The Punjab Bollywood Doesn’t Show: Shiv Inder Singh on Guru Nanak, Partition and a Shared Punjabiyat

Punjab is the one large northern state the BJP has never fully won, and with elections due by February 2027, the party’s attempt to break through there has become harder to ignore. In conversation with senior journalist Bushra Khanum, the independent Punjab-based journalist Shiv Inder Singh — who has covered the state and its politics for more than two decades — lays out why he thinks that campaign depends on dismantling something older and more resilient than any party: a shared Punjabi identity that has, for centuries, refused to sort itself neatly along religious lines.

A Land the Census Could Not Sort

Singh starts with an anecdote about colonial administration rather than politics. When the British conducted Punjab’s 1881 census, the officer Denzil Ibbetson complained that he could record people’s caste but not reliably their religion — because the same household might record itself as Hindu in one survey and Sikh in the next, and because Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims alike bowed at the same Sufi shrines. “I feel that Guru Nanak’s words, ‘no Hindu, no Muslim,’” Singh said, “the Punjabi of that time was absolutely upholding that.” He credits two intellectual traditions — Gurbani and Sufism — with giving Punjab its enduring base: shared existence, brotherhood and a secularism that predates the word.

That shared base, in his account, is precisely what the British moved to dismantle once they occupied Punjab in 1849. Making a religion column compulsory on the census, and linking it to army recruitment and government jobs, hardened identities that had previously been fluid. “The British solidified religious identities to divide Punjabis,” he said — a process he sees post-1947 Indian governments as having continued by other means, and one the BJP is now pursuing with new tools.

The Machinery of Present-Day Division

Singh identifies several specific tactics he believes the BJP is using to break Punjab’s political solidarity ahead of the 2027 vote. One is elevating figures who present as Sikh but effectively carry the BJP’s agenda — he cites Amritpal Singh, who arrived from Dubai during the farmers’ protest, obtained a visa with unusual ease, and went on to win an election, allegedly on the advice of a BJP-aligned adviser, while an American journalist seeking to cover the same protest was denied a visa entirely. A second tactic, he says, targets Punjab’s Dalit population — at roughly 32 to 33 percent, the highest Dalit share of any Indian state — for outreach the BJP has so far failed to convert into real support.

He is careful, though, not to overstate the BJP’s traction. A 2019 report by The Quint found Punjab to be one of only two states, alongside Tamil Nadu, where Narendra Modi registered minimal personal popularity — about 5 percent in Punjab’s case, against roughly 40 percent of the state’s population being Hindu. Even allowing that the BJP’s vote share has since grown as it contests more seats, Singh does not read the numbers as evidence of a state turning saffron. His greater worry is structural: a political vacuum left by a directionless Congress and a weakened Akali Dal, which could be filled either by progressive renewal or, just as easily, by right-wing forces — whether the BJP itself or a more radical current such as Amritpal’s.

A History of Kinship the State Would Rather Not Teach

The heart of Singh’s argument is a long, carefully documented history of Sikh-Muslim closeness that he says a new, BJP-influenced “heroism” syllabus is working to erase. Guru Nanak’s lifelong companion on his travels was Bhai Mardana, a Muslim. The foundation stone of the Golden Temple’s Darbar Sahib was laid by the Muslim Sufi saint Sai Mian Mir. When Mughal soldiers surrounded Guru Gobind Singh at Machhiwara, two Muslim associates, Ghani Khan and Nabi Khan, disguised him as a Muslim holy man and carried him past the army on their shoulders; another ally, Nihang Khan, hid a wounded Sikh fighter in his own daughter’s room rather than surrender him. The Nawab of Malerkotla publicly objected, on explicitly Islamic grounds, when Mughal authorities moved to execute Guru Gobind Singh’s young sons — a stand Sikhs still honour today. Even Guru Gobind Singh’s own furious letter to Aurangzeb, the Zafarnama, accuses the emperor of violating Islam’s own teachings, not of belonging to a rival faith.

“History consists of facts,” Singh said, rejecting the idea of a syllabus built around heroism rather than evidence — as though, he added dryly, history had ever consisted only of heroes. He points also to verses by the Muslim poets Farid and Kabir included directly in Sikh scripture, and to Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s secular rule, in which a Muslim served as foreign minister and one of his wives was Muslim. During Partition itself, Singh cites Sikhs who died protecting Muslim neighbours — among them Gahal Singh Chhajjalwaddi, burned alive by Sikh extremists for doing so — alongside Muslims who sheltered Sikhs and Hindus in Pakistan at equal risk.

Why the State Treats Sikhs and Muslims Differently

Asked why Hindutva politics appears to treat Sikhs and Muslims so differently — a prime minister who will don a turban for Punjab’s voters but would never wear a skullcap — Singh offers a blunt distinction: Sikhs, in his phrase, are dealt with by being hugged “to destroy them,” while the lynching of Muslims is “visible in every one of their idioms.” Both communities, in his telling, have served at different times as the convenient minority a communal politics needs; Sikhs filled that role through the 1980s, Muslims fill it now. But where Congress-era communalism was, in his words, a matter of expedience the party could later apologise for, he argues the BJP and RSS pursue exclusion as doctrine rather than convenience — one that requires permanently absorbing Sikhs as insiders while keeping Muslims cast as outsiders.

Singh backs the claim with a detailed account of 1984 that he has also published in The Caravan. He traces RSS-affiliated agitation in Amritsar demanding tobacco shops be allowed near the Golden Temple, and organised pressure on Indira Gandhi — including a protest led by L.K. Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee shortly before Operation Blue Star — to send the army into Darbar Sahib. Advani, Singh notes, later described this pressure as an achievement in his own memoir, My Country My Life. After the massacre that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination, Singh says, Delhi police filed 14 FIRs naming 49 individuals linked to the BJP and RSS, concentrated in neighbourhoods including Ashram, Bhagwan Nagar and Sunlight Colony; one name, Ramkumar Jain, had served as Vajpayee’s election agent the year before. He adds a list of subsequent episodes — ten Sikh pilgrims killed in Pilibhit in 1991 under a BJP state government, land disputes with Sikh farmers in Gujarat, and Narendra Modi’s own description, by his own account, of Manmohan Singh as a “shikhandi” — a slur invoking eunuch status. A 2019 Caravan report by journalist Nikita Saxena, Singh notes, found the Modi government still used the term “Sikh terrorism” in official documents, even as it avoided equivalent phrases for Hindu-linked violence.

A Banned Film and a Manufactured Outrage

Much of the conversation turns to Punjab 1984 and the recent controversy around a film about human rights lawyer Jaswant Singh Khalra, held at the censor board for roughly four years, cut 127 times, briefly released on a streaming platform and pulled again within two days. Singh, who watched it before its removal, is unconvinced the cuts served any real purpose. “There was nothing in it that deserved those cuts,” he said, noting the film’s narrative placed blame on individual police officers rather than questioning the state itself. He argues the suppression backfired by design or accident: banning the film sent it circulating on WhatsApp and into gurdwara screenings, keeping it in public conversation far longer than an uneventful release would have, while letting competing political factions — the BJP’s own leaders split between defending and inflaming the controversy, the Akali Dal scrambling to claim relevance — extract political value from the resulting anger on both the Sikh and Hindu sides.

On Khalra himself, Singh draws a careful distinction. He credits Khalra’s documented work exposing roughly six to twelve thousand extrajudicial police killings and disappearances in Punjab — a figure he says is more accurate than the 25,000 sometimes cited — as a genuine and dangerous act of human rights documentation that cost Khalra his own life. But he declines to call Khalra simply a human rights activist without qualification, pointing to Khalra’s own writing from the early 1990s describing Indira Gandhi’s assassins as greater martyrs than the independence-era revolutionary Bhagat Singh. “The first condition of human rights,” Singh said, “is that you cannot justify individual murders.”

Partition as the Deeper Wound

Pressed to rank the violence Punjab has endured, Singh sets 1984 and the Khalistan years aside in favour of a larger, older catastrophe: Partition itself, which by his account killed roughly fifteen lakh Punjabis of every faith and displaced a crore more on both sides of the new border, alongside mass sexual violence whose scale he says can never be precisely counted. “Those who lived together until yesterday,” he said, “became monsters overnight” — neighbours shouting their own faith’s sacred phrases while committing atrocities against people they had called family. He notes that Punjab’s Muslim-majority Unionist Party resisted the push for Pakistan until it was too late to matter, and that Punjabi Muslims themselves never organised strongly for Partition — making the scale of what followed, in his view, a tragedy inflicted on Punjabis of every religion rather than one anyone there had actually sought.

That severed kinship, Singh argues, persists in ways that outlast official hostility. He describes Punjabi shopkeepers in Lahore refusing payment from visitors identifying themselves as Punjabi, a phone-in radio obsession that connected him as a schoolboy to a presenter in Lahore he eventually met decades later, and villages in Indian Punjab where families maintain both a Sikh gurdwara and an old pre-Partition mosque within the same compound, dividing remittance money between the two. During the recent military tension following the Pahalgam attack, he says, Punjab was the one state to hold large, organised peace protests against war with Pakistan — demonstrations that found an echo in sister protests in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad. “We don’t even say Indian Punjab or Pakistani Punjab,” he said. “We say Charda Punjab and Launda Punjab” — the Punjab where the sun rises, and the Punjab where it sets.

From Sufi Verse to Gangster Anthem

Singh closes on a cultural argument that runs parallel to his political one: that Punjabi music’s shift from a Sufi and literary tradition toward glorifying gangster culture is not incidental but tracks a real economic and political transformation. The Green Revolution, he argues, split Punjab’s farmers into a wealthy landowning class — whose cultural voice became singers like Gurdas Maan — and poorer small farmers, whose grievances were voiced by the Dalit singer Amar Singh Chamkila before his assassination. As real estate money and gang patronage entered Punjab’s politics from the 2000s onward, he says, the figure of the gangster replaced the romantic hero in popular song, with artists such as the slain singer Sidhu Moose Wala explicitly invoking a lineage of violent, feudal masculinity over the folk tradition’s older symbols of love, Heer-Ranjha and Mirza. “When you make a gangster the hero,” he said, “why wouldn’t a young boy become one?” He traces the same economic desperation, intersecting with cross-border and political patronage networks, to the state’s drug crisis and to the decades-long pattern of Punjabi emigration, now so normalised it is itself celebrated in song.

He ends, fittingly, in verse rather than argument — quoting Amrita Pritam on how much is said and how much still remains unsaid, and the Sufi poet Shah Hussain’s plea that the heart is never fully satisfied. He notes, almost as an aside, that Bulleh Shah, the saint Punjab claims as entirely its own regardless of religion, was born Syed Abdullah Shah — a Muslim whose own era’s clerics tried to deny him burial for mocking their fanaticism, and whose shrine Kasur has since grown to enclose. It is, in Singh’s telling, the clearest possible rebuttal to any attempt to sort Punjab’s saints, singers or citizens into religious camps: the state’s most revered voice belongs, by design, to everyone and no one at once.