When Tikka Ripudaman Singh’s term on the Imperial Legislative Council ran out in 1909, the Anand Marriage Bill did not lapse. Sardar Sundar Singh Majithia picked it up and carried it home. The law giving the Anand Karaj its civil standing has moved like a relay, each leg run decades apart by people who did not always agree on the pace or the finishing line. The recent exchanges over who contributed what to the 2012 amendment are, read generously, a measure of how much the subject still matters to those who gave years to it. The record has room for all of them.
The First Leg: A Tikka’s Bill, a Majithia’s Act (1908–1909)
The Anand Marriage Bill was drafted by a committee of the Chief Khalsa Diwan (CKD, the Amritsar body at the centre of the Singh Sabha reform) and moved in the Imperial Legislative Council on 30 October 1908 by Tikka Ripudaman Singh, then heir-apparent of Nabha. Sardar Sundar Singh Majithia saw it through the select committee, and on 22 October 1909 it was placed on the statute book as Act No. 7 of 1909. It has been an Act from that day, and remains the law of the land.
Its purpose was modest and decisive: to remove doubts about the validity of marriages solemnised by the Anand ceremony. The Act says nothing about divorce, maintenance, custody or succession. For those matters Sikhs came, in 1955 and 1956, under the Hindu Marriage Act and its companion codes, which treat Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists as “Hindus” for the purposes of personal law. That anomaly is where the second leg began.
The Second Leg: Register Now, or Codify First? (2007–2012)
The immediate trigger was parliamentary. In 2007 the Department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice proposed inserting a registration clause into the 1909 Act. One persistent voice for that change was S. Tarlochan Singh, Chairman of the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) from 2003 to 2006 and a Rajya Sabha member from Haryana from 2004 to 2010, whose public biography lists the amendment among his contributions. His term ended in July 2010, but he was still in the room in 2012 when the Bill’s final shape was argued.
A second effort was under way in Amritsar. In September 2011 the CKD, the same institution that had drafted the 1908 Bill, asked Dr. Daljit Singh (former Professor of Law, former Principal of Khalsa College, Amritsar, and a former Vice-Chancellor) to prepare a comprehensive Sikh Marriage Act. By his account, he presented the draft at the CKD on 15 May 2012 before Singh Sahib Giani Gurbachan Singh, then Jathedar of Sri Akal Takht Sahib, CKD President S. Charanjit Singh Chadha, S. Satyajit Singh Majithia and S. Rajinder Mohan Singh Chhina, and asked that it be debated clause by clause rather than treated as final. His argument was, and remains, that registration alone left the substance of Sikh marital law under the Hindu Marriage Act.
The two efforts met at Kapurthala House, New Delhi, at a consultation convened at the instance of the then Chief Minister, Sardar Parkash Singh Badal. SGPC (Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee) President S. Avtar Singh Makkar, S. Tarlochan Singh, Dr. Daljit Singh, senior advocate H.S. Phoolka and several MPs weighed a dilemma: take the registration clause on offer, or hold out for a complete code.
The disagreement was theological as well as tactical. In May 2012 the Jathedar observed that the Sikh Rehat Maryada makes no mention of divorce, and the SGPC President said resort to divorce was not appropriate in Sikhism, while others, among them Prof. Gursharanjeet Singh of Guru Nanak Dev University, argued that a marriage law without divorce would be incomplete and would send couples straight back to the Hindu Marriage Act. Any comprehensive Sikh code must settle that question first.
Parliament chose the incremental path. Law Minister Salman Khurshid, in Dr. Manmohan Singh’s government, piloted the Anand Marriage (Amendment) Bill, 2012; the Rajya Sabha passed it unanimously on 21 May 2012 and the Lok Sabha by voice vote the next day. From opposite benches, S. Partap Singh Bajwa of the Congress and Bibi Harsimrat Kaur Badal of the Akali Dal both said more would be needed. The President assented on 7 June 2012.
The new Section 6 directs States to maintain a marriage register, “without prejudice” to the Hindu Marriage Act, and provides that non-registration does not affect a marriage’s validity. Those who accepted registration in 2012 got the community its register. The questions set aside that year, about divorce, custody and succession, are still open, and the draft code prepared in Amritsar is still available to help answer them.
The Third Leg: From Rite to Register (2025–2026)
Section 6 left the rule-making to the States, and for over a decade most did nothing. It took a petition under Article 32 by Amanjot Singh Chadha to change that. On 4 September 2025, a Bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta directed seventeen States and seven Union Territories to notify rules within four months. Meanwhile, Anand Karaj marriages must be registered without discrimination under existing frameworks, with the certificate recording the Anand rite on request. By January 2026, Bihar’s cabinet had approved its rules.
The Fourth Leg: Who Is a Sikh, and Who Decides?
Neither the Anand Marriage Act nor the Constitution defines a Sikh. Explanation I to Article 25 recognises the kirpan as part of the profession of the Sikh religion, while Explanation II still reads “Hindus” as including Sikhs for social-reform legislation, so the constitutional text pulls both ways. The Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1925 defines a Sikh by a declaration of faith in Sri Guru Granth Sahib and the Ten Gurus and of having no other religion. It counts a person who trims his hair as a Sikh, though a patit one, and the 2016 amendment, retrospective from 8 October 2003, removed such persons from the SGPC electoral rolls, a change still under challenge. The Delhi Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1971 writes unshorn hair into the definition itself, and a Full Bench of the Punjab and Haryana High Court in Gurleen Kaur v. State of Punjab (2009) held it essential for admissions to SGPC institutions.
Where one partner is not a Sikh, the questions multiply. The 1909 Act excludes marriages “between persons not professing the Sikh religion”, which read literally excludes only couples where neither is a Sikh, while the Rehat Maryada holds that the Anand Karaj is for Sikhs alone. The rite itself contains no declaration of faith. If the other partner is Hindu, Jain or Buddhist, the Hindu Marriage Act still validates the marriage. If the other partner is Christian, Muslim, Parsi or Jewish, it does not, and validity then rests on proof of genuine conversion or on registration under the Special Marriage Act. A groom who wears a turban over trimmed hair has no vote in SGPC elections, yet the law still treats him as professing the Sikh religion, and his marriage stands.
State registration rules could close much of this gap by requiring both parties to declare that they profess the Sikh religion, in terms that echo the declaration in the 1925 Act.
The Anchor Leg: Carve-Out or Common Code?
Three States now have a Uniform Civil Code (UCC). Uttarakhand’s Code came into force on 27 January 2025, Gujarat passed its Code in March 2026 and Assam in May 2026. The Uttarakhand and Assam Codes expressly name Anand Karaj among recognised ceremonies, and all three apply uniform rules on divorce, maintenance and succession. The Codes exempt Scheduled Tribes, and make no exemption for Sikhs.
In July 2023 the SGPC executive opposed a UCC and set up a sub-committee of scholars. What the Panth wants in its place is, however, the question now before its institutions. One option is a carve-out through a comprehensive Sikh Marriage Act, for which Dr. Daljit Singh’s 2012 draft is a ready starting text. The other is to accept a common code on divorce and succession with the Anand rite expressly protected, a path that continues the incremental method of 2012. Both are legitimate choices.
The anchor leg is best run as a team: Sri Akal Takht Sahib, the SGPC, the CKD, the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee, Sikh jurists and scholars, and those who ran the second leg, each with a different memory of it. Divergent views, including differing accounts of 2012, belong at that table, and it needs to meet before the Law Commission or Parliament settles the question on the Panth’s behalf.