Introduction
For close to two hundred years, the Panth has argued about who should govern its institutions, and the argument has usually taken a familiar shape. We contest the number of seats on a committee, the share of nominees, the honesty of a chairman, the fairness of an election, the timing of a vote, or the conduct of an office-holder. These questions matter. But beneath them sits a prior question that is rarely named directly.
Can the Panth act as one body under the Guru, or has it been made to exist only as the Sikhs of one state and the Sikhs of another?
This article is about that prior question. It is the institutional form of the argument set down in Under the Guru Alone: Why Sikhi Must Remain Whole: that the Sikh stands under Shabad Guru Granth Sahib Ji and under no other authority, and that Sikh institutions must remain answerable to the Shabad and the sangat, not to state, party, family, faction, or ideology. The method is simple: Shabad first, every outside frame second.
The present Hazur Sahib dispute makes the question urgent. But the issue is older than the current Bill. The Bill is one expression of a deeper condition: Sikh institutions have been repeatedly freed into legal forms that can administer them, but cannot see the Panth whole.
The constitutional order can recognise the Sikhs of Panjab, Haryana, Delhi, Maharashtra, and other states. It can map them onto legislatures, electoral rolls, statutory committees, and management boards. What it cannot see, because it has no operative category for it, is the Guru’s Panth as one body under Shabad Guru Granth Sahib Ji. Once Sikh self-government is passed through state machinery, the Panth is cut into state-shaped pieces. What looks like self-government can become division by law.
Shabad and the Wholeness of the Panth
The ground must be laid before the history is read.
On Ang 943, in Ramkali Siddh Gosht, Mahala 1, Guru Nanak Sahib says:
ਸਬਦੁ ਗੁਰੂ ਸੁਰਤਿ ਧੁਨਿ ਚੇਲਾ ॥
Romanised guide: sabad guroo surat dhun chelaa
Learning-aid sense: The Shabad is Guru, and the consciousness attuned to it is the disciple.
This settles where Sikh authority begins. It also settles where Sikh unity begins.
The Panth is not one because it shares a territory, a language, a committee, a party, or a vote. It is one because it stands together under the Shabad. Its wholeness is constituted under the Guru and nowhere else. No state flag contains it, no register contains it, and no legislature convenes it.
This is not a sentimental claim. It is the most practical fact in the whole discussion. A people whose unity rests on the Shabad cannot have that unity granted, divided, or withdrawn by any power that does not hold the Shabad.
The long story of the Sikh institution is the story of what happened when the Panth’s wholeness came to be treated as something a state could organise.
Takht, Guru-Panth, and the Line Between Trusteeship and Sovereignty
A Takht is not simply a shrine, a heritage property, or a committee-run religious estate. It is a seat of Sikh authority. Sri Akal Takht Sahib is the clearest case of a Takht raised by the Guru as an explicit seat of Sikh temporal responsibility. Guru Hargobind Sahib raised it after the martyrdom of Guru Arjan Sahib, facing Sri Harmandir Sahib. Sikh historical memory records that the platform was raised from within the Guru’s order, associated with Baba Buddha Ji and Bhai Gurdas Ji, and not as an imperial grant. The exact dating and some early naming details should be stated with care; the meaning remembered by the Panth is plain. The Takht was constituted from within the Guru’s order, not by the state.
The other Takhts carry their authority through the Gurus’ lives and through Panthic recognition over time. Keshgarh Sahib, Patna Sahib, and Hazur Sahib are places sanctified by the Gurus’ own presence and acts: the birthplace of the Khalsa, the birthplace of Guru Gobind Singh Sahib, and the place of his final earthly days and of the Guruship of Shabad Guru Granth Sahib Ji for the Panth. Damdama Sahib’s formal recognition as the fifth Takht came through modern Panthic and later official processes.
This does not diminish any Takht. Every Takht is held by the Panth in reverence. The point is institutional: where the Gurus constituted, they constituted under the Guru’s authority; where modern bodies declared and the state recognised, the act passed through committee and legal machinery. That drift, from Guru and Panth to committee and gazette, is central to the present problem.
The key distinction is between trusteeship and sovereignty.
Trusteeship concerns property, accounts, buildings, staff, facilities, budgets, and administration. It is necessary work. It must be honest, disciplined, transparent, and competent.
Sovereignty concerns doctrine, discipline, maryada, Panthic decision-making, Takht authority, and the limits of office. It cannot be reduced to property management.
The central problem in modern Sikh governance is that trusteeship bodies have come to sit too close to sovereignty. When the body that controls buildings, budgets, and payroll also controls the offices that speak from the Takht, capture is not an accident. It is designed into the arrangement.
This is what it looks like when trusteeship swallows sovereignty.
The Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1925: Liberation and Enclosure
It is necessary to be just to the Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1925, because the injustice of forgetting its achievement is as real as the harm of mistaking its nature.
The Act was a genuine and hard-won victory. It wrested historic gurdwaras from corrupt hereditary mahants and colonial management, at the price of real Sikh suffering, and vested them in a body elected by Sikhs. No honest account should deny this.
But the same document that freed the gurdwaras also enclosed them.
In the act of liberation, Sikh institutions were brought into being, defined, and bounded by state law. Their existence, membership, election machinery, and governing structure became creatures of a statute. Liberation and administration arrived in the same instrument.
That is the hinge on which the later history turns. Once the Sikh institution exists by the state’s recognition, its shape becomes something the state can alter. Once its shape can be altered by the state, the unity of the Panth becomes something the law recognises only on the state’s terms.
This is visible even in the later question of Takht office. The Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1925 contains the language of ministers and office-holders, and provides machinery for appointment, dismissal, and management. But it does not create a clear Panthic constitutional basis for the modern power by which the SGPC appoints and removes Jathedars as sovereignty-bearing voices of the Takhts. Later management practice and the SGPC’s own Parbandh Scheme helped fold the language of Head Minister into the office now treated as Jathedar. That is precisely the problem: an office carrying Panthic weight came to sit inside a trusteeship and management frame.
The SGPC was created to manage gurdwaras: property, institutions, committees, elections, funds, administration. It was not created by the Guru as the source of Panthic sovereignty. Yet over time, the power to appoint and remove Jathedars came to sit with the very body whose work was trusteeship.
Before modern statutory trusteeship, the Panthic principle was that questions of collective Sikh sovereignty arose through Sarbat Khalsa and Gurmata: the gathered Panth deliberating under the Guru, not a property-management committee acting by statutory default.
A sovereignty that once lived in the gathered Panth under the Guru came to be exercised by a committee constituted to manage property, under a statute and management scheme that do not clearly create that sovereignty power, because the committee was present and the gathered Panth was not.
This is the design problem. The dispute is not only who occupies office. It is where the authority to create, discipline, review, and remove such office is said to sit.
How the Panth Was Cut into States
The state’s terms became visible as Sikh institutions were divided. The pattern is consistent.
In Delhi, the gurdwaras came under the Delhi Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1971. Elections and committee formation operate through statutory machinery, including the Directorate of Gurdwara Elections.
In Haryana, gurdwaras were removed from the SGPC framework by the Haryana Sikh Gurdwaras (Management) Act, 2014. After years of litigation, the Supreme Court upheld the state legislation in Harbhajan Singh v. State of Haryana in 2022. The judgment treated the matter through the competence of the state legislature and the management of Sikh gurdwaras within Haryana.
The two Takhts outside Panjab, Patna Sahib and Hazur Sahib, are also governed by their own statutory or legally structured committees.
At no point in this machinery is the Panth permitted to be the unit. The unit is always the Sikhs of a state, a territory, a statute, a roll, or a committee. The law can count those Sikhs. It can assign those Sikhs to a body. It can give those Sikhs elections under that state’s frame.
But it cannot see the Guru’s Panth as one body under Shabad.
That is the wound.
This does not mean that courts and statutes are irrelevant. Sikh institutions hold land, employ people, handle donations, manage schools, hospitals, property, staff, and contracts. They necessarily encounter law. But encounter is not authority. Legal personality may be necessary for property and civil administration; it cannot become the source of Panthic legitimacy.
A register is not a Guru.
A statute is not the Panth.
State paperwork is not sovereignty.
What the Law Cannot See
The deepest layer is not money, party, or personality. It is the legal category itself.
The reason the Panth cannot fully defend its wholeness in the courts is not only that its leaders are divided. It is that the constitutional order has no operative category for the Guru’s Panth.
This was made visible in the Supreme Court’s judgment in the Haryana case. The SGPC’s argument, in substance, was that Sikh shrines should remain under one Sikh body and that fragmentation breaks Panthic unity. The Court did not set out to deny Sikh feeling. It assessed the law as a constitutional court must: state competence, statutory management, minority rights in the state, and whether the affairs of the Sikh minority in Haryana were still to be managed by Sikhs.
Hold that logic to the light.
The principle sounds like ours: Sikh affairs managed by Sikhs alone.
But the only Sikhs the law can recognise as a single unit are the Sikhs of a state, because they map onto a legislature, an electoral roll, and an entry in the schedule of powers. The Guru’s Panth maps onto none of these. It is the population of no state. It convenes no legislature. It appears in no constitutional schedule. It cannot be reduced to Panjab, Haryana, Delhi, Maharashtra, Patna, London, Vancouver, Nairobi, or Melbourne.
So when the principle “Sikhs should manage Sikh affairs” is run through a machine that can see only state-bounded Sikhs, it does not produce one Panth managing its own house. It produces many state-bounded bodies, each managing its own fragment.
The division is not a betrayal of the machinery. It is what the machinery is built to do.
Even the SGPC, the nearest Sikhs have to a wider institutional body, appears in law not as the Guru’s Panth but as a statutory body with a particular legal history. It carries wider reach by legislative arrangement, not by the law’s recognition of Panthic wholeness.
Courts may protect statutory rights and decide legal disputes. But they cannot supply the Panthic category that the statutory order itself does not contain.
A Sikh in Amritsar, a Sikh in Delhi, a Sikh in Kurukshetra, a Sikh in Nanded, and a Sikh in London may all stand under one Guru. But the constitutional machinery sees them through different state, territorial, or national frames. It has no place where they act as one body under Shabad.
When Haryana left the SGPC framework, the Panth could not answer in legal language, “But we are one,” because the law has nowhere to record that sentence. It could hear only the Sikhs of Haryana and the Sikhs of Panjab. Between those two, the machinery is built to resolve the question through state categories.
Money, Party, and Capture
It would be dishonest to pretend this is only doctrine. It is also money, property, employment, prestige, contracts, and political leverage.
These bodies do not manage devotion alone. They manage vast offerings, land, schools, colleges, hospitals, staff, trusts, buildings, printing presses, media access, contracts, and appointments. Recent SGPC annual budgets have run well above ₹1,300 crore, and the 2026–27 budget has been reported at ₹1,487.41 crore.
Once institutions hold that scale of resources, they become permanent capture targets.
To control one of these bodies is to control money and patronage as much as management. It is to influence who is employed, who is platformed, which institutions grow, which projects are funded, which voices are amplified, and which are ignored.
Public complaints and reporting have repeatedly raised concerns about funds, memberships, properties, contracts, and institutional control. Those allegations must be treated as allegations unless proved. But the constitutional point does not depend on whether every charge is established. The point is simpler: a body that holds money, land, jobs, platforms, and offices will be fought over.
If that same body sits close to Panthic sovereignty, then every money dispute becomes a Panthic dispute; every committee contest becomes a religious crisis; every factional appointment claims the aura of the Guru’s house.
This is why design matters.
A governance system that assumes capture will not be attempted is already unserious. A mature system assumes capture will be attempted and builds the locks.
The party question must also be handled precisely. The truth is worse and less tidy than a single conspiracy. There is no one hand. There are several, each reaching for advantage.
The SGPC has long been dominated by the Shiromani Akali Dal, and critics have repeatedly described that dominance as family-centred party power. The Haryana separation was passed by a Congress state government. The Delhi committee has seen its own party struggles, alignments, defections, and accusations of outside interference. Hazur Sahib now sits under Maharashtra’s state-led reform attempt.
Congress in one state, Akali dominance in another, allegations around other parties in a third: each reaches for whatever lever lies to hand, whether assembly, Parliament, election directorate, board nomination, administrator, court, or statute, to capture, defend, strip, or redirect a body worth controlling.
This is not the signature of one master plan. It is the predictable behaviour of many interests around large and capturable pools of money, office, and prestige.
That is more damning than a plot, not less. A plot can be exposed and defeated. This requires no coordination at all. It follows automatically from the prior mistake of letting the Guru’s institutions be constituted as state-shaped bodies with treasuries and offices worth seizing.
The Wound From Our Own Side
The argument must turn inward, or it forfeits the right to be made at all.
It would be easy, and false, to tell this as the story of a people wronged only from without by a hostile state and its courts. The state’s logic is real. The law’s inability to see the Panth whole is real. But the fragmentation was not done to a unified Panth that always resisted it.
Much of it Sikhs drove themselves.
The demand for a separate Haryana committee came from Haryana Sikhs and was pressed for years against the SGPC. The Delhi separation grew from real and bitter contests among Sikhs. The SGPC’s own paralysis is the work of Sikh party capture, not only Delhi. Sikh treasuries have been fought over by Sikh hands as often as they have been placed within reach by state law.
This is the one wound seen from two sides, the same wound Under the Guru Alone refuses to let us forget: outside pressure that has never relented, and inside failure of our own.
The thinning of transmission. The hunger for office. The confusion of committee control with Panthic authority. The readiness to call in the state against a rival Sikh. The willingness to defend a captured structure when our side holds it.
A Panth that names only the outside pressure forfeits the standing to name anything but grievance. We were not only divided. We consented to be divided, and often we asked for it.
That honesty is not self-hatred. It is the condition of repair.
Truthful Administration and Panthic Authority
What then is to be done, if the courts cannot grant the Panth’s unity and the state cannot constitute the Guru’s seat?
The answer is not lawlessness. It is not the abandonment of gurdwaras, accounts, property registers, employment rules, audit, or proper administration. The Guru’s institutions must be more truthful, not less disciplined.
The distinction that frees us is the old one: between the Guru’s authority and the body’s worldly existence.
A gurdwara may hold land. It may keep accounts. It may employ people. It may meet courts. It may need contracts, registers, insurance, safety rules, and legal process. On that plane, ordinary law touches it as it touches other lawful holdings.
But none of that is the source of Sikh authority.
The Panth should keep its registers honest, its audits independent, its accounts clean, its appointments disciplined, and its conduct transparent. It should do so not because the state grants it legitimacy, but because truthful living is the Guru’s own demand.
Guru Nanak Sahib gives the test on Ang 62, in Sri Raag, Ashtpadiyan, Mahala 1:
ਸਚਹੁ ਓਰੈ ਸਭੁ ਕੋ ਉਪਰਿ ਸਚੁ ਆਚਾਰੁ ॥੫॥
Romanised guide: sachahu orai sabh ko upar sach aachaar
Learning-aid sense: Truth is higher than all things; higher still is truthful living.
An institution is not made true by clean accounts and a working election alone. It is made true by living truthfully: by answering in its actual working to the Shabad and the sangat, not to office, money, party, state, or faction.
That answering is precisely what no state statute can supply, because it was never the state’s to give.
The Panth’s wholeness was constituted under the Guru. A thing the state did not give, the state cannot take, divide, or withhold.
The recovery of Sikh unity is therefore not a petition to any legislature, which has no category to receive it. It is a return to the only ground on which that unity ever stood: the gathered Panth under the Shabad, constituting its own institutions and naming its own discipline.
This does not mean ignoring law. It means refusing to mistake law for Guru.
The Hazur Sahib Bill as the Latest Instance
This analysis returns to the present dispute.
The proposed Hazur Sahib Bill is not an anomaly to be amended. It is the latest instance of the same underlying pressure: a state-shaped legal frame proposing to seat itself over a Takht.
The immediate Sikh response may understandably defend the 1956 Act against a new Bill that deepens state control. That may be necessary in the present moment. But the deeper question does not end with the old Act. Hazur Sahib is not a free institution suddenly facing capture for the first time. It already sits inside a state statute. The proposed Bill deepens the enclosure; it does not invent it.
The real question is not old Act or new Act.
The real question is why a Sikh Takht should sit inside any law the state can rewrite.
The draft Bill creates state-made machinery around Takhat Sachkhand Shri Hazur Abchalnagar Sahib. It defines the Board, the Committee, Government, Gurudwara, Gurudwara property, and the machinery of administration, control, and management. It gives the Government of Maharashtra the dominant role in Board nomination and office-bearing. The details of the Bill should be read carefully, but the premise is already visible: the state is not merely encountering Sikh institutional life from outside; it is writing the frame through which the Takht is to be governed.
A Takht is not the state’s to constitute.
Findings
The argument may be summarised in six findings.
First, the legal order can recognise Sikh communities within states, but it has no adequate category for the Guru’s Panth as one trans-state body under Shabad Guru.
Second, the Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1925 was both a liberation from mahant and colonial control and a statutory enclosure of Sikh institutional life.
Third, the later Delhi, Haryana, Patna Sahib, and Hazur Sahib arrangements show how Sikh self-government becomes fragmented when routed through state legal machinery.
Fourth, trusteeship and Panthic sovereignty have been fused too closely, allowing property, budget, payroll, and committee control to pressure Takht authority.
Fifth, money, land, offices, appointments, and party influence make statutory Sikh bodies permanent capture targets.
Sixth, the answer is not disorder or anti-law rejection, but a clearer separation between administrative trusteeship and Panthic sovereignty under Shabad Guru and Guru-Panth responsibility.
Conclusion
The Panth cannot recover its wholeness by asking the state to grant it. The state has nowhere to put such a request. It can see communities, electorates, statutes, boards, committees, and states. It cannot see the Guru’s Panth whole.
The Panth recovers its wholeness by returning to the only ground on which it was ever one: the gathered Panth under the Shabad, constituting its own discipline, protecting its own institutions, and refusing to mistake law for Guru.
This is not an argument for disorder. Sikh institutions need stronger order, not weaker order: honest accounts, independent audit, transparent registers, clear appointment and removal processes, fair employment rules, protection against fraud, and real accountability. But that order must arise under the Guru’s Panth. It cannot receive its authority from a government statute.
Nor is this an argument from fear or anger. The Sikh response must be Nirbhau and Nirvair together: without fear and without enmity. We have no reason to fear a state that holds force but was never given authority over the Guru’s seat. And we give that state no reason to fear us.
We need only stop mistaking our wholeness for something it can grant.
A Takht is not the state’s to constitute.
The Panth is not the state’s to divide.
The wholeness of the Sikhs was never the law’s to see, to grant, or to take away.
It belongs to the Guru alone.
References
Delhi Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1971.
Directorate of Gurdwara Elections, Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi. “Act and Rules.”
Guru Granth Sahib Ji. Ang 62, Sri Raag, Ashtpadiyan, Mahala 1.
Guru Granth Sahib Ji. Ang 943, Ramkali Siddh Gosht, Mahala 1.
Harbhajan Singh v. State of Haryana and Others, Supreme Court of India, judgment dated 20 September 2022.
Haryana Sikh Gurdwaras (Management) Act, 2014.
Indian Express. “How do SGPC elections work? Why have they not been held in 13 years?” 19 October 2024.
Indian Express. “Explained: The significance of Delhi government’s recognition to fifth Sikh Takht.” 6 January 2022.
Institute of Sikh Studies. “SGPC Committee Regarding Takht Jathedars.”
Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee. “Sri Akal Takht Sahib, Sri Amritsar.”
Takhat Sri Harimandir Ji Patna Sahib Prabandhak Committee. Official website.
Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1925.
Takhat Sachkhand Shri Hazur Abchalnagar Sahib Gurudwara Bill, 2024. Draft, Revenue and Forests Department, Government of Maharashtra.
Times of India. “SGPC passes Rs 1,487-crore budget for FY 2026–27.” 28 March 2026.
© Copyright Gurjit Singh Sandhu
Independent Sikh researcher, London
Founder, PanthSeva
Plain-English renderings are mine.
Please acknowledge quotations from this article
Articles may be published subject to prior approval by the author