A harrowing video from Bandala, a small village in Punjab’s Ferozepur district, captures a distressing scene: a young man, bloodied and struggling to hold up his head, surrounded by granthis and sevadaars. He is accused of tearing pages—angs—from the Guru Granth Sahib. Despite the young man’s evident injuries, it is clear from the video that no immediate medical intervention was provided to him. It later emerged that the young man, who succumbed to his injuries, suffered from mental health issues.
Bandala joins a notorious list of places in Punjab that has followed a grimly familiar script. An alleged act of beadabi or desecration of the Guru Granth Sahib leads to the swift capture of the accused by a crowd, followed by a lynching. Mob justice is dispensed before due process has a chance to intervene. Often, those accused of these crimes turn out to be either mentally unsound or undergoing depressive or schizophrenic episodes. In some cases, those accused of the killing are honoured by the gurdwara.
As a person born into the Sikh faith, these extra-judicial killings are extremely difficult to reconcile with the philosophy I was raised with. I am no expert, but the precepts of Sikhism, as I understand them, centre around equality, compassion, justice, empathy, and community service. The violent, reactionary behaviour on display in these incidents is a complete departure from Sikh philosophy.
One of the foundational prayers of Sikhism is the mool mantar, which encapsulates the nucleus of Sikh thought. According to the prayer, “Ik Onkaar”, variously defined as the ultimate reality or the Supreme Being, is “nirbhau, nirvair”—without fear and without hatred, enmity, or malice. Sadly, while God might be without fear and rancour, His or Her followers often seem to make up for it in spades.
Still, it’s instructive to understand that the bitter harvest of vigilante justice stems from seeds of discontent. It registers a genuine shock at the acts of desecration, and a profound disillusionment with the legal system. A perceived leniency toward offenders has completely eroded public trust.
For the Sikh community, the Guru Granth Sahib is much more than a holy text. Unlike the Bhagavad Gita or the Bible, it is considered the embodiment of a living guru, and no different in status to the 10 gurus that preceded it. An attack on the Guru Granth Sahib, therefore, is treated like an attack on the body of the guru himself.
Also read: Punjab’s most hated—sacrilege accused live in hiding, face death, can’t use phones
Copycat cases
The recent desecration of the Guru Granth Sahib is only the latest in a series of incidents that began around 2015. The theft of the Guru Granth Sahib in 2015 from Jawahar Singh Sircar village in Faridkot, and the discovery of torn pages in 2018 in Amritsar, led to massive protests. That episode seemed to open the floodgates, and every other district in Punjab can be name-checked.
In December 2021, two severe attempts at sacrilege were reported: one at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, where a man attempted to desecrate the Guru Granth Sahib and was subsequently beaten to death, and another where a man allegedly tried to desecrate the Nishan Sahib at a gurdwara in Kapurthala and met a similar fate.
In October 2021, Lakhbir Singh, a 35-year-old Dalit Sikh from Tarn Taran, was brutally lynched during the farmer’s agitation at the Singhu border, after being accused of desecrating the Sarbloh Granth. In May 2023, a middle-aged salon worker named Kulwinder Kaur, was shot dead for purportedly consuming alcohol within the precincts of Gurdwara Dukhniwaran Sahib in Patiala. A few days prior in Rajpura, a disoriented young man named Sahil was beaten for wearing his shoes and not covering his head inside the premises of a gurdwara.
The list goes on, but according to various estimates, the number of “sacrilege” cases hovers between 100 and 250. Following the recent incident in Bandala, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee issued a statement condemning the desecration but remained silent on the young man’s killing. The body’s official stance is that “the police administration and the government have completely failed to stop such incidents” framing them as part of a larger conspiracy. They attribute the community’s anger and resentment to the government and police’s inability to deliver “strict and exemplary punishment to the culprits of sacrilege”.
I reached out to Harjeshwar Pal Singh, who teaches history at Sri Guru Gobind Singh College in Chandigarh to understand this phenomenon a little better. “Before 2015, we’d never even heard about such incidents [of sacrilege],” he told me. “When these things gather the media’s attention, it leads to copycat cases. In some ways, what was once considered extreme blasphemy seems to have become routine, simply by being in the public eye.”
None of this justifies the actual killings, but it does help contextualise events. Given the frequency of these offences over the last decade, it is tough not to view these as a pattern of targeted attacks on Sikh sentiments. At the very least, it is a reflection of institutional failures.
Daljit Singh Sra, former chief sub-editor of Punjabi Tribune says that there is now a perception that even when such incidents happen, there will be no justice. “The State might be sincere, but this is the pervasive sentiment—and the credibility of the State is on the line,” he told me. Sra is of the opinion that people now fear for their identity. “When the Sikh community witnesses that culprits in such a big incident [in Bargari] have not been punished, even small incidents feel like too much, and they tend to overreact.”
If nothing else, this highlights an urgent need among the Sikh community to engage in critical dialogue, as it reveals a stark dichotomy within the community. On one hand, are a selfless people who embody the spirit of seva and are among the first to assist in crises worldwide. On the other hand, are those who take the law into their own hands, resorting to killing when their religious sentiments are perceived to be attacked.
Also read: Lynching to shooting, ‘instant justice’ is on the rise in Punjab’s sacrilege cases
Fundamentalist mindsets
Even as the desecration remains an emotive issue, lynching the accused is not something ordinary Sikhs I know can make peace with. The prevailing sentiment remains that the offenders be punished according to the law, and that the lynchings are the handiwork of individuals with “kattar soch” or fundamentalist mindsets.
Meanwhile, the inconsistent application of the law fosters an environment ripe for conspiracy theories. Deras around Punjab and Haryana, particularly Gurmeet Ram Rahim’s Dera Sacha Sauda, whose followers were accused in the 2015 case, are viewed with intense suspicion. But there’s little to suggest that the deras would orchestrate plans to provoke the Sikh community like this. For one, many dera followers happen to be gurdwara-going practising Sikhs. Besides, despite their massive followership, dera followers remain a minority within the larger Sikh fold.
There are also some murmurs that the lynchings of Muslims in other parts of India—on summary suspicions of eating beef or transporting cows for slaughter—might have emboldened those in Punjab. Sra dismisses that thought. “There is no communal angle to this,” he said. “The people accused of doing beadabi are often Sikhs. Punjab has witnessed so much struggle, but outside of the violence during the Partition, Punjab has never been communal.”
There are other, more unfortunate reasons behind the community’s heightened sensitivity, and why an attack on Sikh sacred spaces is conflated with an attack on Sikh identity itself. Punjab remembers the events of 1984 when an assault on Harmandir Sahib was quite literally an assault on the Sikh body politic.
We are less than a week away from the 40th anniversary of Operation Blue Star when the Indian army stormed the Golden Temple and left hundreds dead and deeply wounded the Sikh spirit. The title of the Guernica magazine essay “Ten Thousand Pairs of Shoes”, written by lawyer and author Mallika Kaur, is a reference to the number of people who never returned to claim their footwear after the events of June 1984. She writes: “The Army’s burning of the Sikh Reference Library after the June firefight is held as an attack on Sikh psyche. The centuries-old, primary source documents that were housed in the building where no firefight ever took place remain shrouded in mystery even today: since June 1984, Sikhs have claimed—and a 2004 Indian Government revelation even quietly acknowledged—that the materials were taken by the forces and not destroyed, but also not returned as a marker of humiliation and attempt at erasure of heritage.”
Later in 1984, a brutal pogrom followed in the wake of the assassination of Indira Gandhi, when thousands of Sikhs were massacred across India. Can you blame a community that bears the scars of trauma inflicted by recent history, for being hypervigilant?
Then again, shouldn’t a community that has witnessed so much violence, eschew it? Lynchings can never be the answer to these acts of desecration—they only serve to perpetuate a cycle of violence which stands in stark contrast to Sikh values. Those who defend the killings would do well to go back to the Guru Granth Sahib, which reminds us that the Guru’s words remain eternal:
Gur ka bachan basai jiya nale
Jal nahi dubai taskaru nahi levai bhai na sakai jale
Nirdhan ko dhan andhule ko tik maat dudh jayse bale
(The Guru’s Word abides with my soul
It does not sink in water; thieves cannot steal it, and fire cannot burn it
It is like wealth to the poor, a cane for the blind, and mother’s milk for the infant)
It’s not merely the physical form of the Guru Granth Sahib that needs the Sikh community’s concern. Our attentions are better spent upholding and embodying the values enshrined in its teachings—both in thought and in action.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)