical living. But the Gurduara is not only about the darbar. It is also a kitchen, a school, a court of conscience, a refuge, a bulletin board of the community’s needs, a place where disputes are quietly mediated and where grief is held collectively. Langar is not an “add-on.” It is the institution’s heartbeat. A properly functioning langar is a daily enactment of equality: pangat beside pangat, a laborer beside a landowner, a child beside an elder, a visitor beside a regular—eating the same food served by volunteers who rotate through roles that deliberately dissolve social hierarchy. Someone stirs daal in a massive cauldron. Someone rolls rotis for hours, wrists aching, sweat dripping, because the point is not convenience but commitment. Someone washes dishes until their fingers wrinkle and the soap burns a small cut. Someone refills water. Someone cleans the floor after the sangat leaves. And if a Gurduara is healthy, these tasks are not assigned by caste or status; they are rotated as seva—service that reforms the self.

Then there is the “invisible” governance: the money box, the golak; the dasvandh ethic that funds the commons; the committee meetings—sometimes messy, sometimes noble—where decisions are made about repairs, salaries, education programs, flood relief, ration distribution, legal defense for activists, or support for a widow whose breadwinner was jailed. In colonial Punjab, these decisions mattered because they constituted independent civil power. When the Gurduara funds a school, it shapes minds. When it feeds travelers, it builds networks. When it offers shelter in unrest, it becomes a protective institution outside the police station. When it becomes a place where young people learn not only to read but to read Gurmukhi, it becomes an engine of identity that cannot be easily dissolved into the colonial category of “native.”

This is why controlling Gurduaras meant controlling Sikh public life: who speaks, who teaches, who distributes resources, who is recognized as legitimate, how collective memory is transmitted, and which version of Sikh history becomes normal. It is why the paired institutions in Amritsar—Harmandir Sahib as a luminous spiritual court and the Akal Takht as the sovereign seat of temporal responsibility—carry such weight. The doctrine of miri–piri is not a slogan; it is an architecture: spirituality with backbone, worldly duty with humility. The Akal Takht is not merely a building; it is the community’s moral command center, a symbol that Sikh spirituality cannot be severed from accountability, justice, and defense of the vulnerable. That is precisely why invading powers and hostile rulers have repeatedly targeted it across history. To strike the Takht is to attempt to break Sikh self-rule at the spine—to replace a living sovereignty with managed silence.

Colonial interference in Gurduaras was therefore never a quaint religious matter. It was governance. The Raj often tolerated, empowered, or leveraged custodial systems whose legitimacy flowed less from the sangat than from patronage and inertia. In many places, management drifted into corruption and exclusion: offerings treated as private income, the Gurduara’s land treated as personal property, the sangat treated as an audience rather than the owner of the commons. The colonial state preferred intermediaries because intermediaries are controllable. A Gurduara controlled by a dependent gatekeeper was safer to empire than a Gurduara governed by a politically awakened sangat.

And the friction was not abstract. A Sikh walking into a Gurduara knows, almost instinctively, when a place is alive with Gurmat and when it has become a captured institution. In a living Gurduara, the sangat feels like a body: people greet each other, look after children, seat elders, quietly organize seva without announcements, and the tone is humble. In a captured Gurduara, power feels concentrated: access is policed, decisions are opaque, the commons begins to feel like someone’s domain. Colonial “community management” thrived in that second atmosphere because it made Sikh unity brittle and Sikh mobilization predictable.

The Singh Sabha Revival: Language as Self-Defense, Education as Sovereignty

Long before the morchas of the 1920s, Sikhs had already begun to understand that the battle over institutions would also be a battle over meaning—over what Sikh identity was, who could define it, and how it would survive the modern administrative state. This is where the Singh Sabha movement and the revival of Gurmukhi education become crucial—not as a side-story of reform, but as a direct countermeasure to colonial governance.

The Raj did not only rule through police and revenue. It ruled through classification, schooling, and the slow reshaping of public knowledge. In that environment, the Singh Sabha impulse functioned as a refusal: a refusal to let Sikh life be interpreted primarily through colonial categories or absorbed into broader religious umbrellas that made Sikh distinctiveness administratively convenient to ignore. Gurmukhi education was not merely literacy; it was an assertion that the community’s relationship to Gurbani—and therefore to its ethical and historical memory—could not be outsourced to institutions that did not share Sikh priorities. When children learned to read Gurmukhi, they did not simply learn letters; they gained direct access to the Guru’s Word without a mediator. That access is political in the deepest sense: it trains a person to locate authority in Shabad rather than in charisma, bureaucracy, or coercion.

In Gurduara spaces, this revival often took a practical form. After the divan, a child might sit with a small slate board, tracing letters while an elder corrected the curves. Evening classes might gather in a side room where the smell of langar still clung to the air. Young men might debate the meanings of shabads as they learned to read them, while older reformers insisted that Sikh identity was not folklore but discipline: rehat, kirtan, seva, and education as a single ecosystem. The revival also produced print culture—tracts, newspapers, school texts—that allowed Sikhs to circulate ideas without depending on colonial intermediaries. It created a cadre of Sikhs who could argue, document, petition, and organize with a modern fluency while remaining anchored in Sikh epistemology. In a time when empire tried to make communities legible to the state, Singh Sabha-era energy tried to make Sikhs legible to themselves on their own terms.

Census and Category: How the Colonial State Hardened Religious Boundaries

But the same administrative modernity that made education powerful also made classification dangerous. Colonial censuses and bureaucratic forms demanded fixed identities. The state asked: what are you? Hindu? Muslim? Sikh? It asked as if identity were a stable, singular label that could be neatly checked, counted, and governed. Yet Punjab’s lived world was not always so neatly boxed. Shared languages, shared customs, and overlapping religious practices had long coexisted with real differences. The census did not create difference from nothing, but it hardened difference by making it the grammar of governance.

Once religious identity became a counted category, it became a political weapon. Numbers began to matter in ways that were not merely descriptive. A community’s size could influence representation, access, patronage, and legitimacy. Communities began to compete not only in ideas but in demography—because the state increasingly treated demography as destiny. This is one of the quiet ways colonialism manufactures communal competition: it transforms religious identity into an administrative resource, then distributes power through that resource, and finally acts surprised when the competition becomes bitter.

For Sikhs, this produced a pressure that was both existential and strategic. If Sikhs were counted as an indistinct subset of a larger category, they could become politically erasable—praised when useful, ignored when inconvenient. If they asserted distinctness, they risked being treated as a separate “problem” to manage. Either way, the census logic forced Sikh leaders to confront a modern predicament: in a system that allocates power through categories, refusing categories can mean disappearing. This is why so much Sikh energy flowed into defining, reforming, and disciplining identity—why language, scripture, and institutional control became urgent. It was not merely spiritual housekeeping. It was survival under a regime that ruled by counting.

And the hardening did not remain on paper. When the state trains society to think in categories, neighbors begin to see each other through those categories. A label that begins as a bureaucratic convenience can become a social boundary. Competitive representation, patronage networks, and political mobilization increasingly used communal identity as the organizing principle. Over time, people who had once navigated difference through local familiarity found themselves navigating it through hardened abstractions: “our community,” “their community,” “our rights,” “their threats.” The colonial state did not have to invent hatred; it often only had to administratively reward separation and watch separation ripen into fear.

Partition Logic: How Administrative Categories Made Sikh Vulnerability Structurally Inevitable

This is the deeper tragedy: the same processes that trained Sikh resistance also trained the structural vulnerability that Partition would later exploit. When politics becomes a contest between hardened communal categories, the imagination begins to drift toward “solutions” that mirror those categories. Once the public starts believing that communities are best protected by being majorities, the logic of partition—however catastrophic—begins to seem “thinkable” to those willing to trade human life for administrative neatness.

In that grim arithmetic, Sikhs were uniquely exposed. Punjab was their historic homeland, but they were not the overwhelming majority across the entire province in the same way that Hindus and Muslims could claim majoritarian destiny in their respective national narratives. The logic that eventually demanded contiguous communal majorities—territories “for” one community—turned Sikhs into a structural problem that could not be solved without making them refugees, minorities, or collateral. In a politics trained to worship numbers and borders, the Sikh position became perilous: too rooted to be safely relocated, too distinct to be absorbed without loss, too dispersed to become a simple majority state within the binary that was hardening around Hindu–Muslim competition. Sikh vulnerability was not merely a failure of leadership or a tragic accident of timing. It was, in significant part, the result of an administrative modernity that transformed identity into category, category into competition, and competition into the belief that only borders can end fear.

This is why the Gurduara struggle, the language revival, and the resistance movements are not separate themes; they are one continuum. Sikhs fought to keep their institutions sovereign because they sensed, correctly, that once a community’s institutions are captured—once its language is diluted, once its education is outsourced, once its identity becomes a line-item managed by the state—its fate can be decided elsewhere, by others, in the name of order. Colonial rule trained Sikhs in that awareness. It also trained the wider political environment in a lethal simplification: that communities are administratively manageable only when they are separable. Partition would be the final, murderous expression of that simplification.

The Gurduara Reform Movement: Sovereignty Through Discipline

Out of this collision emerged the Gurduara Reform Movement of the early 1920s, a decisive turning point in modern Sikh political formation. These morchas were not only disputes over property or management; they were a struggle over who had the authority to define Sikh life in public. Sikhs organized in jathas, courted arrest, and demanded that Gurduaras be returned to the control of the community. The method mattered: disciplined, collective, and often nonviolent resistance rooted in a moral claim that sacred institutions cannot be held hostage by corruption backed by state convenience.

The Raj’s initial posture—often siding with entrenched custodians or treating Sikh mobilization as disorder—revealed the limits of colonial “respect.” Officials could praise Sikh courage in imperial war while criminalizing Sikh courage in civic struggle. That contradiction did not weaken the movement; it clarified it. Sikhs learned that colonial legality was not automatically justice. It was a toolkit that could be used to protect corruption so long as corruption served stability.

Nankana Sahib (1921): When Sacred Space Became a Killing Ground

The Nankana Sahib massacre in 1921 became one of the most searing shocks in Sikh collective memory, not only for the scale of death but for the symbolic meaning of where it occurred: at the birthplace shrine of Guru Nanak, a site associated with spiritual origin and moral clarity. Accounts describe peaceful Sikh reformists arriving with the intention to assert community control, only to be met with a planned attack by armed men associated with the custodial regime. The violence was brutal and intimate—unarmed bodies trapped, struck down, and in many reports burned. What made the event politically transformative was not only the killing, but the lesson it delivered: that even sacred space could become a theater of extermination when power felt threatened, and that a state claiming civilizational governance could tolerate horrific violence so long as it prevented a grassroots uprising from becoming a precedent.

The aftermath reverberated far beyond Nankana. It became a rallying cry because it collapsed any remaining illusions that the struggle was merely administrative. It was existential. The movement was no longer just about management. It was about whether Sikhs could protect the integrity of their institutions against a system that preferred them dependent and divided.

Guru Ka Bagh (1922): The Nonviolent Body as a Political Weapon

If Nankana Sahib revealed the vulnerability of Sikh bodies, Guru Ka Bagh revealed the weaponization of Sikh discipline. What unfolded there was not a spontaneous scuffle but a calculated pattern: volunteers arrived in groups, prepared to be arrested, and instead were met with beatings—day after day—by police wielding lathis designed not to restrain but to maim. The spectacle was meant to break morale and reassert colonial supremacy through pain.

Yet the Sikh response stunned observers: volunteers endured blows without retaliation, absorbing violence with a composure that turned their bodies into an indictment. The point of such discipline was not passivity; it was a strategic moral inversion. It forced the colonial state to show its face. It made brutality visible and law’s hypocrisy harder to disguise. In a world where imperial legitimacy depended on the performance of civil order, Sikh nonviolent endurance became a mirror held up to colonial claims. Guru Ka Bagh taught Sikh society something profound: that courage is not only the ability to strike, but the ability to suffer without surrendering dignity—and that such suffering, organized and witnessed, can become a form of power the state struggles to control.

Saka Panja Sahib (1922): Seva as Defiance and the Sanctity of the Common Body

The episode remembered as Saka Panja Sahib deepened this ethic by fusing resistance with seva. The moral heartbeat of the story is not only sacrifice, but purpose: the insistence that Sikh prisoners being transported deserved food, dignity, and care—basic human recognition—even in a system designed to humiliate them. When the train carrying prisoners was expected not to stop, local Sikhs resolved to feed them anyway, turning langar into a direct challenge to colonial control over movement, time, and bodies. The willingness of devotees to place themselves on the tracks is remembered as an extremity of self-offering, but its deeper meaning is civilizational: it declared that Sikh duty to serve and protect cannot be suspended by the state’s schedule. In that moment, seva became not merely charity but political defiance, and the Sikh body—placed deliberately in harm’s way—became a boundary the state was forced to acknowledge.

Such incidents formed an archive of moral instruction. They taught that Sikh institutions, when animated by disciplined action, could compel even a powerful state to react. They also taught that sacrifice would likely be demanded repeatedly—that rights would not arrive as gifts but would have to be seized through organized courage.

From Keys to Courts: The Making of Sikh Institutions Under Pressure

Other confrontations, like the Keys Affair—when control over access and authority at the Golden Temple became a public crisis—reinforced the same lesson: that symbolic gestures of control are never merely symbolic. When the state claims the keys, it claims sovereignty. When the community demands the keys back, it is demanding recognition that the sacred does not belong to the administrator.

In time, the cumulative weight of the morchas, the public outrage, and the sheer persistence of Sikh mobilization forced a colonial concession: formal recognition of Sikh community control through the Sikh Gurduaras Act of 1925 and the institutionalization of the Shiromani Gurduara Parbandhak Committee. Alongside this emerged the Shiromani Akali Dal as a political vehicle for Sikh interests. These institutions became cornerstones of Sikh socio-political identity going forward, not because they were perfect, but because they represented something hard-won: a proof that collective discipline could convert suffering into structural gain.

Yet even victory carried a scar. Sikhs did not exit these struggles with naive optimism. They emerged politicized and wary—aware that the state yields not because it becomes virtuous, but because pressure becomes costly. They learned that law can be bent by power, that governance can cloak coercion, and that Sikh institutions must remain vigilant because the temptation to capture or neutralize them never disappears. This wariness would later become painfully relevant as postcolonial India inherited many colonial administrative instincts while changing the vocabulary that justified them.

Revolutionary Punjab and the Global Sikh: Resistance Beyond the Village and the Shrine

As anti-colonial ferment intensified in the 1930s and 1940s, Sikh participation was disproportionate to population—appearing in revolutionary networks, reform movements, and global currents of resistance. The Sikh story of this period cannot be confined to Punjab’s fields and Gurduaras; it extends into diasporic and transnational spaces where Sikhs confronted empire’s racial hierarchies and surveillance regimes. The Ghadar imagination—global, impatient with gradualism—was part of this world. So too were Sikh presences in various streams of anti-colonial activism. The diaspora learned early that imperial power travels, and that repression can be exported along with trade, migration, and policing. This global Sikh consciousness would later reappear—decades after Partition—in the diaspora’s role as witness, advocate, and political counterweight when Punjab’s tragedies were denied or minimized.

At the same time, the martial paradox continued: Sikh soldiers fought in World War II under the British flag even as the empire’s legitimacy collapsed. Many Sikhs could hold two truths simultaneously: pride in courage and deep skepticism about the political project that recruited it. Colonialism forced such contradictions into daily life. That psychological training—learning to separate personal honor from the state’s moral claims—would shape Sikh responses to postcolonial narratives that demanded loyalty while offering little accountability.

Promises on the Eve of Partition: The Seduction of Assurances

By the mid-1940s, as independence neared, Sikhs were courted by competing political forces because Sikh alignment could influence Punjab’s fate. Congress leaders issued statements that many Sikhs understood as assurances of meaningful autonomy or special safeguards in the north—rhetoric that suggested Sikhs would not be absorbed as a mere minority but recognized as a distinct political community with dignity and security. Sikh leadership faced impossible calculations: the fear of a Hindu-majoritarian future, the fear of a Muslim-majoritarian Pakistan, the fear of British divide-and-rule continuing under new names. Many ultimately threw their lot with India, trusting that public promises and nationalist camaraderie would translate into constitutional reality.

This decision was fateful not because Sikhs were naive, but because the machinery of politics rarely honors moral debt once power is secured. The colonial era had already taught Sikhs that promises can be broken when they threaten the architecture of control. The tragedy is that, in 1947, Sikhs would be forced to relearn that lesson at catastrophic scale.

Why This Era Matters: The Training of Sikh Memory and the Blueprint of Repression

The period from 1900 to 1947 does more than “set the stage” for later conflict. It provides a blueprint of the wheel itself. It shows how power flatters a community to harness it and disciplines it when it asserts autonomy. It shows how institutions become the true battleground—because whoever controls institutions controls memory, resources, legitimacy, and mobilization. It shows that violence is not always the first move; often the first move is management: the quiet capture of leadership, the bureaucratic reduction of a living tradition into a governable category, the criminalization of collective action, the use of legality to protect corruption and punish dissent.

Most importantly, it shows why Sikh resistance takes the forms it does. Sikh resistance is not merely anger; it is an ethic—trained through discipline, seva, collective deliberation, and a spiritual doctrine that refuses to separate devotion from responsibility. The Gurduara reform struggles teach that Sikh sovereignty is not an abstract slogan; it is practiced in how the community governs its commons, protects its sacred spaces, educates its children, feeds the hungry, remembers its martyrs, and refuses to let power redefine truth.

When later decades demand that Sikhs forget, accept, or surrender—when Sikh demands are reframed as threats and Sikh bodies treated as expendable—this earlier era explains why the response is not only political but moral. It explains why the community’s instinct is to organize around institutions, to resist capture, to defend the sanctity of the commons, and to treat memory itself as a form of justice. The colonial period did not merely oppress Sikhs. It taught Sikhs how oppression disguises itself—and how to see through the disguise.

But to understand how this “wheel” became so efficient by 1947, one has to add a deeper layer: the way the Raj—and, increasingly, competing non-Sikh political currents—learned to fight Sikhs not only with guns and jails, but with categories, schools, keys, committees, rumors, and reputational warfare. In Punjab, domination did not require constant open terror. It could be achieved by controlling the terms of public life: who is counted as what, who is taught in which script, whose shrine is “managed” by whom, whose protest is called “reform” and whose is called “crime,” whose pain is recognized as national suffering and whose is dismissed as communal agitation.

This is where the role of Hindus in the era must be presented honestly, without caricature and without evasions. Many Hindus in Punjab were neighbors, colleagues, and fellow sufferers under empire; many participated courageously in anti-colonial politics and condemned British brutality. Yet it is also true that the late-colonial decades saw the hardening of Hindu majoritarian self-understanding—sometimes expressed through reformist or nationalist movements that treated Sikh distinctiveness as an inconvenience, an error to be corrected, or a “branch” to be reabsorbed. Sikh vulnerability did not become “structurally inevitable” only because the British withdrew too fast. It became structurally inevitable because, by the 1940s, multiple forces—colonial administration, communal competition, and emerging majoritarian politics—had already made the Sikh community’s autonomy feel, to powerful actors, like a problem to manage rather than a dignity to protect.

One of the most underestimated battlegrounds was education—because education is how a people reproduces itself. The Singh Sabha revival and the broader Gurmukhi education renaissance were not merely “religious reform.” They were civilizational self-defense against a colonial environment that treated communities as administrable blocs and against competing movements that tried to redefine Sikhs as something they were not. Sikh reformers built schools, strengthened Gurmukhi literacy, pushed standardized teaching of Gurbani and Sikh history, expanded print culture, and turned the gurdwara into a nerve center of learning as much as worship. The point was not simply to produce devout individuals; it was to protect the community’s continuity: if a child can read the Guru’s Word directly, if the child learns the moral grammar of miri–piri, if the child inherits a story of sovereignty that is not borrowed from the state, then the community is harder to dissolve into someone else’s category. The education revival also countered colonial “community management” by refusing the idea that Sikh identity is something the state grants; it is something the Panth teaches, lives, and transmits.

At the same time, the Raj’s census and administrative machinery hardened religious categories in ways that intensified communal competition. Enumeration sounds neutral, but in a politicized environment it becomes destiny-making. Once the state counts you, labels you, and publishes you as a “community,” that label begins to determine how resources, representation, recruitment, and prestige are distributed. In Punjab, where Sikhs lived among Hindus and Muslims with shared language and overlapping customs, these hardened categories created incentives to claim, absorb, or deny identities in ways that were not merely theological, but strategic. If census categories decide political weight, then “who counts as what” stops being an academic debate and becomes a struggle over survival. Under this pressure, older pluralities narrowed: communities began to fear demographic disappearance; leaders began to treat boundaries as existential; and ordinary people—who once lived in layered identities—were pushed toward sharper, more defensive self-definitions.

These pressures were intensified by Arya Samaj activism and related currents that, in practice, often treated Sikh distinctiveness as a reversible deviation. Whatever the internal diversity of Hindu reform movements, many Sikhs experienced specific Arya Samaj campaigns—especially reconversion drives and polemical attacks—as an attempt to make Sikh identity subordinate to a larger Hindu fold. This matters not because it licenses hatred, but because it shaped Sikh political psychology. When a community feels that its distinctiveness is constantly being narrated as illegitimate—by colonial bureaucrats on one side and by competing majoritarian reformists on the other—its institutions become protective armor. The gurdwara becomes more than a place of prayer; it becomes the community’s constitutional court, schoolhouse, kitchen, archive, and parliament of conscience.

That is why the gurdwara’s “functioning” is inseparable from the politics of the era. A Sikh gurdwara is not primarily a priestly gatekeeping site; it is a participatory commons anchored in sangat and pangat—congregational listening and egalitarian eating—under the presence of the Guru Granth Sahib. Its daily routine is, in miniature, a political philosophy: kirtan that trains moral sensibility; ardas that converts memory into collective pledge; langar that makes equality tangible; seva that disciplines ego into responsibility; and governance structures that, at their best, reflect accountability to the sangat rather than hereditary control. Even the spatial logic carries meaning: people sit together on the floor in common humility, not ranked by caste or wealth; the kitchen is not “charity” but shared labor; the gurdwara becomes a public square where the community learns to deliberate, to fundraise, to distribute resources, to shelter travelers, to educate children, to organize protest, to produce print culture, to maintain an ethical record of martyrdom and moral obligation. When colonial power, or any power, tries to control gurdwaras, it is attempting to control the Sikh public sphere itself—the community’s ability to reproduce its values without permission.

This is exactly why the “Keys” issue mattered so profoundly. To outsiders it can look like a procedural dispute: keys, access, management. But symbolically it was sovereignty. Who holds the keys holds authority—over entry, over custody, over the right to decide what the sacred means in public life. Sikh agitation around such issues was never only about metal keys; it was a refusal to accept that Sikh sanctity could be subordinated to an administrator’s custody. In Sikh memory, episodes like the Keys Morcha become a template: the state tests capture through “small” controls; the community learns that conceding small controls becomes surrender in slow motion.

This is also where the story of Congress-era promises and the later feeling of betrayal begins to form before 1947, not only after. Sikh leaders were courted repeatedly because Punjab could not be politically stabilized without Sikh participation, and because Sikh moral authority—rooted in institutions and disciplined mobilization—had weight beyond numbers. Many Sikhs were led to believe that independent India would operate as a genuinely federal system in which Sikh distinctiveness, Punjabi language, and Punjab’s autonomy would be respected, not treated as an internal security problem. In Sikh collective memory, the tragedy is not merely that promises were broken; it is that Sikhs were persuaded to invest their legitimacy—sacrifice, loyalty, participation—into a political project that, once power consolidated, could revert to older instincts of “management.” The vocabulary changed from empire to nation, but the reflex could remain: centralize authority, discipline provincial assertion, and treat Sikh mobilization as suspect when it becomes too effective.

Against this backdrop, Sikh revolutionary currents must be understood not as isolated romance, but as another strand of the same ethical training: when constitutional channels appear captured, some individuals turn to absolute forms of resistance. The Ghadar movement, driven heavily by Sikhs in the diaspora, is an example of how Sikh political consciousness became global and impatient with incrementalism. From the vantage point of migrant laborers and students facing racism abroad and imperial domination at home, the empire looked less like a system to reform and more like a machine to break. Young Sikhs like Kartar Singh Sarabha entered Sikh martyr memory not simply because they were executed, but because their lives became proof that the Sikh struggle was not confined to Punjab’s villages—it extended across oceans, print networks, and global anti-colonial imagination. The movement’s reliance on newspapers, pamphlets, meeting halls, and disciplined messaging also reflected a Sikh institutional instinct: build parallel channels of truth when official channels are hostile or censored. (Even the historical geography matters here: the Ghadar headquarters and printing operations in San Francisco became part of the movement’s mythology precisely because print is power—an alternative sovereignty of narrative.)

The same moral architecture helps explain why events like Jallianwala Bagh became permanent accelerants. The massacre did not only kill; it taught a lesson about what “law and order” could mean in colonial hands. Punjab learned that a state can perform civilization while committing atrocity, and that official narratives can seek to normalize the unthinkable. Udham Singh’s later assassination of Michael O’Dwyer—whatever one’s stance on political violence—became, in Punjabi memory, a grim symbol of delayed accountability: the idea that when institutions do not deliver justice, memory searches for other forms of reckoning. The significance for Sikh history is not a celebration of bloodshed; it is the tightening of a psychological loop: atrocity → denial → moral injury → radicalization of the imagination. That loop is precisely what later decades would exploit again, with much higher stakes, when the question became not colonialism versus freedom but “national unity” versus Sikh autonomy.

Bhagat Singh’s story also sits inside this era’s moral training, even as he transcended communal categories and embraced a revolutionary secularism. He came from a Punjabi Sikh background, and his execution—alongside Rajguru and Sukhdev—became part of a wider North Indian martyr memory that Sikhs and others drew upon. For Sikhs, the resonance lay in a familiar rhythm: the young body offered to principle, the state’s fear of symbolic defiance, the attempt to crush ideas by hanging individuals, the transformation of a person into a moral icon who cannot be arrested again. The detail that matters historically is how Punjab produced, again and again, a politics of sacrifice: whether through disciplined morchas, revolutionary conspiracies, or mass protests, Punjab became a furnace of ethical intensity—and the state, colonial and later postcolonial, learned to interpret that intensity as danger.

This returns us to the “partition logic” you want named plainly. Partition did not happen only because leaders negotiated badly at the top. It happened because, over decades, the colonial order trained communities to think of themselves as bounded demographic blocs competing under a state that categorized them, managed them, and—at the end—divided them. When identities become administrative units, geography becomes arithmetic. When geography becomes arithmetic, human beings become “transferable.” And when human beings become “transferable,” violence becomes a rational tool for reshaping the numbers on the ground. Sikh vulnerability became structurally inevitable because Sikh geography was structurally exposed: concentrated in Punjab, wedged between competing nationalisms, and repeatedly treated as politically negotiable rather than intrinsically protected. The Sikh homeland was not merely going to be governed; it was going to be partitioned, meaning Sikh sacred geography, social geography, and demographic security could all be severed at once.

That is why the lesson of 1900–1947 is not simply “the British were oppressive.” The deeper lesson is how oppression modernizes itself. It learns to work through committees and categories; through textbooks and censuses; through the capture of keys; through labeling a protest as “criminal”; through turning a community’s disciplined mobilization into evidence of threat; through praising Sikh courage in war while distrusting Sikh autonomy in peace; through bargaining for Sikh support and then treating Sikh distinctiveness as an obstacle once power is secured. This is the blueprint that later decades will follow with new vocabulary: “public order,” “extremism,” “national integration,” “unity.” The wheel keeps turning, but it turns most efficiently when the population has already been trained—through earlier betrayals—to expect that law may not protect them, and that memory must therefore do the work of justice.

Partition and the 1947 Punjab Carnage

A Transfer of Power That Became a Transfer of Death

The end of British colonial rule in 1947 is often narrated as a clean moment of independence—flags raised, empires lowered, the sunrise of a new era. But in Punjab, independence arrived not as sunrise but as wildfire. Partition did not merely “divide a province.” It severed a civilization’s muscle and nerve, splitting Punjab—the historic homeland of the Sikhs—through a boundary drawn in haste, argued in closed rooms, and then disclosed to the public only after the new states had already performed the pageantry of freedom. The Radcliffe Line did not simply decide which side a city would fall on. It decided whether families would live or vanish, whether gurdwaras would remain accessible or become distant relics behind a hostile border, whether entire communities would remain rooted or be transformed overnight into refugees whose very survival would depend on the speed of their flight and the mercy of strangers.

And what made this boundary-making feel like a sentence handed down without trial was the shock of its timing—especially the “delayed announcement” effect that turned migration into a gamble against fog. The Boundary Commissions were rushed into existence only in mid-1947, with Cyril Radcliffe arriving in India late and working under extreme time pressure; the awards were completed and handed over before they were publicly released. The line for Punjab (and Bengal) was announced on 17 August 1947, two days after formal independence—after the new flags had already been raised, after crowds had already celebrated, after many families had already chosen routes and destinations based on rumor rather than fact.

That gap did not merely confuse; it reorganized the geography of flight. It created a deadly interim in which people delayed evacuation because they believed their district might fall on “their” side, while others fled too early in the wrong direction, trying to “outrun” an invisible verdict. In that suspended moment, fear became a navigation system. Towns and villages became waiting rooms of dread: one rumor said a district would go to Pakistan, another said India; one said the canal colony routes were safe, another said the roads were being cut. Families who might have moved in a single decisive wave instead moved in staggered fragments—some leaving elders behind “until we know,” some sending women and children ahead “just in case,” some pausing in market towns because it still felt possible that normal life would resume. But delay is not neutral in a collapsing order; delay is an accelerant, because predators thrive when civilians hesitate.

Nowhere did this delayed announcement effect become more lethal than on the railways and the arterial roads. Trains departed from stations under one set of assumptions and arrived under another. A route that was “safe enough” on 14 August could be a corridor of slaughter by 18 August, once the announcement hardened uncertainty into panic and panic into organized cleansing. Columns of refugees that might have taken one road chose another because of whispered predictions; those predictions became death sentences when the official border cut across the very corridor they had entered. Partition’s famous “blood trains” were not only atrocities; they were also the logic of fog made physical—human beings funnelled into predictable channels at exactly the moment those channels became hunting grounds.

For Sikhs, the catastrophe contained a cruel double meaning. It was, first, a mass human tragedy—one of the largest and fastest displacements in modern history, in which death moved at the pace of rumor, train schedules, and marching columns. But it was also a metaphysical rupture: Punjab was not only territory; it was the geography of memory, the landscape through which the lives of the Gurus, the martyrs, the shrines, and the inherited rhythms of Sikh collective life were threaded. Partition turned that living continuity into loss that could not be easily repaired. It forced Sikhs to live with a wound that was both material—land, property, livelihoods, institutions—and spiritual—the sense that sacred geography had been amputated.

Yet the Sikh wound was not only the wound of being attacked. It was also the wound of being structurally cornered. Sikhs faced a brutal strategic dilemma in the 1940s: they were too concentrated in Punjab to ignore the province’s fate, but too numerically small at the all-India level to force an outcome on their own. They were asked, repeatedly, to make “the right choice” for India’s freedom, but the architecture of the negotiations was built around two primary claimants—Congress and the Muslim League—while Sikh interests were treated as a complication to be managed rather than a constitutive third pillar with enforceable guarantees.

This is where Sikh political leadership between 1900 and 1950 becomes inseparable from the carnage itself, because Partition was not only a communal eruption; it was also a failure of constitutional engineering—made worse by asymmetries of power. Sikh leadership in the late colonial era was not a single voice. There were Panthic mobilizers anchored in the gurdwara reform tradition; there were constitutional negotiators who tried to secure safeguards within an Indian federation; there were princely networks and landed elites; and there were radicals, including those who believed Sikh survival required sovereignty, not assurances. Master Tara Singh became the emblem of mass Sikh mobilization and bargaining pressure; the Akali Dal and SGPC represented institutional authority in Punjab; and figures like Sardar Baldev Singh—who later became independent India’s first Defence Minister—operated inside the high constitutional arena where deals were drafted and tradeoffs were demanded.

The question “Were Sikhs betrayed, and by whom?” has never been merely academic in Sikh memory; it is a grief-question—because what Partition did to Sikhs was not only to kill and displace, but to expose how little formal protection existed when the major parties decided the map. Many Sikhs came to believe that they were persuaded—sometimes sincerely, sometimes instrumentally—to align with an Indian future on the promise of meaningful autonomy and protection, only to discover that promises made in the heat of anti-colonial unity dissolved once the imperatives of central power took over. That sense of betrayal does not require a single villain to be emotionally real. It can emerge from a system in which Sikh leverage was always limited, Sikh unity was never complete, and the final decisions were made by actors who could afford to treat Sikh consent as desirable but not necessary.

At the same time, it is important to understand how Sikh leaders were trapped inside an impossible triangle. A Pakistan built explicitly around Muslim majoritarian logic threatened Sikh existence in West Punjab; an India that spoke the language of secularism still contained a centralizing instinct that treated strong regional autonomy as a danger; and the British—rushing to exit—prioritized speed and administrative closure over civilian safety. In that triangle, Sikh leaders tried multiple strategies: pressuring for safeguards; floating the idea of an autonomous Sikh-majority region; and warning that Sikhs would not accept a constitution that reduced them to a permanently vulnerable minority.

Those “Sikh homeland” ideas were not fantasy inventions after the fact; they circulated during the late-colonial crisis itself. British records and contemporary commentary show Sikh leaders discussing an autonomous Sikh entity or protected region as early as the mid-1940s—sometimes framed as “Azad Punjab,” sometimes as a Sikh-dominated state, sometimes as a demand that any all-India arrangement be radically federal with enforceable minority safeguards. The tragedy is that these ideas existed in the very window when boundaries were still negotiable, but Sikhs lacked the hard bargaining power to compel either Congress or the League to accept a third sovereign claimant in Punjab. And once the momentum of partition hardened, Sikh “options” collapsed into damage control: how to salvage a viable East Punjab, how to secure refugee relief, how to preserve at least some access to sacred geography, how to survive.

This is where Sardar Baldev Singh’s role becomes especially contested in memory—not because the historical record supports a simplistic claim that he “sold out,” but because he symbolizes the painful wager Sikh leadership made: trading the pursuit of a separate sovereign outcome for the promise that the new Indian state would be sufficiently federal, sufficiently plural, and sufficiently protective to make Sikh life secure. Baldev Singh participated in high-level negotiations and later joined the first Indian cabinet, holding one of the most prestigious portfolios—Defence—at exactly the moment when Sikh refugees were trying to rebuild and Sikh leaders were trying to translate moral debt into constitutional reality. To many Sikhs, that trajectory looks like inclusion; to others, it looks like co-optation—because inclusion without enforceable safeguards can become a ceremonial mask for vulnerability. In the Sikh moral archive, this is the moment where “we were promised partnership” begins to transform into “we were given posts instead of protections.”

But even if one brackets questions of elite choice, Partition’s mechanics made Sikh vulnerability structurally inevitable in a way that deserves to be said plainly. Sikhs were concentrated in districts that became the hinge of boundary decisions, and they were vulnerable to sudden demographic reversal: once violence began to push populations across the line, the very fact of migration became proof of “belonging,” which then justified further expulsion. The border did not merely reflect communal separation; it accelerated it. And once Punjab was split, Sikhs were turned into a minority in India as a whole and nearly extinguished in Pakistan—caught, as Sikh memory often says, “minority on both sides,” with no state in which Sikhs were the unquestioned majority capable of shaping national policy through demographic weight.

This is also why the failure of security arrangements matters so much, because many civilians believed that “some force” would keep order long enough for orderly transfer. The Punjab Boundary Force was created precisely to police the border districts and prevent massacres during transition; in concept it was supposed to be a stabilizing buffer. In practice, it was short-lived and widely judged ineffective—operating for only about a month (early August to early September 1947) while violence surged beyond control, and suffering from confused command structures, political constraints, lack of local intelligence, and the sheer scale and speed of the killings. For refugees, that failure felt like abandonment with uniforms. When the force that exists to protect civilians cannot or does not protect them, the civilian conclusion is not subtle: survival must be self-managed, and that often means flight, preemptive violence, or both.

Partition also tore open a category of trauma that did not end when the borders stabilized: the mass abduction and forced “marriage”/conversion of women during the carnage, and the subsequent “recovery” operations carried out by India and Pakistan. These operations—often formalized through inter-dominion agreements and later legislation—aimed to locate and return abducted women to their “original” communities. But recovery was not rescue in a simple sense. For many women, “recovery” meant being pulled out of households where they had survived—sometimes with children—only to be returned to families or communities that could treat them with suspicion, shame, or coercion. It meant the state asserting a form of ownership over women’s identities—defining them as Hindu, Sikh, or Muslim bodies that must be “restored,” sometimes regardless of the woman’s expressed wishes.

The long-term trauma here is not only the original violence—rape, abduction, forced conversion—but the second violence of being processed by “recovery” bureaucracies that often treated women as communal property rather than as persons. Some returned to stigma; some were rejected; some lived with permanent silence; some carried grief that could not be spoken in the language of honor without reopening wounds. And across Sikh society, these stories braided into the broader Partition scar: not only “we were uprooted,” but “our most intimate bonds were weaponized,” and then “the state tried to repair the fracture with policies that sometimes deepened it.” (Historians’ estimates for abducted women vary widely, but the scale is consistently described as massive.)

So when one asks where Sikhs “missed the train”—where a different political outcome might have reduced vulnerability—the answer is grimly structural. Sikhs lacked the decisive leverage to force either (a) a truly federal constitution with entrenched safeguards at the all-India level before Partition, or (b) recognition of a separate Sikh sovereign entity in Punjab, or (c) a transfer timetable that prioritized civilian protection over administrative speed. Sikh leaders could threaten, plead, protest, and propose; but the decisive actors could still choose a path that treated Sikh security as a secondary problem.

And that is why, for Sikhs, Partition is not simply an episode of communal violence. It is the founding proof—written in ash—that promises without enforceable structure are not protection, that “national unity” can become a bargain in which minorities pay the price, and that sacred geography can be amputated by men who never have to live inside the wound. Partition did not merely break Punjab. It taught Sikhs, at catastrophic scale, how quickly a community can be praised, courted, and then outvoted—how quickly the language of freedom can coexist with the reality of abandonment—and how a transfer of power, when rushed and engineered around majoritarian claimants, can become a transfer of death.

The Tinderbox of the 1940s: How Fear Was Manufactured Into Fate

Partition violence did not erupt from nowhere. The communal tinder had been drying through the 1940s: political competition hardened into communal identity, rumors became weapons, and the uncertainty of the future produced a poisonous logic—strike first, or be erased. In Punjab, the social fabric was interwoven: Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus lived in proximity, traded with each other, shared language, and often shared local customs even when religious boundaries were real. That is what made the collapse so terrifying. When violence arrived, it arrived not between distant strangers but between neighbors who had once exchanged salt, greetings, and labor. When trust breaks at that scale, cruelty can become intimate, and hatred can become efficient.

The British withdrawal accelerated the danger in two ways. First, by leaving behind institutions unprepared to manage a rapid power shift; second, by maintaining the imperial habit of administrative detachment—treating looming catastrophe as a problem to be managed on paper rather than prevented in life. Authority on the ground became ambiguous. Militias, local strongmen, and politicized gangs sensed the vacuum. Lines of command blurred. The colonial state, which had always possessed the capacity for ruthless control when it served imperial needs, now seemed suddenly unable—or unwilling—to prevent mass slaughter. In that ambiguity, violence became a language of conquest: communities tried to secure territory through terror, to reshape demography through expulsion, and to convert fear into irreversible facts.

This is where the often-mentioned “Punjab Boundary Force” becomes more than a footnote—it becomes a symbol of institutional failure dressed as reassurance. A force was assembled in the final days of empire with the stated purpose of keeping peace during the transition, particularly in the border districts where violence was anticipated. On paper, it was meant to be a stabilizer; in lived reality, it was overwhelmed by the speed, scale, and political toxicity of what was unfolding. Its mandate was unclear, its authority contested, its intelligence inadequate, and its personnel often caught between divided loyalties and collapsing civil administration. The problem was not simply that there were too few men for too much violence—though that alone mattered. The deeper failure was structural: no temporary force, assembled at the moment a civilization is being split, can substitute for a credible sovereign commitment to protect civilians when sovereignty itself is being transferred, disputed, and weaponized. In many places, local police forces were already communalized or paralyzed; militias operated with impunity; and “order” became a word used by those who still had weapons, not those who still had rights. The Boundary Force could patrol a road; it could not restore trust. It could stand at a checkpoint; it could not prevent a rumor from igniting a neighborhood. It could disperse a crowd; it could not stop the machinery of displacement once it began to feed itself. And when civilians realized that even a named “peacekeeping” force could not protect them, the psychological effect was devastating: it confirmed that survival would not come from the state. Survival would come from flight, from kin networks, from the mercy of strangers—and from the grim willingness to become hard in order to remain alive.

Punjab as the Epicenter: Genocidal Fury on Both Sides of the New Border

Nowhere was Partition more blood-soaked than Punjab. It was here that the boundary cut through dense populations and contested cities, and here that the logic of communal nationhood—Pakistan as Muslim homeland, India as secular but Hindu-majority republic—translated into a brutal arithmetic of who “belonged” where. The violence that followed was not symmetrical in the moral sense—no atrocity ever becomes “balanced” by a counter-atrocity—but it was mutual in its descent into dehumanization.

In West Punjab, extremist Muslim mobs, and in many places armed formations with varying degrees of local official tolerance, turned on Sikh and Hindu minorities. Entire villages were attacked; families were hunted on roads; women were abducted; shrines were seized or desecrated; homes were stripped and burned. For Sikhs, the horror had a particular psychological edge: West Punjab contained not only homes and farms but an enormous share of Sikh sacred geography. Losing that region meant losing physical proximity to places bound to origin and memory—sites that were not merely destinations but anchors of meaning.

In East Punjab, retaliation arrived with equal ferocity against Muslims who became vulnerable minorities in areas where they had once been neighbors. Sikh and Hindu gangs, and in some contexts armed elements connected to princely forces or local militias, attacked Muslim communities, often in direct reprisal for atrocities committed on the other side. The cycle of vengeance grew self-feeding: each massacre became justification for the next, each rumor became pretext for another purge. What began as political partition became social unraveling. In many places, the goal ceased to be “escape” and became “cleansing”—removing the other community so thoroughly that return would be impossible.

For Sikhs, this mutual madness carried an especially bitter sting. Their historic homeland was being split; their minority status nationally meant they could not rely on demographic power for protection; and the region they were losing contained both the density of their communities and the deep texture of their inherited world.

The Trains of Partition: Steel Coffins and the Industrialization of Terror

Train stations and railway lines became theaters of mass death—Partition’s most chilling symbol of mechanized vulnerability. Trains were supposed to be vehicles of escape, carrying refugees from danger to safety. Instead, they became moving traps. “Blood trains” criss-crossed Punjab’s rail lines—trains that departed packed with families and arrived as silent steel coffins, everyone on board slaughtered en route. They carried not only corpses but messages: that no passage was safe, that migration itself could be punished, that the state could not—or would not—protect even the most basic corridors of civilian movement.

The terror of the trains did something more than kill. It psychologically colonized the imagination. It turned modern infrastructure—symbols of progress and order—into instruments of fear. It taught refugees that death could arrive not only in remote fields or on isolated roads but through the very machinery meant to transport and safeguard them. A train’s whistle, once ordinary, became ominous; a station platform became a place where one waited not only for departure but for news of who had been butchered before arrival.

And the trains were only one artery. On highways and rural paths, caravans of Sikh and Hindu refugees trudging by foot or bullock cart toward the Indian side were ambushed; Muslim convoys headed into Pakistan met the same fate. The roads became corridors of predation where the strong preyed on the fleeing, where property and bodies became loot, and where organized gangs treated refugee columns as moving targets. Rivers, wells, and fields became unmarked graves. Cities—Lahore, Rawalpindi, Amritsar, Multan, Sheikhupura, and others—saw neighborhoods reduced to ash, markets emptied, and local worlds erased within days.

And again, the delayed announcement effect threaded itself into this terror like a hidden hand. People fled based on guesses of where the line would fall; then, once the line was announced, routes that had seemed sensible became deadly. Some trains ran into areas that had flipped overnight from mixed to hostile; some stations became ambush points precisely because they were now “on the wrong side” for those arriving. The violence did not simply accompany movement—it often tracked it, hunting it, learning its patterns. In a landscape where maps were uncertain, predators could treat refugee flow like a river: predictable enough to exploit, chaotic enough to justify brutality as “retaliation.”

Women’s Bodies as Battlefields: Abduction, Rape, and the Unbearable Calculus of “Honor”

If Partition killed in public, it violated in private. Women endured some of the most horrific atrocities: abduction, rape, forced conversions, forced marriages, trafficking, and the destruction of family life as a weapon of communal domination. In Punjab, women’s bodies became battlefields where vengeance was enacted not only against individuals but against entire communities. The violence targeted what communities hold sacred: lineage, dignity, continuity, and the intimate security of home.

In countless cases, Sikh and Hindu women—faced with imminent capture—chose death rather than violation, sometimes through mass suicide acts like jumping into wells. These well tragedies have become searing symbols in Punjabi memory because they reveal the moral extremity Partition forced upon ordinary families: the transformation of survival into a choice between physical death and living death. Sikh religious and community leadership, shaped by older histories of persecution, often urged resistance and the preservation of honor, and families made choices no one should ever have to make—choices that still ripple through intergenerational memory as grief, shame, pride, and unresolved trauma braided together.

It must also be acknowledged—without false equivalence, but with moral clarity—that women in Muslim communities suffered parallel violations in East Punjab and other regions. Partition weaponized women across communal lines because gendered violence is one of the fastest ways to terrorize, humiliate, and permanently poison coexistence. The point is not to dilute Sikh suffering; it is to show how Partition’s cruelty functioned: it targeted the most vulnerable to break the most fundamental human bonds.

Then came the “recovery” operations—an effort that is often narrated as humanitarian repair but that, for many women, became a second upheaval layered onto the first. After the border hardened and the initial frenzy subsided, India and Pakistan undertook state-led programs to “recover” abducted women and restore them to their “proper” communities. The language of recovery sounded like rescue, but the lived experience could be more complicated, more coercive, and more traumatic than public memory tends to admit. Some women wanted to return and could not; some had been brutalized and were desperate to escape; some had been forced into new households, and between violation and time, had borne children or formed fragile attachments in an alien environment that nonetheless had become their present reality. Many were pulled again—this time by governments, police, and community expectations—through a process that treated their bodies as evidence of communal loss and their futures as communal property.

The cruel paradox is that the post-Partition states often acted as if the primary injury was misplacement rather than violation, as if a woman could be “returned” like a stolen object and thereby restored. But trauma does not obey borders. “Recovery” could mean being removed from children born of rape or forced marriage, or being brought back to families who received her with silence, suspicion, or grief sharpened into stigma. In many cases, families—already shattered—did not know how to hold both love and the social fear of dishonor. The woman became, unjustly, a reminder of what had been done, and in patriarchal logic that reminder could be treated as contaminant rather than survivor. The long-term effect was a submerged ocean of pain: women who carried Partition in their bodies and in their dreams, often with no socially acceptable language to speak it. Their trauma did not end with “recovery.” It continued as secrecy, as broken kinship, as self-erasure, as intergenerational silence—Partition living on not only in graveyards and borders but in the private architecture of homes.

Numbers That Cannot Hold the Horror: Death, Displacement, and the Shattering of a Homeland

By the time the frenzy subsided, the dead across India and Pakistan were counted in the hundreds of thousands and widely estimated around a million—figures that remain debated precisely because the killing was so widespread, chaotic, and often undocumented. But numbers, even when accurate, cannot hold the experience. What matters for Sikh history is the disproportionate devastation: virtually the entire Sikh community of West Punjab was annihilated or uprooted. Millions of Sikhs became refugees, pouring into East Punjab traumatized and impoverished, leaving behind ancestral lands, farms, businesses, schools, and Gurduaras—the cultural hearth of Punjabi Sikhs for generations.

The loss was not only economic. It was civilizational. West Punjab contained sacred sites woven into Sikh memory: places tied to Guru Nanak’s life, to Sikh pilgrimage, to the layered history of Punjabi Sikh presence. After 1947, those sites did not disappear, but they became inaccessible for most—transformed from living centers of community life into distant symbols behind an often-hostile border. The Sikh relationship with sacred geography became painfully complicated: the shrines remained, but the people were severed from them; memory survived, but access did not; reverence persisted, but sovereignty was broken.

Survivor memory from this period often carries the same unbearable motifs: leaving in the clothes one wore; stepping over corpses; watching the elderly collapse on roads; hearing that one’s village had been erased; arriving in East Punjab with nothing but grief and a few utensils; rebuilding under tents; living for months in a limbo where the past was burned and the future was uncertain. There are also darker memories: villages that performed a final prayer, knowing they were surrounded; families making impossible decisions under the belief that mercy-killing loved ones was preferable to capture. Even when such episodes are relayed as testimony rather than fully documented record, their emotional truth reveals what Partition did to moral life: it forced people into choices beyond the normal boundaries of human ethics.

Complicity and the Sikh Moral Wound: When Victims Also Become Perpetrators

Sikhs were not only victims of Partition violence. Under extreme conditions, some Sikh groups and individuals participated in atrocities, particularly against Muslims in East Punjab, and some princely state forces were implicated in organized violence. This is a painful truth, but it must be faced honestly because it shapes the Sikh moral legacy of Partition: the community learned not only what it means to be targeted, but also how quickly human beings can be driven into revenge when law collapses and fear becomes total.

Acknowledging Sikh-perpetrated violence does not erase Sikh victimhood; it deepens the tragedy of Partition by showing that in a communal inferno, the boundary between suffering and cruelty can blur. It also reveals why the Sikh memory of 1947 is ethically complex. Many Sikhs carry grief not only for what was done to them, but for what the era made possible in human behavior—including behavior that violated Sikh ethical ideals. That moral complexity becomes part of the “Partition scar”: a scar that is not only about being harmed, but about being thrown into a world where ethical life itself became difficult to sustain.

The Sikh Predicament After 1947: A Minority on Both Sides and the Feeling of Betrayal

While Partition violence was framed as Hindu–Muslim conflict with Sikhs caught in between, Sikhs perceived a distinct element in their suffering: unlike Hindus, who became an overwhelming majority in independent India, and Muslims, who became a majority in Pakistan, Sikhs emerged as a vulnerable minority on both sides of the border. In Pakistan, Sikhs became nearly absent; in India, Sikhs became a small national minority, even if they retained major presence in what remained of Punjab. This created a fundamental insecurity: Sikhs had no nation-state where they were the unquestioned majority, and therefore no demographic shield against being reframed as politically inconvenient.

Sikh leaders had been instrumental in convincing the community to align with India based on assurances that Sikhs would have a dignified future within a secular republic that recognized distinct identity and needs. But the immediate post-Partition atmosphere often produced not gratitude but suspicion. Refugees were not always treated purely as victims; they were sometimes treated as difficult, volatile, and in need of disciplining. Stories circulated—some documented, some preserved through affidavits and community memory—suggesting that certain officials spoke of Sikhs in the vocabulary of control rather than compassion. Even where specific directives are contested or difficult to verify in full bureaucratic chain, the emotional truth remains: many Sikhs felt that the promises of 1947 did not translate into deep institutional respect, and that the state that Sikhs helped legitimize could still view Sikh mobilization as a problem to manage.

This sense of betrayal mattered because it became formative. It meant that Partition did not end as “refugee rehabilitation.” It continued as an argument over belonging: whether Sikhs would be treated as equal partners in the new republic or as a restless minority whose autonomy would always be suspect. That argument did not remain abstract. It would later manifest in federal disputes, linguistic state demands, water politics, political marginalization, and—eventually—the catastrophic collapse of trust in the 1980s.

Partition as the Seedbed of Later Punjab Politics—and the Seedbed of Sandhu’s World

It is in this backdrop that families like Ajit Singh Sandhu’s rebuilt their lives in Indian Punjab. Sandhu was born into a scarred but resilient environment, shaped by stories that were not mere history but living family memory: of relatives lost, villages burned, routes of flight, the terror of trains, the desperate calculus of honor and survival, and the bitter lesson that grand promises can evaporate once power is secured. Growing up in a post-1947 Sikh community meant growing up with grief that was both personal and collective, and with a simmering demand for recognition and respect that never received a full accounting.

That legacy mattered in two ways. For many Sikhs, it sharpened a commitment to safeguard community dignity through institutions, political organization, and the insistence that Punjab would never again be treated as expendable. But it also produced a shadow: the internalization of a security worldview, the normalization of “strong authority” as a response to fear, and the temptation—especially within state systems—to treat dissent as the prelude to chaos. Sandhu would later become an enforcer of the very state that many Sikhs believed had betrayed them. That irony is not incidental. It is the kind of irony history produces when trauma is not healed but repurposed—when the children of refugees grow up inside a political landscape where pain becomes a tool, and where the promise of “order” is repeatedly offered as an antidote to memory.

Partition thus seared into the Sikh psyche a dual lesson: the depths of inhumanity that majoritarian rage can descend to, and the grim reality that Sikhs—despite valor, discipline, and sacrifice—were not immune to victimhood or to complicity under extreme circumstances. It is the foundational rupture that later decades would keep reactivating. To understand Punjab after independence—the struggle for federal dignity, the growth of grievance, the eventual eruption of insurgency and counterinsurgency—one must begin here, where trust was shattered at scale and where the state’s promise of protection failed in the moment it mattered most.

Post-Independence Promises and the Punjabi Suba Struggle (1947–1966)

Freedom With a Shadow: Celebration Interrupted by Grief and Unease (1947–1950)

In August 1947, independence arrived in Punjab as a contradiction. There was jubilation at colonial rule ending, but it was swallowed almost immediately by the violence and dislocation of Partition. The Punjab that had existed for centuries—an interwoven civilizational space of Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims—was cut in two. Lahore, once a major Punjabi metropolis and a center of Sikh intellectual and political life, went to Pakistan. So did Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of Guru Nanak, and a constellation of other Sikh historical sites that had anchored collective memory and pilgrimage. For many Sikh families, the new nation’s first lived reality was not triumph but flight: caravans of refugees, hurried departures, abandoned land, lost relatives, and a dawning sense that the Sikh homeland had been fractured at its cultural heart.

The displacement also carried a psychological wound that would echo for decades. Sikhs had been a highly mobilized community in the anti-colonial struggle and had paid an outsized cost in political repression, imprisonment, and martyrdom across multiple eras. Yet when the political settlement arrived, Sikh institutions received no equivalent constitutional guarantees—no durable framework that recognized Sikh distinctiveness as distinct, no secure “center” that compensated for losing the western half of Punjab, and no stable arrangement that ensured the new state would not treat Sikh identity as a problem to be managed. The post-1947 state asked for Sikh loyalty as a civic duty, but Sikhs increasingly felt that the state offered only conditional dignity in return.

This is the first hinge of the post-independence story: the Sikh community entered the new republic with both hope and fear—hope that freedom would allow cultural and political breathing room, and fear that a centralized national project might treat Sikh distinctiveness as an obstacle to “unity.” In that emotional landscape, language and regional autonomy quickly became proxies for deeper questions: Would Punjab be allowed to govern itself in substance, not merely in form? Would Sikh institutions be treated as legitimate stakeholders, or as inconvenient reminders that India was not culturally uniform?

The Constitution and the Problem of Naming: Article 25 and the Logic of Assimilation (1950)

If Partition was the first trauma, constitutional “naming” became the first institutional insult. Sikhs watched closely as the Constitution was drafted and adopted in 1950, because the language of a constitution is not neutral. It establishes who belongs on what terms and what kinds of difference the state is capable of recognizing. Sikh leaders were unsettled by the explanatory clause to Article 25, which, for certain legal purposes, placed Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists inside an administratively “Hindu” category.

For Sikhs, this was not a technical footnote. It was the politics of recognition. A state that refuses to name you accurately can more easily absorb you into a majoritarian narrative. Sikh identity, in this reading, was not merely being “tolerated” within a plural India—it was being linguistically folded into an umbrella that made Sikh distinctiveness easier to ignore in law and public policy. The concern was not only symbolic: personal-law categories shape institutional power, education policy, and the everyday assumptions through which majorities interpret minorities. When a community’s distinctiveness is treated as a denominational variation, the door opens to gradual assimilation through legal language.

In the Sikh civilizational imagination, this carried an additional sting. Sikh history includes sustained resistance to coercive religious and political order, and it retains a memory of sovereignty—not as nationalism, but as an ethic of collective responsibility and moral self-rule. To be administratively categorized under another identity felt like the new republic inheriting a colonial habit: manage difference by flattening it.

Punjabi Suba as a Constitutional Strategy: Language as the Safe Vocabulary of Autonomy (1950s–1966)

The Punjabi Suba movement must be understood in this context. On the surface, it was a demand for a Punjabi-speaking state—an argument that, if other linguistic states could exist, Punjab too should be reorganized so Punjabi (in Gurmukhi script) had official dignity and administrative security. But beneath that surface, Punjabi Suba was a constitutional strategy. Sikh leadership recognized that explicitly Sikh demands were often dismissed as “communal,” but linguistic demands could be framed as secular and democratic. Language became the safest vocabulary for insisting that Punjab be treated as more than an administrative unit of New Delhi.

This is why the movement carried a double burden. Sikhs were forced to argue for Punjabi not only as a cultural right, but also as evidence that their demand was “not communal.” At the same time, opponents in national politics repeatedly insinuated the opposite: that Punjabi Suba was merely a disguised Sikh homeland project, a step toward separatism. The political technique was predictable and effective—once a demand is labeled “anti-national,” the state no longer needs to address it; it can suppress it. Thus, even a movement articulated through language was read through suspicion because the protagonists were Sikh and the region was Punjab.

Morchas, Mass Arrests, and the 1955 Golden Temple Crackdown: The State Tests Sikh Red Lines

As agitation intensified, Sikh protest took on a familiar form: disciplined morchas. Volunteers organized through gurdwaras and party networks courted arrest, marched peacefully, and treated detention as a form of civic sacrifice. The style of protest drew from a Sikh ethical memory in which suffering is not merely endured but offered—where nonviolent discipline can be a moral rebuke to unjust authority.

The state’s response, however, often treated this mobilization as a security threat. A crucial flashpoint came in 1955, when police action against Punjabi Suba agitation escalated in ways that Sikh memory retains as a warning shot. Arrests swept through Sikh political ranks, and coercive power pressed into the symbolic space around Harmandir Sahib (the Golden Temple) and Amritsar. For Sikhs, policing around the Golden Temple is never “routine crowd control.” Harmandir Sahib is a living symbol of Sikh dignity. When the state’s coercive apparatus appears at that sacred center, the message extends far beyond the immediate protest: it signals that Sikh institutions can be disciplined by force, and that even sacred space is not immune from the state’s desire to impose order.

The event’s psychological impact was enduring. It reinforced the perception that Sikh assertion—even when organized, constitutional, and disciplined—would be met not with dialogue but with coercion and narrative suspicion. It taught a lesson that would resurface later in more devastating forms: that the state’s threshold for violating Sikh symbolic space could lower quickly when political convenience demanded it.

The Punjabi Suba Concession That Did Not Feel Like Settlement: 1966 as Victory and Fracture

In 1966, after years of agitation, arrests, negotiations, and political churn, the Punjabi Suba demand was partially conceded. Punjab was reorganized on linguistic lines. Punjabi gained official dignity. On paper, it looked like resolution.

But in Sikh political consciousness, 1966 felt like a victory that arrived with built-in wounds. The reorganization reduced Punjab’s territory and carved out adjacent regions into what became Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. Chandigarh—conceived and built as Punjab’s capital to replace Lahore—was not handed to Punjab as an unambiguous emblem of statehood. It was made a Union Territory under central administration and positioned as a shared capital arrangement with Haryana. Meanwhile, river waters and resource governance remained entangled with interstate arrangements and central leverage.

The result was a paradox: Punjab existed, and Sikhs were now a majority within their region, yet the most sensitive levers of autonomy—capital status, water control, fiscal architecture, and the center’s override powers—remained beyond Punjab’s decisive command. Punjabi Suba had solved a cartography problem. It had not resolved the deeper question of legitimacy: whether Punjab’s autonomy was real or merely tolerated, and whether Sikh distinctiveness could be respected without being pathologized.

A Democracy With Conditional Punjab: Instability, Factionalism, and the Shadow of President’s Rule (Late 1960s–Early 1970s)

The Akali Dal’s intermittent experience in governance did not ease this anxiety; it sharpened it. Sikh leaders tasted power briefly, but ministries were repeatedly destabilized by internal factionalism and by the brutal arithmetic of national politics. Congress could exploit splits, encourage defections, and—through the constitutional machinery of President’s Rule—signal that Punjab’s electoral choices were conditional.

To Sikh leadership, this did not feel like ordinary party politics. It felt like structural discipline: a reminder that whenever Punjab asserted too much independence, the center possessed both political means and constitutional instruments to push it back into line. This produced a sober recognition by the early 1970s: Punjabi Suba had delivered a boundary, but not a settlement. The structural grievances remained—Chandigarh’s limbo, water disputes, economic imbalances, and the lingering constitutional unease about Sikh identity. The consequence was a decade of introspection. If grievances persisted despite linguistic reorganization, the problem was larger than language. It lay in the practice of Indian federalism itself.

The Anandpur Sahib Resolution and Rising Tensions (1970s)

The Anandpur Sahib Resolution (1973): A Federalist Blueprint, Not a Secessionist Plot

Out of that introspection came the Anandpur Sahib Resolution (ASR) in 1973—adopted by the Shiromani Akali Dal at a general assembly held in Anandpur Sahib. The location mattered. Anandpur Sahib is not merely a town; it is a Sikh place of memory where the Khalsa was forged and where questions of collective discipline and moral sovereignty resonate. Drafting a political charter there was deliberate symbolism: these demands emerge from Sikh historical self-understanding, not from opportunistic agitation.

Substantively, the ASR was a comprehensive diagnosis of Punjab’s political and economic predicament and a constitutional vision for restructuring center–state relations. It argued that India must become truly federal in practice, not merely in constitutional rhetoric. States should have meaningful authority over most domains of governance, while the center retained only a limited set of subjects—defense, foreign affairs, currency, communications, and similarly national matters.

This was not a demand to leave India. It was a demand that India honor pluralism by treating federalism as real rather than decorative. Secession is a claim to exit. Federalism is a claim to dignity within. The ASR belonged to the second category even when it used Sikh vocabulary, because a Sikh-centric party will naturally frame political demands through Sikh memory—especially after decades of being told Sikh distinctiveness is either irrelevant or dangerous. Framing is not separatism. Much of the ASR’s content could have been adopted as a general federal reform platform applicable across India: it expressed a democratic fear that an overly centralized state can suffocate regional rights, extract resources, and dismiss local aspirations as parochial.

What the ASR Actually Sought: Control, Fairness, Recognition

At the heart of the Resolution was a practical demand: Punjab should govern Punjab in the areas that define everyday life. It sought decisive state authority over agriculture, land and resource policy, education and culture, industry, and local administration—domains whose consequences are experienced locally and where centralized control often becomes extraction.

Alongside this structural federalism, the ASR addressed several flashpoints that, by the 1970s, had become symbols of Sikh grievance:

Chandigarh: Capital Status as a Test of Trust

Chandigarh, built as Punjab’s capital to replace Lahore, remained in a peculiar limbo after 1966: formally a Union Territory under central control and treated as a shared capital arrangement with Haryana. For Punjab, the issue was never merely municipal. A capital is the nerve center of governance and the emblem of statehood. Denying Punjab unequivocal control over its capital symbolized, for many Sikhs, a lingering refusal to fully accept Punjab’s legitimacy within the federation. Chandigarh became a recurring psychological wound—an everyday reminder that Punjab’s autonomy was incomplete.

River Waters and Riparian Rights: The Lifeblood Question

Water was—and remains—the most combustible issue. Punjab’s rivers were not abstract resources; they were the lifeblood of agriculture, livelihood, and rural stability. The Green Revolution had made Punjab India’s breadbasket, turning Punjabi farmers into the backbone of national food security. Yet water allocation was often experienced in Punjab as something decided elsewhere, enforced through interstate agreements and central leverage, even when Punjabi opinion felt riparian principles were being violated.

The ASR’s insistence on recognized riparian doctrine was not merely technical. It was a moral claim: you cannot demand Punjab feed the nation while draining Punjab’s own future. For families already scarred by 1947—dispossessed once, then rebuilt—water diversion could feel like a second dispossession: we lost our land across the border, rebuilt here, took on high-risk agriculture to feed India, and now the rivers themselves are treated as national property to be redistributed.

Recognition of Sikh Distinctiveness: Protection Against Legal Assimilation

The ASR also demanded protections for Sikh religious identity and legal distinctiveness, implicitly challenging the constitutional habit of administratively folding Sikhism into a Hindu umbrella for certain personal-law purposes. For Sikhs, recognition was not symbolic vanity. It was a defense against assimilation through legal language—ensuring Sikh rites, institutions, and identity were not treated as denominational footnotes.

Representation and Institutional Respect

Concerns about Sikh representation in national institutions, often discussed with reference to the armed forces and services, reflected a broader fear: that the state’s institutions could gradually marginalize Sikhs while still using Sikh labor and sacrifice. This fear was rooted in post-Partition memory and in recurring experiences of having to constantly demonstrate loyalty while being denied full dignity.

Economic Redress and Structural Imbalance

Underlying many ASR points was an economic critique: Punjab had absorbed enormous refugee rehabilitation burdens after Partition and later became the engine of agricultural transformation. Yet many Sikhs felt that the benefits of industrialization and economic power were concentrated elsewhere, while Punjab carried ecological strain, employment pressures, and a fiscal structure that treated Punjab as a resource base more than a political partner. This produced a combustible perception: Punjab bears disproportionate burdens and yields disproportionate outputs, but receives suspicion instead of proportional power.

Why New Delhi Panicked: Federalism Reframed as Disloyalty

Despite its constitutionalist posture, the ASR triggered alarm in New Delhi. Part of the reaction was ideological: Indira Gandhi’s political instincts were centralizing, and the 1970s were a period of consolidation. Any robust regional assertion—especially one rooted in distinct identity—could be interpreted as a challenge to central authority and to the symbolic unity the ruling establishment cultivated.

But part of the panic was strategic. If taken seriously, the ASR would set a precedent for other states to demand similar autonomy. It was not merely a Sikh platform; it was a federalist argument that threatened the center’s ability to dominate the periphery.

Instead of engaging its content, political strategists and sympathetic commentators often chose narrative inversion. They cherry-picked strong identity language and reframed the ASR as a secessionist manifesto. Once demands are labeled “anti-national,” the state no longer has to address them; it merely has to suppress them. The Akali Dal’s Sikh-centric character made the smear easier to sell in a majoritarian environment where Sikh distinctiveness could be cast as deviation from national normalcy.

A Feedback Loop of Radicalization

This created a dangerous feedback loop: the more Sikh demands were dismissed as disloyal, the more Sikh youth concluded constitutional methods would never deliver genuine justice; and the more disillusionment grew, the more the state claimed its suspicion had been justified. This is how grievances become radicalized—not only by agitators, but by a state’s refusal to distinguish between assertion and insurrection, between autonomy and separatism.

The 1970s: Oscillation Between Hope and Humiliation

The 1970s in Punjab were years of oscillation. At times, the political atmosphere softened; at other times, it hardened. The Emergency (1975–1977) became a national trauma during which Indira Gandhi suspended democratic norms and governed through repression. Sikhs and the Akali Dal were among the most visible and disciplined opponents. Akali workers courted arrest, organized protest jathas, and used gurdwara-linked networks to resist authoritarianism. This resistance reinforced a Sikh moral self-image: that Sikh political discipline stands against tyranny, whether colonial or post-colonial. It also etched itself into Indira Gandhi’s political memory.

After the Emergency, the Janata Party coalition ruled at the center and the Akalis formed the Punjab government in 1977. For a moment, one could imagine the ASR’s demands receiving serious hearing. But the Janata experiment collapsed into internal contradictions, and by 1980 Indira Gandhi returned to power with sharpened instincts and a hardened suspicion of adversaries—like the Akalis—who had challenged her during the Emergency. The political temperature rose.

Economic Anxiety as Political Fuel

Meanwhile, Punjab’s economic reality was changing in ways that deepened frustration. The Green Revolution brought abundance but also distortions: mechanization reduced rural employment; inequality widened; small farmers faced rising input costs and debt; ecological strain deepened; and educated youth increasingly experienced a brutal mismatch between aspiration and opportunity. Many young Sikhs felt trapped in a paradox: Punjab’s labor fed the nation and symbolized national pride, yet Punjab’s grievances were dismissed, its autonomy constrained, and its youth increasingly treated as politically suspect. Economic frustration and political humiliation began to reinforce each other.

From Constitutional Blueprint to Ignored Alarm Bell

The ASR did not “cause” militancy. It was one of the last comprehensive constitutional attempts to resolve Punjab’s grievances before the political atmosphere curdled. When such a document is demonized rather than debated, it teaches a dangerous lesson: that the system has no language for you except accusation. It is within this charged milieu—federal disputes unresolved, identity recognition denied, resource grievances festering, economic anxieties rising, and political suspicion hardening—that Punjab approached a more volatile threshold.

And then a dramatically unforeseen catalyst arrived—not directly between Sikhs and the state, but between Sikhs and a heterodox quasi-Sikh sect: the Sant Nirankaris. The 1978 clash would become a spark in a room already saturated with gas. The powder keg did not begin in 1978; it had been assembled for years. The Nirankari confrontation simply provided the match.

The Nirankari Clash of 1978: Prelude to an Armed Revolt

“From 1978 to Dharam Yudh Morcha: How Martyr Memory, State Framing, and Political Opportunism Made 1984 Thinkable”

On April 13, 1978—Vaisakhi, the day Sikhs commemorate the founding of the Khalsa—an event unfolded in Amritsar that many Sikhs would come to describe as the moment a constitutional struggle began to harden into something more combustible. A protest procession, planned in the moral language of disciplined demonstration, encountered lethal violence outside a gathering of the Sant Nirankari Mission. Thirteen Sikhs were killed and many more were wounded.

Why this episode became a watershed is not explained by the body count alone. It is explained by the story that formed around it: that a sacred day in a sacred city had been used for provocation; that armed force had been deployed against demonstrators; and that the state either did not prevent the killings or did not hold perpetrators accountable afterward. In Sikh memory, this compressed into a single, searing verdict: “They were killed on Vaisakhi in Amritsar—and the system did nothing.” That sentence became powerful because it contained, in miniature, a full theory of abandonment: sacred space was not protected, civic rights were not protected, and Sikh dignity was negotiable.

Who Were the Nirankaris—and Why Did the Issue Cut So Deep?

The Sant Nirankari Mission was viewed by many orthodox Sikhs as a heterodox movement that disrupted Sikh doctrinal boundaries and challenged the Panth’s text-centered sovereignty. Sikh tradition centers the Guru Granth Sahib as the eternal Guru. Any movement perceived as elevating a living figure into guru-like authority can trigger profound alarm, not merely as theological disagreement but as a threat to institutional integrity. In this sense, the controversy was not only about “doctrine.” It was about the Panth’s ability to remain unified under a scripture-centered sovereignty, and about who has the authority to define Sikh boundaries.

Adding fuel were allegations of public insult, performative provocation, and political shielding. Whether every allegation was accurate or amplified, what mattered for the psychology of the moment was the perception that provocations were being staged in ways that signaled impunity. To many Sikhs, the issue began to feel less like an internal religious argument and more like an external test of limits: how far can symbolic injury be pushed, and how far will the state go to protect—or ignore—the injured?

Why Vaisakhi in Amritsar Felt Like a Deliberate Provocation

The choice of Vaisakhi was not incidental. Vaisakhi is a collective remembrance of discipline, courage, and the moral birth of the Khalsa. Amritsar is not a neutral city; it is a center of Sikh sovereignty-memory. When a controversial public gathering occurs in that setting, on that day, it reads as an assertion of dominance—an announcement that “we can do this here, today, and no one can stop us.”

This is why the state’s role became central. Even if one argues over intentions, the structure of the event communicated provocation, and the state’s response communicated permission. In moments like this, the difference between neutrality and complicity can be measured by prevention and accountability. The perception that neither was delivered hardened grievance into something closer to destiny.

The Protest: Black Flags, Disciplined Intent, and the Moral Language of Demonstration

In response, devout Sikhs organized a protest procession that carried a recognizable moral symbolism: black flags, disciplined marching, and the insistence that the demonstration was an act of collective conscience. In Sikh ethical memory, protest is often framed as a sacrificial assertion—an appeal to the state and to society that something unjust is being normalized.

This is where the tragedy’s moral tension begins. The protest was charged, and anger was real, but it was also framed as demonstration rather than attack. Sikh narratives describe a fundamental expectation: that the day would end in slogans and arrests, not in funerals.

The Violence: A Protest Met With Lethal Force and a State That Did Not Stop It

As the procession approached the Nirankari venue, violence erupted. Sikh accounts emphasize gunfire directed at demonstrators and police presence that failed to prevent the killing. Thirteen Sikhs died and many were wounded. Whatever one’s interpretive lens, the event functioned as a political education for a generation of Sikh youth: if peaceful demonstration can be met with lethal force in the heart of Sikh sacred geography, and if accountability does not follow, then the social contract is not reciprocal.

Martyr Memory and the Shift in Assumptions

In Sikh consciousness, the deaths quickly acquired the status of shaheedi (martyrdom). Martyr memory is not only grief; it is instruction. Funerals become political classrooms, and trauma becomes a narrative of obligation: to remember, to protect, to answer. Once a society’s assumptions about safety and justice shift, its behavior shifts too. That shift often begins not in manifestos but in funerals.

This is why 1978 matters in the arc of Punjab’s crisis. It did not create militancy on its own. But it helped rewire trust. It intensified the feeling that constitutionalism was being punished and that dignity could not rely on institutional protection. In that atmosphere—already charged by the unresolved federal disputes of the 1960s and 1970s—Punjab moved closer to a threshold where demands would increasingly be expressed in the language of confrontation rather than petition.

From Dharam Yudh Morcha to the Militarization of Sacred Space: How the State’s Security Frame and the Panth’s Martyr Frame Collided (1981–1984)

If 1978 gave Punjab the martyr list and 1980 gave it the lesson of legalized inversion, then the early 1980s gave it something even more dangerous: a daily rhythm of confrontation. The Morcha converted grievance from sentiment into mass action—arrests, slogans, defiance, negotiation attempts, and repeated disappointment. Every arrest became both a statistic and a story, retold in villages as proof of resolve and proof of state stubbornness. In that environment, politics stopped feeling like debate and started feeling like siege.

This is where the two frames—the Panth’s martyr frame and the state’s security frame—began to synchronize in a destructive way.

The Panth’s martyr frame did not require complex ideology. It required only continuity: 1978 → impunity → moral duty → protest → repression → more duty. Under that frame, each crackdown could be interpreted as further proof that the struggle was righteous. Each humiliation could be metabolized into resolve. The language of “dharam” elevated endurance into worship.

The state’s security frame also did not require nuance. It required only escalation: protest → disruption → targeted violence → fear → administrative pressure → coercive response. Under that frame, each act of militancy—no matter how localized—could be used to paint the entire movement as a threat. Each refusal to “calm down” could be treated as proof that the problem was not policy but loyalty. Under that frame, the center of gravity shifts away from negotiation toward “decisive action.”

And once “decisive action” becomes the mood, institutions begin to move—police doctrines harden, intelligence units expand, media narratives sharpen, and politicians discover the utility of polarization. That is how a society slides from protest to confrontation without a single formal declaration that “we have entered a war.”

In the next stage of this narrative, the question becomes unavoidable: when a movement rooted in civil disobedience begins to coexist with intermittent violence, and when a state committed to projection of strength begins to treat sacred geography as a strategic variable, what stops the escalation?

In Punjab, tragically, almost nothing stopped it—because by then both sides had begun to treat the other not as a political opponent but as an existential danger.

And it is here—between the Morcha’s mass arrests and the hardening of the state’s security posture—that the road to June 1984 is laid, step by step, until the idea of storming the Sikh sanctum is no longer unspeakable in the administrative mind, and the idea of enduring that storm becomes, in the Panth’s memory, another entry in the martyr ledger that began to refill on Vaisakhi 1978.

Operation Blue Star (June 1984): The Storming of the Golden Temple

By early 1984, Punjab was no longer merely “restive.” It was straining under a double crisis that fed on itself day by day: a mass political agitation that made routine governance increasingly unworkable, and a growing underground war in which selective killings, intimidation, and retaliatory violence hardened the entire atmosphere into fear. The state—and especially the national media ecosystem aligned with state framing—collapsed these two realities into one narrative: Punjab equals extremism; Sikh protest equals separatism; Bhindranwale equals the problem itself. That narrative was politically convenient because it transformed a messy, layered conflict—rooted in federal grievances, identity denial, water disputes, political manipulation, and unresolved trauma—into a clean “law-and-order” story in which the only logical solution was force.

But on the ground, the reality was more combustible and more tragic. The Dharam Yudh Morcha, launched as a mass civil disobedience movement under Akali leadership with Bhindranwale as an increasingly magnetic pole, had become a daily ritual of defiance. Batches of volunteers courted arrest, jails filled, and protests disrupted transport and administration. At the same time, a spectrum of militant groups—some aligned with Bhindranwale, some only loosely affiliated, some operating as independent factions—carried out targeted assassinations and sporadic terror acts. Officials were killed; moderate Sikhs were killed; and in incidents that became heavily publicized, Hindu civilians were attacked in ways that generated panic and, crucially, invited communal polarization. These acts did two things at once: they terrified ordinary people, and they gave the state what it needed rhetorically—a set of images that could be used to justify a totalizing crackdown against the larger Sikh movement.

By 1984, many Hindu families in Punjab felt unsafe; some began leaving. Those departures were not just demographic changes—they were political weapons. They were cited as proof that “extremists” had overrun Punjab, and they helped the central government justify escalating control. Meanwhile Sikh families watched another transformation: the state’s language about them grew more absolute. It wasn’t only militants being described as threats; Sikh assertion itself—protest, negotiation demands, the very insistence that Punjab’s rights mattered—was increasingly framed as a prelude to secession.

This was the precipice: not only the breakdown of peace, but the breakdown of trust—the sense that the state was no longer seeking a political resolution, and that many Sikhs were no longer confident that peaceful politics would protect either their grievances or their dignity.

Why the Golden Temple Became the Epicenter

To outsiders, it can sound like a tactical oddity: why would an insurgent leader place himself inside a major religious complex? But in the moral and historical logic of Punjab, the Golden Temple complex is not simply a “holy site.” It is a civilizational nerve center—spiritual authority, public refuge, and symbolic sovereignty in one geography. For centuries, in Sikh memory, Darbar Sahib is sanctuary: the place one flees when the state becomes predatory and the law becomes a mask. The Sikh idea of refuge is not merely personal; it is collective and historical. Under Mughal persecution, Sikh institutions repeatedly became the location where the vulnerable gathered and where the community organized itself for survival.

Bhindranwale’s presence in the Harmandir Sahib complex from 1982 onward was therefore both protective and performative:

Protective, because he understood—correctly—that the state would hesitate to invade the sanctum after earlier episodes (notably the backlash from the 1955 police action in the complex). The shrine’s holiness was, in effect, a shield because an assault would carry an incalculable political cost.

Performative, because the symbolism was unmistakable: If you want to suppress Sikh resistance, you will have to do it where Sikh sovereignty is most visible. It forced the state to choose between negotiation and sacrilege.

Over time, the complex became a convergence zone. It was not only Bhindranwale’s followers. It attracted men from various militant streams, ideologues, and supporters—and it pulled in civilians too, because the Golden Temple is always full of pilgrims. The result was a dangerous mixture: armed men, spiritual pilgrimage, political theater, and state surveillance all occupying the same space.

Fortification of the Akal Takht: A Sacred Seat Turned into a Battlefield Target

Within the complex, the Akal Takht was not merely a building. It is the Sikh seat of temporal responsibility, the visible embodiment of miri–piri: spirituality with a spine, prayer with accountability, devotion that refuses tyranny. Turning the Akal Takht into a defensive position was therefore not only militarily significant but morally explosive. From a Sikh perspective, it was tragic that the Takht had to become a bunker; from the state’s perspective, it became evidence that Sikh sovereignty itself had been “weaponized.”

As 1983–84 progressed, the Akal Takht area was increasingly fortified—sandbags, barricades, firing positions, and defensive planning. A key figure here was General Shahbeg Singh, a retired Indian Army officer with battlefield experience. His presence mattered profoundly for two reasons:

It disproved the simplistic state image that the conflict was driven only by “fanatics” or “criminals.” Shahbeg Singh represented disciplined military competence and gave militants a tactical mind.

It symbolized a deeper rupture: an Indian Army veteran joining the militant cause suggested to many Sikhs that the conflict was no longer simply about “law and order,” but about a crisis of legitimacy.

The government’s claim was straightforward: the Golden Temple was being turned into a fortress and command center. Sikh counter-perception was equally straightforward: the Golden Temple had become the last refuge precisely because the state had made political resolution feel impossible. Both perceptions could be held simultaneously, which is part of why the situation was so combustible.

The Road Not Taken: Negotiations, Political Manipulation, and the “Frankenstein” Argument

Your draft rightly notes that there were multiple opportunities to defuse the crisis. It is important to elaborate why these opportunities failed—not only because of “extremism,” but because of mutual distrust and political incentive structures.

The Akali Dal remained open to negotiation—particularly on core issues like water, Chandigarh, and federal power. But negotiations repeatedly ran into a wall: the center feared appearing weak, and Sikh leadership feared being tricked into symbolic compromise without substantive change. Compounding this was the widely asserted—and historically plausible—charge that Congress had earlier played with fire by tacitly encouraging Bhindranwale’s rise to undercut the Akalis. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bhindranwale’s growing religious influence fractured Sikh political space in ways that benefited Congress’s electoral calculus. Whether every detail of patronage is provable in a courtroom sense is not the key point here; the key point is that a large segment of Punjab came to believe the state had instrumentalized Sikh religious currents—and then, when those currents became dangerous, sought to crush them with force.

This is the classic arc of “managed dissidence” backfiring: a leader is tolerated or encouraged to weaken opponents, then becomes too powerful, and the state responds with a decisive show of coercion to reassert monopoly control. The result is the worst possible outcome: the state looks cynical and violent, and the leader looks prophetic to his followers.

By 1984, Indira Gandhi’s options had narrowed politically. She faced multiple pressures: maintaining national authority, managing other regional crises, and preserving her image as a decisive leader. A military operation promised a clean narrative: the state acted; the extremists were removed; order was restored. But that promise was an illusion, because it ignored one central fact: the Golden Temple is not just a location. It is a global Sikh symbol. An assault on it would not end conflict; it would export conflict into Sikh memory everywhere.

The Lead-Up: Curfew, Censorship, and the Architecture of a Closed Battlefield

On June 1, 1984, the state’s approach moved from containment to preparation for war. Curfew measures tightened. Foreign journalists were expelled. Domestic press was constrained. Communications were restricted. These are not just details—they are the political architecture of impunity. When a state intends to use overwhelming force and wants to manage public reaction, the first step is to control the story by controlling who can witness.

The timing sharpened Sikh outrage even before the first shot. June 3 marked the martyrdom day of Guru Arjan Dev, a date that draws pilgrims in large numbers. Thousands were in and around the complex—many likely unaware of the magnitude of what was approaching. That congregation of civilians is one of the most morally devastating aspects of Blue Star: a sacred anniversary increased the civilian presence at the very moment the state chose to tighten the noose.

The military operation was led by senior commanders—Lt. Gen. Kuldip Brar is often named among the operational leaders, under a broader command structure. The state also moved simultaneously against other Gurduaras suspected of harboring militants—an associated crackdown commonly linked to Operation Woodrose, which is crucial to emphasize because it shows Blue Star was not only about Amritsar. It was the spearpoint of a broader campaign to break the Sikh political ecosystem across Punjab—through raids, mass arrests, and intimidation.

The Assault Begins: June 5–6 and the Collapse of Restraint

The main assault intensified the night of June 5. Initial attempts to storm the complex met fierce resistance. The tactical reality was ugly: the Golden Temple complex is a dense environment with choke points, narrow passages, and multiple structures—making it dangerous for attackers and advantageous for defenders. The militants, fewer in number, had prepared positions. The army, even if initially attempting restraint, encountered high casualties.

This is a critical hinge in the story: at some point, the state chose to prioritize victory over sanctity. Once the army took significant losses and encountered stronger resistance than expected, the operation shifted from “clearing” to “crushing.” And that shift is what made Blue Star existentially traumatic for Sikhs: the moment the state decided to use tanks and heavy weaponry against a sacred seat of sovereignty, it converted the operation from a security action into an assault on Sikh metaphysics.

By early morning June 6, tanks were used and heavy fire was directed at the Akal Takht. This is the iconic image of Blue Star: the Akal Takht—symbol of Sikh temporal authority—being reduced to rubble. Whether the state intended to destroy it as an institution or saw it as a hardened military target, the result was the same in Sikh perception: the state struck the Sikh spine.

Bhindranwale and Shahbeg Singh were killed. Their bodies were displayed, in part to prevent rumors of escape. Militarily, the state achieved its immediate objective: decapitating the leadership and clearing armed resistance from the complex. But morally and politically, the state opened a wound that could not be sutured with victory declarations.

Civilian Deaths: The Uncounted Dead and the Injury of Memory

The deepest wound was not only the death of militants; it was the death of pilgrims—the ordinary men, women, and children trapped inside. The precise number of civilian dead remains contested, and that contest itself is part of the trauma: when the dead are not counted transparently, grief becomes political, and suspicion becomes inevitable. Official figures tended to minimize civilian death; Sikh sources often claim far higher numbers. The truth likely includes a grim mixture of civilians killed in crossfire, civilians caught in enclosed areas, and civilians mistaken for militants or treated as suspect simply by being present.

For Sikh memory, the exact number matters less than the pattern: bodies in a sacred precinct, blood on Vaisakhi-like pilgrimage days, and a state that managed information rather than acknowledging grief. The result is what your broader essay calls the “injury of memory”: a people not only buried their dead, but watched the state refuse to fully name them.

Cultural Destruction: The Sikh Reference Library and the Erasure Fear

Beyond bodies and rubble, Blue Star carried the terror of cultural annihilation. The burning of the Sikh Reference Library within the complex—containing rare manuscripts and historical materials—became, for Sikhs, a symbol of a deeper intent: not only to kill bodies, but to damage memory itself. Whether the fire was deliberate, negligent, or an outcome of chaos, the effect was the same: irreplaceable heritage lost in the very operation that Sikhs already experienced as desecration.

This is a crucial theme for your “wheel of repression” framework. Modern repression is not only about killing; it is often about destroying archives, disrupting testimony, and making future truth harder to prove.

The Aftermath Inside Punjab: Roundups, Humiliation, and Woodrose

Blue Star did not end when the shooting stopped. The immediate aftermath included combing operations, detentions, interrogations, and credible allegations of abuse. Reports of young men being rounded up, beaten, and in some cases killed after surrender became part of the post-operation landscape. This is where the moral damage multiplied: even Sikhs who disliked Bhindranwale could not ignore the sense that Punjab was now under punitive occupation, and that Sikh identity itself—especially visible Sikh identity—had become suspect.

Operation Woodrose and related raids across Punjab deepened this perception. Amritdhari youth, activists, and ordinary men were detained under suspicion. The combination of curfew, censorship, military presence, and mass arrests produced a lived experience close to martial law. In such conditions, the line between targeting militants and punishing a population blurs quickly—and once blurred, it becomes a generator of insurgency rather than a solution.

Sikh Reaction: A Shattered Loyalty and a Global Shockwave

The Sikh response was immediate and visceral. In India, households mourned as if a family member had died—because, in Sikh consciousness, the Darbar Sahib complex is family: it is the collective heart. Elderly Sikhs who had lived through Partition reportedly said they had never imagined witnessing this: an Indian state assault on Sikh sanctity.

Among Sikh soldiers and police, shock became crisis. Reports of Sikh mutinies—hundreds of soldiers refusing orders, attempting to move toward Punjab, or otherwise rebelling—were unprecedented. Even when suppressed, these mutinies signaled something profound: Blue Star ruptured the narrative that Sikh loyalty could be taken for granted. A state can compel obedience, but it cannot compel moral consent. Blue Star cost the state moral consent across large segments of the Sikh community.

Internationally, the diaspora erupted—London, Vancouver, New York. Protests were not merely political; they were grief rituals. Many diaspora Sikhs experienced Blue Star as an attack not only on a building in Amritsar but on their own identity, transmitted through ancestry and memory. The diaspora’s later political mobilization—including the strengthening of Khalistan sentiment—cannot be understood without Blue Star as its central trauma.

How Blue Star Rewrote Punjab’s Political Equation

The most tragic irony is that Blue Star achieved a tactical decapitation but created a strategic explosion. Bhindranwale was killed, but the idea he represented—Sikh dignity under siege—became more credible to many who had previously opposed him. Moderates were discredited: if the state could do this, what good were negotiations? If political leaders could not prevent it, why should anyone follow them? The center of gravity shifted. The space for compromise shrank. The emotional demand for revenge grew.

This is the point you already gesture toward with the “hydra” metaphor—and it is essential to underline: Blue Star turned a localized crisis into a mass legitimacy rupture. Once that rupture occurs, insurgency is no longer just an underground phenomenon; it becomes socially ambient—present in sympathy, in silence, in the refusal to cooperate, in the willingness to hide fugitives, in the moral defense of retaliation.

Ajit Singh Sandhu: Blue Star as the Psychological Gate to “Encounter Logic”

For your essay’s Sandhu-centered framework, Blue Star functions as the critical psychological gate. For many Sikh civilians, it proved the state could desecrate sanctity. For many state-aligned officers—including Sikh officers who chose loyalty to the institution over loyalty to community grief—it proved something else: that Punjab had crossed into a zone where ordinary policing was insufficient and that extraordinary methods were justified.

This is where the later “encounter logic” becomes imaginable. Once a state convinces itself that insurgency is existential, it begins to treat due process as a luxury and legality as an obstacle. Blue Star did not create the logic of impunity, but it normalized the idea that extraordinary coercion could be publicly defended as necessity. Officers like Sandhu would later embody that logic in its most brutal form: the transformation of policing into predation, killing into paperwork, disappearance into administrative routine.

The Fuse to the Next Catastrophe

After Blue Star, Punjab was held in a tight grip—calm on the surface, seething underneath. The moral earthquake was still rolling when a single event detonated the next phase: Indira Gandhi’s assassination on October 31, 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards, a deed some Sikhs interpreted as retribution and many Indians interpreted as unforgivable treachery. That assassination did not close the wound. It was used as permission to open a new one: the November 1984 pogroms, which would further cement Sikh conviction that the Indian state could turn into a machinery of mass violence with little accountability.

Blue Star, therefore, is not only a chapter in the Punjab conflict. It is the hinge between two eras: from contested federal grievances and rising militancy to a post-1984 landscape in which impunity becomes system, trauma becomes identity, and the “wheel of repression” accelerates into its darkest rotation.

The 1984 Anti-Sikh Pogrom: Orchestrated Massacre in Delhi

On the morning of October 31, 1984, Indira Gandhi walked through the garden of her New Delhi residence toward what was meant to be a routine television interview. The scene carried a strange, fateful contradiction that would later feel almost symbolic: security was simultaneously heavy and porous—heavy in the sheer number of guards and the fortified aura surrounding the Prime Minister after June 1984, yet porous in the most intimate way, because the protective ring around her still included Sikh personnel. It was a choice that could be read in multiple ways—an insistence on appearing impartial, a belief in individual loyalty, a refusal to concede that an entire community had become suspect. But it also meant that, within the compound itself, vengeance could enter wearing the uniform of duty.

As she passed a gate, two Sikh bodyguards stepped forward and fired at point-blank range. Beant Singh discharged his sidearm into her body, and Satwant Singh followed with a burst from a Sten submachine gun. In seconds, India’s Prime Minister lay bleeding on the ground. She was rushed to AIIMS, but she was declared dead shortly thereafter. The assassins surrendered to other security personnel. In their own framing, they had acted as avengers—retaliating for what they and many Sikhs regarded as the desecration and slaughter of June 1984. Beant Singh was killed on the spot in the immediate aftermath; Satwant Singh was later tried and executed years later. The state moved swiftly against the assassins, decisively, publicly—an efficiency that would soon stand in grotesque contrast to how it handled the mass killing of Sikhs in the days that followed.

Indira Gandhi’s assassination stunned the country. For many non-Sikhs—particularly in Delhi’s political atmosphere—the killing quickly became a single, simplified story: “Sikhs have killed the nation’s leader.” For Sikhs, the emotional reality was more complex and far more dangerous to express. Publicly, there was fear, restraint, and the instinct to avoid provocation. Privately, many Sikhs felt a grim, combustible mixture of dread and bitter recognition: that this act was being interpreted not as the deed of two men, but as the collective guilt of an entire community. The nuance—that June 1984 had left many Sikhs traumatized and furious, that the assault on Darbar Sahib had ruptured Sikh loyalty at the level of the sacred—was either ignored or weaponized. The assassination became the spark, but the fuel had already been prepared: rumor, resentment, political opportunism, and a social permission structure that could be activated in the name of “revenge.”

Within hours, Delhi began to slide from grief into choreography.

What unfolded over the first week of November 1984—most intensely from November 1 through November 3—was not merely a “riot,” not an uncontrolled spasm of communal rage, and not a symmetrical clash between groups. It was a targeted pogrom: Sikhs were identified, tracked, attacked, and burned in patterns that survivors experienced as systematic and that multiple fact-finding efforts later described as organized rather than spontaneous. The violence moved across specific neighborhoods and resettlement colonies—Trilokpuri, Kalyanpuri, Sultanpuri, Mangolpuri, and others—where working-class Sikh families lived in dense clusters that were easy to encircle and hard to defend. What made the pogrom so devastating was not only the brutality of the mobs, but the predictable sequence through which law, protection, and citizenship were stripped away—step by step—until Sikh households were reduced to ash and silence.

First came identification. Sikh homes and shops were not found by chance. Survivors repeatedly described attackers arriving with local knowledge, lists, or guidance—able to pick out Sikh families with precision. Voter rolls, school records, neighborhood familiarity, and political networks became instruments of targeting. In a functioning democracy, these are administrative tools; in a pogrom, they become hunting aids. Then came mobilization. Crowds appeared not as scattered individuals but as groups that seemed assembled—sometimes transported, sometimes led, often arriving with a sense of coordination: who would loot, who would burn, who would block lanes, who would shout, who would strike. Then came weaponization: iron rods, clubs, blades, kerosene, and incendiary materials—tools suited not for an impulsive brawl but for killing and erasure. Finally came the disabling of defense: police that refused help, telephones that went unanswered, fire brigades that arrived late or not at all, and a state that seemed unable—or unwilling—to stop what it plainly saw.

This is the core reason that the phrase “orchestrated massacre” is not rhetoric here. It is descriptive. The pogrom did not succeed because hatred existed; hatred exists in many societies without becoming a three-day extermination spree. The pogrom succeeded because hatred was given time, space, and institutional permission.

In Sikh memory, the most chilling aspect was how openly political leadership appeared to move through the violence—how slogans, incitement, and local authority fused into a single force. Witnesses and survivor affidavits, later echoed in public discourse and inquiries, repeatedly named Congress-linked figures in Delhi’s political ecosystem—men alleged to have incited, supervised, or emboldened mobs in particular localities. Among the names most often repeated in survivor narratives and widely discussed in the decades that followed were Sajjan Kumar, Jagdish Tytler, H.K.L. Bhagat, and Lalit Maken, among others. The historical record here must be handled with discipline: not every allegation resulted in conviction, not every name had equal evidence attached, and impunity itself distorted what could be proven in court. But the cumulative pattern—how many survivors independently described political instigation, how often the same names recurred, how rarely institutional consequences followed—forms one of the central moral facts of 1984: the distance between accusation and accountability became its own mechanism of violence.

This is why Who Are the Guilty? became so important—not as mere commentary, but as an early attempt to rescue truth from the immediate fog of propaganda. The fact-finding work associated with PUDR and PUCL did not treat Delhi as “communal unrest.” It emphasized organization, political incitement, and administrative failure. Its contribution was to insist that patterns matter: when targeting is precise, when methods repeat across neighborhoods, when police inaction is consistent, when political speech functions as ignition, the violence is not simply social—it is political. It is not merely that Sikhs died; it is that a machinery was allowed to function.

The killings themselves were designed to terrorize and to erase. Sikh men and boys were especially targeted, not simply as individuals but as the perceived carriers of future resistance: adult men, adolescents, even boys pulled from hiding. Homes and Gurduaras were looted and burned. Sikh men were beaten with rods, hacked with blades, and—most notoriously—burned alive after being doused in kerosene. Survivors described the “tire” method—tires forced around necks and ignited—an execution style that felt less like rage and more like ritualized humiliation. Women and children suffered atrocities that survivors often struggled to name without breaking: sexual violence, abduction, public degradation, families burned alive inside their homes. The air, survivors recalled, carried the smell of petrol and charred flesh; streets carried bodies that were not treated as dead citizens but as garbage to be cleared.

And through it all: the police.

The Delhi Police—answerable through the capital’s administrative chain—became, in survivor memory, the symbol of abandonment and complicity. Many Sikhs described police disarming them “for their own safety,” only to leave them defenseless. Others described officers standing by, refusing to intervene, or claiming there were “no orders.” Calls for help went unanswered. Fire brigades refused to enter Sikh areas or arrived after homes had already collapsed into flame. In a pogrom, neutrality is not a middle ground; it is a weapon in the attacker’s hand. Whether through direct complicity, selective paralysis, or bureaucratic delay, the effect was the same: the violence was allowed time to complete its work.

There were, amid the inferno, acts of human courage—Hindu neighbors who hid Sikh families, sheltered children, forged escape routes, stood at doorways and lied to mobs to save lives. These stories matter, not as absolution for the society that failed, but as proof that the pogrom was not an inevitable expression of “people’s anger.” It was a political event with choices at every step. Some chose murder; some chose rescue; the state largely chose delay.

By November 4, the killing ebbed—not because compassion arrived, but because the wave had exhausted itself and because the Army finally appeared in meaningful force. The delay of deployment became a permanent wound in Sikh political consciousness: in the capital of the country, where the state’s power is at its maximum, Sikhs were left for days to be hunted and burned. The official death figures, even by conservative measures, ran into the thousands in Delhi alone, and several thousand more across other cities. Entire localities were transformed into landscapes of widows, orphans, and relief camps, where survivors recounted horrors so extreme they sounded unreal until one remembers that mass violence always feels “unbelievable” to the living—because normal moral language breaks in front of it.

To many Sikhs, Delhi 1984 felt like Partition repeating itself—except with one difference that cut deeper than any blade. In 1947, violence came with the collapse of an empire and the birth of borders; in 1984, violence came inside their own country, in the national capital, under a government that claimed secular legitimacy. The betrayal was civic as well as human.

It was in this context that Rajiv Gandhi’s infamous metaphor—“When a big tree falls, the earth shakes”—landed like a pronouncement of impunity. Even if defended as a description of grief, it was received by Sikhs as moral permission: a way of naturalizing mass murder as an understandable aftershock. The phrase became a shorthand for the state’s posture: mourning for power, explanations for violence, and silence for victims.

What followed after the pogrom was the second half of the atrocity: the long war against truth.

Instead of swift prosecutions, there came a procession of inquiry commissions and committees—some earnest, some constrained, some widely criticized as performative. Names surfaced, receded, resurfaced again decades later. Cases were filed, witnesses intimidated, files lost, investigations reopened after political pressure. Only after many years did certain convictions emerge in high-profile cases, and even then the timeline itself became a moral scandal: decades to convict in a mass atrocity, while the assassins of the Prime Minister were processed swiftly. For Sikhs, this was not merely “justice delayed”; it was justice structured to fail. The absence of accountability did not simply deny closure—it taught a civic lesson: that Sikh blood could be spilled without consequence if political cost demanded it.

This vacuum—where institutions refused to provide justice—created space for a different, darker idea of “justice” to take hold: retaliation. In the years immediately after 1984, militant formations and underground networks targeted certain individuals associated in public memory with state violence and anti-Sikh atrocities. Some of these killings—such as the assassination of Lalit Maken in 1985, and later the assassination of General A.S. Vaidya in 1986—were framed by militants and sympathizers as retribution for June and November 1984. Harjinder Singh Jinda and Sukhdev Singh Sukha became emblematic of this retaliatory arc after the Vaidya assassination, a symbol—within some Sikh militant narratives—of an alternative accountability when the courts appeared captured or inert. But this must be stated with clarity: extrajudicial retaliation did not restore what was lost; it expanded the logic of blood into an organizing principle. It hardened the Indian state’s security posture, legitimized broader repression in the public imagination, and helped convert Sikh trauma into a “law-and-order” framework that would soon swallow thousands of Sikh families who had no connection to militancy at all.

This is the hinge on which the post-1984 tragedy turns. The pogrom did not merely kill thousands; it transformed the political ecosystem. It sealed the fate of Punjab’s insurgency by converting a portion of Sikh despair into militant recruitment and by converting the Indian state’s credibility—already shattered by Blue Star—into something even thinner: a state that could assault the Sikh sacred in June and permit Sikh slaughter in November, and still claim moral authority. After Delhi, many Sikhs—especially the young—concluded that peaceful dissent had been met first with desecration and then with extermination. The militant ranks swelled not only in Punjab but also among displaced survivors and diaspora youth who saw in photographs and testimony a warning about what Sikh existence could mean under majoritarian rage and political impunity.

It is within this widening abyss that Ajit Singh Sandhu’s trajectory becomes more legible. The Delhi pogrom occurred hundreds of miles from his daily post, but its aftershock traveled instantly into Punjab. The state’s narrative hardened: militancy was no longer a “problem” but an existential threat; extraordinary policing was no longer an aberration but a necessity. For officers like Sandhu—Sikh officers working inside a state increasingly determined to crush Sikh militancy by any means—1984 created a brutal moral corridor. Some Sikh officers recoiled, resigned, or withdrew. Others stayed and adapted. Sandhu stayed. Whether he felt private conflict is difficult to know; what matters for history is what followed: the rise of a counterinsurgency culture in which coercion became routine, legality became selective, and terror was answered with terror—until the line between policing and predation blurred so completely that Punjab itself seemed to become a laboratory of impunity.

The pogrom, then, is not only a chapter of grief; it is a structural turning point in the larger argument of this work. It demonstrates how quickly a modern state can translate a political shock into communal punishment; how easily a ruling party’s local networks can become the spine of mass violence; how “administrative delay” can function as a weapon; and how the failure to prosecute atrocity becomes the seedbed for the next cycle of blood. In the moral ledger of modern India, Delhi 1984 remains one of the clearest examples of how a republic can train itself to live with the deaths of its own citizens—through euphemism (“riot”), through delay (“commission”), through selective punishment, and through the corrosive message delivered to survivors: you may mourn, but you may not name; you may remember, but you may not demand.

And that is why the Sikh memory of 1984 is not merely memory. It is diagnosis. It is the recognition that what was done was not only murder, but a rehearsal of governance through fear—and that until truth and accountability exist at the level of institutions, the wheel does not stop. It only rolls forward, crushing new lives under old habits.

For your end bibliography section, the anchor sources for this portion typically include the PUDR/PUCL fact-finding report Who Are the Guilty?, later official inquiry materials (including the Misra Commission and the Nanavati Commission report), survivor affidavits and contemporaneous journalism, and subsequent court records in cases that resulted in convictions decades later; you can also cite reputable human-rights documentation on police inaction and the structure of pogroms as a political phenomenon, alongside scholarly work on how 1984 reshaped Punjab’s insurgency and the Indian state’s counterinsurgency doctrine.

The Decade of Darkness (1985–1995) — The Machinery of Counterinsurgency

Punjab’s “dark decade” is often narrated as a duel between militants and the state. But for most families, it did not feel like a duel. It felt like a vice: violence on one side, coercion on the other, and a daily life in which law became rumor and survival became strategy. After 1984, many Sikhs experienced something deeper than “instability”: a collapse of trust in courts, commissions, and elections—an intuition that the state could injure with impunity, and that the language of national security would swallow every demand for accountability. In that atmosphere, insurgency grew, but so did a counterinsurgency architecture that treated entire districts as suspect populations.

What follows expands your section by tightening the causal chain: how political failure hardened militancy; how militancy’s drift helped justify extraordinary policing; how extraordinary policing evolved into routine disappearance; and how disappearance was protected by paperwork, propaganda, and a system of rewards. I’m going to keep descriptions of torture and sexual violence non-graphic, while still naming the patterns, the institutional logic, and the human consequences.

From Accord to Ashes: 1985 and the Reopening of the Wound

In 1985, the Rajiv–Longowal Accord arrived with the familiar architecture of post-crisis Indian governance: promises of commissions, transfers of territory, and compensation—paired with an expectation that Sikh anger could be managed back into “normalcy.” The accord’s political meaning was not simply what it contained, but what many Sikhs heard beneath it: recognition without accountability. There was no genuine reckoning for 1984; there was no credible mechanism to punish perpetrators of the pogrom; and there was little faith that Delhi would actually deliver on the core concessions. Longowal’s assassination soon after didn’t only kill a man; it killed a path—because it signaled to militants that moderation was betrayal, and to the state that negotiation could be portrayed as weakness. The center of gravity moved from bargaining tables to police stations and clandestine networks.

Militancy as Retaliation, Identity, and Drift

From 1986 onward, multiple armed formations—Babbar Khalsa, the Khalistan Commando Force, Khalistan Liberation Force, Bhindranwale Tiger Force, and splits of the AISSF—claimed the mantle of Sikh defense and retribution. In Sikh memory, some operations were framed not as “terrorism,” but as punitive justice against architects of 1984 and Blue Star—especially because formal justice appeared blocked or endlessly delayed. Harjinder Singh Jinda and Sukhdev Singh Sukha became emblematic within that moral universe. Their supporters cast them as men acting inside an older Sikh ethical vocabulary: the idea that when lawful remedies are foreclosed, sovereignty and dignity must still be defended, even at the cost of one’s life.

Yet the decade’s moral complexity cannot be flattened into romance. As the insurgency lengthened, parts of militant violence widened beyond targeted retaliation into indiscriminate killing, intimidation, and communal polarization. Attacks on Hindu civilians, executions of alleged “collaborators,” and intra-Sikh coercion did more than produce victims—they provided the state a narrative gift: Punjab as a battlefield of “terror,” in which normal legal restraints could be described as naïve luxuries. This is how the public space shrank: every atrocity by militants made it easier for the state to argue that “restraint” was treasonous softness.

The State’s Turn: Emergency Law as Everyday Law

If militancy provided the spark, the state provided the machine. By late 1980s and early 1990s, counterinsurgency was no longer just “policing.” It was a governance model: President’s Rule, intelligence primacy, and special laws that normalized indefinite detention and lowered evidentiary thresholds. In practice, statutes like TADA did not merely expand state power; they shifted risk. For the police, the risk of illegal action decreased—because detention could be justified, confessions could be coerced, and trials could be delayed indefinitely. For ordinary Sikh families, risk expanded—because mere suspicion could become incarceration, and incarceration could become disappearance.

This is the pivot that many outside Punjab miss: the “war on terror” logic did not begin with a single spectacular operation. It emerged as a slow administrative conversion in which the citizen increasingly encountered the state through raids, checkposts, informant economies, and custodial fear—not through services, courts, or rights.

The Counterinsurgency Machine: Incentives, Units, and Denial

A modern counterinsurgency does not run only on ideology; it runs on incentives. Punjab’s security architecture developed a ladder of rewards—cash, commendations, promotions, prestige—for “results.” In the language of the time, “results” meant recoveries (weapons), arrests, and, increasingly, bodies. When the state makes the body-count a metric—implicitly or explicitly—the law becomes a nuisance to be routed around.

This is where the “encounter” became a technology. The encounter, as a narrative form, solved multiple problems at once. It provided a story of danger and heroism (“they fired first”), justified immediate lethal force, and preempted judicial scrutiny by presenting death as the unavoidable end of a firefight. Even when encounters were genuine, the form itself created cover for those that were not. And once the form becomes normalized, the public begins to live inside a fog where truth is always “classified,” and grief is always asked to prove itself.

Alongside “formal” police work, Punjab saw the expansion of commando-style units and irregular auxiliaries—popularly remembered as “cats” or “black cats,” and in some accounts linked to covert action and deniable operations. The allegation repeatedly made by human-rights advocates—and echoed even in contemporaneous diplomatic reporting—was not simply that such elements fought militants, but that some participated in criminality, intimidation, and staged violence that could be blamed on “terrorists,” thereby corroding popular sympathy and deepening communal fear. The strategic purpose of this tactic is chillingly rational: if you can make the population fear the insurgents and mistrust the community around them, you isolate militants from social oxygen. The ethical price is catastrophic.

Named Faces in a System: “Supercops,” District Fiefdoms, and the Normalization of Cruelty

K.P.S. Gill’s public persona was built on the promise of restoration: the “supercop” who would bring Punjab back from insurgency. But a restoration purchased by extrajudicial force is not a restoration of law; it is a restoration of state dominance. Gill’s defenders argued that extraordinary measures were necessary against an extraordinary threat. Critics argued that “necessity” became a blanket that covered everything—torture, disappearance, and a culture in which police action was presumed patriotic by default.

Within that architecture, certain district commanders became legendary—admired by the establishment for “control,” feared by civilians for the same reason. Ajit Singh Sandhu, particularly in Tarn Taran, is remembered in survivor testimony not merely as an officer, but as a symbol of how one district could be turned into a laboratory of the encounter form: abduction, illegal detention, coerced confessions, and killings later framed as shootouts. Ensaaf’s documentation, built from interviews and public records, presents this not as an isolated pattern but as a sustained practice attributed to Sandhu’s tenure and the agents operating under his authority.

Other names recur in the moral geography of the decade. Mohammad Izhar Alam is associated in multiple accounts with covert operations and police-linked auxiliaries described as “black cats” or vigilante-style squads. Gobind Ram is remembered in Punjab’s human-rights narratives as a figure associated with custodial humiliation and family-targeting tactics—the use of relatives, especially women, as leverage against wanted men. Whether every allegation attached to every name can be proven in court is often a different question; but the recurrence of these names in testimony points to something larger: Punjab’s counterinsurgency was not experienced as “mistakes.” It was experienced as a method.

Custody as a Weapon: Torture, Sexual Violence, and Collective Punishment

A counterinsurgency’s hidden center is custody. Once detention becomes easy, the body becomes the site where the state extracts information, produces confessions, and performs dominance. Human rights reporting from the period describes a pattern of torture in custody, including methods intended to break identity and will rather than simply “question” a suspect. The purpose was not only intelligence; it was deterrence: to make the idea of militancy—or even sympathy—feel physically expensive.

Women’s bodies were also pulled into this machinery. Multiple reports and testimonies from Punjab describe sexual violence, threats, and humiliation used to terrorize families and force surrenders. Even when rape did not occur, the threat environment was itself a form of control: families learned that the state could reach into the home, rewrite honor into vulnerability, and then deny everything.

Collective punishment operated alongside custody. When a wanted militant could not be found, pressure shifted to parents, siblings, spouses, and sometimes entire villages. Raids became ritualized spectacles—doors broken, elders struck, livelihoods disrupted—followed by the quiet aftermath in which no complaint could be safely filed. In Sikh memory, some incidents became emblematic of this logic: the reported targeting of the Jatana family, remembered as an act designed not merely to punish one militant but to send a message to every household that resistance would burn through kinship itself. Whether recounted as “burst” operations or simply as terror, the meaning was the same: the state would not only fight the gunman; it would discipline the family line.

The Bureaucracy of Erasure: Disappearance, “Lawaris” Bodies, and the Cremation Registers

If encounter killings were one pillar of counterinsurgency, disappearance was the other. Disappearance is not merely death; it is death plus uncertainty. It makes mourning impossible and fear permanent. It also protects perpetrators: a missing person creates no corpse, no autopsy, no trial-ready evidence. That is why disappearance so often travels with the destruction of remains.

This is where the cremation grounds enter the narrative not as religious spaces but as administrative endpoints. Jaswant Singh Khalra’s work made the machinery visible. By examining municipal and cremation records, he surfaced the scale at which bodies labeled “unclaimed,” “unidentified,” or “lawaris” were disposed—often without meaningful identification processes, often without families being notified even when families were actively searching. His findings did not merely accuse individual officers; they indicted a system in which the state could kill, rename the dead as “unknown,” and then turn fire into bureaucracy.

The deeper horror here is the attempt at ontological erasure: not only to kill the person, but to erase the fact that the person was ever there—to deny the family even the right to grieve properly, to keep the wound open, and to make the community’s memory feel like an inconvenience rather than evidence.

Khalra: The Man Who Read the Fire Registers—and Was Swallowed by Them

Khalra’s story sits at the hinge of the decade because it exposes what the machine could not tolerate: documentation. He represented a uniquely dangerous form of dissent—not armed resistance, but evidentiary resistance. He took the state’s own paper trails and used them to speak in a language the world could recognize: numbers, registers, dates, grounds, categories, and patterns. When he carried this story abroad, the state faced a new threat: that Punjab’s “normalcy” narrative might fracture internationally.

Khalra was abducted in 1995 in broad daylight, and his disappearance became an international scandal precisely because it was so brazen. Investigations and later legal proceedings identified police responsibility for the abduction; witness accounts described extended illegal detention and torture; and convictions eventually followed for several officers. Even then, the case illustrates the system’s core reflex: deny, delay, deflect—until fatigue becomes policy. The counterinsurgency’s final tactic is often not the bullet. It is time.

Resistance Figures Without Romance: Jinda, Sukha, and the Moral Language of Retribution

To write this decade honestly, you have to hold two truths at once. First: many Sikhs revered figures like Jinda and Sukha because the formal justice system appeared to protect perpetrators of 1984 and Blue Star. In their own writings, they framed retaliation as a form of dharmic combat—a last-resort ethics under conditions of institutional collapse. Second: the logic of assassination, once normalized, is a door that rarely closes cleanly. It can target the guilty, but it can also harden a political ecology where violence becomes a substitute for law, and where civilians become symbols rather than persons.

This is why the decade’s tragedy is recursive. State impunity nurtured militant vengeance; militant violence nourished state exceptionalism; and the population became trapped in a loop where each side’s brutality “proved” the other side’s necessity. The state claimed it must become ruthless because militants were ruthless. Militants claimed they must become ruthless because the state was ruthless. The civilian learned to whisper.

The “Peace” That Arrived: Graveyard Normalcy and Unfinished Accounting

By the mid-1990s, Punjab’s gunfire diminished, but the peace that returned was not a peace built on truth. It was a peace built on exhaustion and selective amnesia. Many officers celebrated as saviors faced few consequences; some political actors preferred stability to reckoning. The Akali Dal’s later entanglements with institutional control—over the SGPC and Akal Takht appointments—fed a different kind of injury: the sense that Sikh institutions were being domesticated into managed religion, stripped of independent moral authority.

Ajit Singh Sandhu’s suicide in 1997, with many cases pending, is often remembered as a parable of how the machine eventually discards its instruments. But for victims’ families, even that ending offered little closure. A suicide does not locate the missing. It does not return names to the cremation registers. It does not answer the simplest question that haunts every era of enforced disappearance: Where is my person?

And so the decade does not “end” in 1995. It continues as inheritance—trauma carried into drugs, emigration, silence, and periodic eruptions of anger whenever the state tries again to brand Sikh dissent as inherently suspect.

Source notes for verification and later bibliography building (no inline citations above)

Key reference points used for dates, documented patterns, and the evidentiary record include: PUDR/PUCL’s documentation of 1984 and impunity; Human Rights Watch reporting on custodial abuse and counterinsurgency practices in Punjab; Amnesty International reporting on unlawful detentions and specific cases including the death in custody of Jathedar Gurdev Singh Kaunke and Khalra-related advocacy; Ensaaf’s data-driven documentation and perpetrator profiles (including Sandhu and Izhar Alam) grounded in interviews and public records; contemporaneous reporting on Jinda/Sukha’s execution and the 1987 Ludhiana bank robbery; and reporting/records on delayed accountability for 1984 perpetrators. (Wikipedia)

Aftermath and Continued Pursuit of Justice (1996–2010s)

The Sullen Peace and the Architecture of Amnesia

The late 1990s in Punjab were a time of uneasy calm – the sound of gunfire had faded, but the silence was heavy with grief and unresolved questions. For the first time in over a decade, Punjabis were not waking up to news of another shootout or bomb blast. Festivals like Vaisakhi and Diwali once again drew large, carefree crowds. Economically, Punjab even rebounded to an extent: investments trickled back in, and fields yielded bumper crops under the peacetime skies. On the surface, it looked as if normalcy – that much-vaunted goal – had returned.

However, beneath this veneer of stability, the state and much of public life engaged in a project of collective amnesia. The strongest public messaging was “move on”: commerce, pop culture, emigration, and a kind of manic normal were encouraged, while open discussion of the “horror years” was quietly discouraged. In Punjab itself, people generally avoided speaking about the crackdown years openly – not only from fatigue and trauma, but from a learned instinct: memory could be punished. For many households, especially in belts like Tarn Taran, Amritsar, Gurdaspur, and parts of Majha and Doaba, peace did not mean closure. It meant a prolonged, suspended mourning.

For families of those killed in alleged fake encounters, and for families of those who vanished, normalcy was impossible. Many primary breadwinners were gone. Widows became heads of households overnight, often with no paperwork, no death certificate, no acknowledged body, and therefore no legal pathway to benefits, inheritance, or dignity. Some families were driven into penury, debt, or a forced migration out of their ancestral villages. In many places, the social stigma was engineered: the bereaved were treated as families of “terrorists,” even when the community knew the disappeared as ordinary farmers, students, granthis, or daily-wage workers. The cruelty was not only the death. It was the administrative afterlife of death: the denial of identity, the denial of rites, the denial of acknowledgment.

Meanwhile, Sikh diaspora communities—freer to speak and organize—held conferences, commemorations, and remembrance events to keep 1984 and the 1990s atrocities alive in collective memory. As the decade turned, the center of gravity of “voice” moved outward: from villages whispered into silence, to Gurduaras and community halls in Canada, the UK, the United States, and Europe, where survivors and families could name what had happened without immediate local retaliation. Even there, the story remained contested: diaspora remembrance became both a moral archive and, in the eyes of the Indian state, a security problem.

History has a way of demanding acknowledgment. The question Punjab carried into the post-insurgency era was not only “who won,” but “what was done to win”—and whether the winners would ever be held to law.

The Churn of the Judicial Machinery

One significant development of the aftermath was the slow churn of judicial and investigative efforts regarding the abuses. The democratic framework of India did, haltingly, provide some avenues. Yet these avenues were shaped by delay, narrowing jurisdictions, procedural hedging, and a persistent reluctance to call state crime by its proper name. The pursuit of justice, in this phase, was rarely a straight line. It was a series of small openings, partial admissions, and long plateaus of denial.

In the national political arena, the Nanavati Commission was set up in 2000 to re-examine the 1984 anti-Sikh massacres. In its 2005 report, it confirmed much of what survivors had said all along – that powerful political actors were credibly implicated, that the violence was not simply “spontaneous,” and that the state’s failure in prevention and prosecution was itself part of the crime. The impact was simultaneously historic and maddening. There were moments of public shame and symbolic removals; yet convictions arrived painfully late, reinforcing the Sikh perception that “justice delayed is justice denied.” The machinery could acknowledge in principle, but it struggled to punish in fact. That gap—between official admission and meaningful accountability—became a defining feature of the post-1996 landscape.

On the Punjab front, the mass cremations case—forced into public view by Jaswant Singh Khalra’s work—became a rare arena where the state could not fully erase its own paper trail. The NHRC’s proceedings, shaped by Supreme Court direction and constrained by jurisdictional boundaries, were both a record and a limitation: an official acknowledgment that illegal cremations occurred, paired with a refusal to fully prosecute the architecture behind them. This produced the “blood money” controversy that still haunts the discourse. Compensation—whether described as relief or as remedy for “violation of fundamental rights”—could not answer the questions that mattered most to families: Who ordered these actions? Who pulled the trigger? Who falsified the records? Where are the bodies? Why were families denied remains? Why were identities stripped and replaced with a bureaucratic word: unclaimed?

For many families, money without criminal accountability felt like a second burial—one that sealed impunity in exchange for silence. Many refused compensation on principle, or accepted it while continuing to demand prosecutions, insisting that relief cannot substitute for justice.

And yet, even imperfect proceedings created something the state could not easily undo: documentation. A ledger of names. An official trail. A record that could be carried forward into future courts, international forums, and intergenerational memory.

Civil Society as the Witness Against Forgetting

Civil society and human rights organizations kept the flame of remembrance alive. Groups like the Punjab Human Rights Organization (PHRO) and later Ensaaf (a U.S.-based nonprofit), along with documentation initiatives such as PDAP and allied researchers, began doing what the state refused to do: treating each missing person not as a statistic but as a life with a name, a village, a family, and a story.

One seminal work, “Reduced to Ashes” by Ram Narayan Kumar (2003), documented hundreds of individual cases of alleged extrajudicial killings and disappearances in Punjab, putting names to numbers and narratives to the silences in police files. That approach mattered. It changed the moral geometry. The debate could no longer be confined to abstractions like “counterinsurgency” or “terrorism.” Each case study—each testimony, each affidavit, each cremation record—forced a confrontation with the granular human reality of state power used without restraint. Reports of fake encounters, torture, sexual violence, custodial abuse, and enforced disappearances were compiled not only for history, but for law: to be placed before courts, commissions, and international mechanisms, and to prevent a second erasure through forgetfulness.

This was a new kind of struggle: less about territory, more about truth. Less about armed capacity, more about documentation capacity. In the post-1996 era, the Sikh demand sharpened into a triad: truth, accountability, and memory. If the state could not be forced to prosecute broadly, it could at least be prevented from rewriting.

The Institutionalization of Memory: History Written in Stone

As the 2000s matured into the 2010s, memory became more formalized, more architectural—built into Gurduara complexes, commemorative spaces, and institutional resolutions. Symbolism mattered because it contested the state’s narrative monopoly. It said: the community will not outsource its history to official textbooks or security briefings.

On the political front, the Akali Dal (led by Badal) took some steps to symbolically address Sikh grievances, including memorialization. The construction of commemorative structures—such as the “Wall of Truth” memorial at Gurduara Rakab Ganj in New Delhi listing names of 1984 victims, and a memorial within the Golden Temple complex related to June 1984—represented an attempt to fix memory in physical form. The Indian establishment was often uneasy with such memorials, particularly where commemoration intersected with figures still framed by the state as “terrorists.” But the structures went ahead as community catharsis: a refusal to let memory be managed.

The Sikh religious leadership (SGPC and Akal Takht) also made pronouncements aimed at healing and assertion. In 2005, the Akal Takht declared that the events of 1984 were a “genocide” of Sikhs—politically and legally charged language because it challenged the “communal riot” framing and implied intent, organization, and state complicity. In 2014, on the 30th anniversary of Blue Star, the SGPC passed a resolution glorifying Bhindranwale as a “martyr of faith.” Such steps were cheered by Sikhs who felt their narrative was finally being voiced by their institutions, though they also ensured that wounds—never properly treated by law—did not simply “close” into silence.

This period also saw another uncomfortable reality: institutional capture and compromise. Even as some memorial and resolution politics asserted Sikh memory, the legitimacy of Sikh religious leadership was contested from within, with critics arguing that the SGPC and Akal Takht could be co-opted through political patronage. The struggle for memory, in other words, was not only between Sikhs and the Indian state; it was also within Sikh institutions themselves—between those seeking uncompromised truth and those seeking negotiated stability.

Militancy in Retreat, Not in Myth

Sikh militant activity in Punjab largely ceased by the late 1990s, but that didn’t mean all militants were gone—or that the militancy era vanished from imagination. Many had escaped abroad (to Pakistan, or Western countries), where they remained vocal. Groups like Babbar Khalsa and ISYF maintained networks in the diaspora, though increasingly constrained by international counterterrorism regimes after 9/11. In Punjab, occasional arms seizures and sporadic attempts at revival surfaced, but they did not gain broad traction. The public, exhausted by the violence and its consequences, largely preferred other modes of assertion: democratic protest, legal advocacy, diaspora pressure, and cultural remembrance.

At the same time, the story of the 1980s–1990s became mythologized in certain spaces. Songs, films, and social media narratives sometimes romanticized militants as folk heroes; other narratives emphasized the civilian costs and the corrosive effects of armed struggle. The post-insurgency era did not deliver one settled memory. It delivered a contested memory—because truth, when unadjudicated, becomes a battleground of narratives.

Flashpoints That Proved the Past Was Not Past

Through the 2000s, Punjab enjoyed peace, but not a peace free of tremors. Incidents like the Dera Sacha Sauda controversies (including clashes and protest deaths) reminded Punjabis that religious injury could still ignite mass emotion. These episodes were not the same as the dark decade, but they revealed a continuity: when Sikh sanctity felt attacked, the response could still become statewide—and when the state responded with coercion, the old memories returned immediately.

Then came 2015, a year that shattered the illusion that the police culture of impunity had ended. Punjab was rocked by sacrilege incidents—desecrations of the Guru Granth Sahib, with torn pages found scattered in villages, beginning most famously around Bargari in Faridkot district and echoing across dozens of sites. The Sikh populace was deeply hurt and outraged. Peaceful protests erupted: mass gatherings, sit-ins, and morchas that were moral in character, anchored in sanctity rather than party politics.

At Behbal Kalan in October 2015, the Punjab Police under the Badal-led government opened fire on unarmed protesters, killing two Sikh youths and injuring many. The scene—blood of unarmed Sikhs staining Punjabi soil—did not read as “law and order” to many Sikhs. It read as an old script resurfacing. The aftermath became politically explosive and helped fracture the Akali Dal’s claim to be the natural protector of Sikh interests, contributing to their electoral collapse in 2017. More importantly, it proved a deeper point: if accountability for the 1990s had been real, 2015 might have unfolded differently. Impunity is not only injustice; it is precedent.

Diaspora as Archive, Pressure, and Political Force

Beyond India’s borders, Sikh diaspora communities became increasingly assertive in seeking justice and maintaining memory. In Canada, the UK, and the USA, Sikh political participation expanded, and remembrance entered parliamentary spaces through motions and commemorations recognizing Sikh suffering. The diaspora also built memory infrastructure outside state control: annual rallies, museums, Gurduara-led archives, academic conferences, and a growing ecosystem of oral-history projects. Social media connected Sikh youth to their history like never before. Where official curricula might offer a sanitizing line about “flushing out terrorists,” the internet offered survivor testimony, destroyed shrines, commission records, and the voices of those long ignored.

This created a new tension. The Indian state’s intelligence and diplomatic arms increasingly treated diaspora activism as a security concern—pressuring Western governments to curb what it called “pro-Khalistan extremism.” Western states, balancing diplomatic ties with commitments to free expression, often resisted blanket restrictions while still monitoring genuinely violent networks. The result was a constant tug-of-war: remembrance framed as advocacy by Sikhs, framed as threat by New Delhi.

The “Referendum 2020” campaign, led by Sikhs for Justice, became a vivid illustration of this tension—legal as a political expression in many Western jurisdictions, but treated by India as an intolerable provocation. Whether one viewed it as symbolic or substantive, it underscored a shift: Sikh self-determination discourse, suppressed domestically by fear and policing, migrated outward into diaspora civil space.

Transnational Repression and the Export of ‘Encounter’ Logic

This tug-of-war culminated in one of the most dramatic international incidents related to Sikhs since the Air India bombing: the 2023 assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, Canada. Nijjar, a Canadian citizen and Gurduara leader, was an outspoken advocate for Sikh self-determination; India accused him of involvement in militant plotting, charges he denied. On June 18, 2023, Nijjar was shot dead in the parking lot of his Gurduara. The murder shocked Sikhs in Canada and reverberated globally.

In September 2023, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Parliament there were “credible allegations” linking agents of the Indian government to the killing. The diplomatic fallout was immediate and severe. For Sikhs, Trudeau’s statement carried historic weight: it echoed a fear long held in diaspora memory—that the coercive methods refined in Punjab could be projected abroad.

That sense of projection intensified when U.S. authorities later alleged a separate plot to assassinate Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a U.S.-based Sikh activist, describing a murder-for-hire scheme and alleging links to Indian officials. For many Sikhs, the connective tissue was unmistakable: the logic that the state may eliminate perceived enemies without due process—a logic that, in Punjab, had been normalized through staged encounters, unlawful detention, coercive “assets,” and deniable proxies.

Even for observers who bracket conclusions until courts adjudicate every claim, the pattern is psychologically and politically significant: the old conflict’s grammar—threat, surveillance, intimidation, plausible deniability—appears to have acquired an international accent.

The Long View: Justice as a Horizon, Not an Event

By the late 2010s and 2020s, one can identify a lingering Sikh sense of injustice alongside a broad fatigue and a reluctance to relive bloodshed. It is telling that when new charismatic separatist figures emerged in Punjab, the public response did not become a mass armed uprising; most Sikhs—while often receptive to the language of dignity and grievance—preferred political, legal, and protest pathways rather than a return to the graveyard arithmetic of the dark decade.

And so, as this historical analysis moves beyond the 1990s, the wheel of tragedy that began in earlier eras has slowed but not stopped. Sikhs today still demand answers for Partition-era wounds, for 1984, and for the 1990s: recognition of excesses as internal war crimes, a truth commission, the opening of records, the naming of perpetrators, the locating of remains, and the end of impunity as inherited privilege.

The Indian establishment often responds with a dual argument: that formal apologies have been issued for 1984, and that Sikh representation in high office proves integration. But representation does not equal reconciliation, and apology does not equal prosecution. Many Sikhs point to continuing structural disputes—over identity recognition under law, over Punjab’s political and water rights, over the fate of long-detained Sikh prisoners, and over recurring patterns of state suspicion—as evidence that the trust deficit remains.

Yet, the Sikh community also has remarkable resilience and a complex relationship with the Indian state that cannot be reduced to one story. Sikhs have served in the armed forces, contributed to national life, and led major democratic movements. The farmers’ protest of 2020–21, overwhelmingly Punjabi and heavily Sikh in composition and moral texture, compelled the Indian government to repeal contested farm laws—achieving a “morcha” victory through mass nonviolence. In that sense, the post-1996 era is not only a story of grief. It is also a story of survival strategies: rebuilding family life, rebuilding institutions, rebuilding voice, and finding new methods to demand what the 1990s tried to burn away—truth itself.

Conclusion: An Unfinished History

By 2025, the “Crimes Against Sikhs” narrative is no longer confined to the borders of Punjab. It is a global human rights issue. The struggle is no longer only about territory; it is about the right to memory—the refusal to let the state bury the truth alongside the thousands of unidentified bodies in the cremation grounds of Punjab. Until the files of the disappeared are opened, until perpetrators are named and prosecuted with integrity, and until Sikh institutions can speak without capture or coercion, the aftermath remains what it has always been: not an ending, but a long, contested pursuit.

ANNEXURE A: CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS (1900–2025)

Date

Event

Significance

1905–1909

Colonial-era gurdwara control disputes intensify

Sets stage for reform movement and institutional sovereignty.

1914

Komagata Maru incident; Budge Budge confrontation

Diaspora exclusion and coercion become formative political memory.

1914

Mewa Singh assassinate Hopkinson; execution follows

Early diaspora surveillance and resistance enter Sikh political lore.

1919

Jallianwala Bagh massacre (Amritsar)

Regional trauma deepens distrust of state violence in Punjab.

1920–1925

Gurdwara Reform Movement

Establishes Sikh institutional self-management; strengthens Akal Takht centrality.

1922

Guru Ka Bagh and Panja Sahib morchas

Nonviolent protest ethics and community discipline are publicly performed.

1947

Partition of Punjab

Mass displacement and violence imprint generational trauma.

1955

Police action at Darbar Sahib during Punjabi Suba agitation (periodic)

Rehearses postcolonial coercion against Sikh constitutional mobilization.

1966

Punjab Reorganisation; Punjabi Suba achieved

Creates Punjabi-speaking state but leaves unresolved Chandigarh and river-water disputes.

1973

Anandpur Sahib Resolution adopted

Articulates federalist and autonomy demands; later securitized by the state.

1975–1977

Emergency in India

Expands coercive state capacity; normalizes exceptional governance practices.

1978

Nirankari–Sikh clash (Amritsar)

Catalyzes radicalization and deepens communal fault-lines.

1982

Dharam Yudh Morcha begins

Mass civil-disobedience and constitutional demands intensify.

Jun 1984

Operation Blue Star (Darbar Sahib complex)

Sacred-space violence becomes a civilizational rupture.

Oct–Nov 1984

Assassination of Indira Gandhi; anti-Sikh pogrom

Mass violence, impunity, and denial structure long-term grievance.

1985

Rajiv–Longowal Accord

Promises relief and federal adjustments; implementation contested.

Late 1980s–early 1990s

Counterinsurgency peaks; disappearances and ‘encounters’

Allegations of systematic extrajudicial violence and torture.

1995

Murder of Jaswant Singh Khalra

Human-rights documentation meets lethal retaliation; symbol of impunity.

1995–1997

Ajit Singh Sandhu era prominence; subsequent suicide (1997)

Embodies the personalization of counterinsurgency brutality and its moral fallout.

2000s

Diaspora documentation campaigns expand

Memory work and human-rights advocacy globalize.

2005

Nanavati Commission report (1984)

Official narrative contested; accountability debates continue.

2009

HRDAG/Ensaaf quantitative report published

Adds statistical framing to disappearances and violent deaths.

2010s

Digital narrative battles intensify

‘Khalistan frame’ and disinformation contests proliferate.

2020–2021

Mass farmer protests in India (Punjab central)

Agrarian distress becomes mass political crisis; Punjab’s ‘slow violence’ foregrounded.

Jun 2023

Hardeep Singh Nijjar killed in Canada

Transnational repression allegations reshape diaspora security discourse.

2023–2024

Reporting of alleged plot targeting Sikh activist in U.S.

Signals potential extraterritorial escalation and diplomatic crisis.

2025

Renewed dossiers and documentation releases (including Sandhu focus)

Institutional memory work strengthens accountability claims.

ANNEXURE B: GLOSSARY OF KEY TERMS

Akal Takht: The temporal seat of Sikh authority, historically associated with miri–piri (temporal-spiritual responsibility).

SGPC: Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee; statutory gurdwara management body shaped by reform-era struggle.

Sarbat Khalsa: Collective assembly tradition convened in moments of crisis to issue Panthic resolutions.

CPOM: Corporate Practice of Medicine (used as analogy in narrative framing; not a Punjab term).

‘Encounter’ killing: Colloquial term for alleged staged firefights resulting in extrajudicial deaths.

Enforced disappearance: Arrest/detention followed by denial of fate or whereabouts; often linked to torture and extrajudicial killing.

Secret cremations: Allegations that bodies were cremated without identification to conceal unlawful killings.

Punjabi Suba: Movement for a Punjabi-speaking state, achieved via 1966 reorganisation.

Anandpur Sahib Resolution: 1973 Akali Dal resolution outlining federalism and autonomy demands.

‘Khalistan frame’: Analytical term used here for narrative techniques that securitize Sikh advocacy by default.

ANNEXURE C: RECURRING MECHANISMS OF REPRESSION — A CROSS-ERA MATRIX

This matrix is a synthetic tool. It does not claim that every mechanism operated identically in every era. It identifies patterns that recur, mutate, and recombine across time: colonial ‘managed religion,’ postcolonial federal coercion, sacred-space violence, counterinsurgency impunity, economic ‘slow violence,’ and transnational narrative capture.

Mechanism

Typical Manifestations

Long-Term Effect

Managed religion / institutional capture

Colonial-era gurdwara managers and intermediaries; later politicized capture of statutory Sikh bodies; appointment disputes over Takht authority.

Weakens autonomous decision-making; converts religious institutions into controllable administrative levers.

Procedural legality as a weapon

Immigration restrictions (diaspora); emergency laws; preventive detention; opaque prosecutions; delayed justice in mass violence cases.

Turns law into exclusion; produces ‘legal’ outcomes that still feel morally illegitimate.

Narrative securitization (‘security lens’)

Labeling constitutional demands as sedition; reducing Sikh identity to militancy; post-2010 digital disinformation ecosystems.

Justifies exceptional measures; delegitimizes testimony; normalizes impunity.

Sacred-space violation and symbolic rupture

Attacks on gurdwara sanctity; June 1984 violence in Darbar Sahib complex; subsequent memory wars over ‘what happened.’

Produces civilizational trauma; hardens identity boundaries; destabilizes trust in the state.

Impunity infrastructure

Weak prosecution; compromised investigations; witness intimidation; commission reports without proportional accountability.

Signals unequal citizenship; perpetuates fear; transmits trauma across generations.

Counterinsurgency incentives and ‘encounter’ culture

Promotions, bounties, and informal rewards; normalized torture; disappearance; clandestine disposal of bodies.

Creates violence market; institutionalizes illegality; corrodes rule-of-law norms.

Economic extraction and ‘slow violence’

Agrarian distress, debt, groundwater collapse; fiscal burdens of water disputes; unemployment and narcotics economy.

Extends trauma beyond bullets; converts political injury into intergenerational precarity.

Transnational repression and intimidation

Surveillance allegations; targeting of activists abroad; diplomatic conflicts around diaspora advocacy.

Exports insecurity; chills speech; globalizes minority vulnerability.

ANNEXURE D: AFFIDAVIT-STYLE WITNESS SUMMARIES AND ILLUSTRATIVE VIGNETTES

This annexure provides affidavit-style summaries designed for human-rights documentation and public education. They are written in a neutral, structured voice and are anonymized unless the individual is a widely documented public figure. They illustrate recurring patterns reported in Punjab and in anti-Sikh mass-violence contexts: displacement, targeted mob violence, custodial abuse, enforced disappearance, intimidation of witnesses, and the intergenerational transfer of trauma. These vignettes are not substitutes for case files; they are templates for how a case narrative can be documented.

Vignette 1 — Partition Survivor (1947): Displacement and the Inheritance of Silence

The witness states that they were a child during the 1947 Partition of Punjab. They recall that the household received warnings that the neighborhood was no longer safe and that the family would need to leave quickly. The witness describes hurried packing, the abandonment of valuables, and the fear that accompanied travel. They report seeing columns of displaced people on roads, hearing rumors of attacks, and encountering scenes of burned homes. The witness does not claim knowledge of every detail; they emphasize the general atmosphere of terror and uncertainty.

The witness reports that, during the journey, family members were separated and the family did not know for days whether certain relatives survived. They state that property left behind was never recovered. After resettlement, the family rebuilt materially over time, but the psychological consequences persisted: the witness describes a culture of silence in which elders avoided speaking about what happened, as if naming the trauma might reopen it. They describe this silence as both a coping mechanism and a form of intergenerational transmission: children learned fear without being told its history.

The witness links this early trauma to later political moments. They state that, when later violence occurred in Punjab decades later, older family members reacted with a recognizably similar posture—withdrawal, mistrust, and a belief that the state could not be relied upon for protection. The witness’s account illustrates how a community’s relationship to authority is shaped not only by formal rights but by lived memory of abandonment.

Vignette 2 — Punjabi Suba Protester (1950s–1960s): Constitutional Demands and Coercive Policing

The witness states that they participated in Punjabi Suba–era protests seeking linguistic and federal recognition. They describe the movement as constitutional and nonviolent, centered on petitions, assemblies, and morchas. The witness recalls repeated arrests during demonstrations, short detentions, and the use of public-order policing to disperse crowds. They emphasize that these encounters were formative because they taught activists that peaceful protest could still be treated as suspicious.

The witness reports that local media and officials often portrayed the movement as destabilizing or communal, even when slogans and demands were framed as democratic rights. They describe this as an early example of securitization: a political demand is reclassified as a threat, which then justifies coercive response. The witness states that this pattern produced a slow erosion of trust in negotiation, especially among youth, who began to interpret repeated policing as proof that the state was unwilling to concede dignity through democratic means.

The witness notes that the eventual creation of a Punjabi-speaking state did not resolve core grievances because disputes over Chandigarh and river waters remained contested. The witness describes how partial victory can produce a long aftertaste of betrayal: the state acknowledges the demand but retains leverage through unresolved issues.

Vignette 3 — 1978 Shock and the Rumor Economy: Communal Polarization as a Political Technology

The witness states that they were present in Punjab during the period surrounding the 1978 clash in Amritsar. They describe the speed with which fear and rumor circulated: stories traveled faster than verified facts, and local events became symbols of broader existential threat. The witness emphasizes that communal polarization did not happen spontaneously; it was fueled by speeches, pamphlets, and selective retellings that framed the conflict as proof of irreversible hostility.

The witness describes how political entrepreneurs benefited from the rising temperature. In their account, organizations and individuals gained influence by claiming they alone could protect the community’s honor. The witness states that the state’s response—whether through perceived indifference, selective enforcement, or heavy-handed policing—amplified resentment. They describe a pattern in which insufficient protection is followed by punitive control, leaving the community feeling both unsafe and criminalized.

The witness’s testimony illustrates an important mechanism: rumor economies can become political technologies. Once a community is placed in a permanent state of alert, it becomes easier to justify exceptional measures, and harder to maintain the disciplined nonviolent repertoire that earlier Sikh movements had cultivated.

Vignette 4 — June 1984: Sacred-Space Rupture and Moral Injury

The witness states that the June 1984 violence associated with the Darbar Sahib complex created an enduring moral injury. They describe a sense of disbelief that a place of worship could become a battlefield, and they emphasize the symbolic impact beyond any tactical debate. The witness reports that, for many Sikhs, the event felt like a civilizational message: sacred space was not protected by the state’s claimed respect for pluralism.

The witness describes immediate psychological consequences—fear, grief, and anger—followed by long-term effects such as nightmares, avoidance of discussion, and a persistent distrust of official narratives. They state that what hurt was not only violence but the struggle over meaning: the state framed the event as necessary security action, while many Sikhs experienced it as desecration and collective humiliation. The witness reports that family conversations became politically charged, with elders urging restraint and youth expressing a sense that constitutional pathways were closing.

The witness concludes that June 1984 should be understood not only as a political episode but as a rupture in civic trust. When sacred institutions are violated, the injury becomes metaphysical: it challenges the community’s belief that it is safe within the national moral order.

Vignette 5 — 1984 Pogrom Survivor (Delhi): Targeted Violence and the ‘Second Violence’ of Impunity

The survivor states that, in the days following Indira Gandhi’s assassination, mobs targeted Sikh neighborhoods. They describe attackers chanting slogans, identifying Sikh households through local knowledge or lists, and using crude weapons and accelerants. The survivor reports that police were present but did not intervene effectively. They emphasize that the experience created a lasting belief that the violence was not merely spontaneous but enabled through neglect or complicity.

The survivor describes displacement within the city and the loss of family members. They state that the immediate horror was followed by a ‘second violence’: the bureaucratic and judicial maze. They describe filing complaints that went nowhere, encountering hostile officials, and watching cases stall for years. Compensation processes, in their account, were inconsistent and humiliating, requiring repeated retelling of trauma to disbelieving clerks.

The survivor’s testimony illustrates why impunity is itself traumatic. When perpetrators are not punished, survivors receive a message that their lives are worth less than the state’s convenience. The survivor emphasizes that memory becomes political because justice is absent: survivors must keep speaking simply to keep the truth from being erased.

Vignette 6 — Disappearance Pattern (Late 1980s–Early 1990s): Administrative Denial as Violence

The witness states that a relative was taken into custody during a security sweep. They report that, after the arrest, the family visited multiple police stations and was repeatedly told that the person was not in custody. The witness describes the experience as a bureaucratic labyrinth: each office denies responsibility, and the family is forced to navigate informal channels—lawyers, journalists, community intermediaries—simply to learn whether the person is alive.

The witness describes how uncertainty prevents mourning. Without confirmation of death, the family cannot grieve; without confirmation of life, the family cannot hope. The witness reports economic collapse as well: the detained person was a wage earner, and the family’s resources were consumed by travel and legal fees. The witness emphasizes that disappearance is a form of collective punishment because it forces the whole household into fear and precarity.

The witness also describes intimidation. They report that neighbors advised silence, and that families who speak risk retaliation. The testimony illustrates how enforced disappearance functions as both a crime and a governance technique: it removes individuals and installs fear as a social discipline.

Vignette 7 — Torture and Scripted Confession: Rewriting Reality Through Pain

The survivor states that they were subjected to custodial torture intended to produce a confession. They describe beatings, forced stress positions, sleep deprivation, threats against family members, and humiliation. The survivor emphasizes that torture is not only about physical pain; it is about narrative capture. Under pressure, the victim is coerced into repeating the state’s script, thereby converting violence into paperwork and illegality into ‘evidence.’

The survivor reports that, after release, the stigma persisted even without conviction. Community members treated the survivor with caution, employers avoided contact, and the label ‘militant’ lingered. The survivor describes long-term health consequences—chronic pain, anxiety, hypervigilance—and the feeling that the body has become a permanent archive of coercion.

This testimony illustrates why torture corrodes not only individuals but institutions. If confessions are manufactured through pain, the criminal-justice system becomes a theater: courts process scripts rather than facts, and truth becomes subordinate to security performance.

Vignette 8 — Secret Cremations and the Problem of Proof: The Body as Evidence and the Politics of Erasure

The witness states that they learned, through community networks, of bodies cremated without identification. They describe how families were denied access to information, and how the absence of records made accountability nearly impossible. The witness emphasizes the evidentiary trap: if the state denies custody, families must prove custody; if bodies are cremated without identification, families cannot prove death; and without proof, courts and officials can dismiss claims as rumor.

The witness explains why documentation efforts become dangerous. Those who collect affidavits, maintain lists of missing persons, or contact journalists risk being labeled troublemakers. The witness describes a climate in which truth-telling becomes risky, and silence becomes a survival strategy.

This vignette highlights a structural concept: administrative disappearance. Violence is not only in the killing, but in the destruction of the evidentiary chain that would allow society to name the killing as a crime.

Vignette 9 — Human-Rights Defender (Public Figure: Jaswant Singh Khalra): When Documentation Becomes a Target

This vignette summarizes the public role of Jaswant Singh Khalra, a human-rights defender associated with efforts to surface allegations of unlawful cremations and missing persons. The key point is structural. A defender converts private grief into public evidence: lists become data, testimonies become affidavits, and rumor becomes documented pattern. In doing so, the defender threatens the infrastructure of impunity.

The murder of a defender signals to society that truth is dangerous. It is not only a crime against one person; it is a warning to everyone who might follow. This is why the killing of documentation figures is so corrosive: it attacks the possibility of accountability itself.

The vignette also illustrates a moral argument: human-rights defense is an act of civic loyalty, not disloyalty. It seeks to align state practice with constitutional values. When defenders are targeted, the state’s claim to legality is hollowed out, because legality without accountability becomes mere procedure.

Vignette 10 — The ‘Bandi Singh’ Household: Intergenerational Punishment Through Indefinite Detention

The family states that their relative has been incarcerated for decades. Their life is organized around prison visits, petitions, and waiting. They report that the household’s finances were consumed by travel and legal costs, and that stigma in the community and workplace persisted. Children grew up with an absent parent and with a political label attached to their surname.

The family describes the psychological violence of indefinite detention: every year brings a new hope of remission, followed by delay or denial. This creates a cyclical grief that never resolves. The family emphasizes that the issue is not only the prisoner’s fate but the state’s message: some communities can be punished beyond the standard logic of proportionality.

The vignette illustrates how reconciliation fails when punishment is identity-linked. A democracy seeking closure must show consistent standards, transparent rules, and the ability to distinguish accountability from perpetual stigmatization.

Vignette 11 — Farmer Debt and ‘Slow Violence’: When Economic Precarity Extends Political Trauma

The witness states that agrarian distress functions as structural trauma. They describe rising input costs, unpredictable markets, groundwater depletion, and debt cycles that turn farming into a gamble. Social pressure to maintain dignity compounds the harm: families hide debt, postpone medical care, and exhaust informal loans. The witness describes suicides and addiction not as isolated moral failures but as symptoms of hopelessness.

The witness links this ‘slow violence’ to political injury. When a community’s economic foundations weaken, social cohesion fractures. Youth migrate or become vulnerable to illicit economies; local institutions struggle to provide stability. The witness describes narcotics as both symptom and weapon: addiction spreads where hope collapses, and it can be exploited by power brokers to keep populations distracted and fragmented.

This vignette argues that the post-1995 era cannot be understood solely through overt political conflict. Economic injury can perpetuate the same fundamental message of disposability: that the lives and livelihoods of Punjabi rural households can be sacrificed without consequence.

Vignette 12 — Diaspora Intimidation (2010s–2020s): Chilling Effects on Speech and Memory

The witness states that they organize diaspora events focused on 1984 remembrance and human-rights documentation. They report receiving threats, being labeled extremist, and encountering pressure on community venues. Intimidation is not always direct; the witness reports that family in India received inquiries, employers received anonymous messages, and community members urged silence for safety.

The witness describes how intimidation alters community behavior. Speakers decline invitations, organizations avoid public statements, and fundraising for documentation becomes harder. The witness emphasizes that this chilling effect reaches beyond separatist politics. Even those who advocate only for accountability and equal rights can be targeted under broad security framing.

This vignette illustrates why transnational repression allegations matter: they export insecurity across borders and attempt to make memory itself risky. When speaking about past crimes becomes dangerous in the present, impunity is not merely preserved; it is renewed.

ANNEXURE E: LEGAL AND HUMAN-RIGHTS FRAMEWORK (INDIA AND INTERNATIONAL)

This annexure summarizes legal frameworks relevant to the narrative: constitutional rights, criminal accountability, and international human-rights standards. It is written for readers who want a bridge between historical description and legal evaluation.

E.1 Constitutional Commitments and Equal Citizenship

India’s constitutional structure contains robust commitments to equality, non-discrimination, and religious freedom. The Sikh experience described in this manuscript raises recurring questions about how constitutional promises operate in practice: when a minority’s political claims are repeatedly treated as security threats, rights such as equal protection, freedom of expression, and freedom of religious practice can be functionally narrowed. In a constitutional democracy, the test is not whether the state may regulate; it is whether regulation is proportional, non-arbitrary, and consistent across communities.

E.2 Policing, Custody, and the Prohibition of Torture

Torture and custodial violence are prohibited by both domestic criminal-law principles and international norms. Even where states face genuine security threats, the rule of law requires transparent arrest records, prompt production before a magistrate, access to counsel, and independent investigation of abuse. Patterns of enforced disappearance and ‘encounter’ killings, when alleged, implicate not only individual officers but institutional systems: record manipulation, denial of custody, intimidation of witnesses, and failure of prosecutors to act.

E.3 Enforced Disappearance as a Composite Crime

Enforced disappearance is not a single act; it is a composite practice: deprivation of liberty by state actors or their proxies, followed by denial of fate or whereabouts, and placement of the person outside the protection of law. Its moral cruelty is that it prevents mourning and creates permanent uncertainty. Even where domestic law lacks a dedicated disappearance statute, the practice can still violate multiple legal prohibitions: unlawful detention, kidnapping, torture, murder, and obstruction of justice.

E.4 Mass Violence and the Duty to Investigate

In episodes of mass communal violence, the state’s duty is not only to refrain from participation but to protect, investigate, prosecute, and remedy. Where police non-intervention or complicity is alleged, accountability must include command responsibility, political incitement, and systematic obstruction. Commission reports can be useful, but without prosecutions and reparations they risk becoming ‘documentation without justice.’

E.5 International Standards: ICCPR, Customary Norms, and Transitional Justice

International human-rights instruments and customary principles emphasize the right to life, freedom from torture, fair trial, and effective remedy. Transitional justice frameworks—truth-telling, reparations, institutional reform, and guarantees of non-repetition—are relevant when a society seeks to close a period of mass abuse. A core insight is that reconciliation cannot be mandated by silence; it must be earned through credible accountability and reform.

E.6 Narrative Harm as a Human-Rights Concern

Human-rights analysis increasingly recognizes that propaganda and dehumanizing narratives can be enabling conditions for violence. When a minority community is persistently framed as disloyal or dangerous, it becomes easier to justify exceptional treatment, deny remedies, and normalize impunity. Therefore, the ‘Khalistan frame’ is not only a political discourse issue; it has legal relevance as a mechanism that can enable rights violations by shaping institutional willingness to hear evidence.

ANNEXURE F: AJIT SINGH SANDHU AS PRISM — PATTERN EVIDENCE, ALLEGATIONS, AND THE LOGIC OF ‘ENCOUNTER’ AUTHORITY

This annexure treats Ajit Singh Sandhu as an analytical prism rather than as a lone villain. The claim in Sikh human-rights discourse is not only that particular officers committed abuses, but that the state created an ecosystem in which abuse could become rewarded, normalized, and narratively sanctified. Where specific numbers or allegations are attributed to a dossier or report, they should be read as allegations or documented claims by those sources unless verified by court findings.

Sikh memory often organizes the counterinsurgency through named figures because systems become visible through faces. Sandhu’s name appears in this narrative as a symbol of the ‘encounter’ logic: the idea that extrajudicial killing can be reframed as heroism, and that legality is optional where the state declares emergency. This logic thrives when institutions treat success as a body count, reward shortcuts, and tolerate torture as intelligence gathering.

When dossiers and testimonies describe patterns associated with particular police leadership, the focus is frequently on a recurring toolkit: sweeps and custodial detention; pressure to confess; staging of encounters; intimidation of lawyers and journalists; and the erasure of proof through unrecorded cremations or denial of custody. These allegations, where substantiated, describe not isolated misconduct but a governance technique: remove the person, erase the record, and deny responsibility.

Sandhu’s later suicide in 1997 is often narrated in Sikh discourse as a moral aftershock. The point is not to psychoanalyze. The point is to recognize that systems that normalize brutality often damage their own agents as well. When violence becomes routine, the boundary between policing and predation dissolves, and even those inside the apparatus may face psychological collapse, fear of exposure, or factional betrayal. Suicide, in this reading, becomes a symptom of an apparatus that cannot admit its own crimes without undermining its legitimacy.

A responsible dossier must distinguish between three layers: (1) documented individual cases, (2) pattern evidence across cases, and (3) political narratives built around those patterns. The manuscript uses Sandhu to hold all three in view. Individual cases require names, dates, and records; pattern evidence requires aggregation and statistical methods; political narrative requires ethical interpretation. Conflating them creates risk. Separating them creates clarity.

The key ethical claim is that security cannot justify impunity. Even if insurgent violence existed—and it did—the state remains bound by law. A state that defeats militancy through illegality damages its own democratic legitimacy and leaves behind a population that cannot trust institutions. That loss of trust is not an emotional inconvenience; it is a constitutional wound. It is how trauma becomes institutionalized: not only through violence, but through the refusal to name violence as illegal.

Finally, the Sandhu prism helps explain the ‘hero’ problem. States often memorialize counterinsurgency figures as saviors. Communities that experienced those same figures as predators cannot accept that memorialization. The conflict then becomes a conflict over reality itself. This is why dossiers and documentation matter: they contest the monopoly of official narrative and insist that a democracy’s heroes must be compatible with the rule of law.

ANNEXURE G: POLICY AND ACCOUNTABILITY RECOMMENDATIONS

These recommendations are offered as democratic accountability measures. They are not endorsements of violence or separatism. They reflect standard human-rights and rule-of-law practices used internationally after periods of mass abuse.

Truth and Record Preservation

Create independent, victim-centered truth documentation processes with protected archives. Commission reports should be digitized, searchable, and linked to prosecutorial action; survivors should not be forced to relive trauma repeatedly just to be believed.

Prosecutions and Command Accountability

Prioritize cases with strong evidentiary foundations and pursue not only direct perpetrators but those responsible for enabling conditions: command responsibility, political incitement, evidence suppression, and witness intimidation.

Witness Protection and Anti-Retaliation Safeguards

Implement enforceable witness-protection systems and penalties for retaliation. Civil-society documentation should be protected rather than treated as disloyalty.

Custodial Transparency and Anti-Torture Measures

Mandate custody registers, body cameras with independent storage, prompt medical examinations, and independent investigation of allegations of torture or disappearance. Torture must be treated as a serious crime, not a policing tactic.

Reparations and Community Healing

Design reparations that are not merely monetary but restorative: mental-health services, educational scholarships for affected families, memorialization practices, and official acknowledgment that validates victim testimony.

Institutional Autonomy and Non-Interference

Respect and strengthen the autonomy of Sikh institutions and ensure that statutory bodies cannot be captured through coercion or intimidation. Institutional legitimacy requires transparent appointments and community confidence.

Diaspora Security and Transnational Accountability

Investigate credible allegations of transnational intimidation and protect diaspora civil society. Diplomacy must not override basic protections for political speech and community safety.

Narrative Integrity and Education

Revise curricula and public commemorations to reflect evidence-based accounts of 1984 and Punjab counterinsurgency abuses. Balanced education reduces rumor economies and prevents securitization from becoming permanent ideology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY, VIDEOGRAPHY, AND SOURCE NOTES

1984 and Its Precursors

[1] Mark Tully & Satish Jacob, Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle (Jonathan Cape, 1985).

[2] Kuldip Nayar & Khushwant Singh (eds./commentaries), writings on Operation Blue Star and aftermath (selected).

[3] Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).

[4] H.S. Phoolka, writings on 1984 cases and prosecution strategy (selected).

[5] Manoj Mitta & H.S. Phoolka, When a Tree Shook Delhi (selected editions).

[6] Veena Das, writings on riots, violence, and everyday life in India (selected).

[7] Paul R. Brass, The Production of Hindu–Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (University of Washington Press, 2003) (methodological frame).

[8] Lt. Gen. K.S. Brar, Operation Blue Star: The True Story (UBS Publishers, 1993).

[9] Satish Jacob, reportage and interviews on Punjab during the 1980s (selected).

[10] Praveen Swami and other journalists’ long-form reporting on Punjab militancy and state response (selected).

Books & Scholarly Works

[11] Khushwant Singh, A History of the Sikhs (Vol. 1–2) (Princeton/Oxford editions, selected).

[12] J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (Cambridge University Press).

[13] W.H. McLeod, Sikhism and Sikh History (selected works).

[14] Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, Sikhism: An Introduction (I.B. Tauris, 2011).

[15] Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair, Sikhism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2013).

[16] Christopher Shackle & Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair (eds.), Teachings of the Sikh Gurus (selected).

[17] Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries (University of Chicago Press, 1994) (used critically).

[18] Pashaura Singh and Louis E. Fenech (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies (Oxford University Press, 2014).

[19] Louis E. Fenech & W.H. McLeod (eds.), Historical Dictionary of Sikhism (Scarecrow Press, selected editions).

[20] Eleanor Nesbitt, Sikhism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005).

[21] W. Owen Cole & Piara Singh Sambhi, The Sikhs: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (Sussex Academic Press / Routledge editions).

[22] Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan (novel; contextual to Partition trauma, 1956).

[23] Joyce Pettigrew, The Sikhs of the Punjab: Unheard Voices of State and Guerrilla Violence (Zed Books, 1995).

[24] Darshan Singh Tatla, The Sikh Diaspora: The Search for Statehood (Routledge, 1999).

[25] Verne A. Dusenbery, Sikh diaspora studies (selected articles).

[26] Himadri Banerjee, writings on Sikh identity and politics (selected).

[27] Sikh studies journals and peer-reviewed articles (Journal of Sikh Studies; Sikh Formations; South Asia journals) (selected).

Commissions & Official Inquiries

[28] Justice Ranganath Misra Commission Report on 1984 anti-Sikh violence (Government of India, 1986).

[29] Justice G.T. Nanavati Commission Report on 1984 anti-Sikh violence (Government of India, 2005).

[30] Justice Dhingra Committee/related investigative updates on 1984 cases (selected public reports).

[31] Shah Commission of Inquiry (Emergency, 1978) (selected volumes/excerpts).

Counterinsurgency and Human Rights

[32] K.P.S. Gill, writings and interviews defending counterinsurgency strategy (selected; included for viewpoint diversity).

[33] Julio Ribeiro, writings on policing and Punjab (selected).

[34] C. Christine Fair and other scholars on counterinsurgency and internal security in India (selected).

[35] Works on ‘encounter’ killings, incentives, promotions, and impunity in Punjab policing (selected).

[36] Case materials and reporting on Jaswant Singh Khalra and the ‘secret cremations’ investigations (selected).

[37] Julio Ribeiro, Bullet for Bullet: My Life as a Police Officer (Viking/Penguin India, 1998).

[38] Sumedh Singh Saini and other Punjab police-era accounts (used critically; selected).

Court Records and Judgments

[39] Supreme Court of India: litigation related to Sutlej–Yamuna Link (SYL) canal and inter-state river water disputes (selected judgments).

[40] Supreme Court of India: Kehar Singh v. Union of India (1989) (mercy petition jurisprudence; contextual to post-1984 state reasoning).

[41] Punjab & Haryana High Court and Supreme Court proceedings related to 1984 prosecutions and transfers (selected).

Diaspora, Migration, and Revolution

[42] Ali Kazimi, Undesirables: White Canada and the Komagata Maru (Douglas & McIntyre, 2012).

[43] Hugh Johnston, The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada’s Colour Bar (UBC Press, 2014 / earlier editions).

[44] Gurdit Singh, personal accounts and compiled materials on Komagata Maru (selected).

[45] Harish K. Puri (and/or relevant scholars), writings on the Ghadar movement and Punjabi diaspora politics (selected).

[46] SikhRI educational materials on Mewa Singh and early diaspora surveillance (selected).

[47] Gurharpal Singh & Darshan Singh Tatla, Sikhs in Britain: The Making of a Community (Zed Books, 2006).

[48] Gurharpal Singh & Darshan Singh Tatla, Sikhism in Global Context (selected writings).

[49] Anita Rau Badami and other literary works reflecting diaspora Sikh memory (selected; contextual).

[50] Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (Oxford University Press, 2014).

[51] Maya Jasanoff and other scholars on empire and mobility restrictions (selected; contextual).

Disinformation and Narrative Analysis

[52] Scholarly literature on securitization, propaganda, and diaspora politics relevant to the ‘Khalistan frame’ (selected).

[53] Media studies on communal framing and incitement in North India, including the role of print media during periods of tension (selected).

[54] Studies and reporting on communal media incitement in Punjab and North India, including references to Jagat Narain and Punjab Kesri controversies (selected).

[55] Academic work on securitization theory (Copenhagen School) as applied to minority politics (selected).

[56] Academic literature on diaspora lobbying, think-tank ecosystems, and digital propaganda relevant to minority securitization (selected).

Government & Constitutional Documents

[57] Government of India, Constitution of India (as amended): Fundamental Rights, DPSPs, and federal structure provisions.

[58] Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India: States Reorganisation Commission Report (1955).

[59] Punjab Reorganisation Act, 1966 (Parliament of India).

[60] Punjab Accord / Rajiv–Longowal Accord (1985) (text and official statements).

[61] Punjab Settlement and related water-sharing documents: SYL canal materials and inter-state agreements (selected).

Human Rights Reports & Dossiers

[62] PUDR & PUCL, Who Are the Guilty? (Report on the 1984 anti-Sikh violence, 1984).

[63] Human Rights Watch & Physicians for Human Rights, Dead Silence: The Legacy of Human Rights Abuses in Punjab (May 1, 1994).

[64] HRDAG/Benetech and Ensaaf, Violent Deaths and Enforced Disappearances During the Counterinsurgency in Punjab, India: A Preliminary Quantitative Analysis (January 26, 2009).

[65] Ram Narayan Kumar et al., Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab (SAHRDC, 2003).

[66] Amnesty International, India: Punjab — Accountability and Disappearances (selected reports, 1990s).

[67] Ensaaf, thematic reports and case dossiers on enforced disappearances, secret cremations, and impunity (2000s–2020s).

[68] Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab (CCDP), compilations and case lists (selected).

[69] Punjab Human Rights Organization (PHRO), reports and case documentation (selected).

[70] Asia Samachar coverage of Ensaaf’s dossier and related releases on Ajit Singh Sandhu (Dec 2025).

[71] South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre (SAHRDC), thematic reports on Punjab and internal security laws (selected).

[72] People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), reports on communal violence and police accountability in India (selected).

[73] Civil Liberties/advocacy archives on the Enforced Disappearances and mass cremations litigation and documentation (selected).

[74] Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) public updates in major 1984 cases (selected).

[75] Human Rights Watch, India-related reports on police abuse, custodial violence, and impunity (selected).

[76] Amnesty International, India-related reports on torture, emergency powers, and accountability (selected).

International & UN Materials

[77] UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances: India country-related materials (selected).

[78] UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions: India-related communications (selected).

[79] UN OHCHR guidance on transitional justice, truth commissions, and reparations (selected).

[80] International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), India-related rule-of-law and accountability materials (selected).

Partition and State-Building

[81] Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Duke University Press, 1998).

[82] Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge University Press, selected editions).

[83] Ishtiaq Ahmed, The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed (Oxford University Press, 2012).

[84] Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (Yale University Press, 2007).

[85] Mushirul Hasan (ed.), India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom (selected).

[86] Katherine Frank, Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (Houghton Mifflin, 2001) (contextual).

[87] Stanley Wolpert, writings on modern Indian political history (selected; contextual).

Primary & Institutional Texts

[88] Sri Guru Granth Sahib (standard published editions).

[89] Dasam Granth (standard published editions; scholarly debated).

[90] Sikh Rehat Maryada (SGPC), authorized code of conduct (standard editions).

[91] Proceedings and Hukamnamas associated with Sri Akal Takht Sahib (selected published compilations).

[92] Gurdwara Reform-era proclamations and jail diaries (selected compilations).

Punjab Economy, Agrarian Change, and ‘Slow Violence’

[93] P. Sainath, Everybody Loves a Good Drought (Penguin, 1996) (contextual rural distress framework).

[94] Pritam Singh and other economists on the Green Revolution’s long-term impacts in Punjab (selected).

[95] Academic and policy reports on farmer debt, suicides, groundwater depletion, and environmental degradation in Punjab (selected).

[96] Policy and investigative reports on Punjab’s narcotics economy, unemployment, and public health impacts (selected).

[97] Reporting and research on Punjab floods, climate vulnerability, and fiscal burdens (selected).

[98] Government of Punjab and Government of India agricultural statistics yearbooks (selected).

[99] Central Ground Water Board and related environmental assessments for Punjab groundwater depletion (selected).

[100] UNODC and public-health literature relevant to narcotics supply chains and opioid impacts in Punjab (selected).

[101] Reports on Punjab’s river-water politics and climate vulnerability by Indian think tanks and universities (selected).

Punjab Politics & Federalism

[102] Baldev Raj Nayar, Minority Politics in the Punjab (Princeton University Press, 1966).

[103] Gurharpal Singh, Ethnic Conflict in India: A Case-Study of Punjab (Palgrave Macmillan, selected editions).

[104] Pritam Singh, Federalism, Nationalism and Development: India and the Punjab Economy (Routledge, selected editions).

[105] Harnik Deol, Religion and Nationalism in India: The Case of the Punjab (Routledge, 2000).

[106] Rajiv A. Kapur, Sikh Separatism: The Politics of Faith (Allen & Unwin, 1986).

[107] Academic analyses of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution and Indian federalism (selected peer-reviewed articles).

[108] Paul Wallace, Region and Nation in India: The Punjab in Indian Politics (selected editions).

[109] K. C. Yadav and other historians on Punjabi Suba and linguistic federalism (selected).

[110] Bipan Chandra et al., India Since Independence (Penguin, selected editions) (chapters on federalism and Punjab).

[111] Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford University Press) (federalism and rights framing).

[112] Christophe Jaffrelot, writings on Indian nationalism and communal politics (selected).

[113] Brass, Paul R.; Jaffrelot, Christophe; and other scholars on communalism and state power (selected).

Sikh Institutions & Reform

[114] Ganda Singh, writings on the Gurdwara Reform Movement and Akali struggles (selected).

[115] Teja Singh & Ganda Singh, A Short History of the Sikhs (multiple editions).

[116] Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Punjabi University Patiala) (multi-volume reference, selected entries).

[117] SGPC Act and associated legal frameworks governing gurdwara management (selected legal texts and commentaries).

Transnational Repression and Diaspora Politics

[118] Reuters, reporting on the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar and ensuing diplomatic events (2023–2024).

[119] CBC News, reporting on Canadian investigations and diaspora security (2023–2025).

[120] BBC News, reporting on Canada–India tensions after Nijjar’s killing (2023–2024).

[121] The Washington Post and other major outlets, reporting on alleged transnational plots targeting Sikh activists (2023–2024).

[122] Public court filings and indictments related to alleged transnational assassination plots (United States, 2023–2024) (selected).

[123] Public reporting and parliamentary debates in Canada on foreign interference and diaspora intimidation (selected, 2023–2025).

[124] US Department of Justice public filings related to alleged transnational targeting plots (selected, 2023–2024).

Videography & Oral History

[125] Survivor interviews and oral-history collections on 1947 Partition and 1984 anti-Sikh violence (selected archives).

[126] Documentaries on Operation Blue Star, 1984 violence, and Punjab counterinsurgency (selected).

[127] Recorded testimonies of families of the disappeared and human-rights defenders (selected).

[128] Ajit Singh Sandhu-related dossier presentations and recorded talks (Ensaaf and related forums, 2025).

[129] CBC Fifth Estate / similar investigative segments on foreign interference and diaspora intimidation (selected).