Two developments today, on their face unrelated, deserve to be read together. Bhai Balwant Singh Rajoana, from Patiala Central Jail, has issued a three-page open letter to the Khalsa Panth. And Bhai Jagtar Singh Hawara, from a Delhi prison, has declined a two-day custody parole, holding out instead for a regular parole to see his ailing mother. Neither, taken alone, would detain a chronicler for long. Taken together, and read against the rest of this week’s overlapping developments, they point to a fault line that runs not between the Panth and its adversaries, but within the Panth’s own claimants to represent it. I write as an outsider to that contest — a retired civil servant who spent a career administering the districts these movements contest — not as a participant in the argument. What follows is cartography, not advocacy.
The premise nobody quite states out loud
For three decades, the convenient shorthand has been that Punjab’s radical or “Panthic hardline” spectrum — tracing its lineage to Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, regarding the egregious events of June 1984 and the anti-Sikh pogrom of that year as unfinished business, never fully reconciled to the so-called “moderate” Akali politics as an adequate vehicle for Sikh grievance — is more or less a single current, however factionalised at the edges. Bhai Balwant Singh Rajoana in Patiala Central Jail and Bhai Jagtar Singh Hawara in a Delhi prison, both convicted in the 1995 assassination of Chief Minister Beant Singh; the Khadoor Sahib MP Amritpal Singh in Assam’s Dibrugarh jail; the late Deep Sidhu’s residual following within Waris Punjab De — these have generally been read, by journalists and by the state’s own intelligence assessments alike, as points on a single spectrum of intransigence, differing in tactics and generation but not in fundamental orientation.
This week’s events suggest that reading needs revision, and on a wider canvas than I first allowed. Taken together, they have forced nearly every claimant to Panthic representation to state — in public, in writing, or in the more eloquent language of defection — who exactly has earned the right to speak for the Sikh Panth. The answers do not converge into two camps, or even three. They fracture into five.
Five corners, not two
The first corner belongs to the Shiromani Akali Dal itself — Sukhbir Badal, presiding over a party that has spent the better part of a decade losing its claim to being the Panth’s default political address. An organisation built for an era of unquestioned Jat-Sikh, rural, agrarian consolidation now competes in a landscape reshaped by the SIR-era electoral rolls, by AAP’s incumbency, and by a younger cohort for whom Emergency-era Akali martyrology carries diminishing weight. Sukhbir Badal’s own legal position compounds matters: he faces imminent prosecution in the Kotkapura and Behbal Kalan police firing cases, and remains embroiled, years on, in the pardon extended to the Dera Sacha Sauda chief and its subsequent withdrawal by the Sikh high priests — a sequence that has kept SAD in something close to political wilderness since 2015, sporadic speculation of a BJP alliance notwithstanding, speculation as regularly floated as it is denied. The Nanded attack should, on its face, have generated sympathy sufficient to arrest that decline. It has not — or not yet — in part because of what is happening in the other four corners simultaneously.
The second corner belongs to Amritpal Singh’s Waris Punjab De — inheriting what remains of Deep Sidhu’s following — a post-2023 revivalist current drawing its energy less from institutional Akali politics than from a self-consciously insurgent register, and built substantially on treating Deep Sidhu’s 2022 road accident as martyrdom rather than tragedy. This current shows every sign of actually gaining ground: it was reported today that Jhunda, until recently within the Akali fold, has joined it — one more data point in a discernible drift of cadre toward the more assertive pole.
The third corner has, until this week, been comparatively quiet on this particular question: the surviving cohort of convicted militants from the 1990s assassination generation, Bhai Rajoana and Bhai Hawara chief among them. Their claim to primacy rests on decades of incarceration rather than a road accident or the performative militancy of a social-media-era organisation, and Bhai Rajoana has now said so, questioning in his letter to the Khalsa Panth whether “people of questionable conduct” are being dressed in Bhindranwale’s image while a lesser figure is marketed as a shaheed. Bhai Hawara, for his part, has made his own quieter statement this same week, in a different register: he declined the two-day custody parole offered by the Delhi Prison Department — citing his classification as a high-risk prisoner requiring extra security for any movement outside jail — and held out instead for a regular parole, to see his ailing, octogenarian mother, notwithstanding Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann’s own intervention on his behalf. It is not a claim to Panthic primacy in the way Bhai Rajoana’s letter is, but it is, in its own quiet fashion, a reminder that this cohort still commands a form of public attention — sympathetic, this time, rather than contested — that neither Amritpal’s camp nor the SAD leadership can presently summon on demand.
Simranjit Singh Mann belongs, broadly, to this same current, and his trajectory previews the diminishing returns Bhai Rajoana and Bhai Hawara’s generation may yet face. Simranjit Mann — who to this day describes, on his own Twitter handle, the pursuit of a sovereign Sikh state as unfinished business — won a landslide from Tarn Taran in the 1989 Lok Sabha election while still in custody, but never took his seat, refusing to enter the House without his kirpan and being refused that accommodation in turn. Three decades of comparative wilderness followed. His consolation, when it came, was modest: the Sangrur Lok Sabha by-election, vacated by Bhagwant Mann on becoming Chief Minister, which he went on to win — a seat that brought no lasting renewal of relevance. The seat itself proved short-lived: in the 2024 general election, an Aam Aadmi Party candidate reclaimed Sangrur, and Simranjit Mann was voted out — a caution, sharper still, against reading Bhai Rajoana’s current prominence as anything more durable than a moment.
The fourth corner — and this deserves far more scrutiny than it has received — is the institutional religious authority represented by the Acting Jathedar of Sri Akal Takht Sahib, Bhai Kuldeep Singh Gargaj, active on precisely this terrain: on the contested drafts of the Jaagat Jot Sri Guru Granth Sahib Satkar Rules, and at congregations such as the one convened at Harike, the confluence of the Sutlej and the Beas, follwwing the Satluj movie repurcussions. It is worth pausing on why this corner stands separately at all, rather than folding into the first as merely another voice of the Badal establishment. The Jathedar of Sri Akal Takht Sahib is, in Sikh polity, universally regarded as occupant of the highest seat of Sikh temporal authority — a sovereignty in kind distinct from, and in theory superior to, that of any political leader, Sukhbir Badal included. That the office of the President of the SGPC is, in current practice, widely perceived as aligned with the Badal establishment is precisely what makes it analytically interesting rather than redundant: the tension between its claimed sovereign standing and its actual institutional dependence is itself part of the story. The difficulty is structural, not personal — Jathedars of the Takhts are appointed and removed by resolution of the SGPC’s executive committee, and the SGPC’s own General House was last elected in 2011, meaning the body that installs and can dismiss the Panth’s highest religious functionaries has not faced its own Sikh electorate in fifteen years, and remains under the control of the group that has held it since. Authenticity and alignment are not the same thing, but in the absence of a fresh SGPC mandate, the Sangat cannot easily draw the distinction.
The fifth corner is the quietest and, electorally, the least consequential — which is itself the point. Giani Harpreet Singh’s SAD (Punar Surjeet) — the name itself a claim to revival rather than rupture — has tried to stake out precisely this moderate centre: articulate, well-informed, led by a former Akal Takht Jathedar whose personal standing for scholarship and restraint is not seriously disputed even by critics, and unwilling to indulge either SAD’s inertia or the hardline spectrum’s appetite for confrontation. It has not gained traction. Its own personnel are the evidence: Surjit Singh Rakhra has moved to the Aam Aadmi Party, while both Manpreet Singh Ayali and, as of today, former MLA Iqbal Singh Jhunda have gravitated not to a rival moderate formation but to Waris Punjab De — Amritpal Singh’s own camp. A moderate centre that cannot hold its own defectors within moderation, losing them instead to the more assertive pole, tells us something about where the energy in Panthic politics currently resides.
The uncomfortable arithmetic
Here the analyst must resist the temptation to smooth things over. Bhai Rajoana’s intervention is, on its own terms, internally coherent: a man who has spent thirty-one years in custody for an act of political violence is entitled, if anyone is, to an opinion on what counts as sacrifice. But the same letter that condemns the Nanded attack as “against Sikh principles” — because Sukhbir Badal was a devotee at Guru Ghar, and no true Sikh attacks a devotee regardless of political enmity — is written by a man convicted of conspiring to kill a sitting head of a state government. The Panth is being asked, in the same document, to accept a hierarchy of legitimate and illegitimate violence calibrated by the letter-writer’s own biography.
The Acting Jathedar’s position carries a parallel discomfort, of a different kind: an office meant to stand above factional politics is, by the SGPC’s own unreformed structure, appointable and removable by resolution of a body that has not tested its legitimacy at the ballot in a decade and a half. And Giani Harpreet Singh’s discomfort, at the fifth corner, is simpler still — the discomfort of irrelevance, of correctness without a constituency.
Why this matters beyond the personalities
The significance of this five-cornered fissure is not gossip about which claimant respects which other. It matters because the hardline and institutional wings of Panthic politics have, for most of the post-1984 period, derived coercive leverage over Punjab’s political class from the presumption of a broadly unified Panthic sentiment behind them. This week has punctured that presumption in public view, across all five corners simultaneously: the old militant generation contesting the new; the institutional Takht read as compromised by an unreformed SGPC; the moderate centre bleeding cadre not toward compromise but toward the most assertive of its rivals.
One postscript, briefly, on the Nanded attack on Sukhbir Badal itself, which this piece has deliberately kept for the close rather than its opening: whatever else it has exposed, it has also occasioned something worth noting on its own terms. Political opponents and senior leaders at the Centre alike called to express relief and wish Sukhbir Badal a speedy recovery, cutting across the very party lines this piece has examined. That such courtesies still hold, notwithstanding how bitter and at times virulent the verbal contest between these camps has become, suggests some baseline of democratic comradery survives the five-cornered scramble — a small mercy, and not an unimportant one.
A second postscript, adjacent to the five corners rather than fully one of them, is worth flagging for the record. The case of Bhai Jaswant Singh Khalra — the human-rights defender abducted and murdered by Punjab Police in 1995 for documenting unclaimed cremations of those killed in custody during the militancy years — has returned to national, indeed international, prominence following the release of Diljit Dosanjh’s film Punjab ‘95, itself only reaching audiences after a protracted contest with the censors. In its wake, Bibi Paramjit Kaur Khalra, his widow and a political figure in her own right, has said she does not intend to contest. Whether that position holds is for her alone to determine. But it is worth setting down in advance how readily any change of heart is likely to be explained: not as the ordinary political recalculation every other actor in this piece has exercised without needing to justify it in communal terms, but as a response to the kaum’s call, or to some notional adesh of the Panth — undertaken, in the language that will inevitably be reached for, in the service of the Panth rather than in pursuit of office.
Irrespective of how the Punjab Vidhan Sabha elections themselves turn out, one thing they are certain to settle, at least provisionally, is this: among the corners that actually place themselves before the ballot — the Shiromani Akali Dal, Waris Punjab De wherever it fields candidates, and Giani Harpreet Singh’s SAD (Punar Surjeet) — which one the electorate, and particularly the Sikh electorate of rural Punjab, regards as the true representative voice of regional Panthic politics. The prison cells and the Akal Takht will continue to render their own, separate verdicts, by other means entirely. Whether Punjab’s Sangat will read the larger fracture the way this piece has laid it out remains, as always, an open question — and one I would not presume to answer on the Panth’s behalf.