THE KHALSA TEST OF SOVEREIGNTY

ਖ਼ਾਲਸੇ ਦੀ ਕਸਵੱਟੀ

A Forensic Audit of Sikh Men and Women Under Historical Test: Martyrdom, Service, Silence, Betrayal, and Institutional Capture

Published by KPSGILL.COM · Definitive Forensic Edition

EVIDENTIARY LEGEND: [PF] Proved Finding [DA] Documented Allegation [AI] Analytical Inference [PM] Panthic Memory / Devotional Tradition

I. WHY THIS IS A COURT OF RECORD, NOT A POLEMIC

A polemic shouts and moves on. A court of record names the office, produces the date, states the duty, identifies the gap between duty and conduct, and stands behind every inference it draws. This article is the second thing. It has been built the way a prosecutorial brief is assembled and a forensic historical audit is organized: from the institution outward, from the chronology inward, from the statutory obligation to the documented pattern of its non-fulfillment. Every serious charge in this document is traceable to a source: a court judgment, a commission finding, a human-rights report of institutional standing, a statutory text, a verified tenure date, or the article's own explicitly named analytical inference drawn from the architecture of office, jurisdiction, and omission.

This approach is not modesty. It is the article's most lethal instrument. A pamphlet can be dismissed as emotional. A brief requires rebuttal on the record. If any figure named in these pages believes the article has read the evidence incorrectly, the response must engage the evidence: the NHRC's confirmed minimum of 2,097 illegal cremations across three Amritsar district cremation grounds; the Supreme Court of India's November 1996 directive; the text of Section 176 of the Code of Criminal Procedure; the precise tenure of each district magistrate; the criminal conviction of Punjab Police personnel for the abduction and murder of Jaswant Singh Khalra. These are the foundations of the article's indictment, and they must be contested on those terms or not at all.

This article also tells a story. It tells the story of the Khalsa across five centuries: how it was constituted in blood, made sovereign through sacrifice, built institutions that were captured, and produced, across every generation of that history, the same recurring cast of characters — the martyr who refused, the servant who preserved, and the collaborator who held the door. The story is a reckoning. The reckoning is the record. And the record, as this article argues throughout, belongs to the Panth.

II. THE TEST IS NOT NEUTRAL

ਭੈ ਕਾਹੂ ਕਉ ਦੇਤ ਨਹਿ ਨਹਿ ਭੈ ਮਾਨਤ ਆਨ ॥

Fear no one; cause no one to fear. — Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji, Salok, Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji, Ang 1427

These two lines, composed by the Ninth Guru before his execution in Delhi's Chandni Chowk in November 1675, constitute the Khalsa's foundational political command. They are not counsel for monks in retreat or mystics at peace with imperial rule. They are a structural mandate: do not cause suffering through the instrument of fear; do not accept suffering through the mechanism of submission. Every figure examined in this audit is measured against those two imperatives, across five centuries and three forms of historical conduct. The test applies to generals and district magistrates, to theologians and police chiefs, to institutional custodians and hereditary dynasts. It has no exemption for the complexity of political climate, the institutional constraints of office, or the career calculations that make managed accommodation feel like realism.

This article does not proceed from administrative neutrality. That phrase — administrative neutrality — is one of the most institutionally effective constructions in the vocabulary of managed impunity. The DC/DM of Amritsar is not a neutral actor. His office is the Indian administrative state's nervous system in that geography: the clearing house for every death, every detention, every question about the rule of law within the district's borders. When the NHRC later confirmed that 2,097 bodies had been cremated illegally in three municipal grounds within that district — cremated without inquest, without family notification, without legal identity documentation — the DC's Section 176 CrPC obligation did not become optional because the political climate was demanding. It became urgent. Neutrality in that moment was not an absence of conduct. It was a specific form of conduct: the systematic non-exercise of a statutory duty, which this article characterizes as institutional nonfeasance with documented systemic consequences.

The Khalsa Test of Sovereignty has three answers, and this article insists they are not morally equivalent. First: irreducible refusal — the body offered, the record made, the sovereign's survival terms rejected. Second: bounded service — the legal brief filed, the theological text preserved, the institutional ground held within cages that were not broken. Third: the open door — the command lent to the assault, the district seal pressed in the geometry of disappearance, the dynasty erected over the shrine, the symbolic Sikh face provided to the state's communal violence so it could be narrated as something else. The archive records all three. It does not remember them in one register.

The district smoked. Khalra counted. The office survived and was promoted. Those nine words are the whole forensic argument. Everything else in this article is the evidentiary chain that makes them exact.

III. MEN AND WOMEN: SCOPE OF THE ARCHIVE

The Khalsa Test of Sovereignty has never been a gendered test. Guru Gobind Singh Ji constituted the Khalsa through five men and made its sovereignty a claim across all Sikh bodies. The Sikh tradition's own historical and devotional record preserves women in positions of Tier I conduct — women who prepared their children for martyrdom rather than submission, who returned deserters to the battlefield, who refused British annexation terms for the remainder of their lives, and who performed the sacred last rites for the fallen at moments of extreme personal danger. Their omission from the prior edition of this article was a substantive error, and this edition corrects it on the same evidentiary standard applied to male figures. Women are not included for representational symmetry. They are included because the record supports inclusion.

This edition also applies its exclusionary standard with equal discipline. Several figures — including Air Marshal Arjan Singh, General Bikram Singh, and Gurdev Singh Brar IAS — were assessed and excluded because the available record does not meet the threshold of documented sovereign Sikh conduct, institutional rupture, or clear tier-defining behavior that inclusion requires. The assessments are noted in the article rather than silently omitted, because the methodology of a court of record requires that its exclusions be as accountable as its inclusions. A name forced into the audit by prominence alone weakens every name that earned its place through the record.

The article further notes the separate evidentiary category of Panthic Memory and Devotional Tradition, designated throughout as [PM]. This is a distinct archive from the court judgment, the NHRC proceeding, and the rights report. It is not inferior to those records for Khalsa historical purposes — the Panth has preserved and transmitted its memory through traditions that predate the colonial documentary apparatus and will outlast it. But it is labeled differently because the article insists on knowing when it is speaking from a juridical record and when it is speaking from the community's living transmission of its own history. That distinction makes both archives more credible, not less.

IV. EVIDENTIARY METHOD: PROOF, DOCUMENT, INFERENCE, AND PANTHIC MEMORY

ਸਚਹੁ ਓਰੈ ਸਭੁ ਕੋ ਉਪਰਿ ਸਚੁ ਆਚਾਰੁ ॥

Truth is higher than everything; but higher still is truthful living. — Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji, Ang 62

This publication distinguishes with precision among four evidentiary categories, because the precision is the article's primary defense and its primary weapon simultaneously. Imprecision invites dismissal. Precision invites rebuttal on the record, which is the only rebuttal this article cannot survive.

Proved Finding [PF]: A conclusion established by court judgment, formal commission finding, Supreme Court order, CBI investigative record, NHRC proceeding, or uncontested official documentation. These facts constitute the article's structural pillars. They are not claimed as probable. They are reproduced as established within the institutional record of the Indian legal system and international human-rights accountability mechanisms.

Documented Allegation [DA]: A claim carried in credible human-rights reports of institutional standing, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the People's Union for Civil Liberties, sworn testimony before courts or commissions, or serious investigative documentation not finally adjudicated at the criminal-conviction level. These claims do not carry the weight of criminal conviction. They carry the weight of institutional documentation by organizations whose methodological standards are internationally recognized.

Analytical Inference [AI]: A conclusion drawn explicitly and openly from the sequence of office held, statutory duty attached to that office, verified tenure chronology, jurisdictional authority, documented pattern of omission, command structure, institutional continuity, or public effect. Where [AI] is invoked, the article names the inference and argues it as a conclusion that the documented record compels. It states what it is inferring and from what. A competing inference grounded in a better record is the only rebuttal this article cannot answer.

Panthic Memory / Devotional Tradition [PM]: The Sikh community's own living transmission of its history, preserved in gurbani commentary, hagiographical literature, community tradition, and the oral and written devotional record. This archive is not weaker than the colonial documentary apparatus — for Khalsa historical purposes, it is often more authoritative. But this article labels it distinctly when it draws on it, because the difference between a Supreme Court finding and a community tradition is real, and the article will not flatten it even in the service of a strong conclusion.

This article also draws on the logic of superior responsibility — the doctrine developed through the Yamashita proceedings of 1945 and subsequently codified in international humanitarian law, holding that when widespread atrocities occur within a command or civilian-supervisory structure, and the record does not show meaningful intervention by the responsible superior, the office itself becomes part of the evidentiary story. This article applies that logic as an analytical instrument, not as a claim that any figure is being prosecuted under international criminal law. The Yamashita analogy is used because it has been developed precisely to address the gap between the man who pulled the trigger and the man whose institutional authority was the administrative envelope within which the trigger was pulled and the body was subsequently processed. The district magistracy in the Punjab counter-insurgency geography is exactly that envelope.

A final method note: this article explicitly distinguishes criminal liability, documented human-rights violation, Panthic moral condemnation, and institutional critique as separate categories. A man may be condemned by the Khalsa archive without a criminal conviction. A man may be institutionally condemned for statutory nonfeasance without being personally accused of ordering specific acts. A man may occupy Tier III for symbolic betrayal without being charged with the operational conduct of the police apparatus his office theoretically superintended. These distinctions are preserved throughout because they make the indictment more devastatingly exact, not less.

V. ADMINISTRATIVE SILENCE AS STRUCTURED OMISSION

There is a legal fiction embedded in the phrase administrative neutrality that this article must dismantle at the foundation before the audit can proceed, because that fiction was the primary institutional mechanism through which Punjab's state violence was sustained at the district level and rendered administratively invisible. The fiction runs as follows: a public official who did not personally order an atrocity, did not personally witness it, and did not personally benefit from it, is not responsible for its concealment merely because his office held the statutory authority to investigate it and did not do so. The fiction treats official omission as a passive posture — a failure to act, rather than an act.

This is not how administrative systems function, and it is particularly not how the Indian administrative system under the Code of Criminal Procedure operates. Section 176 CrPC places a mandatory duty on the Executive Magistrate to conduct an inquiry into any death that occurs in circumstances suggesting police involvement or custodial cause. This duty is not discretionary. It is not contingent on political climate, career calculation, or the preference of the state's police apparatus. It is a statutory obligation attached to the office by Parliament. When the NHRC later confirmed 2,097 illegal cremations as a proved minimum across three Amritsar district grounds — cremations conducted without legal inquest, without family notification, without formal identity documentation — the absence of Section 176 inquiries commensurate with that scale is not a neutral fact. It is a systemic gap between what the law required and what the law got. That gap is itself evidentiary. It supports a strong inference of widespread institutional noncompliance — not the inference that each of 2,097 specific deaths generated a specific and deliberate decision not to inquire, but the broader and more devastating inference that the district magistracy's oversight function was systematically absent from a geography of illegal killing that its statutory mandate was specifically designed to prevent from becoming invisible.

The DC/DM's office is the state's administrative nervous system in the district. It processes information, issues findings, grants or withholds official recognition of what has occurred within its boundaries. When it remains quiet in the face of a documented pattern of illegal cremation — when the firewood vouchers accumulate and the municipal registers fill with unidentified bodies and the Section 176 inquiries do not arrive in commensurate numbers — the office has not abstained from the drama. It has chosen a side. It has chosen the side of the architecture that required the silence. In Punjab between 1992 and 1996, the DC/DM of Amritsar was K.B.S. Sidhu. This article's argument is not that Sidhu personally ordered the cremations or personally suppressed inquiries in each documented case. Its argument is structural and inferential: the record does not show intervention, inquiry, or rupture commensurate with the scale of what was occurring within his administrative jurisdiction, and that absence is the administrative fingerprint of a district magistracy that functioned as the silence's institutional guarantor.

In administrative systems, silence is never neutral. Every official non-finding is itself a finding. The DC office's unstirred desk was as much a weapon in Punjab's architecture of disappearance as the vehicle that carried the body to the cremation ground.

VI. THE STATE DID NOT ONLY KILL — IT PROCESSED THE DEAD

The violence of Punjab's counter-insurgency was not primitive. It was not a frenzy. It was bureaucratically sequenced, administratively documented in strategically incomplete form, and then rendered invisible through the very instruments of governance whose specific institutional purpose was to register death, require inquest, and prevent exactly the kind of disposal that occurred at scale in three Amritsar district cremation grounds. Understanding this is essential for understanding why the DC/DM's office matters, why the police command architecture matters, and why Khalra's work was so threatening to an institutional apparatus that had organized itself around the managed invisibility of what it had done.

The administrative grammar of disappearance operated as follows. A person is detained by Punjab Police, typically without the formal procedure of an FIR or a production before a magistrate. They are killed in custody or at a staged encounter. Their body is transported to one of the district's municipal cremation grounds — Amritsar city, Patti, or Tarn Taran in Khalra's documentation. The cremation ground manager enters the body in the register as 'unidentified' or assigns a demonstrably false identity. Firewood is requisitioned. Payment is authorized through municipal financial channels. The body burns. What remains in the paper record is: a municipal cremation entry, a firewood purchase, a payment receipt, and the absence of an inquest form, a Section 176 inquiry, a family notification, and any documentation connecting the cremated person to an arrest, a detention, or a legal process of any kind.

[PF] The Supreme Court of India, in November 1996, directed the National Human Rights Commission to investigate the pattern of illegal cremations documented in Khalra's research. [PF] The NHRC's investigation confirmed, as a proved minimum, 2,097 illegal cremations across three specific Amritsar district cremation grounds: Amritsar city, Patti sub-tehsil, and Tarn Taran. These were bodies cremated without legal inquest, without family notification, without formal identity documentation as required by law. [AI] Khalra's broader Punjab-wide research, which was proceeding at the time of his abduction, suggested a substantially larger provincial figure. No final Punjab-wide total with equivalent evidentiary precision has been judicially confirmed. The 2,097 is the proved floor for three sites. The full accounting has not been completed.

The paper trail of death, in this architecture, runs through firewood vouchers. That fact must be held in the mind before the audit proceeds. The state's machinery of managed disappearance left administrative fingerprints at every step of its process, because it used civilian municipal infrastructure — cremation grounds, payment systems, local government records — to process what it had produced through police operations. Khalra read those fingerprints. He was a bank manager. He used the forensic intelligence of someone accustomed to reading financial patterns in documentary records, and he applied it to the documentary records of municipal death registration in three districts. The result was the most important single act of accountability documentation in the history of the Punjab counter-insurgency. It cost him his life.

VII. THE ADMINISTRATIVE FINGERPRINT

Every atrocity processed through bureaucratic infrastructure leaves documentary residue. This is one of the central insights of modern international accountability: states that use administrative systems to manage their violence — that route the bodies through municipal procedures, the payments through government accounts, the silences through official non-findings — cannot entirely erase those systems' traces. The Nazi genocide left freight manifests and camp census records. The Rwandan genocide left radio broadcast logs and local administrative documentation. Punjab's counter-insurgency left cremation register entries, firewood voucher payments, and the conspicuous absence of Section 176 inquiry records in a district whose cremation grounds were processing illegal deaths at the scale the NHRC later confirmed.

Khalra was not the first person to understand this. He was the first person to enter the specific records that contained this district's specific fingerprint and read them against each other with sufficient methodological discipline to reconstruct the pattern. He cross-referenced municipal cremation entries against police records of arrests and encounters, against family testimony about disappearances, and against the official record of inquests — and found the gap. The gap between 'body received' and 'identity documented' was the gap between the state's official account and the human reality behind it. He made that gap public, internationally, at the cost of his life.

The DC/DM of Amritsar held every instrument required to read the same fingerprint officially and legally. His Section 176 mandate gave him compulsory investigative authority that Khalra lacked entirely. His access to police records was direct rather than through public channels. His access to municipal records was institutional rather than through personal inquiry. The record does not show those instruments deployed at a scale commensurate with what the fingerprint revealed. The record shows career continuity through the period of Khalra's investigation, through Khalra's abduction, and beyond. That continuity is itself the DC office's administrative fingerprint: the negative imprint of a statutory duty not performed, in the same documentary landscape as the positive imprint of what was done.

Khalra's notebook in the municipal records office — The DC's desk: undisturbed, the career advancing

VIII. KHALSA MEMORY IS NOT LIBERAL MEMORY

ਦੇਹ ਸਿਵਾ ਬਰੁ ਮੋਹਿ ਇਹੈ ਸੁਭ ਕਰਮਨ ਤੇ ਕਭੂ ਨ ਟਰੋਂ ॥

O Lord, grant me this boon: that I may never deviate from righteous action. — Guru Gobind Singh Ji, Dasam Granth

The moral hierarchy this article constructs is not built on secular procedural innocence. It does not condition historical condemnation on criminal conviction. It does not apply the standard of the due-process liberal state to persons whose actions and omissions this article assesses within the Khalsa's own archive of sovereignty, sacrifice, and accountability. The Khalsa tradition has always had its own court of historical judgment, and it has always operated on principles distinct from the state's criminal law: not 'did this man receive a fair trial before conviction?' but 'where did this man stand when the Panth was under assault?'

In secular and state-friendly discourse, several figures in this article's Tier I remain legally condemned or politically contested. The legal characterization is stated here plainly and without concealment. Alongside it, the Panthic reading is stated with equal plainness: these figures are in the upper archive not because this article claims they were legally innocent by the standards of the Indian constitution or criminal code, but because within the Khalsa register of sovereignty, sacrifice, and answered desecration, their conduct belongs in the record of those who refused. Both readings exist simultaneously. The Panth's capacity to hold them simultaneously without collapsing one into the other is not confusion or irrationality. It is the intellectual architecture of a tradition that has spent three centuries watching the state use its legal apparatus as an instrument of communal coercion, and that has accordingly developed an independent epistemological framework for recording what occurred and why it mattered.

This article equally does not grant the shelter of secular complexity to figures who held institutional Sikh authority while serving anti-Sikh functions. Administrative neutrality in the face of atrocity is not a morally neutral position. A District Magistrate who holds a statutory investigative duty and does not deploy it at the scale the documented pattern of his district requires has not abstained from politics. He has chosen a political position: the political position of the state's institutional silence. The Khalsa archive names that position without euphemism.

IX. THE GENEALOGY OF INTERNAL WEAKENING

The Panth has always understood two distinct forms of threat, and it has never made the analytical mistake of treating them identically. External enemies clarify. They arrive in uniform, with imperial warrant, with the cannon of Mughal authority or the legislative instruments of British colonial administration. Their identity is unambiguous. Against that clarity, the tradition's response has always been possible — however costly. The sword, the witness, the martyr's body, the forensic reconstruction of the state's own records: these are the instruments the tradition has developed across three centuries of encounter with external coercive power, and they work precisely because the enemy is named and its methods are visible.

Internal accommodation is categorically different in its institutional operation. It does not announce itself. It arrives wearing the same turban, occupying the same shrine, speaking the same theological vocabulary, and performing the same ritual observance as the Panth it is managing or betraying. Its injury is not only the specific act of betrayal. Its deeper and more durable injury is to memory: it confuses the narrative, fragments the historical record, makes domination survivable for those who administer it by converting it into complexity, and converts complexity into the kind of managed amnesia that allows successive generations of Sikh institutional leadership to ask how the Panth's institutions were captured without examining the structural pattern of how they have always been capturable.

This article traces the genealogy of internal weakening across five centuries not as a catalogue of personal villains but as a recurring structural pattern that the Panth must recognize in order to interrupt. Prithi Chand did not invent internal betrayal. He established its template within the Guru's own family and circle of institutional authority. Dhir Mal did not invent the weaponization of sacred textual custody against the living institution. He established the template of using control over the physical Granth as a counter-claim against the recognized Guru's succession. The twenty-two claimants at Bakala did not invent opportunistic succession claim. They established the canonical illustration of how Panthic vulnerability at moments of institutional transition attracts those who would occupy the empty seat rather than serve the living tradition. And Lal Singh and Tej Singh did not invent command betrayal at the moment of sovereign crisis. They established the pattern of Sikh military commanders choosing accommodation with arriving imperial power over fidelity to the Khalsa sovereignty they were formally commissioned to defend.

The genealogy continues without interruption through Arur Singh honoring Dyer in Darbar Sahib's administrative precincts, through Zail Singh remaining in the constitutional chair during Blue Star, through Brar commanding the military assault on the Akal Takht, through Gill designing the counter-insurgency's institutional architecture of managed disappearance, through Sidhu managing the district whose cremation grounds were processing the disappeared, through Gurbachan Singh deploying the Akal Takht's authority as a political management instrument, through the Badal dynasty converting Panthic statutory institutions into family political assets. The specific forms of each betrayal differ. The structural function is constant: Sikh-faced institutional authority deployed in the service of anti-Sikh power or dynastic self-interest, and subsequently described as political realism, administrative duty, historical complexity, or the inevitable accommodation of those who work within the structures available to them.

X. FROM MAHANT TO MODERN DYNAST: THE RECURRING CAPTURE

In the early twentieth century, the principal custodians of the major Sikh shrines were the mahants — hereditary managers whose families had held shrine administration for generations under arrangements that had developed, in many cases, into working relationships with British colonial administration. The mahants were not simply agents of colonial power. Many had roots in legitimate Udasi and Nirmala custodial traditions. But by the 1920s, the majority of the most significant shrine mahants had established arrangements with colonial administrators that functioned, in institutional terms, as exactly the same structural pattern this article traces through five centuries: Sikh-faced custodianship of Panthic sacred institutions, serving in practice the interests of an external power that protected the custodian's control in exchange for the custodian's institutional compliance.

Jathedar Arur Singh's honoring of General Dyer in the precincts of Darbar Sahib was not an aberration within this system. It was the system's most publicly visible expression: the shrine's administrative authority extended institutional recognition to the man who had ordered the massacre of Sikh and Hindu civilians in Jallianwala Bagh, because the system within which that shrine administration operated was one in which the British colonial government's preferences were the effective framework of custodial conduct. The Akali reform movement of 1920 to 1925 was organized in substantial part against this structural arrangement, and it produced the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925 and the creation of the SGPC as a democratically elected statutory body as the institutional answer to mahant capture.

The Akali reformers understood that the individual mahant was not the problem. The structural arrangement that made mahant collaboration institutionally sustainable was the problem: the system by which a person who controlled the sacred institution served an external power in exchange for that power's protection of the control. The reform replaced the individual mahant with a democratically elected statutory committee. What the reformers could not fully anticipate was that a democratic statutory committee with a sufficiently dominant political party could reproduce the same structural function in a different institutional form. The committee's electoral structure required political organization. Political organization that achieved sufficient dominance over the committee's elections could effectively convert the statutory body from a Panth-serving institution into a party-serving one. The mahant returned in the form of a dynasty.

The Badal family's management of the SGPC across the latter decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first is the article's primary modern illustration of this structural reproduction. The statutory body that exists to serve the Panth's sovereign interest in shrine management became, under the political network the Badal organization built, an institution whose elections, appointments, finances, and institutional decisions were embedded in the same political machine that governed Punjab and whose management of the 2015 sacrilege incidents and the protest response they produced is one of the most precisely documented modern instances of institutional capture serving dynastic political interest rather than Panthic accountability.

The Akali reformer who gave his body to free the shrine from the mahant — The dynast who built the shrine's committee into his electoral apparatus

XI. WHY SIKH-FACED COLLABORATION WOUNDS DEEPER THAN EXTERNAL ATTACK

External attack on the Panth is terrible, and the Panth has never minimized its terror. But it is also legible. When Aurangzeb's Mughal state executed Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji in Chandni Chowk in 1675, the identity of the aggressor was unambiguous, the nature of the coercive demand was explicit, and the martyrdom's meaning was clear enough to serve as the Khalsa's foundational political statement for three hundred years. When the British Empire hanged Kartar Singh Sarabha at nineteen, the executioner's institutional identity was visible in its uniform. When the Indian Army brought armored columns and artillery into the Darbar Sahib complex in June 1984, the institutional aggressor was the Indian state, and no administrative framing could dissolve from the visual record what tanks in the Guru's courtyard documented. External attack clarifies the battlefield. It tells the Panth who is carrying the sword into the Guru's house, and the tradition has always known how to respond to that clarity.

Sikh-faced collaboration does something categorically different and more institutionally corrosive. It does not clarify the battlefield. It makes the battlefield illegible. When a Sikh President of the Indian republic remains in his constitutional chair while the state attacks Darbar Sahib, the state can present the image of a Sikh Head of State presiding over a republic that is conducting not a communal assault but a security operation. When a Sikh-born general commands the military columns, the state can say that a Sikh officer made the professional military judgment about force application. When the SGPC under Badal-aligned management declines to demand full sacrilege accountability, the state can say that even the Sikhs' own statutory shrine management institution has accepted the political resolution. Each of these figures provides the state with a narrative shield against the charge of communal targeting. Each converts what would otherwise be an unambiguous record of state communal violence into something that every interested party — the government, the media, the diplomatic corps, the historical commissions — can describe as nuanced, complex, and resistant to simple characterization.

That complexity is the collaboration's most important institutional product. It does not merely protect the collaborator. It damages the Panth's capacity to narrate what was done to it, to organize memory around what occurred, and to build the sustained institutional resistance that clarity of historical record makes possible. This article is written in explicit and deliberate resistance to that complexity. It names what the collaboration achieved, for whom, and at what cost to the Panth's sovereign archive.

TIER I — THE AMAR SHAHEEDS AND PERSONS OF IRREDUCIBLE REFUSAL

Those not available for purchase — who broke the state's grammar of submission with body, blood, witness, or unbroken sovereign conscience

Tier I belongs to those who, when the Khalsa Test of Sovereignty arrived, gave an answer that cost everything the state could take. Some gave blood. Some gave body. Some gave decades of institutional position sacrificed at the altar of Panthic principle. Some gave the sustained patience of a person who had decided on an accounting and refused to release the thread of that obligation across years of imprisonment, poverty, and surveillance. What unites them is not the sameness of method, moment, century, or outcome. It is the sameness of the answer when the Guru's standard demanded one. When the Panth was under assault — when the Guru's house was threatened, when the archive of the dead was being sealed in administrative silence, when the state presented its offer of continued existence in exchange for submission or complicity — they did not accept the offer.

Women of Irreducible Refusal

Mata Gujri Ji (c. 1624–1705)

Imagine the Thanda Burj in December 1704: the cold tower of Sirhind, in the dead of the Punjab winter, where Mata Gujri Ji — mother of Guru Gobind Singh Ji and grandmother of the Sahibzade — sat with Baba Zorawar Singh, aged nine, and Baba Fateh Singh, aged six, after the family's separation at the Sirsa river crossing during the evacuation of Anandpur Sahib. They had been delivered to Nawab Wazir Khan's administration by Gangu, a former household servant who had reported them for the reward. The state's offer was available: conversion in exchange for the children's lives. Mata Gujri Ji did not take the offer. She prepared her grandsons, from the cold tower's confinement, for the martyrdom that refusing it would require. She sent them to the wall rather than purchase their physical survival at the cost of the Khalsa's foundational principle.

[PM] Sikh devotional and historical tradition preserves the Thanda Burj as one of the Panth's central sites of moral memory. The tradition holds that Mata Gujri Ji died in the cold tower after receiving news of the Sahibzade's execution — that the cold and the grief together claimed her. Whatever the precise biographical detail, the theological and moral meaning of her conduct is what the tradition has transmitted without ambiguity across three centuries: she chose the sovereignty of the Khalsa standard over the survival the state's coercive offer made available. The state's most intimate instrument of coercion — the life of her grandchildren, visible in front of her — did not purchase the required submission.

Mata Gujri Ji belongs at the head of this article's women's register not as ornament to the Sahibzade's story but as its sovereign axis. She transmitted the grammar of refusal across the space between a grandmother's presence and a Nawab's court. She did what the Thanda Burj was designed to make impossible: she held, under conditions of the state's most intimate coercive pressure, the answer the Khalsa Test requires.

Mata Bhag Kaur / Mai Bhago (c. 1680 – after 1705)

In December 1705, forty Sikh men who had signed a bedava — a formal written disclaimer of their discipleship, renouncing their relationship to Guru Gobind Singh Ji — were making their way home from the siege of Anandpur Sahib, having left the Guru's side when the siege's conditions exceeded what they could sustain. They had, in the technical language of the institution, resigned their Khalsa membership under sovereign pressure. They were going back to their villages. Mata Bhag Kaur met them on the road near Khidrana.

[PM] Sikh historical and devotional tradition preserves her confrontation with the returning forty as one of the Panth's defining moments of moral reorientation. She challenged their retreat, named it for what it was in the Khalsa's own vocabulary, dressed herself in armor, and returned to the battlefield with them. She fought at the Battle of Khidrana in December 1705, was seriously wounded, and survived. The Guru subsequently absolved the forty, calling them liberated — Mukte — and the site is known as Muktsar in their honor. Mata Bhag Kaur continued in personal service to Guru Gobind Singh Ji after the battle, accompanying him to Nanded.

Her placement in Tier I is grounded in what she did on the road before the battle: she confronted the men who had chosen survival over sovereignty and turned them back toward the Guru. In an article that documents at length the various forms of accommodation and managed retreat from the Khalsa standard, Mata Bhag Kaur stands as the specific figure who interrupted that retreat in real time, at personal bodily cost, and whose intervention is preserved in the Panth's memory as a model of Sikh conscience operating on those who had let it lapse.

Rani Jind Kaur (1817–1863)

Rani Jind Kaur was the youngest wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the regent of the Sikh empire on behalf of her young son Maharaja Duleep Singh after Ranjit Singh's death in 1839. She governed during the empire's terminal crisis, through the Anglo-Sikh wars of 1845–46 and 1848–49, and after the empire's defeat and British annexation of Punjab, she refused on behalf of the Sikh sovereign claim what the British required of her. She was imprisoned by the British authorities, first at Sheikhupura and then at the Chunar fortress in what is now Uttar Pradesh, in conditions her contemporary supporters and later historians characterized as deliberately designed to incapacitate her political capacity.

She escaped from Chunar in April 1849, disguised as a servant, and made her way to Nepal under the protection of the Nepali court, where she lived in exile for more than a decade. She maintained correspondence with Sikh political figures and with Duleep Singh, now in British custody in England. She and Duleep Singh were reunited in Europe in 1861, after thirteen years of forced separation. She died in London in 1863, in exile, never having accepted the British annexation as the final word on the Sikh sovereign claim. Her political effectiveness was materially constrained by the realities of what the empire could do to a woman in its custody. Her refusal was not. She maintained it until her death, at the cost of her son's childhood, her country, and her life in permanent exile.

Bibi Harsharan Kaur — The Chamkaur Tradition

[PM] The Battle of Chamkaur in December 1704 left the bodies of the Wadde Sahibzade — Baba Ajit Singh and Baba Jujhar Singh — and other Sikh warriors who fell there within a battlefield surrounded by Mughal forces. In Sikh historical and devotional tradition, the performance of the last rites for the fallen at Chamkaur was an act of extreme personal danger: those who approached the battlefield to honor the dead risked Mughal identification, arrest, and death. Sikh community tradition preserves the name of Bibi Harsharan Kaur as a local Sikh woman who, in the tradition's account, performed or arranged for the last rites of the fallen Sahibzade and Sikh warriors at Chamkaur, making possible the sacred rituals that the tradition requires for the departure of a Sikh soul — the recitation of Gurbani, the dignified treatment of the body — at a moment when every available authority wished the fallen to remain unacknowledged and undignified.

This article presents her in the Sikh historical and devotional memory category rather than as a claim of judicially proved fact, because the tradition's preservation of her name and her act does not carry the same evidentiary weight as a court finding or an NHRC proceeding. What the tradition preserves is her moral function: the woman who did the sacred thing at the moment when doing it was the most dangerous thing available, who performed the rites of the Guru's house for the Guru's sons at the cost of her own security. In an article that examines at length the figures who provided the state's violence with institutional cover and administrative normalcy, Bibi Harsharan Kaur of the Chamkaur tradition stands as the specific figure who, without institutional authority, without statutory protection, and without official permission, performed the Panth's most sacred obligation for the fallen. The shrine without its living sacramental practice is just architecture. She ensured the practice continued when its continuation was most dangerous.

Men of Irreducible Refusal: The Guru-Period Foundation

Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji (1621–1675)

In 1675, a delegation of Kashmiri Pandits arrived at Anandpur Sahib seeking the Guru's intervention against Aurangzeb's policy of forced conversion. They were not Sikhs. They were members of a different religious community whose faith was under coercive Mughal pressure, and they had come to the Guru because they believed the Guru would hear them. Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji heard them, accepted the burden of their coercion as a Sikh political responsibility, traveled to Delhi, and presented himself before the Mughal state as the answer to its demand. He was arrested, his three companions were executed in ways designed to break his resolve through their visible bodily destruction, and he was beheaded in Chandni Chowk. He did not break. He composed the two lines that open this article's second section while he was in Mughal custody, and those lines constitute the Khalsa's foundational political statement: the sovereign who fears no one and causes no one to fear.

His martyrdom is placed at the head of this audit's Tier I not as a formality but as an architectural necessity: every subsequent entry in this tier is a specific expression of the principle his death established in irreversible public form, and every entry in Tier III — every man who provided the state's violence with his institutional presence, his office, his command authority, or his administrative silence — is measured against the standard he set in blood in the Mughal capital. The Khalsa Test of Sovereignty begins here.

Bhai Mati Das, Bhai Sati Das, and Bhai Dayal Das (d. November 1675)

These three companions of Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji were executed in Chandni Chowk through methods specifically designed to break the Guru's resolve by inflicting maximum bodily destruction on those he loved in his visible presence. Bhai Mati Das was bound between two posts and sawed vertically in half while reciting Japji Sahib. Bhai Sati Das was wrapped in raw cotton that was then set alight. Bhai Dayal Das was placed in a boiling cauldron. The Mughal state's calculation was that the sight of this suffering would purchase the Guru's submission or at minimum his silence. The calculation was wrong. The Guru did not break. The three men did not ask him to. Their place in Tier I is not peripheral to the Guru's martyrdom but constitutive of it: they demonstrated that the Panth's doctrine of collective refusal — the teaching that Khalsa sovereignty belongs to the body of the Khalsa entire rather than to any individual — was not an abstract principle but a practice embodied in three specific men dying together rather than separately negotiating their survival.

Banda Singh Bahadur (1670–1716)

He was a Hindu sadhu from Nanded when Guru Gobind Singh Ji commissioned him as the Khalsa's military commander in Punjab, gave him five arrows and a letter of authority, and sent him north to answer the murder of the Sahibzade and the destruction of Anandpur Sahib. He arrived in Punjab and did what had not been done in Sikh history: he made Khalsa sovereignty territorial, administrative, and redistributive simultaneously. He defeated the Mughal governor at Sirhind, the city whose Nawab had ordered the execution of the younger Sahibzade, abolished the zamindari system in the territories he captured, and redistributed land from landlords to the farmers who tilled it. For the first time, a Khalsa commander was not merely resisting Mughal authority but replacing it with a functional agrarian and military governance architecture.

He was captured in 1715, brought to Delhi with several hundred Sikh prisoners, and subjected to the most elaborate theater of coerced submission the Mughal state could construct. Each day, some of his companions were offered their lives in exchange for conversion. They refused, day after day, until their number was exhausted. Banda Singh Bahadur himself was executed in June 1716, his infant son killed before his eyes as a final instrument of coercion. He did not submit. The Mughal state's execution of him required this theater precisely because his sovereignty was sufficiently threatening that its destruction also required his submission, and his submission could not be obtained.

Bhai Mani Singh (c. 1644 – martyrdom date disputed: 1734, 1737, or 1738)

Bhai Mani Singh served as head Granthi at Darbar Sahib during the post-Guru period and was a central figure in the custodianship and transmission of the Guru Granth Sahib after Guru Gobind Singh Ji's passing. He served as scribe in the compilation of the Adi Granth under Guru Arjan Dev Ji's direction, and Sikh tradition regards him as a foundational exegetical and interpretive authority for the Granth's textual tradition. The precise year of his martyrdom is disputed across sources: some cite 1734, others 1737, others 1738, and this article states that uncertainty explicitly rather than resolving it with false confidence. What the sources agree on is the manner and meaning of his death: he was arrested by the Lahore Mughal administration over a financial dispute connected to a Sikh gathering he had organized, was offered his life in exchange for conversion, and was executed by dismemberment, joint by joint, for refusing.

His placement in Tier I ensures that the upper register is not read exclusively as a military archive. It is also the archive of those who refused to let institutional custodianship of the Guru's word become a mechanism of accommodation with the state's authority. The shrine's administrator who dies rather than purchase institutional survival through submission is in Tier I for the same reason as the general who dies in the Guru's house: he refused the state's survival offer on the state's terms.

Bhai Taru Singh (1720–1745) and Bhai Subeg Singh with Bhai Shahbaz Singh (d. 1745)

Bhai Taru Singh embodies in Sikh memory the doctrine of bodily sovereignty: the principle that the state's coercive reach over the Sikh self encounters a hard limit at the visible markers of Khalsa identity. Imprisoned by Lahore's governor Yahiya Khan and offered his life in exchange for cutting his kes, he refused with a formulation that Sikh tradition preserves as the complete statement of that principle. He died from the consequences of his refusal. He stands in this audit as the structural inverse of those who wear Sikh symbols while performing anti-Sikh institutional functions: the man for whom the symbol was worth more than the life its removal could have purchased.

Bhai Subeg Singh and his son Bhai Shahbaz Singh, executed together in 1745, carry a specific institutional lesson: Bhai Subeg Singh had worked within the Mughal administrative apparatus as a translator and contractor. His proximity to the state's structures did not purchase immunity when the state decided that his Sikh identity was a political problem. He refused conversion alongside his son. They were broken on the wheel together. The lesson this article draws is not that administrative service is itself betrayal — Tier II is full of those who served within the state's or the Panth's institutions with integrity. The lesson is that proximity to external power is not the same as protection, and that the state's tolerance of Sikh institutional presence has always had conditions attached to it.

Men of Irreducible Refusal: Anti-Colonial Martyrdom

Hari Singh Nalwa (1791–1837)

Hari Singh Nalwa was Maharaja Ranjit Singh's most feared and most celebrated military commander, and he occupies a specific position in this audit that distinguishes him from all others in the Tier I register: he is the man who extended Sikh sovereignty to its maximum territorial expression. His campaigns against Afghan forces pushed the Sikh empire's northern frontier to the Khyber Pass, the gateway between the subcontinent and Central Asia, which no Sikh, no Hindu, and no Buddhist ruler had secured in the modern period. His name became proverbial across the Pashtun and Afghan belt: mothers warned misbehaving children that Hari Singh was coming, and that proverbial threat retained its currency for generations after his death.

He fell at the Battle of Jamrud in April 1837, commanding the defense of the Khyber gateway fortress against an Afghan attempt to retake it. Whether he died at the battlefield or survived long enough to ensure the garrison held before succumbing to his wounds, the governing historical fact is unambiguous: he died extending and defending the maximum territorial reach of Sikh sovereignty. He is in Tier I as the general who conquered for the Panth rather than later served the state that replaced it, and as the explicit contrast to those Sikh-born military commanders who turned organized force against the Panth's most sacred institutions.

Kartar Singh Sarabha (1896–1915)

Nineteen years old. That is how old the British Empire of India hanged him in Lahore Central Jail on November 16, 1915. He had been studying at the University of California at Berkeley when the Ghadar Party's call went out for revolutionary Sikhs and Punjabis to return to India and attempt an armed uprising against colonial rule during the First World War, when British military capacity was stretched across multiple theaters. He returned. The uprising was infiltrated by colonial intelligence. Its members were arrested in mass proceedings, tried before special tribunals, and sentenced. Kartar Singh Sarabha was sentenced to death. He had opportunities to reduce or avoid that sentence. He did not take them.

His significance in this audit is genealogical as well as biographical. His image hung above the bed of Bhagat Singh in Bhagat Singh's Lahore home, making him the explicit model of the next generation's anti-colonial martyrdom across the boundary of religious community — Bhagat Singh was not Sikh. That transmission: from a Sikh revolutionary at nineteen to a Hindu revolutionary in the following decade, through the specific image of a young man's poster on a bedroom wall, is itself a statement about what Tier I membership means in the Panth's archive. It is not only about the individual's choice. It is about the archive that choice creates, and the moral community that archive sustains.

Udham Singh (1899–1940)

He waited twenty-one years and eleven months. He carried the debt of Jallianwala Bagh — where British troops had opened fire without warning on unarmed civilians gathered in the walled Amritsar garden on April 13, 1919, killing at minimum several hundred persons — from the moment he witnessed or encountered its aftermath as a young man, through decades of labor migration, immigration, and brief imprisonments, without losing the thread of the specific accounting he intended to present. On March 13, 1940, he shot and fatally wounded Sir Michael O'Dwyer at Caxton Hall in London. O'Dwyer had been the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab who backed General Dyer's conduct. Udham Singh did not attempt to escape. He was arrested at the scene, tried at the Old Bailey, convicted of murder, and hanged at Pentonville Prison on July 31, 1940. His statement before the court was explicit in naming what he had done and why.

His twenty-one-year vigil is itself the political act that places him in Tier I. The British Empire's preferred outcome for Jallianwala Bagh was that it would become the past — the archived, the regretted-in-retrospect, the historical incident that administrators could acknowledge with official sorrow without bearing personal or institutional accountability for it. Udham Singh refused to let it become the past until it had been answered. He maintained that refusal across two decades, through poverty and surveillance and imprisonment, without releasing the obligation. He is in Tier I not only for what he did in Caxton Hall but for the sustained refusal of historical closure that made Caxton Hall the specific form his accounting took.

Men of Irreducible Refusal: The Martyrdom of Forensic Truth

Jaswant Singh Khalra (1952–1995)

He was a bank manager. Hold that fact before the analysis begins. Jaswant Singh Khalra was employed at the Punjab National Bank's branch in Tarn Taran, not as a lawyer, not as a human-rights professional with institutional backing, not as a political figure with any official standing or protection. He was a bank manager with forensic intelligence about documentary patterns and a conscience that refused to let the administrative fingerprint of Punjab's state violence remain unread. He began his investigative reconstruction of the illegal cremation pattern in the three Amritsar district cremation grounds in 1993, cross-referencing municipal records against police documentation, family testimony, and public information to identify the systemic discrepancy: bodies were arriving at the Amritsar city, Patti sub-tehsil, and Tarn Taran cremation grounds identified as 'unidentified' or with demonstrably false identities, without inquest, without family notification, without any connection in the official record to a legal arrest, a legal detention, or a legal death.

[PF] He presented his findings at international forums in Canada and the United States in 1994 and 1995. On September 6, 1995, he was abducted by Punjab Police personnel from outside his home in Amritsar. His body was recovered from a canal. In 2005, Punjab Police personnel were convicted by a CBI court for his abduction and murder — a criminal conviction on the public record of the Indian judicial system. [PF] The NHRC, following the Supreme Court's November 1996 directive, confirmed 2,097 illegal cremations as a proved minimum in the three Amritsar district grounds he had documented before his death.

K.B.S. Sidhu was DC/DM of Amritsar from May 11, 1992 to August 11, 1996. This means he held the district's highest magistracy authority for the entire arc of Khalra's investigation: from its initiation through its international presentation through the abduction of its author. He held Section 176 CrPC. He held the compulsory investigative authority that Khalra worked without. He held access to police records that Khalra approached through public channels. The record does not show those instruments deployed at a scale commensurate with the 2,097 proved illegal cremations in his district's geography. His career proceeded without visible rupture, inquiry, or public dissent. Khalra's body was found in a canal.

Truth without office found the record and gave his life for it. Office without rupture kept the record quiet and advanced the career. Between those two outcomes, the entire moral geography of this article is located.

Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (1947–1984) and General Shabeg Singh (1925–1984)

The Indian state's account of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale begins with the accusation and ends with the military operation. The Khalsa archive begins somewhere different and ends with the same event but reads it differently. The governing question in the Panthic register is not whether Bhindranwale's politics were constitutionally defensible, or whether every act associated with the period of his influence meets a threshold of liberal innocence. The question is: when the Indian state brought armored vehicles, artillery, and infantry into the Darbar Sahib complex in June 1984 — when the Akal Takht, the temporal seat of Sikh sovereignty, was struck by military fire and substantially damaged — did he leave to save himself? He did not. He died inside the Guru's house. That is his permanent entry in the Khalsa archive. Both the legal record and the Panthic record are stated here without concealment and without collapsing one into the other.

General Shabeg Singh commanded the defensive arrangements inside the complex. He was one of the Indian Army's most capable special forces commanders, decorated for his role in training the Mukti Bahini forces whose contribution to the 1971 East Pakistan campaign was militarily decisive. He was court-martialed in 1975 in circumstances widely understood in military circles as factionally inflected. He died in the Guru's house during Blue Star. Whatever the biographical path from decorated Indian Army general to armed defender of the Akal Takht, his final choice is his permanent entry: he knew the force being brought against the complex better than almost anyone inside it, and he chose to remain. He was not available for departure on the state's terms.

Beant Singh and Satwant Singh (d. 1984 and 1989)

The legal record: Beant Singh was killed immediately by other security personnel after the shooting on October 31, 1984. Satwant Singh was tried, convicted of murder and criminal conspiracy, and executed on January 6, 1989. This article states the legal record without concealment. The Panthic record is also stated without concealment: within the Khalsa register of response to the desecration of the Guru's house that Blue Star represented, their act belongs in the grammar of answered sacrilege. Both records exist simultaneously. The Panth's capacity to hold both without requiring one to erase the other is not confusion. It is the intellectual architecture of a tradition that has never ceded to the state the exclusive authority to determine the moral meaning of events the state itself produced.

Harjinder Singh 'Jinda' and Sukhdev Singh 'Sukha' (executed October 9, 1992)

This article records with precision: Harjinder Singh was known as Jinda; Sukhdev Singh was known as Sukha. They were convicted and executed at Yerawada Central Prison in Pune for the 1986 assassination of General Arun Shridhar Vaidya, who had served as Chief of Army Staff during Operation Blue Star and carried command responsibility for the military assault on the Darbar Sahib complex. Contemporary reports describe them going to the gallows singing Sikh devotional hymns, having refused clemency petitions. The legal record is clear. The Panthic record is equally clear: men who carried the grammar of answered desecration to its terminal institutional consequence, accepted the state's ultimate penalty, refused its mercy offer, and died within the tradition's vocabulary of sovereign Sikh response to sacrilege.

Jathedar Gurdev Singh Kaunke (1949–1992)

He was the sitting Jathedar of the Akal Takht, holder of the highest seat of Sikh temporal sovereignty, when Punjab Police personnel abducted him in December 1992. He was never returned. No body was officially produced. No conviction has been obtained for his disappearance and murder. The documentary record of his institutional conduct in the period before his abduction — his use of the Akal Takht's moral and institutional authority in ways that conflicted with the state's Punjab counter-insurgency management objectives — provides the inferential context for what was done to him and why.

[AI] The article's analytical inference, drawn from the chronology, the institutional context, and the documented pattern of the Punjab counter-insurgency's approach to Sikh institutional authority, is that Kaunke was disappeared because the state and its allied political networks found the sovereign exercise of the Akal Takht's authority under his Jathedarship institutionally threatening. The disappearance of the sitting Jathedar is itself the most precise possible evidence of what the Khalsa Test of Sovereignty costs when the state decides it will not tolerate the Akal Takht's independence.

His martyrdom and the subsequent institutional history of the Jathedar's office — particularly the Gurbachan Singh Jathedarship examined in Tier III — are not parallel stories. They are the same story told from opposite sides of the question of what happens to the Akal Takht's authority when the Jathedar uses it sovereignly versus when the Jathedar domesticates it for political management. Kaunke's disappearance made the subsequent capture easier. That connection is part of his Tier I entry.

Bhagat Puran Singh (1904–1992) and the Returned Padma Shri

Bhagat Puran Singh built the Pingalwara in Amritsar from personal poverty over decades as a center for the disabled, the destitute, and the mentally ill — a standing institutional rebuke to the indifference of both the state and the social hierarchies that made abandonment of the vulnerable structurally normal. He is in Tier I not because he fought with arms but because the Pingalwara was an act of moral refusal at institutional scale, and because after June 1984, at the age of approximately eighty, he returned the Padma Shri that the Indian state had awarded him. He gave back the honor to the hand that had ordered tanks into the Guru's courtyard and then presided over the mass killing of Sikh civilians in Delhi. A man who has built his entire life around caring for those the state discards, and then gives back the state's recognition at eighty years old in protest at what it has done, has passed the Khalsa Test of Sovereignty in the specific form available to a man of radical seva.

Simranjit Singh Mann (b. 1945)

Simranjit Singh Mann resigned from the Indian Police Service in protest at Operation Blue Star in 1984, forgoing career, pension, and institutional status. He subsequently founded Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar), was elected to the Lok Sabha from Tarn Taran in a by-election in 1988 while imprisoned, and has spent four decades using every available institutional platform to articulate a Sikh political claim that the Indian political establishment's management apparatus has consistently found irreducible to acceptable form. He is in Tier I not because he died a martyr's death but because the record shows no visible moment at which he accepted the state's right to define the ceiling of Sikh political aspiration. The IPS officer who resigned rather than serve a state that had attacked the Guru's house, and who has maintained that position through four decades of political marginalization, belongs in the register of those who refused domestication.

Baba Baghel Singh (1730–1802), Dilawar Singh Babbar, Anokh Singh Babbar, and Bhai Taru Singh

Baba Baghel Singh commands Tier I for the specific act of converting military capacity into permanent Panthic architectural claim on the imperial capital: his 1783 march into Delhi resulted in the negotiated construction of gurdwaras at sites of Sikh historical significance in the Mughal capital — a sovereign assertion in permanent physical form at the seat of the power that had executed Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji. He extracted concession and built monuments in the space of the oppressor's authority. Dilawar Singh Babbar and Anokh Singh Babbar belong in the Tier I register within the framework established throughout this article: not because this article adjudicates every act of the organizations they were part of, but because within the Khalsa archive, men who refused domestication at the cost of death and accepted extremity rather than the state's offer of managed normalization occupy a structural position that this audit consistently places in Tier I.

Balwant Singh Rajoana (b. 1970)

Balwant Singh Rajoana has been on death row in Patiala Central Jail since his conviction for the 1995 assassination of Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh, who governed Punjab through the final and most intense phase of the counter-insurgency period whose illegal cremation record this article has documented at length. He has not filed a mercy petition. Each time the legal system has offered a formal path to commutation, his answer has been: no. Nearly three decades on death row without a mercy petition is not a passive condition. It is the most sustained and exact modern expression of the Khalsa Test of Sovereignty available: the refusal, across thirty years and counting, to ask the state for permission to continue living in a matter the Khalsa conscience locates outside the state's moral jurisdiction. This article's assessment of his Tier I placement is based on that unbroken refusal, stated openly and without romanticization.

Deep Sidhu and the Return of Sovereign Vocabulary

Deep Sidhu (birth year disputed: most records cite 1984; some documentation reportedly lists 1979 — d. February 2022)

The public record carries a discrepancy on Deep Sidhu's birth year: most media profiles and documentation at the time of his death cite 1984; some personal and official documentation reportedly lists 1979. This article states both and resolves neither, because the record does not support forced resolution.

His professional biography before his political turn matters for understanding what that turn meant. He held a law degree, practiced as an advocate, served as legal head for Balaji Telefilms — one of India's largest television production houses — and worked as legal advisor to Sahara India Pariwar. He subsequently crossed into the Punjabi film industry as an actor. This is the professional infrastructure of a man with access to the most comfortable forms of Indian institutional modernity: corporate legal credentials, entertainment industry standing, the social capital of an established career in both law and public culture. He gave it up, or more precisely he let it become irrelevant, in favor of a political position that the Indian state found threatening enough to pursue with criminal charges.

His political awakening, by his own account in pre-death interviews, was substantially shaped by engagement with the historical and political analysis of thinker Ajmer Singh, whose work on Punjab's colonial and post-colonial relationship with the Indian state, Sikh political consciousness, and the unresolved questions of sovereignty and federal dignity gave Sidhu a historical framework within which the farmers' protest and its vocabulary of concession-seeking made inadequate sense. He used a phrase — hond di ladai, the struggle for existence — that reframed the protest from a negotiation over agricultural economics into a question about whether Punjab and the Panth had a political existence the Indian state was required to respect as a matter of federal and constitutional reality rather than administrative concession. That reframing was the threat.

At the Republic Day tractor rally of January 26, 2021, he was present when the Nishan Sahib was raised on the flagpole of the Red Fort. The Indian state read the act as insurrection. The established Akali and farmer union leadership distanced itself from it. Both responses confirmed that the act had landed where it was aimed: it introduced the vocabulary of Sikh sovereign presence into a protest moment that institutional political management on all sides had worked to keep within the grammar of economic grievance and constitutional petition. He was not chasing concessions. He was reopening the argument about Punjab's existence, the Panth's federal dignity, and the 'power equation' — his phrase — between Punjab and Delhi that three decades of post-normalization management had tried to declare settled.

He died in a road accident in February 2022 before the state's legal proceedings against him concluded. His legacy institutionalized through the Waris Punjab De organization. His specific contribution to this article's argument is this: he proved that the Khalsa Test of Sovereignty's question — where do you stand when the Panth's sovereign claim is under pressure? — did not close with the counter-insurgency's end in the 1990s. The state's preferred narrative of normalization held that the sovereignty question was settled, that Sikh political aspiration had been successfully managed back into constitutional channels, and that the vocabulary of Sikh sovereign identity had been effectively archived as historical tragedy rather than living political claim. Deep Sidhu reopened that vocabulary in a national media moment, at the cost of his institutional comfort and his legal freedom, for a generation of young Punjabi Sikhs who had grown up in the post-normalization period and for whom the sovereignty question had no living institutional voice. He gave it one.

General Harbaksh Singh (1913–2000)

General Harbaksh Singh commanded the Western Army Command during the 1965 India-Pakistan war and is credited with defensive and counter-offensive decisions that were critical to preventing Pakistani armor from reaching Amritsar. He belongs in Tier I on the specific basis that this article maintains throughout: not all Sikh-born generals occupy the same moral position in the Khalsa archive. Some defended Punjab's soil and its civilian population. Others later commanded military force against Sikh sacred sites. Harbaksh Singh belongs with the former, and the distinction is not trivial. The record of his service does not show him turning organized military force against the Panth.

TIER II — THE SHIELD, THE COMMITTEE, AND THE CAGE

Those who kept law, doctrine, institution, and Panthic breathing space alive within structures they could not fully rupture

ਸੂਰਾ ਸੋ ਪਹਿਚਾਨੀਐ ਜੁ ਲੜੈ ਦੀਨ ਕੇ ਹੇਤ ॥

He alone is recognized as brave who fights for the righteous cause. — Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji, Ang 1105

Tier II is not the consolation register for those who failed to achieve Tier I. It is the essential archive of the Panth's survival in periods when survival required something other than blood: it required the legal brief that kept the accountability case open across three decades of institutional obstruction; the theological text that preserved the tradition's interior grammar against colonial absorption; the institutional custodian who held shrine independence from complete political capture; the political leader who held a line under catastrophic pressure without fully surrendering or fully rupturing. The Panth does not survive only through martyrdom. It also survives through those who preserve and transmit what martyrdom creates. Tier II honors that preservation while naming its structural limits with equal honesty, because the distinction between preservation under constraint and surrender under pressure is one this article insists on.

H.S. Phoolka

His three decades of legal work produced Sajjan Kumar's conviction by the Delhi High Court in 2018 for his role in organizing the November 1984 anti-Sikh killings in Delhi — the first conviction of a senior Congress party political figure for crimes of that period, and the most significant single accountability outcome of the post-1984 Sikh rights legal struggle. That contribution is real, documented, and historically consequential. During the period of his purely juridical work, Phoolka occupied the highest and clearest position in Tier II: the advocate who kept the accountability record mobile across three decades in a legal system that was systematically designed to exhaust it. His later political positioning — including associations and proximities that the Khalsa register reads as uncomfortably adjacent to the political formations most hostile to Sikh accountability demands — has created symbolic instability in his archive that his earlier work did not deserve and that his subsequent choices produced. The article holds both simultaneously: the legal contribution and its qualification. Neither erases the other.

Justice Ajit Singh Bains (1925–2015)

Justice Ajit Singh Bains was a sitting High Court judge who went into Punjab's prisons in 1985 and counted the people inside them. The Bains Committee's investigations documented approximately 6,000 detainees held without credible legal basis or formal due process documentation, and the Committee's recommendations led to approximately 3,000 of those persons being confirmed returned to their families as a direct result of the intervention. This article preserves the distinction between the two figures: 6,000 documented and recommended; approximately 3,000 confirmed returned. They are not the same number and must not be treated as such. He founded the Punjab Human Rights Organisation, sustained documentation and advocacy through the height of the counter-insurgency period at personal risk, and was himself illegally arrested and physically assaulted by Punjab Police in 1992. He is in Tier II at its highest register: the institutional figure who used his standing as a shield for truth, at personal cost, in a period when that standing and that truth were in severe tension.

Sirdar Kapur Singh (1909–1986)

Sirdar Kapur Singh was an ICS officer who was dismissed from the Indian Administrative Service for defending Sikh political interests in post-Partition India — specifically for positions on Sikh constitutional rights and the Punjabi Suba question that the IAS required him to abandon. His dismissal freed him to become what the service would never have permitted: the most forensically precise Sikh political intellectual of the mid-twentieth century. Sachi Sakhi, his insider account of how Sikh interests were handled during Partition negotiations and the early Indian republic, remains the most damning firsthand indictment of that process from within the administrative apparatus that managed it. He belongs in Tier II as the scholar-administrator who refused to allow institutional absorption to reach its natural conclusion.

Justice Kuldip Singh (1929–2019)

Justice Kuldip Singh was the second Sikh justice in the history of the Supreme Court of India, following Justice Ranjit Singh Sarkaria, who is remembered both for his judicial tenure and for the Sarkaria Commission on Centre-State relations that bears his name. Justice Kuldip Singh served on the Supreme Court and developed an environmental jurisprudence that extended the court's protective reach in ways that earned him the informal designation of the 'Green Judge.' After his retirement from the bench, the Akal Takht appointed him as the first president of the World Sikh Council, through which he maintained international institutional attention on Sikh rights and the accountability deficit of the 1984 period. His Tier II placement reflects the distinction between a figure who uses institutional standing for Panthic purpose without crossing into the sovereign rupture that Tier I requires, and one who uses institutional standing for personal or political advantage. He belongs with the former.

Bhai Gurdas (c. 1551–1636) and Bhai Nand Lal (1633–1713)

Bhai Gurdas served as scribe in the compilation of the Adi Granth under Guru Arjan Dev Ji's direction, and Sikh tradition regards him as a foundational exegetical and interpretive authority — the key to unlocking the Granth's meaning through his own Vars and Kabits, which constitute the most authoritative classical commentary on Sikh theology outside the Guru Granth Sahib itself. Bhai Nand Lal composed Persian and Punjabi poetry at Guru Gobind Singh Ji's court, and his compositions remain among the very few works outside the Granths recited in formal Sikh devotional contexts. A Panth that cannot transmit its own theological self-understanding across generations loses the interior architecture of its sovereignty. These two men built and maintained that architecture at periods of maximum institutional vulnerability. That is preservation under constraint of the most essential kind.

Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha (1861–1938) and Bhai Vir Singh (1872–1957)

Ham Hindu Nahin, written in 1899 at a moment when Arya Samaj theology, British colonial categorization, and early Indian nationalist politics were all working through different mechanisms to absorb Sikh identity into a larger Hindu framework, is Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha's permanent contribution to the Panth's intellectual sovereignty. His Mahan Kosh, the encyclopaedic dictionary of Sikh tradition, remains the most comprehensive Punjabi and Sikh reference work of its kind. Alongside him, Bhai Vir Singh built the literary infrastructure of modern Sikh consciousness: the novels, the poetry, the theological writing that gave the tradition a modern form capable of surviving the colonial encounter without losing its distinctiveness. Both men fought for the Panth's civilizational claim not with weapons but with the precise articulation of what the Sikh tradition is and what it refuses to be absorbed into.

Gurcharan Singh Tohra (1924–2004)

More than two decades as SGPC president makes Tohra the most consequential institutional figure in Sikh shrine governance of the twentieth century. The argument for his Tier II placement is carefully bounded: during periods when the Badal political machine was working to convert the SGPC fully into a family political franchise, Tohra's independent institutional base prevented that conversion from being complete. He was not a sovereign rupture figure. He did not use the SGPC's authority for the full sovereign exercise that the Panthic standard demands. But he maintained institutional independence within the cage at political cost to himself within the Akali political world, and that independence was consequential enough to generate sustained conflict with the Badal organization. Tier II at a point of real but bounded service: he held some institutional ground without using it for the full claim the ground enabled.

Harchand Singh Longowal (1932–1985)

Longowal signed the Rajiv-Longowal Accord in July 1985, an agreement that promised territorial and constitutional concessions in exchange for Akali Dal participation in Punjab assembly elections and a general de-escalation of political confrontation with the center. In Sikh militant circles, the Accord was read as a betrayal of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution's core demands. He was assassinated in August 1985, less than a month after signing, by gunmen who considered the agreement a surrender. He died for the political position his assassination condemned. This article places him in Tier II because his political conduct was genuinely that of constrained bargaining under catastrophic pressure — the Akali leader attempting to hold institutional ground for the Panth within a constitutional framework that had just demonstrated it could obliterate the most sacred Sikh site in the world with military force — rather than active collaboration with state violence or dynastic political capture. Whether the Accord represented wisdom, weakness, or the last available institutional strategy is a question that Sikh historical memory has not resolved. This article does not resolve it either. His placement is Tier II. The question of where exactly within that tier is held open.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780–1839), Master Tara Singh (1885–1967), General Jagjit Singh Aurora (1916–2005), Jagmeet Singh (b. 1979), and Partap Singh Kairon (1901–1965)

Maharaja Ranjit Singh enters this audit in Tier II not because his achievement is diminished but because the forensic lens the article applies must examine institutional inheritance alongside individual greatness. The empire he built was the zenith of Khalsa political power; the succession architecture and the Dogra ascendancy he permitted made possible the command betrayal of 1845–46 and the British absorption of Punjab that followed. Ranjit Singh the sovereign stands in Tier II under the full forensic examination of what he left behind. Master Tara Singh spent decades defending Sikh political distinctness within a republic that worked continuously to contain it; his inconsistencies of execution are real, and Tier II holds both his sustained commitment and its limits. General Aurora accepted the surrender of Pakistan's Eastern Command in 1971, held military command without turning organized force against the Panth, and used post-service standing for Sikh political advocacy. Jagmeet Singh maintains public positions on 1984 accountability at the cost of Indian state hostility including a travel ban, working within Canadian parliamentary institutions rather than any sovereign Sikh political framework. Partap Singh Kairon governed Punjab with genuine developmental capacity and was found by a judicial commission to have simultaneously engaged in practices of corruption and nepotism; Tier II holds both the capacity and the ethical failure.

TIER III — FALSE CLAIMANTS, EXECUTIONERS, SYMBOLIC FACES, MEN OF THE SEAL, AND DYNASTIC CAPTORS

The collaborators, the commanders, the administrators, the captured Jathedars, and the dynasts who built thrones over the Guru

Tier III is internally differentiated and must be read as such. There is a moral and evidentiary distance between the military commander who personally directed the assault on the Akal Takht, the police commander who designed the institutional architecture of disappearance, the District Magistrate whose office provided administrative silence while the cremation grounds filled, the Jathedar who extended institutional religious pardon to the desecrator of the Guru's symbolic identity, and the dynast who converted the SGPC into a family political franchise. All of them belong in Tier III by the Khalsa Test of Sovereignty. None of them belongs in the same analytical paragraph without the distinction named. This article names the distinction because precision is the indictment's force, not its weakness.

A. The Guru-Period Genealogy: Internal Betrayal as Recurring Template

Prithi Chand (1558–1618), Dhir Mal (1627–1677), Ram Rai (1646–1687), and the Twenty-Two Claimants of Bakala

Prithi Chand, eldest son of Guru Ram Das Ji, opposed his brother Guru Arjan Dev Ji's succession, sought Mughal patronage for his counter-claim, circulated unauthorized compositions as Gurbani, and established a rival hostile movement. Sikh tradition named him and his followers Minas — the hidden deceivers. Dhir Mal, grandson of Guru Hargobind Ji, withheld the Kartarpur Bir from Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji and aligned with Mughal administration against the recognized Guru's line, weaponizing control of the sacred manuscript against the living institution. Ram Rai, eldest son of Guru Har Rai Ji, reportedly altered a line of Gurbani in Aurangzeb's court to avoid imperial displeasure; for this, Guru Har Rai Ji severed relations permanently and did not meet him again, bypassing him in the succession. The twenty-two claimants who presented themselves as the successor Guru at Bakala after Guru Har Krishan Ji's death in 1664 are the canonical illustration of opportunistic Panthic institutional claim in moments of succession crisis. Together, these figures establish the complete template of internal Tier III conduct: the man within the Guru's own institutional circle who chooses personal ambition, external patronage, false claimancy, or survival-through-accommodation over fidelity to the Panth's sovereign claim. Every subsequent entry in this tier is their institutional heir.

B. Empire-Collapse: Command Betrayal at the Moment of Sikh Sovereignty

Raja Lal Singh and Tej Singh

Raja Lal Singh served as Prime Minister and Tej Singh as commander of the Khalsa Army during the First Anglo-Sikh War of 1845–46. Both are documented in British military dispatches, Sikh chronicle sources, and subsequent historical scholarship as having coordinated with British forces against their own command obligations: providing intelligence to the enemy, declining to press tactical advantages at moments when the Sikh Army held the field, and allowing British forces to escape destruction in engagements they could not have survived against a commander using his authority faithfully. The Sikh empire collapsed with their assistance. The institutional consequences of that collapse — British administration of Punjab, the Sikh Gurdwaras Act, Partition, 1984 — trace a direct institutional line from the doors they opened at the war's critical moments. They are in Tier III as the foundational command-betrayal archetype of the post-Ranjit Singh era.

C. The Symbolic Sikh Face: Custodians and Commanders of Sacrilege

Jathedar Arur Singh

He honored General Dyer in the precincts of Darbar Sahib. This is the article's record on Arur Singh, and it requires no elaboration beyond precision. Dyer had ordered troops to fire on unarmed civilians gathered in the walled Jallianwala Bagh garden on April 13, 1919, blocking the exits before opening fire and continuing until the ammunition was nearly exhausted. The official British death toll was 379; independent contemporary estimates were significantly higher. The SGPC's predecessor management under Arur Singh's authority extended a siropa and institutional recognition to the commanding officer of that massacre. This act produced the Akali reform movement that created the SGPC. That the reform produced a statutory structure capable of being captured in different forms is part of the article's larger argument. That the act requiring reform was perpetrated by a Sikh institutional custodian in Darbar Sahib's precincts is the foundation of Arur Singh's Tier III placement.

Giani Zail Singh (1916–1994)

The only Sikh President of the Indian republic remained in his constitutional chair during Operation Blue Star in June 1984 and during the November 1984 anti-Sikh killings across India, in which the government of India's own figures acknowledged nearly three thousand Sikh civilians killed in Delhi alone. He did not resign. He did not issue from the constitutional office of Head of State a categorical public condemnation of what had been done. He subsequently gave interviews in which he described feeling like a rubber stamp, kept uninformed, unable to act. Those retrospective statements are part of the record. They do not alter the Khalsa archive's assessment of his public conduct, because the Khalsa Test of Sovereignty is applied to what a person did with the institutional power they actually held, not to what they wished they had been able to do. A Sikh President who remained in his constitutional chair while the state struck the Guru's house and killed Sikh civilians in the capital did not demonstrate that Sikh representation at the republic's summit protects the Panth. He demonstrated that the state can wear a Sikh face while striking the Panth, and that the face's wearer can survive the contradiction.

Lt. General Kuldip Singh Brar (b. 1934)

Lt. General Kuldip Singh Brar commanded the Indian Army operational forces during Operation Blue Star. The Akal Takht sustained structural damage of significant severity under that command. An unconfirmed number of civilians who had taken shelter within the complex were killed during the operation. Brar is Sikh-born. He commanded the assault. He has spent four decades writing and speaking in defense of that command. The Khalsa archive does not grant Sikh-born officers of the Indian Army immunity from Panthic judgment on the grounds that the command structure required compliance. He directed the military assault on the most sacred site of the Sikh tradition. That is his permanent institutional entry in this tier.

Hari Singh Nalwa extending Sikh sovereignty to the Khyber Pass — Kuldip Singh Brar directing military fire at the Akal Takht's walls

D. The Police-State Architects

K.P.S. Gill (1934–2017)

K.P.S. Gill served as Director General of Police, Punjab, from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1991 to 1995 — the second tenure encompassing the most intense and most documented phase of systematic illegal killing, disappearance, and torture in the Punjab counter-insurgency record. His contribution to this article's analysis is not merely that he held the position during a period of widespread violation. It is that the record supports the characterization of him as the institutional architect of the police system within which the violation was systematized: the command arrangements, the special forces structures, the operational mandates, and the accountability gaps that made illegal killing at scale possible within the Punjab Police's organizational framework.

[DA] Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the People's Union for Civil Liberties documented, across multiple reports and time periods, a pattern of systematic illegal detention, torture, extrajudicial killing, and enforced disappearance under Punjab Police command during the period of Gill's authority. [PF] The NHRC confirmed 2,097 illegal cremations as a proved minimum in three Amritsar district cremation grounds — cremations occurring within the period of and under the organizational structure his command directed. [PF] Punjab Police personnel were convicted for the abduction and murder of Jaswant Singh Khalra, confirming that the murder of a human-rights researcher documenting the illegal cremation pattern was an operational act of the police structure he commanded. [PF] Gill was convicted by Indian courts for the sexual molestation of a senior IAS officer — a conviction upheld by the Supreme Court of India in 2005 — establishing his record of using institutional power to assault a woman in his institutional orbit.

The managed impunity of Gill's post-service career — the state awards, the invited commentary on security policy, the intellectual rehabilitation of his command record within the Indian establishment's preferred narrative of Punjab normalization — is the final institutional act in the chain this article documents: the state laundering its own violence through the public celebration of its primary architect.

Ajit Singh Sandhu (1952–1997) and Sumedh Saini (b. 1954)

[DA] Ajit Singh Sandhu's name appears consistently in rights documentation of the Amritsar counter-insurgency period in connection with specific disappearances, illegal detentions, and extrajudicial killings at the operational level of the police apparatus. He died in 1997, recorded as suicide, within weeks of the Supreme Court of India issuing an order for his arrest in the Khalra abduction case. [AI] The chronological proximity of his death to the arrest order deprived the judicial process of the testimony most directly relevant to the Khalra murder's operational chain. Whatever the truth of the circumstances of his death, the judicial process ended with him, and the institutional knowledge he carried has not been recovered through other means. Sumedh Saini served in senior Punjab Police positions during the counter-insurgency and subsequently as Director General of Police. His name appears in documented proceedings before Indian courts involving allegations of illegal detention and custodial killing in his earlier operational roles, placing him in the institutional command record of the period this article examines.

E. The Men of the Seal: Administrative Silence as Institutional Weapon

Ramesh Inder Singh, IAS

[AI] The public record places Ramesh Inder Singh as Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar on and around June 4–6, 1984, the days of the military assault on the Darbar Sahib complex, having assumed the DC position as the operation was executing. The Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar holds simultaneously the role of District Magistrate — the highest civilian-magistracy authority in the district. The article's analytical inference, drawn from the office, the verified chronology, and the statutory duties attached to the position, is that his tenure represents the civilian administrative envelope around the military operation: the DC/DM office providing the geographic and institutional framework within which the assault was conducted and its civilian consequences were not independently investigated through the magistracy's statutory mechanisms. The record does not show a Section 176 inquiry, an independent magisterial report on civilian casualties, a public statement of dissent, or a rupture of any kind. The record shows career continuity.

K.B.S. Sidhu, IAS — DC/DM Amritsar, May 11, 1992 – August 11, 1996

Here is the chronology in the precise terms this article's method requires. Khalra initiates his investigative reconstruction of the illegal cremation pattern in the Amritsar district cremation grounds in 1993. He presents internationally in 1994 and 1995. He is abducted on September 6, 1995. He is murdered. His body is recovered from a canal. The NHRC confirms 2,097 illegal cremations as a proved minimum in three Amritsar district cremation grounds. The criminal conviction of Punjab Police personnel for Khalra's murder is entered in the record of the Indian judicial system. K.B.S. Sidhu was DC/DM of Amritsar for the entire arc of this sequence: May 11, 1992 to August 11, 1996, encompassing Khalra's full investigation, his international presentations, his abduction, and eleven additional months during which the DC/DM office continued in uninterrupted administrative operation.

[PF] The 2,097 illegal cremations are confirmed in three Amritsar district cremation grounds. [PF] Section 176 CrPC's mandatory duty for the district magistracy is a matter of statutory record. [PF] The criminal conviction of Punjab Police personnel for Khalra's abduction and murder is a matter of judicial record. [AI] The article's analytical inference, built from the confluence of these proved facts, the precise tenure dates, the statutory duty, and the documented absence of Section 176 inquiry commensurate with the scale of illegal cremations in his district, is this: the record does not show the civilian magistracy's oversight function deployed at a scale that the 2,097 proved cases would require. That absence supports a strong inference of systemic institutional nonfeasance — not the inference that Sidhu personally ordered each specific suppression of inquiry, but the broader and more devastating inference that his office provided the administrative silence within which the cremation infrastructure operated without institutional challenge from the one statutory body specifically empowered to challenge it.

This article does not portray Sidhu as a cartoon villain. It portrays him as something more instructive: the face of career normalcy during systemic atrocity. The DC/DM office of Amritsar from May 1992 to August 1996 was not the site of obvious corruption or visible misconduct in the ordinary administrative sense. It was the site of something more structurally important: the systematic absence of the oversight function that the law had placed specifically in its hands, during the period when the district's cremation grounds were processing illegal deaths at the scale later confirmed by the NHRC. Khalra read those grounds' records without official authority and gave his life for what he found. Sidhu held official authority and the record does not show him finding the same thing or looking for it.

After retirement, Sidhu became a prolific public writer on administrative reform, Punjabi governance, institutional integrity, and the interpretation of Gurbani. The Guru's word is not a post-retirement credential. It is a sovereign standard that judges office by what was done with its power when the district smoked and the evidence burned. Khalra gave testimony. Sidhu had the institutional instruments of the same compulsion. The record is what the record shows.

The state's Sikh face in the district magistracy is not a less serious form of Tier III conduct than the state's Sikh face in the military command. It is a different form. The military command was visible. The administrative silence was invisible. That invisibility was its institutional function.

F. Jathedars Who Failed the Akal Takht's Sovereignty

Jathedar Giani Kirpal Singh

[AI] Giani Kirpal Singh held the Jathedarship of the Akal Takht during and after Operation Blue Star in June 1984. The record does not show the full institutional weight of that office deployed in public rupture against the military assault on the Darbar Sahib complex. The Akal Takht's sovereign authority — the authority that Jathedar Kaunke was later disappeared for exercising — was not visibly brought to bear against the most significant desecration of the Guru's house in the modern era. In the Khalsa register, a Jathedar who does not use the Akal Takht's authority against those who assault the Guru's house has not protected the institution. He has demonstrated that the institution can be inhabited without being exercised sovereignly. His placement in Tier III is based on that institutional failure at the precise moment the institution's full sovereign use was most required.

Jathedar Gurbachan Singh (b. 1946)

The Ram Rahim pardon. This is the specific institutional act on which Gurbachan Singh's Tier III placement is anchored, and it must be stated with precision. Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, head of the Dera Sacha Sauda, permitted his followers to stage a ceremony in which he appeared in regalia mimicking Guru Gobind Singh Ji's appearance and identity. The Sikh sangat across Punjab and the global diaspora reacted with unmistakable institutional seriousness. The Akal Takht's response under Gurbachan Singh's Jathedarship was to extend a religious pardon. The pardon was subsequently withdrawn under the force of public response. The withdrawal does not erase the issuance. The issuance is the institutional act.

[AI] The pattern of the Gurbachan Singh Jathedarship — including the Ram Rahim pardon, the management of other politically sensitive Akal Takht proceedings in ways that aligned with the Badal political organization's concurrent interests, and the overall trajectory of institutional authority toward political management rather than Panthic sovereignty — constitutes, in this article's analytical judgment, the most complete documented modern instance of the Akal Takht's sovereign authority being systematically domesticated for political management purposes.

Gurdev Singh Kaunke disappeared for exercising the Takht's sovereignty — Gurbachan Singh protected for deploying it as a political instrument

G. SGPC Captured: The Statutory Committee as Political Asset

Bibi Jagir Kaur (b. 1958)

[PF] Bibi Jagir Kaur was convicted by a trial court in 2012 in connection with the death of her daughter Harpreet Kaur; subsequent legal proceedings on appeal are complex and are a matter of public record. [AI] Her multiple SGPC presidencies have been politically linked throughout her career to the Badal political organization, and her management of the committee during those tenures has functioned as an extension of that political network rather than as an independent exercise of the SGPC's statutory authority for shrine protection. This article's Tier III placement is based on institutional function and documented office history, not on personal accusation beyond the public record. The Khalsa Test of Sovereignty applies to her on identical terms as to male figures in this tier.

Avtar Singh Makkar (b. 1938)

Avtar Singh Makkar's SGPC presidency coincided with the deepest integration of the committee into the Badal political machine, including the period of the 2015 Guru Granth Sahib sacrilege incidents in Faridkot district. The statutory body whose foundational mandate is the protection of the sanctity of the Guru Granth Sahib was, under his institutional management during those years, functionally embedded in the same political organization that was managing the political consequences of the sacrilege rather than demanding its full accountability. The captured committee serving its captor's interests at the precise moment the Guru's word required protection: this is the article's characterization of his institutional function, based on the documented overlap of his presidency, the sacrilege incidents, and the political organization's response to those incidents.

H. The Dynastic Captors: The Throne Over the Guru

Parkash Singh Badal (1927–2023) and Sukhbir Singh Badal (b. 1962)

[PF] During Parkash Singh Badal's final Chief Ministerial term (2007–2017), the Guru Granth Sahib sacrilege incidents of 2015 occurred in Faridkot district, and the state police under his government opened fire on Sikh protesters demanding accountability at Behbal Kalan and Kotkapura, killing at least two persons and wounding others. [PF] Formal investigations initiated by subsequent governments produced findings that implicated elements of the Badal government's management of the sacrilege response. [DA] The systematic relationship between the Badal political organization's dominance over the SGPC institutional leadership, the Akal Takht Jathedar's decisions during the relevant periods, and the political management of sacrilege accountability was the subject of documented allegations by human-rights organizations, opposition formations, and within the organized Sikh community.

Sukhbir Singh Badal was the subject of Akal Takht saza proceedings in connection with these events. Those proceedings were themselves complicated by the institutional capture they were designed to address: the Akal Takht adjudicating the political dynasty that had influenced the Akal Takht's Jathedar during the very events under review. The self-referential architecture of that entanglement is the most precise available illustration of what institutional capture means in operational practice: the captured institution cannot independently judge its own captor because the two share the same institutional infrastructure. The Khalsa Test applied to the Badal dynasty produces the finding that the genealogy of internal weakening this article traces across five centuries found its most complete modern expression in their decades of managing Punjabi Sikh political institutions as a family political asset.

Captain Amarinder Singh (1942–2023) and Balwant Singh Ramoowalia (b. 1939)

Captain Amarinder Singh promised 1984 accountability during the 2017 election campaign, governed Punjab for four years, produced some institutional steps through the SIT investigation, did not deliver the full accountability his rhetoric had promised, resigned under Congress internal pressure in 2021, and moved subsequently toward BJP-adjacent political formation — the political establishment most consistently hostile to Sikh accountability demands. His political biography is the arc of managed accommodation deployed across a Chief Ministerial career: the vocabulary of Sikh rights and 1984 justice used for electoral credentialing, then set aside when political survival required it. Ramoowalia's trajectory across a longer timeline follows the same structural pattern: Akali political credentials used to enter Union ministerial positions under Congress, with the political cost of that accommodation to the Sikh community visible and documented throughout.

XV. THE THRONE OVER THE GURU AND THE STATE'S SIKH FACE

The throne over the Guru is not a historical metaphor reserved for Arur Singh and the mahants. It is a structural condition that this article has documented across five centuries in reproducible institutional form, because the Panth's sacred institutions are always, in principle, capturable by those who inhabit them without the sovereign Panthic conscience that their authority requires. The condition is this: an institution created to serve the Guru's house is inhabited by a person or family using it to serve something else — their career, their dynasty, their political organization, their external patron, or the state that requires their institutional compliance in exchange for their institutional security.

The state's Sikh face is the deployment of Sikh-identified institutional authority as the state's shield against the accusation of communal targeting. Zail Singh in Rashtrapati Bhavan provides the republic with a Sikh constitutional head of state during the sacrilege. Brar provides it with a Sikh-born general at the Blue Star operational command. Gill provides it with a Sikh-born DGP at the disappearance architecture's helm. Sidhu provides it with a Sikh-born DC/DM at the district whose cremation grounds are processing the disappeared. Gurbachan Singh provides it with a Sikh Jathedar whose Akal Takht authority manages sacrilege accountability rather than demanding it. The Badal dynasty provides it with a Sikh-named political organization whose SGPC control makes the statutory shrine-management body a component of the political management apparatus rather than a Panthic sovereignty instrument.

These are not coincidences of individual biography. They are the documented institutional architecture of what this article calls Sikh-faced intermediary power: the deliberate deployment of Sikh institutional identity as the state's most effective buffer against the charge of communal targeting, and as the community's most corrosive internal instrument of managed submission. The Sikh face does not redeem the function it performs. In most respects, as this article has argued throughout, it compounds the betrayal by making the betrayal narratively survivable for the state and institutionally difficult for the Panth to narrate.

XVI. KHALRA AND THE MEN OF THE SEAL

Return to the image that opens this article's forensic argument. A bank manager sits in a municipal records office in Amritsar with a notebook. In front of him are the cremation registers of Amritsar city, Patti sub-tehsil, and Tarn Taran. He is cross-referencing their entries — the 'unidentified' body notations, the firewood quantities, the payment receipts, the conspicuous absence of inquest documentation — against police records, family accounts, and the official documentation of arrests and encounters. He has no Section 176 authority. He has no compulsory disclosure power. He has no institutional protection. He is a private citizen approaching public records without statutory force, and he is reading in those records the administrative fingerprint of 2,097 illegal killings that the state's own cremation infrastructure processed and concealed.

ਸਚਹੁ ਓਰੈ ਸਭੁ ਕੋ ਉਪਰਿ ਸਚੁ ਆਚਾਰੁ ॥

Truth is higher than everything; but higher still is truthful living. — Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Ang 62

Khalra lived this verse in its operational form. He found the truth in the administrative fingerprint and gave his life for making it speak publicly. K.B.S. Sidhu, from May 11, 1992 to August 11, 1996, inhabited the administrative institution within which that fingerprint was embedded. He held the Section 176 mandate that Khalra lacked. He held access to the same records through compulsory rather than public channels. He held the institutional authority to open inquiries that Khalra was performing without official status, and to require the explanations and findings that Khalra's investigation was developing through private research. Khalra was abducted on September 6, 1995 — within Sidhu's tenure, within Sidhu's district, by officers of the police apparatus that operated within the institutional framework his district administration oversaw.

[PF] The criminal conviction of Punjab Police personnel for Khalra's abduction and murder is on the public record. [PF] The 2,097 illegal cremations are confirmed in the NHRC's investigation. [PF] Section 176 CrPC's mandatory character is established by statutory text. [AI] The inference available from the combination of these three proved facts and the precise tenure chronology is this: the DC/DM's office of Amritsar from 1992 to 1996 provided the administrative normalcy within which the police apparatus that murdered Khalra operated and the cremation infrastructure that processed the 2,097 illegal deaths functioned without the level of district magistracy intervention that the statutory framework specifically placed in the DC/DM's hands.

K.B.S. Sidhu now writes on Substack about governance, administrative reform, the failures of Punjab's institutional architecture, and the wisdom of Gurbani. The Guru's word is a living standard that judges office by what was done with its power when the district smoked and the evidence burned. Khalra, without an office, made the evidence speak. Sidhu, with every official instrument of the same compulsion, produced no finding commensurate with what Khalra found. After retirement, he writes about Gurbani. This article's assessment of that post-retirement posture is contained in the forensic record assembled above. The Khalsa archive does not grant interpretive authority over the Guru's word to those who held the instruments of truth-enforcement and left them undisturbed during atrocity.

Khalra's ink found the truth in the state's own records. The state's ink, through managed administrative silence, tried to bury it. One of them was murdered for what he found. The other was promoted for what he did not find. The Panth reads both outcomes as evidence.

XVII. A MEMORIAL TO TODAR MAL OF SIRHIND

No audit of the Panth's moral archive can proceed through the martyrdom of the Sahibzade without recording the name of the man who made their dignified departure possible. Todar Mal was a Hindu merchant of Sirhind. After the execution of Baba Zorawar Singh and Baba Fateh Singh at Nawab Wazir Khan's order in December 1704, the Nawab's administration refused to permit normal cremation or burial rites. The price of the land required for last rites was set in the most deliberately humiliating form available to the Mughal administrative imagination: gold coins laid touching each other, covering the entire surface of the ground.

[PM] Sikh historical and devotional tradition preserves the account of Todar Mal paying those coins — converting his wealth into the price of a cremation ground for the Guru's sons — so that the sacred rites could be performed. The tradition has preserved his name across more than three hundred years not because he was Sikh — he was not — but because the Panth's moral archive has never been exclusively bounded by religious community membership. It records service to the Guru's house when that service is genuine and costly, regardless of the server's faith tradition.

Todar Mal is noted here because the article's structural framework has no tier to place him in — he was not Sikh, and this audit applies the Khalsa Test to Sikh men and women. But the Panth's memory holds him, and this article honors that memory by naming him in the record. The Khalsa's sovereignty has always included within its moral archive the recognition of those who served the Guru's house without wearing the Guru's turban. He paid for the ground. The tradition remembers.

XVIII. THE FINAL ACCOUNTING

ਜਿਉ ਜਿਉ ਤੇਰਾ ਹੁਕਮੁ ਤਿਵੈ ਤਿਊ ਹੋਵਣਾ ॥

As is Your Will, so it shall be. — Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji

The Khalsa Test of Sovereignty was not invented by this article. It was sealed in blood in Chandni Chowk in November 1675, when Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji answered Mughal sovereign coercion with his body rather than his submission. It was transmitted by Mata Gujri Ji from the Thanda Burj's cold confinement to the two grandsons she sent to the wall rather than purchase with accommodation. It was carried by Banda Singh Bahadur through the execution theater in Delhi, by Rani Jind Kaur through thirteen years of enforced exile, by Kartar Singh Sarabha to the gallows at nineteen, by Udham Singh through twenty-one years of patient accountability, by Jaswant Singh Khalra through the cremation registers of three municipal grounds, by Gurdev Singh Kaunke through the Jathedar's office until the state's vehicle took him. It was refused by Prithi Chand, by Ram Rai, by Lal Singh and Tej Singh, by Arur Singh and Zail Singh, by Brar and Gill and Sandhu, by Gurbachan Singh, by the Badal dynasty, and by the quiet institutional normalcy of K.B.S. Sidhu's four years of DC/DM tenure over the geography of 2,097 confirmed illegal cremations.

The test has three answers, and the Panth's archive holds all three. The first answer is Tier I: the body at the point of coercion, the blood at the site of desecration, the record built without official authority at the cost of life, the refusal that accepts the state's ultimate consequence rather than its survival offer. The second answer is Tier II: the legal brief filed across three decades, the theological dictionary compiled against civilizational absorption, the institutional independence maintained within the cage, the political line held under catastrophic pressure. The third answer is Tier III: the military assault commanded, the district administered in silence, the symbolic constitutional chair occupied during sacrilege, the Akal Takht's authority deployed for political management, the statutory shrine committee converted into a dynastic political asset.

This article has examined all three answers, named the people who gave them, and rendered the Khalsa archive's assessment of each. It has done so with the evidentiary discipline that the archive's credibility requires: proved findings distinguished from documented allegations, documented allegations distinguished from analytical inferences, analytical inferences distinguished from Panthic memory, and all four distinguished from personal accusation without record. Where the article has drawn inferences, it has named them and argued them. Where the record is settled, it has treated it as settled. Where the record is disputed or incomplete, it has said so. A court of record owes the truth that exactness.

ੴ ਸਤਿ ਨਾਮੁ

Some died for the Guru's house.

Some kept watch within cages they did not break.

Some handed the state their seal, their sword, their committee, their silence.

Sikh history receives all three into its archive.

It does not give them the same crown.

It never has.

It will not begin now.

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[PF] Proved Finding · [DA] Documented Allegation · [AI] Analytical Inference · [PM] Panthic Memory

[Footnote] A continuously updated archive of K.B.S. Sidhu’s published writings on governance, constitutionalism, public administration, and statecraft is available at The KBS Chronicle Substack Archive (https://kbssidhu.substack.com/archive?sort=new). That body of post-retirement commentary is read, across this website, as a contemporaneous interpretive record against which the administrative history of Punjab—particularly Amritsar district between May 1992 and August 1996—is analytically tested.

Within the evidentiary framework developed at KPSGill.com, the office of the District Magistrate is examined not merely as an administrative post but as a civilian shield—a statutory locus of “general control and direction” over the police under the Punjab Police Act, and of mandatory judicial inquiry under Code of Criminal Procedure §176. The record attributed to that office during the relevant period is therefore assessed in light of both documented actions—including high-visibility interventions such as hijacking negotiations and the Galliara (Darbar Sahib precinct) project—and documented inactions, including the absence of magisterial inquiry and civil-administrative intervention in relation to custodial deaths, disappearances, and the pattern of illegal cremations later confirmed in judicial and quasi-judicial proceedings.

The analytical method applied throughout KPSGill.com situates such writings not as abstract reflections on governance, but as part of a dual record: one declarative (post-retirement articulation of constitutional norms), and the other administrative (the statutory, documentary, and evidentiary footprint of the same office when those norms were operationally engaged). The relevance of the archive, therefore, lies in this juxtaposition—between stated principles and the historical exercise, or non-exercise, of authority in a district subsequently defined by litigation, inquiry, and unresolved questions of accountability.