Majoritizing the Minor: The Sikh and Panjabi Ethos Today
Anneeth Kaur Hundle
“Majority/Minority Politics in South Asia” is an essay collection, co-edited by Mohsin Bhat and Natasha Raheja, that moves beyond nation-specific frameworks to foster comparative, cross-disciplinary, and cross-border inquiry into how majoritarianism takes shape across South Asia. The collection illuminates shared mechanisms of majoritarian rule and the varied forms of opposition they provoke, thus advancing critical scholarship on democratic erosion while contributing to public debates on resisting authoritarianism and rebuilding democratic futures.
In the Indian Punjab today, many Sikhs are animated by affective anxieties surrounding rapidly changing state demographics and extractive capitalist violence, the incursion of Hindutva politics and Brahmanization of the Sikh tradition, and the failures of opportunistic party politics. Unlike Hindu and Muslim communities in South Asia, Sikhs are not a demographic majority in any nation-state. They constitute 1.72% of the Indian population, arguably a “micro-minority”; they also form minority populations across South Asia, especially in occupied Kashmir, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. [1] Yet Sikhs are a demographic majority in the state of Punjab, at 55 % of the population.
In this essay, I probe the entanglement between the “majority status” of Sikhs in the state of Punjab, their “minority status” in the postcolonial Indian nation and transnationally, and Sikh political assertions of an independent religious identity, self-determination, and sovereignty. I am interested in the processes by which the state and central government produce Sikhs as an assimilable minority group, and I explore these processes through continuities between majoritarian and right-wing state politics.
In contrast to demographic notions of “minority” as a reified status, or visible, biological, and kinship-based markers of minority Sikh religious identity, I center the condition of “the minor” through processes of “minoritization” and “minoritized” subjectivity and consciousness in the domain of culture and politics. I frame this minoritized subject position as the Sikh and Panjabi ethos; [2] this ethos emanates from the Panjab [3]—a geo-historical region that has seen the Sikh movement at odds with despotic forces in Delhi across many regimes of governance and time periods. This ethos offers a possible alternate “majoritizing” political culture that is both shaped by but transcends the nation-state form.
Sikhi, the new Punjab and Politics in Formation
The category “Sikh” evokes dualism: First, it refers to a modern and distinctive religious identity and community, understood through postcolonial Indian state-based legal-juridical and Constitutional recognition. Second, it evinces an unfolding spiritual tradition, inclusive of diverse and heterogeneous Sikh and “Sikh-adjacent” communities in practice (the Sikh tradition is influenced by and departs from Bhakti, Sufi and Shia Islam, and Persianate traditions, beginning with the sant tradition in the 15th and 16th century Panjab region). So, in addition to what is understood as the mainstream Sikh Khalsa-Panth, established by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699 on Vaisakhi [4], there are Nanak-panthi traditions that revere Guru Nanak, sectarian traditions related to Sikh Guru succession controversies, and deras comprised of caste-oppressed communities.
Debates over Sikh tradition and identity are profuse, but scholars generally agree that the Sikh Gurus shaped the movement as an inclusive tradition that aimed to critique Brahmanism, casteism, gender inequality, religious persecution, and political authoritarianism—and especially as it developed into a martial tradition and became codified through the sovereignty of the Khalsa-Panth. The inclusivity of the tradition is expressed in the pluriversal and mystical poetic discourse of the Adi Granth/ Guru Granth Sahib Ji (GSS), which includes the compositions of six of the Sikh Gurus and Muslim and Hindu saints like Baba Farid, Kabir, Namdev, and Ravidass, many from lower-caste communities. In the colonial era, Singh Sabha religious reformers continued to construct Sikhi as a distinctive dharm and independent religious identity. This was a response to both European Orientalists and Arya Samaji religious reformers who constructed Sikhi as a reformist branch of Hinduism and a derivative faith, the latter also questioning the authority of Guru Nanak and Sikh scriptures.
In 1947, negotiations between the Sikh-dominant Akali Dal political leadership and the Indian National Congress (INC) led the Sikhs to cast their lot with the new, ostensibly secular Indian nation. In the aftermath of the violent rupture of the Panjab Partition, Sikhs expressed political anxieties surrounding representation in the officially secular nation-state, with many demanding a Punjabi- rather than Hindi-speaking state (a key conflict between Punjabi Sikh and Hindu communities) and more political autonomy from central government rule. By 1966, the Akali Dal political party’s demand for the Punjabi Suba led to the newly trifurcated state of Indian Punjab (from Hindu-majority Himachal Pradesh and Haryana).
The Sikhs were now, for the first time, a demographic majority in the new Punjab (with Hindus, Christians, and Muslims as demographic minorities). Up to now, Punjab is the only state in postcolonial India with a minority group holding majority power in state governance. As David Singh and Christine Moliner (2025) have observed, this contradictory majority-minority complex has implications for postcolonial political trajectories—from electoral politics and the relationship of the central government to the Punjab’s Sikh-majority vote to civil society agitations to political insurgency to social movements.
Punjab is thus the site of a diverse spectrum of “formal” postcolonial politics: from the far-left Maoist-Naxalites to the more mainstream Sikh-centric Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), to SAD splinter-groups, to neo-Panthic movements. They are further complicated by commitments to Sikh sovereignty emanating from the Akal Takht (“throne of the timeless”, the highest seat of Sikh spiritual-political authority, established by the sixth Guru Hargobind Sahib in 1606 at Darbar Sahib or the Golden Temple) and the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandak Committee (SGPC). Members of the SGPC have formed at times opportunistic alliances between Punjab politicians and Congress and BJP parties. Most recently, the political landscape is intensified by student organizations active at Panjab University, Chandigarh; farmers unions and landless Dalit assertions, the post-2021 Farmers Movement Punjab governments (including leadership by the first Dalit-Ramdasia Sikh-CM Channi Singh and the new AAP-led government of CM Bhagwant Singh Mann (Singh and Moliner 2025).
Sikh Confrontations with Secular Majoritarianism
Majoritarianism in India is shaped through liberal-secular constitutionalism: cow protection bills, anti-conversion laws, and uneven caste (SC-status) recognition across religious communities, constructing biases against Christian and Muslim communities to preserve a demographic Hindu majority. This majority relies upon colonial and Brahmanical assimilation tactics to construct Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains as variations of universalized Hindu religion for supposedly “legal” purposes, which many Sikhs oppose. Thus, a central mode of preserving majoritarian political culture is through disciplining independent Sikh religious identity and self-determination, absorbing Sikhs into a Hindu-Sikh national identity that maintains Brahmanical state authority and hierarchy.
Sikhs are therefore concerned with both infringements upon minority religious rights and freedoms and the self-determination of an unfolding tradition. A significant source of contention is marriage and divorce laws: the registration of the Anand Karaj marriage ceremony and other divorce or matrimonial issues were exclusively adjudicated under the 1955 Hindu Marriage Act until 2025, when the Indian Supreme Court ordered all states to enforce the Anand Marriage Act.
Caste is another domain through which majoritarian politics and Sikh minoritization operate. Given its history of religious transformation, the state of Punjab has the highest proportion of Dalits in India at 32% of the population, with 60% of the SC population self-identifying as Sikh. Caste politics in Punjab feature “competing” rural and urban dominant-caste communities , both Jat Sikh and Hindu landed agricultural communities, and urban (Sikh and Hindu Khatri and other Brahmin and Baniya) business communities. The landed Jat Sikh community is 20-25% of Punjab’s total population and control 80% of the state’s land; however some estimates suggest that 90% of this land is owned by small and marginal Jat farmers who are indebted to creditors.
Persistent caste inequality in the Punjab is related to the resurgence of Brahmanical forces in the Sikh movement that became entrenched with colonial hierarchical and “re-casted” land—labor-capital relations. These inequities are reinforced by the Brahmanical-caste-capitalist structures of urban-rural indebtedness in Punjab and the neoliberal Hindutva state—both of which foster agrarian oppression and inequality. Decades of Dalit assertion in the Punjab—primarily led by Sikh Mazhabi, Ramdasia/Ravidassia and Valmiki communities—have revealed enduring inequities in land tenure and ownership and labor exploitation, culminating in rural social movements for dignity against large landowners and access to village lands for SC communities.
SC (Dalit) Sikhs were officially recognized in the 1956 Constitution in response to their demands after exclusion from the 1950 Constitution. Legal-juridical recognition helped secure a “Hindu-Sikh” majoritarian demographic in relation to the perceived threat of Christian conversions. But SC Dalit Sikh recognition also advanced a secular and majoritarian project of assimilating the Sikh tradition into a sectarian reformist branch of Hinduism writ large or the Sanatan Dharm.
Thus, the central government’s ruling parties (both the Congress and BJP) have been successful in mobilizing SC/Dalit voter support. This has consolidated a majoritarian agenda that assimilates Sikhs and fostered distrust among Khalsa-affiliated Sikh political parties in the Punjab. At the same token, dominant parties often invisiblize the structural discriminations that compel Dalit communities to seek other routes for political autonomy. [5]
Majoritarian politics effectively pits the Dalit question against minority rights questions in the Punjab, managing minority difference and political narratives while maintaining hegemony. In fact, both Jat and Dalit Sikhs, across caste and sectarian divisions, were and continue to be central to minoritized resistance to majoritarianism in the 1980s and to Hindutva politics in India today.
The Turn to Militancy and Martyrdom
The confrontation between majoritarian political culture and Sikhs’ minoritized tradition took a decisive turn from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, when the Sikhs (who are generally celebrated by the state for their martial tradition and over-representation in the Indian army) became a threat to the nation’s power center.
The rise of militant leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, Punjab state insurgency and eventually the Khalistan movement for Punjab secession from India is grounded in a (unacknowledged and unanswered) history of nonviolent Akali-led agitation for sovereign land and water rights from the central government. At the time, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the Congress political leadership violently repressed the insurgency via Operation BlueStar and Operation Woodrose (the military attacks on Darbar Sahib or the Golden Temple and other Sikh gurudwaras in the Punjab) and killings of Sikh militants and civilians. The attacks were followed by Gandhi’s political assassination by her Sikh bodyguards and vengeful Hindu mob-led anti-Sikh pogroms in New Delhi and elsewhere in the fall of 1984.
Indian and Punjab military, state and policing operatives pursued counterinsurgency in the Punjab for the next decade, claiming the lives of many thousands of Sikh men (both associated with the militancy and civilians) through fake “encounters” between “terrorists” and military and police personnel and illegal enforced disappearances. “Anti-terror” laws and “securitizing patriarchies” in the Punjab paved the way for Indian state militarization and securitization tactics in Kashmir in the early 2000s, the growth of the Hindu right-wing (BJP), and worsening violence against Muslims, especially in Gujarat and UP. Evidence suggests that the militancy in Punjab was likely cultivated by the Congress Party to “divide and rule” Sikh political dissent (secular-oriented Akalis from neo-Panthic agitation) and to influence Hindu vote banks against the competition of the BJP. There is also clear evidence of collusion between the Congress and the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms, which the current BJP government now politically harnesses to assimilate Sikhs.
In the absence of any form of transitional justice to move the Punjab to a post-conflict society, piecemeal forms of compensation for Sikh widows and survivors of sexual assault during the Delhi pogroms and surviving families of the disappeared, many Sikhs feel alienated from Indian national identity and the Congress Party, continuing to align themselves with Panthic-centric movements and/or wider diasporic formations.
Writing in the aftermath of counter-insurgency and studying the perspectives of California Sikh political asylees in the 1990s, anthropologist Cynthia Mahmood argued that the claim for Khalistan can best be understood as a mode of political critique among Sikhs who hold an array of political positions and practices, but who are united by spiritual ideals of Khalsa-Panth and Khalsa Raj sovereignty and collective and embodied memories of dissent against imperial and state incursions into autonomous Sikh religious and political autonomy What Mahmood (and myself) find interesting is that dissent is connected to a Sikh-centric notion of Khalsa Raj (miri-piri, or temporal and spiritual) sovereignty and worldly conduct that is not assimilable to secular politics and modern state governance—a potent, creative sense of self-determination in excess of institutionalized political parties and the horizon of nation-states.
Yet in the modern nation-state form—and both its secular and Hindu nationalist expressions—claims to autonomy and sovereignty tend to be constrained by the fact that neo-Panthic or “religious” minority assertion is understood as a mode of communalism and thus violently repressed to re-assert secular (read Hindu majoritarian) dominance. Political claims for Khalistan largely emanate from the diaspora, and as David Singh and Christine Moliner argue, they tend to drive populist support for the Hindu right-wing and the current BJP government. An imagined–and Indian state-supported–“Khalistan threat” serves both majoritarian and Hindu nationalist interests. It bolsters Hindu minority (in the state of Punjab) anxieties about marginalization and expulsion from the idea of a Sikh-led independent nation-state, one whose parameters have never been clearly defined but which are constantly projected upon (Sandhu 2021). Punjabi Hindus’ anxieties are animated by their memories of social vulnerability during the militancy as well as majoritarian and BJP loyalties, including discourses that hinge on the expulsion of the Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir Valley in 1990. These discourses often construct all Sikhs and Sikh political dissidents as Khalistani extremists and terrorists with affinities to imputed Pakistani terrorism, ISI agents, and Kashmiri militants.
Following Mahmood Mamdani’s arguments in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, we can understand that the “good Sikh” is proximate and loyal to the Brahmanical state and central government authority, fighting and even dying for the nation; the “bad Sikh” is a traitor, a possible Khalistani, aligned with the perceived Muslim threat to the nation (Nanda, forthcoming). [6]
From Majoritarianism to Hindutva Politics
For many Sikhs, secular (Hindu) majoritarianism and Hindu right-wing fundamentalisms are entangled projects, as the state took on fascistic impulses as early as the Emergency Period in the 1970s and in 1984. They are concerned by the overt Hindutva strategy to assimilate Sikhs and Sikhi into a Brahmanical caste Hindu-Sikh formation by embracing and diluting the Sikh ethos and de-emphasizing its unique aspects, including its ruptures from Brahmanical caste patriarchy. The Sikh tradition is now understood—and increasingly in the Western university—as not only a Dharmic religion, but a branch of the Sanatan Dharm, “the sword arm of the Hindus,” and as politically antagonistic to the Abrahamic Islamic and Christian traditions, which most Sikhs refute.
Hindutva groups in the Punjab reshape diverse interpretations of Sikh religious and political history in line with Hindu nationalist narratives that are anti-Muslim, especially the shaheedi of Guru Tegh Bahadhur and other martyrs in the Sikh tradition. The Rashtriya Sikh Sangat (RSS) is now active in the Punjab, and fluid lines between the BJP and this formation of the RSS render Sikhs vulnerable to RSS propaganda (Sandhu 2019:392-396). This RSS creates moral panics over Christian conversions in the Punjab, supporting “Ghar Wapsi” mass reconversions of the caste-oppressed back to Sikhism, in line with the Hindu nationalist agenda.
Right-wing activists seek to insult Sikhs through acts of beadbi (sacrilege) of the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, through disrespectful actions in Sikh gurudwaras, or by intentionally de-turbanizing Sikh political dissidents. These actions humiliate Sikhs and their traditions, inciting violence, paving the way for the repression of Sikh dissidents and the profiling of civilians.
Meanwhile, the BJP has passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), legalizing the exclusion of Muslim and Christians migrants and others deemed non-citizens from the nation while strategically creating pathways for citizenship for Pashtun Sikhs from Afghanistan and Pakistan. The act effectively indigenizes Sikhs to an imputed Hindu civilizational homeland, estranging them from their Panjabiyaat and Central Asian connections, and invisibilizing the ways in which Kashmiri Sikhs are also impacted by the Indian occupation of Kashmir.
Of course, nationalist assimilation also relies upon invisibilizing the central government’s own persecution of Sikhs in India and the diaspora, at least until it is no longer possible. This was revealed when overseas intelligence revealed that PM Narendra Modi and the BJP were involved in the planned or completed assassinations of pro-Khalistan Sikh political activists in the US and Canada. The prime example is the murder case of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, British Columbia, in 2023, which sparked a diplomatic crisis between India and Canada and political advocacy for anti-transnational repression bills among Sikh civil society groups and progressive South Asian politicians in the US
The Sikh and Panjabi Ethos Today: Resistance, Solidarities, Futures
In 2020-2021, the leftist and Sikh-oriented Farmers’ Movement brought together many typically divided communities across the Sikh and Punjabi fold. The Indian Parliament passed three exploitative farm bills that harmed peasant livelihoods, leading to the mass mobilization of Sikh and Hindu-led farmers’ unions across the states of Punjab and Haryana. Sikhs and Hindus formed strategic solidarities across Jat and Dalit communities and identities, especially between small farmers and landless laborers. Remembering and reinterpreting collective memories of 1984, they were especially careful to avoid factional politics between farmers’ unions and neo-Panthic political leaders and groups, knowing that the central government would take the opportunity to sow divisions and dismantle collective political mobilization.
Embodied Sikh and Panjabi histories of rebellion, the anti-colonial freedom struggle and martyrdom, Sikh practices and principles like sangat-pangat and langar seva, naam-simraan and shabad-kirtan crossed caste and class divides. The financial and political support of diasporic Sikhs and Punjabis, the mobilization of Nihang Sikhs on horseback, and the labor of Sikh women sustained the protest for almost a year and a half. In the Sikh shaheedi tradition, it is estimated that 700-750 farmers and martyrs died during the protests, many suffering violence from police repression. Once the farmers’ unions returned to the Punjab, they persevered by dismantling the power structures sustaining several decades of corrupt, dynastic politicians (SAD-Badal family). While the possibilities and limitations of the new government in Punjab (AAP) remain to be seen, Punjab will continue to be a source of social movements and resistance to Hindutva politics.
The point here is not to establish a legitimizing or moralizing typology of political praxis among dissident Sikhs. Understanding Sikh minoritized resistance requires an analysis of minority-making as a process, a vigilance to how officially “secular” majoritarianism and right-wing politics share strategies and mutually reinforce each other (e.g., through assimilation and absorption, the management of sectarian and caste difference and conflict, and overt criminalization, detentions, targeted assassinations, and genocidal violence).
Majoritizing “minoritized resistance” is a possible strategy: the “Sikh and Panjabi ethos” that I offer here is not exclusive to Hindus and other minoritized communities of Muslims, Christians, and Dalits, but an unfolding tradition and radical movement. It is vigilant to internal community neo-fascisms, neo-traditionalisms, neo-patriarchies; to self-Orientalization and self-Brahmanization. It is defined by an always existing egalitarian thesis animated by Ravidass’s Begampura, Guru Arjan Sahib’s Halemi Raj, and Guru Gobind Sahib’s Khalsa-Panth; it is an “orthopraxis” tradition. [7] It builds upon previous radical disruptions from ritualized political cultures of Brahmanism, casted labor hierarchies, sexism, religious persecution and political tyranny in an unfolding dance towards justice. These are generative spiritual-ethical-political philosophies (and activist ways of being) that can be universalized as creative strategies for practicing (non-state) collectivist sovereignties and social justice.
Transcending fixed religious identity categories inherited by birth and social norms, nationalist exclusions, and institutionalized identities, the Sikh and Panjabi ethos inspires solidarities with other oppressed communities that work past the limits of “the postcolonial contemporary” and engage in decolonizing possibilities, exceeding nationalist logics and participating in planetary horizons This is a provocation I take up in my next project on feminist readings of the Sikh tradition and the Black Radical Tradition.
Notes
[1] I do not collapse Sikh with Hindu identity, as is common in normative scholarship and central to Hindu nationalist discourse. At the same time, I do not take religious categories and boundaries as objective givens; nor do I minimize the fact that Hindi-Sikh syncretism persists in northern India and in relation to caste dynamics and urban-rural dimensions of labor-trade relations. I am more concerned with the political mobilization of Hindu-Sikh communities to maintain majorities and exclude dissident subject positions. This maneuver maintains a Brahmanical and caste-ordering of the state apparatus and is constitutive of the Hindutva project. The author grew up in the Khalsa Sikh tradition, building on emic and etic anthropological understandings of Sikhi as an unfolding tradition.
[2] I am indebted to Amandeep Sandhu and Preetika Nanda for my conceptualization of the “Sikh and Panjabi ethos.” Both have emphasized the Sikh ethos in Punjab as critical to dissent to majoritarian and Hindutva state projects, while being inclusive of non-Sikh Punjabi identities.
[3] My use of “Panjab” refers to pre-colonial and pre-Partition indigenous notions of the Panjab region (inclusive of ecological and geological understandings) as opposed to the modern notion “Punjab”, used to demarcate the territorial state in postcolonial India, or “chardha” (east/rising sun) Punjab, from “lehndha” (west/setting sun) Punjab in Pakistan.
[4] The Khalsa-Panth refers to the sovereign political and spiritual community of initiated (amritdhari) Sikhs who embrace the “5 K’s “(kesh, kanga, kara, kaccha, and kirpan), the sant-sipahi (saint-warrior) identity and who aim to embody the teachings and sovereignty of Guru Granth Sahib Ji. The Khalsa-Panth is meant to be a casteless, class-less and without gender/sex discrimination, as in the taking on of the names “Singh” and “Kaur.”
[5] Tensions are also related to conflicts between the SGPC and the construction of Panthic orthodoxy in relation to heterodox sectarian movements shaped by caste-oppressed communities, often with affinities to Hindu religiosity.
[6] Thanks to Preetika Nanda, Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology at UC Irvine, for this brilliant “good Sikh, bad Sikh” formulation, discussed in her forthcoming dissertation.
[7] Begampura, or “sorrowless city” is a 16th-century utopian ideal described by Bhagat Ravidas, representing a place free from caste, taxes, and suffering, and a foundational vision in the Guru Granth Sahib Ji (GGS Ang 345. It is often associated with Guru Arjan Sahib’s (fifth Sikh Guru and martyr) notion of Halemi Raj, or rule of humility and benevolence, describing a divine, just society based on peace, equality and compassion, rather than oppression (GGS Ang 74).
Anneeth Kaur Hundle is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Presidential Chair of Social Sciences to Advance Sikh Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She can be reached at ahundle@uci.edu
Thumbnail credit: "2020 Indian farmers' protest 16" by Harvinder Chandigarh is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Prepared with the editorial assistance of Mishaal Mahmood.