At twenty minutes to eight on the morning of 11 September 2026, a WhatsApp message reached me from a highly respected retired Judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, settled in Chandigarh and still active in duties assigned by the Supreme Court. The phrase “Khalsa ji de bol bale”, he wrote, is the one Sirdar Kapur Singh set into the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, and it has been read for half a century as a coded demand for a separate country. In the reading of some of the leading contemporary Sikh scholars, it means something else: a State decentralised to the point where the village itself is governed on Khalsa principles of equality, fraternity, liberty and social justice. The Catholic Church, the judge added, has a cousin of this idea and calls it subsidiarity. He suggested I write about it, to clear away the misunderstanding about “Khalistan”.
Rather than defend a slogan, I propose to describe the sovereignty behind it. The Sikh Panth has exercised it since 1606, Indian statute law has defined its members by faith alone for a century, and the Constitution of India already concedes it. It has nothing whatever to do with maps, flags or passports. Then I will name who is eroding it. The most consequential threats to it today come from Amritsar, Chandigarh, Mumbai and New Delhi, not from the diaspora.
A Sovereignty That Needs No Map
Every day, in gurdwaras across the world, the sangat stands after the Ardas and recites the couplet ਰਾਜ ਕਰੇਗਾ ਖਾਲਸਾ ਆਕੀ ਰਹੈ ਨ ਕੋਇ: the Khalsa shall rule, and none shall remain defiant. It is recited in Brampton and in Queens, in Southall and in Melbourne, in Nairobi and in Novellara. Those reciting it carry Canadian, American, British, Australian, Kenyan and Italian passports. Not one of them is applying for a new one.
The raj in that line is the rule of a disciplined, self-governing community over its own affairs, and first of all over itself. The sovereignty of the Sikh faith resides in the Panth, the collective body of the Guru’s Sikhs. It is exercised through the Panth’s own institutions, and Sri Akal Takht Sahib stands foremost among them. That sovereignty is internal, a claim on conscience rather than on land. A Sikh’s citizenship is his own business, and his country’s. His faith, and the institutions that speak for it, are the Panth’s business and no one else’s.
That, stripped of the noise, is what “bol bala” means. The pre-eminence of the Khalsa is the pre-eminence of its own institutions in its own house.
Three Centuries Before the Statute
Consider the arithmetic.
In June 1606, within weeks of Guru Arjan Dev’s martyrdom in Lahore, Guru Hargobind girded himself with two swords, miri for temporal authority and piri for spiritual. He raised Sri Akal Takht Sahib, the Throne of the Timeless, facing the Harmandar Sahib. Bhai Gurdas was its first custodian.
Sixty-nine years later, in 1675, the ninth Guru, Tegh Bahadur, gave his life in Delhi so that the Kashmiri Pandits might go on practising a faith that was not his own. The first great sacrifice of the Sikh sovereign tradition after the Takht was raised claimed no territory; it defended someone else’s conscience.
In 1699 the Khalsa was created at Anandpur Sahib. In 1708 at Nanded, Guru Gobind Singh vested Guruship in the Granth and the Panth together. Through the eighteenth century, when the Sikhs had no state and a price on their heads, the Sarbat Khalsa gathered at Sri Akal Takht Sahib at Vaisakhi and Diwali to pass gurmatas, resolutions taken in the Guru’s name and binding on every misl. Every Sikh had to obey them whether or not he held a scrap of land.
The statute book arrived much later, and the Panth wrote its first pages itself. Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha published Ham Hindu Nahin (”We Are Not Hindus”) in 1898, the founding text of the Singh Sabha’s assertion of a complete and independent faith. The Anand Marriage Act of 1909 gave the Sikh wedding rite its own statutory standing. Then came the struggle for the shrines. The massacre at Nankana Sahib in February 1921 was followed by the Keys morcha, which ended with Mahatma Gandhi telegraphing Baba Kharak Singh in January 1922: “First decisive battle for India’s freedom won.” Then came Guru ka Bagh and Jaito. Out of all that came the Sikh Gurdwaras Act, assented to on 28 July 1925.
From 1606 to 1925 is 319 years. The Act is younger than Sri Akal Takht Sahib by more than three centuries. It cannot, therefore, be the source of the Takht’s authority. The Act manages gurdwara property and constitutes a board to do so. It did not create the Panth’s conscience, and it could not. The Act is the servant, and the Takht is not its creature.
Bol Bala, Read Aright
The judge’s pointer to subsidiarity deserves more than a nod. In Quadragesimo Anno (1931), Pius XI laid down that a larger and higher body does an injustice when it takes over what a smaller one can do for itself. Europe later wrote the principle into the Maastricht Treaty. Mahatma Gandhi dreamt of it in his own idiom. He wrote in Harijan in July 1946 of tens of thousands of village republics arranged in an “oceanic circle”, with the individual at the centre and the widening circles existing to serve the inner ones rather than to crush them.
The Anandpur Sahib Resolution of 1973 did pitch its autonomy demand at the Centre–State tier rather than the village, and the scholars’ reading is a generous one. The ethic inside it, however, is sound, and it cuts in two directions at once.
Outward, subsidiarity says the State should not do what the Panth can do for itself: define its own religious terms, settle its own maryada (code of conduct), choose its own spiritual heads. Inward, it says that within the Panth, a political party should not do what the sangat can do for itself: elect its own gurdwara parliament and choose its own Jathedar.
A little later that morning, the judge reminded me that the Eleventh and Twelfth Schedules have promised power to panchayats and municipalities for thirty-three years and have never really kicked in. I have written and spoken on that failure for years. The symmetry is uncomfortable. The same political class that demanded autonomy from Delhi in 1973 never devolved it to the gram sabha. And it has not allowed the Sikh electorate to vote for its own gurdwara parliament since 2011. Centralisation, it turns out, is a habit rather than an ideology.
The Colour of the Passport
The Jewish people have a state, Israel. Yet a Jew who holds an American, Swiss, German or Canadian passport does not need an Israeli one to be fully Jewish. The rabbinical court in London does not draw its authority from the Knesset. The influence Jewish communities exercise across the democracies comes from organisation. Their institutions are old, well funded, internally elected and internally respected. The colour of the passport makes no difference.
The closer analogy may be the Ismaili Imamat, which has no territory at all and yet has concluded formal agreements with governments from Ottawa to Lisbon. Or it may be the Holy See, whose spiritual writ runs among Catholics of every nationality. The subsidiarity my correspondent invoked, after all, comes from that same Church.
Indian law makes the same point, more precisely, in its definition of a Sikh. Where a person’s status is in question, the definition clause of the 1925 Act settles it by a solemn declaration:
“I solemnly affirm that I am a Sikh, that I believe in the Guru Granth Sahib, that I believe in the Ten Gurus, and that I have no other religion.”
There are three conditions, and three only. Not one of them asks where the declarant was born, where he lives, or which passport he carries. It is open to anyone, of any birth, who can make the declaration honestly. The same formula, with “Keshadhari” added, went into the Delhi Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1971, and it has been carried into Maharashtra’s current draft for Hazur Sahib. For a hundred years, then, the statute book of this country has defined the Sikh by faith alone and never by domicile, a century of law that the Khalistan debate keeps overlooking.
Authority recognised across passports rests on legitimacy, not territory. A hukamnama from Sri Akal Takht Sahib runs in Surrey as it runs in Sangrur. That is sovereignty, and all it requires is legitimacy. Legitimacy is what is being drained from the institution, and not by anyone abroad.
What the Constitution Already Concedes
Read Article 25 slowly. It guarantees every person freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion, subject to public order, morality and health. It allows the State to regulate the economic, financial, political and other secular activity that may be associated with religious practice. And then, appended to the Article, comes a single sentence the framers chose to write in terms:
Explanation I.—The wearing and carrying of kirpans shall be deemed to be included in the profession of the Sikh religion.
Pause on the drafting. The kirpan was not left to be argued before the courts, case by case, as an “essential practice” to be proved. The Constitution deems it so, and “shall be deemed” is the strongest phrase in a draftsman’s vocabulary. On this one article of faith, the Republic answered the doctrinal question itself, and answered it the way the Panth would have answered it. It also named the thing it was protecting: “the Sikh religion”, a religion in its own right. No other faith has an article of faith named and protected in the text. The Sikh’s distinctiveness was written into the fundamental rights on 26 January 1950, the day the Constitution came into force.
Much heat has been spent, over the decades, on the second Explanation, which extends the word “Hindu” to include Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists. Akali leaders publicly burnt copies of Article 25 over it in the agitation years that ran from the Asiad of 1982 into 1984. Yet, as I argued at the Constitution Club of India on 3 June 2025, the protest missed the nuance of Explanation I, which is the clearest acknowledgment of Sikh distinctiveness anywhere in the Constitution. Explanation II, read carefully, borrows the word “Hindu” only for one purpose: laws throwing open Hindu religious institutions to all classes and sections, which is to say temple entry and the dismantling of untouchability. It is not a general equation of Sikh with Hindu. The genuine and still-live clubbing lies elsewhere, in the personal-law statutes of 1955 and 1956 on marriage and succession, whose application clauses sweep Sikhs into the definition of “Hindu”.
Central law, for its part, has answered the question without ambiguity. When the Union Government notified religious minorities under the National Commission for Minorities Act on 23 October 1993, it named Sikhs individually and separately, alongside Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Parsis. With that notification come the cultural and educational rights that Articles 29 and 30 reserve for minorities. I set out this whole record, historical, institutional and constitutional, in Not a Sect, but a Sovereign Faith this July. As that piece concluded, Sikh identity as a distinct religion requires no certificate of validation from any outside body.
Article 26 goes further still. Every religious denomination may manage its own affairs in matters of religion, and may administer its property in accordance with law. The line is drawn with care. Property and management can be regulated by law, and that is why the 1925 Act exists. It is also why the Supreme Court in September 2022 upheld Haryana’s separate gurdwara management law. Matters of religion, however, belong to the denomination. As far back as the Shirur Mutt case (1954), the Supreme Court held that what is essential to a religion is to be ascertained from the doctrines of that religion itself. That is the general form of what Explanation I had already settled for the kirpan. Sikh doctrine is not the Vidhan Sabha’s to settle.
We have just watched this principle work, and work within the Constitution. On 29 June this year, Sri Akal Takht Sahib directed the Punjab Government to put the Jagat Jyot Sri Guru Granth Sahib Satkar (Amendment) Act, 2026 on hold and amend the disputed provisions within a month, holding that the law had strayed into matters reserved for the Panth. The Jathedar did not deny the State its powers. He accepted that it may enact criminal law and prescribe punishment for sacrilege, but held that it could not legislate on Sikh religious terminology, maryada, or custodianship of the Guru Granth Sahib. The ministers and MLAs present accepted his directions.
That is the whole model in miniature: sovereign within, citizen outside. Elected legislators of every party stood before the Takht as Sikhs and returned to the Assembly as legislators, and nobody seceded from anything.
The House That 2011 Built
The general house of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC, the body that manages the historic gurdwaras of Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Chandigarh under the 1925 Act) serves a five-year term. The last board was notified on 16 December 2011, and its five years ran out on 16 December 2016. That is nearly a decade ago.
The Constitution nowhere defines who a Sikh is; the 1925 Act does, and the argument over who falls within that definition swallowed the house’s first five years. The litigation over the voting rights of Sehajdhari Sikhs ran on until Parliament settled the point in 2016. There has been no election since.
By November 2022, twenty-six elected members had died and two others had resigned. Mortality has redrawn the house more than the electorate has. The same house has elected Harjinder Singh Dhami president for five consecutive terms, the latest for 2025-26.
The machinery was set in motion and then left idling. Voter registration began on 21 October 2023, and the deadline was extended six times. By February 2024 only about 23.89 lakh applications had come in, against roughly 52.69 lakh eligible voters in 2011. Then, as I recorded on this Chronicle at the time, Justice (Retd.) S.S. Saron reached the statutory age limit of seventy on 30 June 2025, and the Centre declined him an extension to complete the rolls. This week, Congress MP Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa called the fifteen-year delay a violation of the Sikh community’s democratic rights. On that he is right, whatever one’s politics.
The Panth’s electoral clock is wound in New Delhi. Justice Saron himself said so: fixing the poll schedule is the Centre’s prerogative under the 1925 Act. And Delhi has long waited on the convenience of whoever holds the house. As far back as 2003, The Tribune reported that the Centre would not set dates without first taking the Akali leadership into confidence, and that there had been no green signal from the SAD. The frozen house suits two parties at once: the one that controls it, and whichever government in Delhi is doing its alliance arithmetic. Neither consults the Sikh voter.
The 1925 Act thus defines a Sikh by faith, invites every such Sikh within its territory onto the rolls, and has left him without a vote for fifteen years.
Two Swords in a Party Scabbard
The Jathedar of Sri Akal Takht Sahib is regarded by Sikhs everywhere as the foremost spokesman of the Khalsa. In practice he holds the power to summon, try and sentence any person who identifies as a Sikh. Yet no written code governs how he is appointed or removed; I examined that gap within the 1925 Act in 2023, and it has not narrowed since. He is appointed, and removed, by the SGPC’s executive committee: fifteen persons elected annually by the house of 2011.
On 2 December 2024, Giani Raghbir Singh, then Jathedar, pronounced tankhah (religious penance) on Sukhbir Singh Badal and other Akali leaders for their governments’ alleged wrongdoings between 2007 and 2017. He was removed on 7 March 2025. His removal angered Sikhs across the community and prompted renewed demands for a formal framework governing how Jathedars are appointed and removed. Giani Kuldeep Singh Gargaj was appointed by the SGPC the same day.
The fault is structural and says nothing about any individual incumbent. Guru Hargobind’s two swords were meant to be worn by the Guru and later held in trust by the Panth. Today they hang in a party’s scabbard. The office that can summon a State’s Cabinet ministers to Amritsar, as it did in June, can itself be dismissed by a committee answerable, in practice, to one party’s leadership. An office held at pleasure can be withdrawn at displeasure. Every Jathedar knows it, and every Sikh watching knows he knows it. No hukamnama issued under that shadow can carry its full weight.
Knocking at the Takht’s Door
It would be convenient to blame a single party. It would also be dishonest. Nearly every party has had its hand on the door at one time or another.
In 2009 the Congress-led Centre named Justice J.C. Verma the first non-Sikh Chief Commissioner of Gurdwara Elections, and the appointment escalated into a major confrontation between the Union government and the SGPC. In 2023 the AAP government in Punjab carried a Sikh Gurdwaras (Amendment) Bill on the telecast of Gurbani. The SGPC answered by invoking the 1959 understanding between Master Tara Singh and Pandit Nehru, under which the Gurdwara Act is not to be amended without the approval of two-thirds of the SGPC general house. In 2026 the same government produced the Satkar amendment described above.
In Maharashtra, the government in February 2024 took the power to nominate 12 of the 17 members of the Hazur Sahib board directly, and rolled the change back only after massive protests. This June it moved to repeal the 1956 Act altogether, and the Takht Hazur Sahib responded with a gurmata rejecting the repeal. I wrote in June that parts of the Maharashtra draft were a step forward, not least its alignment of the definition of a Sikh with the 1925 Act. Whether they are or not, the point stands: the governance of one of the Panth’s five Takhts is being settled in a State cabinet in Mumbai.
Add Haryana’s separate committee. Add the Union Home Ministry’s hold over the SGPC poll calendar. Add the SAD’s hold over the executive that makes and unmakes Jathedars. Each actor defends the Panth’s autonomy against the others and ignores it when the power is its own.
Four Fences Around Sri Akal Takht Sahib
I would put four fences around Sri Akal Takht Sahib. Each is weak alone, and together they hold.
The electoral fence. The Centre should fill the post of Chief Commissioner and notify SGPC general elections without further delay. In the longer run, the 1925 Act should be amended, on the recommendation of a freshly elected general house, so that polls fall due automatically when the term expires. There is a precedent in the very constitutional scheme the judge invoked. The 73rd and 74th Amendments require that elections to panchayats and municipalities be completed before the expiry of their terms. The Panth’s own parliament deserves no less than a village panchayat.
The appointive fence. The Panth needs a written code of appointment, tenure and removal for the Jathedars of the Takhts. It should be a maryada, not a statute. Selection should rest with a broad Panthic college: the SGPC general house rather than its fifteen-member executive, the other Takht boards, the Delhi and Haryana committees, Sikh scholars, and representatives of the diaspora sangats, who have never had a voice in choosing the man who speaks for them. The code should fix a tenure and allow removal only by the same college, by special majority, after a hearing. It should be adopted at Sri Akal Takht Sahib itself, so that its authority flows from the Panth and not from any Act.
The partisan fence. No office-bearer of the SGPC and no member of its executive should hold office in any political party. Parties may field candidates, since this is an elected body, but the firewall must stand at the office. One Akali faction resolved in 2020 that its candidates for the SGPC would hold no political position. The principle should bind everyone, not only those out of power.
The statutory fence. No legislature, whether Parliament or the Assemblies of Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra or Bihar, should amend gurdwara law or define Sikh religious terms without the recommendation of an elected Panthic body. The 1959 convention should be made explicit. The SGPC will not like the corollary, which is that it can invoke this moral veto only after facing its own electorate. A house elected in 2011 cannot claim to speak for the Panth of 2026.
Neither Secession Nor Khalistan
The judge’s message ended with Khalistan, and so should this piece. None of this is about secession or Khalistan. Khalistan is a claim on territory; the Panth’s claim is on conscience, the same claim Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur made for others in 1675. It is the claim that Sikhs, wherever they live and whatever passport they carry, are entitled to institutions they themselves elect and that are universally recognised as taking the Panth’s decisions. No government, no party and no leader should be able to overrule those decisions, or quietly buy them.
Sikh identity needs no certificate from any outside body. By the same token, the Panth’s institutions need no minder in Delhi, Chandigarh, Mumbai or any party office.
The Jew in Zurich and the Ismaili in Toronto live by this arrangement. The Sikh in Sangrur has lived as sovereign within and citizen outside since 1606, three hundred and nineteen years before any statute put the arrangement on paper.
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About the author: KBS Sidhu, IAS (retd.), superannuated in July 2021 as Special Chief Secretary, Government of Punjab. He is the Founder-Editor of The KBS Chronicle and Convener of the Shiromani Punjab Forum.
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