The Punjab the BJP Cannot Crack: Shared Heritage, Sikh Politics, and the Long Shadow of 1984

A state the British could never quite categorise

Punjabi journalist Shiv Inder Singh opens his conversation with Nous host Bushra Khanum Fahad with an origin story about identity itself. When the British held their first census of Punjab in 1881, the officer in charge, Denzil Ibbetson, found he could record people's caste without difficulty but could not pin down their religion. People who looked Hindu registered as Sikh; Sikhs registered as Hindu; both groups routinely bowed at Muslim shrines, and many Muslims quietly kept Hindu customs alongside their own. Census counts of Hindus and Sikhs in the same district would shift within months, because the underlying religious boundaries the British were trying to enumerate simply were not fixed in the way colonial administration assumed.

Singh traces this fluidity to two intellectual traditions that shaped Punjab more than any other: Gurbani, the teachings of the Sikh Gurus, and Sufism. Guru Nanak's declaration that there is "no Hindu, no Muslim," and the poet-saint Bulleh Shah's line "Bulla ki jaana main kaun" (Bulla, I know not who I am), reflect, in Singh's account, a Punjab that folded its religious identity into a broader Punjabiyat — a shared culture built on coexistence, brotherhood, and a habit of secularism that long predates the Indian Constitution's use of the word. He points to a pattern that has held across a century of Punjabi politics: whether it was the Ghadar movement, Bhagat Singh's revolutionary circle, the protests against the revocation of Article 370, the anti-CAA demonstrations, or the enormous farmers' movement that saw more than 700 people die, Punjab has repeatedly mobilised on a cross-community basis that other states have struggled to replicate.

The BJP's strategy for a state it has never won

That history is precisely what makes Punjab a problem for the BJP, which has captured power across nearly all of north India but has never won it outright in Punjab, tasting office only through its earlier alliance with the Akali Dal. Singh describes a set of deliberate tactics now being deployed to change that. One is amplifying figures who look like authentic Sikh voices but who, in practice, serve the BJP's agenda — pointing to Amritpal Singh, who arrived from Dubai during the farmers' protest period, easily obtained the visa that a critical journalist covering the same protests had been denied, and went on to contest and win an election, advised by a man who had himself joined the BJP years earlier. A second tactic works on caste: Punjab has India's highest proportion of Dalits, at over 32 percent of the population, and the BJP has been trying to pull this bloc toward itself, so far without much success. A third works by amplifying fringe Khalistani voices — Singh names Gurpatwant Singh Pannun specifically, arguing that a figure largely ignored even by Khalistani sympathisers six years ago was made prominent by the very government bans and media coverage meant to suppress him, because his inflammatory statements consistently served the BJP's narrative during the farmers' protests, branding peaceful protesters as secessionists.

Singh is careful to note that Punjab is not simply a fortress of secular consciousness immune to these efforts. A generation born after the trauma of the 1980s and 90s — when Punjab endured both state violence and militant violence — has been cut off from the Gurbani and Sufi heritage he describes, and finds its heroes instead in figures like the slain rapper Sidhu Moose Wala or the radical preacher Bhindranwale, without the deeper context that once anchored Punjabi identity. That vacuum, Singh warns, is dangerous precisely because a vacuum does not stay empty: if progressive politics fails to fill it, right-wing politics — whether from the BJP or from other reactionary currents — eventually will.

Caste, without the same electoral machinery

Singh's account of Dalit politics in Punjab complicates any simple narrative of caste solidarity. Punjab's Dalit population, split across 39 sub-castes, carries significant internal friction — Singh describes long-standing divisions even within single caste categories, such as refusals to intermarry between sub-groups distinguished only by regional origin and skin tone. Kanshi Ram, the founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party, was himself Punjabi but had to build his political project in Uttar Pradesh because it never took hold in his home state. Sikhism's core philosophy formally rejects caste, which blunts, without eliminating, its political salience; caste discrimination persists in practices such as wage boycotts during harvest, but it does not translate into the same bloc voting that shapes politics elsewhere in India. When the Congress elevated Charanjit Singh Channi, a Dalit, as chief minister and then as its lead face in the state, Singh argues the subsequent defeat had little to do with his caste and everything to do with public anger at both major established parties during a period when voters were actively searching for an alternative — which is what delivered the state to the Aam Aadmi Party instead.

The record on 1984

Singh's most pointed material concerns the 1984 anti-Sikh violence that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination, and what he presents as documented RSS and BJP involvement in the events leading up to and following it. He traces a lineage from the 1960s Jana Sangh-backed Maha Punjab movement, which sought to split Punjabi Hindus from the Sikh-led demand for a Punjabi-speaking state, through RSS-affiliated groups demanding that tobacco shops be permitted near Amritsar's Darbar Sahib, and a BJP state committee member's destruction of a model of the shrine, for which Khalistani militants later killed him. He cites L.K. Advani's own memoir, My Country My Life, in which Advani describes pressuring Indira Gandhi's government toward the military assault on Darbar Sahib known as Operation Blue Star, and credits the resulting pressure campaign as an achievement of his politics. Singh also points to a laudatory 1984 essay by Nanaji Deshmukh — later awarded the Bharat Ratna — justifying the military action, and to Arun Shourie's essay in a compilation called The Punjab Story defending it as well. Citing his own investigative reporting for The Caravan, Singh states that Delhi police records include 14 FIRs naming 49 individuals affiliated with the RSS and BJP in connection with the killings that followed, with the highest concentration of cases at south Delhi's Srinivas Puri police station. He notes that Ramkumar Jain, named among those individuals, had served as Atal Bihari Vajpayee's election agent in the 1980 general election.

He extends the pattern into more recent decades: the 1991 killing of ten Sikh pilgrims in Pilibhit under a BJP state government, later found to have been ordinary travellers wrongly labelled terrorists; sustained government attempts to seize land from Sikh farmers in Kutch, Gujarat, even after courts ruled in the farmers' favour; and a set of derogatory remarks by senior BJP figures, including Narendra Modi's past reference to Manmohan Singh using a term implying emasculation, and a separate anecdote in which Modi described Singh's warmth toward him using language widely understood as a slur against Sikhs. Singh also cites reporting that the government continues to use the phrase "Sikh terrorism" in official documents, a term he contrasts with the government's active discomfort over parallel phrases like "Hindu terrorism."

Embrace, or exclusion

Asked why Sikhs, despite this history, retain a form of political agency that Muslims — a far larger community — largely lack, Singh offers a structural explanation rather than a numerical one. Congress-era communalism against Sikhs, in his account, was driven by convenience and could later be walked back or apologised for; no comparable apology has ever been extended to Muslims, because the BJP's ideological architecture requires Muslims to remain permanently external to the nation, while Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists are claimed as internally Hindu even when their own communities reject the label. The practical result, Singh argues, is two different strategies of control: Sikhs are managed through periodic conciliation — a turban worn by Amit Shah for a Punjab election, a wreath laid, an embrace extended — while Muslims are targeted through open, public violence, including lynching, which is never deployed against Sikhs in the same manner. "We have to embrace them and then finish them off," he says of the Sikh strategy, contrasting it with the visible, streetside character of anti-Muslim violence.

Singh devotes considerable attention to countering a parallel effort, which he attributes to the current state government, to recast the historical relationship between the Sikh Gurus and the Mughal empire purely as one of religious conflict between Sikhs and Muslims. He offers an extended catalogue of documented friendships across that divide: Guru Nanak's lifelong companion Bhai Mardana, a Muslim who accompanied him on his travels; the Sufi saint Mian Mir, who laid the foundation stone of Darbar Sahib; the Muslim landlord who gifted Guru Nanak the land at what is now Nankana Sahib, still registered in the Guru's name; Emperor Akbar's documented visits and gift of land at Amritsar; Ghani Khan and Nabi Khan, who disguised Guru Gobind Singh as a Muslim holy man to smuggle him past Mughal soldiers; and verses by the Sufi poet Baba Farid included within the Guru Granth Sahib itself, given equal status to the Gurus' own writings. Even the harshest chapter of that history, he notes, contains its own counter-example: after Aurangzeb's forces killed Guru Gobind Singh's young sons, the Nawab of Malerkotla, a Muslim ruler, publicly objected that the act violated Islam — a stance Sikhs still honour by treating Malerkotla with particular respect today.

The wound that outlasts the politics

For Singh, all of this history circles back to Partition, which he calls the greatest tragedy Punjab has ever endured — greater, in his reckoning, than even the violence of the 1980s. He cites newer research putting the death toll across both religions at roughly 1.5 million Punjabis, with a further ten million displaced on both sides of the new border and rapes numbering in the lakhs. He describes this as a wound that has not healed across four generations, even in families like his own that were not directly uprooted, because it fractured what had been, in his account, a coherent Punjabi people and culture, cutting off access to Lahore and reducing what could have been one of India's largest states, alongside Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, to a fraction of its former population and reach.

That grief coexists, in Singh's telling, with an enduring cross-border intimacy that Partition never fully extinguished. He describes shopkeepers in Pakistani Punjab refusing payment once they learned he was from "Charda Punjab" — the rising-sun, eastern Punjab, as distinct from "Launda Punjab," the setting-sun west — and villages in Indian Punjab where residents maintain both a mosque and a gurdwara built side by side, funded from the same family remittances, because, as one elderly caretaker told him, "they are houses of the same God." He notes that Sikh congregations turned out for Shaheen Bagh's anti-CAA sit-in and for flood relief in Muslim villages, just as Muslim residents have shown up for Sikh causes, evidence, in his framing, of a solidarity that political actors on both sides of the border have never fully managed to sever, even through war, propaganda, and the mutual banning of independent journalists and media outlets that criticise their own governments.

An industry that lost its own memory

Singh closes on a different kind of decline: the transformation of Punjabi music, once rooted in the same Sufi and Gurbani inheritance, into an industry that glorifies gangster culture and, in his reading, models toxic masculinity as an economic strategy. He traces the shift to the dominance of the Malwa region's feudal culture after Punjab's 1966 reorganisation, the rise of a music market built around real-estate money and hired muscle, and lyrics that celebrate figures like Sucha Soorma — a folk hero who killed his own sister-in-law — while sidelining Ranjha and Mirza, older folk symbols of romantic love and rebellion. He connects this cultural drift to sustained economic migration, a 200-year-old pattern he says is now sustained less by necessity than by a self-reinforcing network of family ties abroad, and to a drug trade he insists "cannot run without a political nexus," naming political patronage as a precondition for the trade's scale rather than a side effect of it.