The immediate controversy is over GTC Punjabi, run by former PTC head Rabindra Narayan, lifting the SGPC’s official YouTube live feed of Gurbani from Sri Darbar Sahib, Amritsar and putting it out on satellite TV and other platforms. The SGPC President has called this “illegal” and served a legal notice against it, triggering sharp internal criticism of the SGPC’s own stance and renewing questions from figures like Giani Harpreet Singh over who really “owns” Gurbani and how far digital sharing can, or should, be controlled.
This is not, however, going to be one of those Maryada controversies where courts and governments tread with characteristic caution, wary of appearing to interfere in matters of faith. This is different in kind. It sits at the complicated intersection of core Sikh values, copyright and intellectual property law, and the commercial policies of two global platforms, YouTube and Meta, both of which now find themselves unwitting stakeholders in a dispute they almost certainly did not anticipate and will be reluctant to resolve by simply applying their takedown rules mechanically, given the global audience and the sensitivities involved.
What Has GTC Done, and Why the SGPC Has Cried Foul
Rabindra Narayan, now MD of GTC Network and earlier MD/president of PTC, has started live-telecasting Gurbani from Darbar Sahib on GTC Punjabi. He is not deploying a separate camera crew inside the Harmandir Sahib complex; he is, quite simply, picking up the SGPC’s own live YouTube stream, from the “SGPC Sri Amritsar” channel, and relaying it via satellite and digital platforms from around 3:15 am daily.
He has framed this, publicly and somewhat disarmingly, as sewa: thanking the SGPC for “opening this broadcast for all channels” and thereby, in his telling, entrusting Guru Sahib’s Baani to the Sangat at large. He has gone so far as to urge the SGPC “with folded hands” not to disrupt the relay, on the ground that it exists to reach devotees worldwide.
SGPC president Harjinder Singh Dhami sees it altogether differently. His position, stated at a press conference and repeated since, is that all Gurbani broadcasting rights, visual and audio, from Darbar Sahib rest with the SGPC alone, and that no entity may lift or re-relay its feed, whether from satellite or from YouTube, without express permission. A legal notice has been served on GTC for what Dhami calls “unauthorised telecast,” with the promise of further legal action to follow. This is entirely consistent with the position the SGPC took when it first launched its own YouTube channel after the PTC contract lapsed in 2023: that it, and it alone, controls relay and distribution, and that “duplication or illegal dissemination” by any web, satellite, or social media entity would invite prosecution.
The Question Giani Harpreet Singh, and Many Others, Are Now Asking
It is here that the dispute acquires its real edge, and it is worth pausing on the question itself, because it is not a small one: does Gurbani, once placed on an open global platform like YouTube, freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection, remain the SGPC’s proprietary content in any meaningful legal sense? Or does it, by its very nature, and by the SGPC’s own act of publishing it without a paywall, belong to the Sangat, and indeed to all humanity, in a manner that ordinary copyright law was never designed to constrain?
Giani Harpreet Singh, former acting Jathedar of Akal Takht, has for some time been pressing the SGPC on precisely this point, having earlier urged it to launch its own channel rather than remain dependent on PTC’s monopoly. His present line of questioning, and that of SGPC members such as Jaswant Singh Purian, cuts deeper still: it revives uncomfortable memories of how PTC held exclusive telecast rights for sixteen unbroken years, of the commercial arrangements that underpinned that monopoly, and of the SGPC’s own internal factional politics, including the removal of Giani Harpreet Singh himself as acting Jathedar. Seen against that history, the SGPC’s decision to now go after GTC for merely rebroadcasting an open YouTube feed strikes many within the Panth as an institution less troubled by Maryada than by the loss of control it once enjoyed, and the revenue that control could command.
This, inevitably, has revived an older political charge as well. Various sections and factions within the Shiromani Akali Dal, and critics beyond it, have for years accused the Badal family of treating the PTC monopoly over Gurbani telecast as a private commercial asset, of profiting, in effect, from what devotees hold to belong not to any family, channel, or committee, but to the whole of mankind. Rabindra Narayan, once the very face of that PTC arrangement, has now recast himself, whether from conviction or convenience, as the champion of free and unrestricted distribution. That reversal alone tells its own story, and it is one this practising Sikh suspects will not go unnoticed by the Sangat.
Copyright, IPR, and the Two Platforms That Never Asked to Be Stakeholders
Strip away the panthic sentiment for a moment, and what remains is a fairly conventional, if unusually delicate, intellectual property question. Does a live audio-visual feed of Gurbani kirtan, recorded and streamed by the SGPC on its own equipment and its own YouTube channel, attract copyright protection in the ordinary sense, vesting first ownership in the SGPC as the maker of the broadcast? Under Indian copyright law, a “broadcast” enjoys its own distinct protection, separate from the underlying literary or musical content, and a broadcasting organisation ordinarily does hold rights against unauthorised rebroadcast, retransmission, and re-communication to the public, quite apart from any question of who owns the Gurbani itself, which nobody claims to own.
That, at least, is the legal spine of the SGPC’s case, and it is not a frivolous one. But it collides, awkwardly, with two further considerations that this analyst expects will occupy the courts at some length. First, whether content of this character, devotional, continuously live, offered by the SGPC itself without restriction on a public platform, can realistically be treated as commercially exploitable IP in the way a television production house treats its programming; and second, whether GTC’s conduct, non-commercial in its stated intent, attributed and un-monetised on its own account, falls within any recognised exception, statutory or equitable, even if none currently exists in so many words.
Then there is the matter of YouTube and Meta, both of which now find themselves, however unwillingly, stakeholders in this dispute. Both platforms operate content-matching and copyright-strike systems capable, in principle, of taking down GTC’s rebroadcast at the SGPC’s request within hours. Yet this commentator would be surprised if either platform moves with its customary mechanical efficiency here. These are global companies acutely conscious that Gurbani reaches a diaspora audience spread across continents, an audience that would not take kindly to seeing what it regards as sacred content becoming the subject of a corporate takedown notice. Platforms that have, in other contexts, been swift to remove disputed material will, this observer suspects, tread far more carefully where the optics involve a gurdwara, a global faith community, and a dispute that could easily be misread, however unfairly, as one religious body silencing devotional access for millions.
Where This Is Headed: Litigation, and the Primacy of the Interim Order
Unlike the Maryada disputes of years past, where courts have generally declined to step into matters touching religious practice, this is squarely litigable terrain: broadcasting rights, copyright infringement, and platform liability are all conventional heads of civil law, and Indian courts have adjudicated them before, in far less sensitive contexts. This observer expects the matter to end up in the Punjab and Haryana High Court, if it has not already begun moving in that direction, with the SGPC seeking an injunction and GTC resisting on grounds of public interest, prior intimation, and the essentially non-commercial character of its relay.
What will matter most, however, is unlikely to be the final judgment, which could be years away given the pace of civil litigation in India. It will be the interim orders: whether an ad-interim injunction restrains GTC’s telecast pending trial, whether the SGPC is required to furnish an undertaking, whether the court asks YouTube and Meta to weigh in as intervenors, and how each side’s conduct during the interregnum shapes the eventual outcome. Interim relief, in matters of this kind, very often decides the practical result long before the substantive question of law is settled, and this former civil servant would not be surprised if that turns out to be the case here as well.
How it eventually pans out, whether the SGPC succeeds in re-establishing exclusive control, whether GTC’s sewa framing prevails in the court of public opinion if not in the court of law, or whether some negotiated licensing arrangement emerges to pre-empt a protracted battle, only time will tell.