Sikhs Today: Diaspora, Turbans in Law and Who Is a Sikh

By the mid-1990s the insurgency in Punjab had ended (§10). The Sikh world that came out of it was larger and more scattered than at any earlier point: more than twenty million Sikhs in India, and communities of hundreds of thousands in Canada, Britain and the United States, with smaller ones from East Africa to Australia. Its institutions were old ones. The Shiromaṇī Gurdwārā Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) and the Sikh Gurdwaras Act date from the 1920s, the Sikh Rahit Maryādā from 1950 (§9), and the Khālsā form most people picture as “Sikh” from 1699 and the centuries after (§5).^[1]​^[2] Consensus

What changed after 1995 is where the questions are settled. Whether a boy may wear a turban to school, who may vote for the body that runs the Harmandir Sāhib (the Golden Temple), whether a woman may sing in its sanctum, which day is Guru Nānak’s birthday: these are argued in courts and legislatures, in census forms and calendar committees, in Amritsar and in the diaspora at once. That is the argument of this chapter: since 1995 Sikh identity has been defined less by war and more by law, and the old question of who is a Sikh is now answered by statute, court judgment and census as well as by the Akāl Takht. Majority

Timeline

How many Sikhs?

Every Sikh number has a source and a date, and they are of different kinds. India and Canada ask a census question on religion; England and Wales ask a voluntary one; the United States asks none, so American figures are estimates. The world total is an estimate built on all of these. The table gives the main figures and who produced them; the chapter’s own rounding follows in the text.^[21]​^[22] Consensus on the census counts; Contested on the estimates.

India has completed no census since 2011; the one due in 2021 was postponed, and is now under way: houselisting ran from April to September 2026, and the count of the population is due in February 2027.^[25] Consensus In 2011 the Sikh share of India’s population had fallen slightly since 2001 (from 1.9 to 1.7 per cent), and the Sikh share of Punjab from 59.9 to 57.7 per cent; lower fertility is the main explanation given, with emigration.^[21]​^[26] Majority on the explanations. Canada has the largest Sikh population outside India, and in 2021 almost a third of it lived in the Toronto area and over a quarter in Vancouver.^[17] Consensus The American figures differ by a factor of more than two. Pew’s estimate of about 200,000 came from its 2012 survey of Asian Americans; the Sikh Coalition, an advocacy body, gives “more than 500,000” from its work with gurdwaras, and objects that the 2020 US census, the first to tabulate “Sikh” write-ins to its race question separately, recorded only 70,697 people that way.^[23]​^[24] Contested The usual world figure, about 25 million (some estimates are higher), rests on India’s 2011 count plus the diaspora estimates. Contested

1999: three hundred years of the Khālsā

Vaisākhī 1999 marked three hundred years since the founding of the Khālsā at Anandpur (§5). The central celebrations at Anandpur, in April, drew pilgrims in very large numbers, and gurdwaras across the diaspora held their own.^[1] Consensus A month before, in March 1999, the SGPC elected its first woman president, Bibī Jagīr Kaur, and while she was president (1999–2000) the SGPC first tried to bring in the Nanakshahi calendar (below).^[4]​^[6] Consensus

The anniversary did what anniversaries do: it fixed a single founding date in public memory, and it told the story of 1699 in the form the later sources give it, with the five heads and the Pañj Pyāre. How that form grew is a question for §5. Majority

Turbans and kirpans in law

For most Sikhs outside Punjab, the Khālsā’s outward form (uncut hair under a turban for men, and for the initiated the kirpān, the sword) is the point where religion meets the state. The question came first to Britain, and was decided there before this chapter’s period begins.^[1]​^[27] Consensus

Britain: Sikhs as an ethnic group

In the late 1970s the headmaster of a private school in Birmingham refused to admit a Sikh boy, Gurinder Singh Mandla, unless he cut his hair and gave up his turban. The Race Relations Act 1976 protected “racial groups”, not religions. On 24 March 1983 the House of Lords held that Sikhs were an ethnic group within the Act, and that the school’s rule was unlawful discrimination. Lord Fraser set out the test that British courts still use: a long shared history and a cultural tradition of the group’s own, with other marks, such as a common religion, literature or origin, that help to distinguish it.^[3] Consensus The judgment protected Sikhs in Britain as an ethnic group decades before religion itself was protected there, and it is part of why many British Sikhs have since asked to be counted as an ethnic group in the census, as some did in 2021 by writing “Sikh” under ethnicity.^[18]​^[1] Majority; Political on the census question.

Two statutes had already made exceptions for the turban. The Motor-Cycle Crash Helmets (Religious Exemption) Act 1976 exempted a Sikh wearing a turban from the law requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets, and section 11 of the Employment Act 1989 exempted turbaned Sikhs from the requirement to wear safety helmets on construction sites.^[28]​^[29] Consensus

Canada: the kirpan at school

In 2001 a twelve-year-old initiated Sikh in Montreal, Gurbaj Singh Multani, dropped the kirpan he wore under his clothes in the schoolyard. The school’s governing board refused to let him wear it, and the school board’s council of commissioners upheld the refusal. On 2 March 2006 the Supreme Court of Canada declared the decision a nullity: an absolute prohibition infringed his freedom of religion under the Charter, and the board had not shown that it impaired that freedom as little as possible, when a kirpan sealed in its sheath and worn under the clothes posed little risk. The court was unanimous in the result.^[9] Consensus Justice Charron’s reasons call religious tolerance “a very important value of Canadian society”, and are quoted below.

Armies and airports

Armies had long been the place where the turban was most visible (§8). In the United States, the Army granted individual waivers to Sikh soldiers from 2009. Captain Simratpal Singh, a West Point graduate who had cut his hair as a cadet, sued the Department of Defense on 29 February 2016 over special helmet and gas-mask tests; a federal judge halted the tests in March, and at the end of that month the Army granted him a waiver to keep his beard, hair and turban.^[30] Consensus Army Directive 2017-03, of January 2017, let brigade-level commanders approve turbans, beards and hijabs worn for religious reasons, for a soldier’s whole career.^[14] Consensus For beards the rule changed in 2026. A Defense Department memorandum of 11 March 2026 required religious facial-hair waivers to be approved by each service’s chief of personnel or higher, and required service members who already held one to submit a new request, with a sworn written statement that the belief is sincerely held and religious in nature.^[31]​^[32] Consensus

At airports after 2001 the turban became a screening question. In August 2007 the US Transportation Security Administration’s guidance named turbans for additional screening; after objections from Sikh organisations it revised the procedure in October 2007, allowing travellers to pat down their own head covering and have their hands swabbed instead.^[33]​^[34] Consensus Most countries bar the kirpan from aircraft cabins; India allows a short one (a blade of up to six inches, nine inches in all) on domestic flights, under an order of March 2022.^[35] Consensus

After 9/11

For Sikhs in America, 2001 was a turning point. Turbaned and bearded men were taken for Muslims or Arabs by people seeking revenge for the attacks of 11 September. On 15 September 2001 Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh who owned a petrol station in Mesa, Arizona, was shot dead outside it by a man who was convicted of his murder in 2003; the Arizona Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 2006.^[5] Consensus His death is usually counted as the first killing in the backlash after 9/11, and new Sikh civil-rights organisations were founded in response to the assaults, among them the Sikh Coalition, formed by volunteers in New York in September 2001.^[36] Majority

On 5 August 2012 a gunman who had played in white-power bands entered the gurdwara at Oak Creek, near Milwaukee in Wisconsin, during the Sunday preparations for laṅgar and killed six people: Paramjit Kaur, Satwant Singh Kaleka, Prakash Singh, Sita Singh, Ranjit Singh and Suveg Singh Khattra. He wounded four others, among them a police officer, and killed himself; the FBI concluded that he had acted alone, and found no evidence that any white-supremacist group had directed the attack; its statement gave no motive, which an FBI spokesman said “may never be known”. A seventh worshipper, Baba Punjab Singh, left paralysed, died of his injuries in 2020. President Obama’s statement that day noted that the attack had taken place at a house of worship.^[13]​^[37]​^[38]​^[39]​^[40] Consensus It was the deadliest attack on Sikhs in the United States. Consensus

Who is a Sikh?

The categories

Sikhs themselves use several overlapping words. An amritdhārī Sikh has taken the Khālsā initiation and keeps the Five Ks and the code (§5). A keshdhārī keeps uncut hair, men usually with a turban, without necessarily having taken amrit. A sahajdhārī, literally a “slow adopter”, follows the Gurus and the scripture but does not keep uncut hair; the word has also been used of Sikhs from Hindu Punjabi families who never took up the Khālsā form. A Sikh born to a keshdhārī family who cuts his hair is a monā, or in the codes a patit (“lapsed”).^[41]​^[1] Consensus on the words. Most Sikhs in Punjab and the diaspora are not amritdhārī; the proportion is not counted by any census. Majority

The Sikh Rahit Maryādā (1950) defines a Sikh by belief, including belief in the initiation of the tenth Guru, and requires initiation of no one; the Sikh Gurdwaras Act, the Punjab law of 1925 under which the SGPC is elected, defines a Sikh by a declaration of belief, and in amendments of 1944 and 1959 has defined the amritdhārī, the sahajdhārī and the patit separately, for the purpose of deciding who may vote and stand.^[42]​^[43] Consensus Both texts are quoted below. McLeod’s Who Is a Sikh? (1989) argued that the question has had different answers in different centuries, and that the Khālsā answer became dominant only with the Singh Sabhā (§8).^[41] Majority; Political

The sahajdhārī vote

Who elects the SGPC turned into a legal dispute. On 8 October 2003 the central government, acting under the Punjab Reorganisation Act, issued a notification removing the provisos to the Sikh Gurdwaras Act that had let sahajdhārī Sikhs register as voters. The SGPC had asked for the change, arguing that a body that governs the Khālsā’s shrines should be chosen by Sikhs who keep its form; sahajdhārī organisations answered that they had been part of the Panth since the Gurus’ time. In a judgment of 20 December 2011 the Punjab and Haryana High Court quashed the notification and left it to the competent legislature to decide. Parliament then passed the Sikh Gurdwaras (Amendment) Act, 2016 (Rajya Sabha in March, Lok Sabha in April; assent on 5 May), which removed the sahajdhārī exception from the Act itself with effect from 8 October 2003.^[7] Consensus on the sequence; Political The 2016 Act has been challenged in the High Court; this site does not comment on open cases.

The dispute is narrow in law and wide in meaning. It decides whether the institutions the Akālī movement won in the 1920s (§9) belong to the Khālsā or to everyone who calls himself a Sikh. The law now gives the Khālsā answer, for SGPC elections. Majority

Caste among Sikhs

The Gurus’ hymns reject caste as a measure of a person before God; Guru Nānak placed himself with “the lowest of the low” (quoted below), and the laṅgar seated everyone in one line. The Rahit Maryādā tells Sikhs to marry “without giving thought to the prospective spouse’s caste and descent”.^[44]​^[42] Consensus on the texts.

In practice caste survives in Sikh society, and is the subject of open argument within it. The main groups are these.^[45]​^[46]​^[1]​^[47] Consensus that it survives; Political on what that means.

• Jaṭs, the landowning agricultural caste, are the largest group in rural Punjab and have dominated the SGPC and Sikh politics in the twentieth century. Majority
• Khatrīs and Aroṛās, traditionally mercantile castes, were the Gurus’ own (all ten Gurus were Khatrīs) and have been prominent in the towns. Consensus
• Rāmgaṛhīās, from castes traditionally assigned carpentry and smithing, were prominent among the Sikhs who went to East Africa and then to Britain, and run gurdwaras of their own in several British towns. Majority
• Mazhabī and Ravidāsīā (or Rāmdāsīā) Sikhs come from Dalit castes, the first from a caste traditionally assigned sweeping and the second from one traditionally assigned leatherwork. Majority

Most Sikh marriages are arranged within caste. In many Punjab villages Dalit Sikhs have their own gurdwaras and cremation grounds, and in Britain caste names attach to some gurdwaras.^[45]​^[1] Majority Punjab has a higher share of Scheduled Castes than any other Indian state, about 32 per cent of its people in 2011, many of them Sikh.^[21] Consensus Surinder Jodhka has argued that Sikh caste is not the Brahmanical hierarchy of purity, since the scripture and the gurdwara leave no religious place for it, but a hierarchy of land and status that the Jaṭ dominance of the countryside keeps alive; Ronki Ram has shown how Dalits answer it through the ḍerās.^[45]​^[46] Majority; Contested

The ḍerās and the Ravidāsīā break

The ḍerās

A ḍerā (“camp”) is a religious centre around a living teacher. Punjab has many, some of them large: the Rādhā Soāmī Satsaṅg at Beās (founded 1891), the Ḍerā Sachā Saudā at Sirsā in Haryana (founded 1948), the Ḍerā Sachkhaṇḍ at Ballāṅ near Jalandhar, and others. They draw followers of every background, and Ronki Ram has shown how heavily Dalits, Sikh and non-Sikh, are represented among them: a ḍerā offers a place where caste does not bar a person from religious honour.^[46]​^[1] Majority For the Khālsā institutions, the problem is the living teacher. A line of human Gurus ended in 1708 (§5), and a ḍerā head who takes a Guru’s role challenges that settlement. Majority

The conflict became open in May 2007. The head of the Ḍerā Sachā Saudā appeared at a gathering dressed in a manner that Sikhs took to imitate Guru Gobind Singh, and administered a ceremony that was likened to the Khālsā initiation. The Akāl Takht and the other high priests issued an edict calling on Sikhs to boycott the ḍerā; clashes between Sikhs and ḍerā followers followed across Punjab.^[10]​^[46] Consensus on the events; Political A pardon the Akāl Takht granted in 2015 was withdrawn after protest.^[10] Consensus

The Ravidāsīā break

The Ravidāsīās, Dalits from the leatherworking caste, venerate the fifteenth-century poet Ravidās, whose forty hymns are in the Guru Granth Sāhib (§1). Many were Sikhs, or kept the Granth in their own temples (bhavans), while following the Ḍerā Sachkhaṇḍ Ballāṅ.^[47]​^[11] Majority On 24 May 2009, at a Ravidāsī temple in Vienna, six armed Sikh men attacked the ḍerā’s two leaders during a service; Sant Niranjan Dās was wounded and Sant Rāmānand Dās died of his wounds. Violent protests followed in Punjab, and in September 2010 a Vienna court convicted all six, one of them of murder.^[48]​^[49] Meanwhile, in January 2010, at Varanasi on Ravidās’s birth anniversary, the ḍerā declared a separate religion, Ravidāsīā Dharam, and began to replace the Guru Granth Sāhib in its temples with its own scripture, the Amritbāṇī, a collection of hymns attributed to Ravidās.^[11]​^[1] Consensus on the events; Political Not all Ravidāsīs followed: many still keep the Guru Granth Sāhib and call themselves Sikhs. Majority It stands with the Nāmdhārīs and Nirankārīs (§8, §10) among the breaks from the Khālsā Panth, as a break founded on a separate scripture. Majority

The Nihaṅgs

The Nihaṅgs, in dark blue with high turbans ringed with steel, are the Sikhs who most visibly keep the warrior form. They trace their orders, the Buḍḍhā Dal and the Taruṇā Dal, to the Khālsā armies of the eighteenth century (§6), and appear in force at Anandpur for Holā Mahallā in spring.^[1]​^[50] Majority The lineage is disputed: Santbir Singh (2026) argues that the Akālī order began with Akālī Nainā Siṅgh in the late eighteenth century, and that “Jathedar of Akal Takht” is a title of 1920, not an office the Nihaṅgs inherited.^[51] Contested They keep their own maryādā, giving more weight than the SGPC does to the Dasam Granth and other texts, and some keep customs the Rahit Maryādā forbids, such as sukkhā, a drink made with cannabis.^[52] Majority They are a reminder that the Rahit Maryādā of 1950 did not end the variety of Khālsā practice. Majority

The rosary

Many Sikhs keep nām simaran, the remembering of the Name, by repeating Vāhigurū, the gurmantra given at initiation. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism describes it as repeated “silently or aloud, with or without a rosary”.^[52] Consensus A rosary is a mālā, “garland”; a short one held in the hand is a simaranī (the Nihaṅgs, who give feminine words a masculine ending, say simaranā). The Mahān Kosh, the dictionary of 1930 by the Singh Sabhā scholar Kāhn Singh Nābhā (§8), gives it 27 beads and a head bead, a quarter of the full 108.^[53] No Sikh code requires one, and the Rahit Maryādā mentions the rosary only to reject it. Among the delusive observances (bharam-rūp karam) a Sikh should not put faith in, its Punjabi text lists, after the frontal mark and the sacred thread, tulsī, mālā, “basil, rosary”. The SGPC’s English version reads the two words as one item, “wearing of a necklace of the pieces of tulsi stalk”, a basil-wood rosary, and adds a note that most of the list are Hindu observances that converts kept; McLeod translates “sanctified rosaries”.^[42]​^[54] Consensus None of the older rahitnāmās that McLeod translates in the same book lays down a rule about beads.^[54] Majority

The scripture is wary of the object. Guru Nānak puts “a rosary round the neck and a mark on the forehead” among a Brahmin’s observances that are empty without knowledge of God (Āsā dī Vār, aṅg 470), and Kabīr asks:^[55]

ਕਬੀਰ ਜਪਨੀ ਕਾਠ ਕੀ ਕਿਆ ਦਿਖਲਾਵਹਿ ਲੋਇ ॥ ਹਿਰਦੈ ਰਾਮੁ ਨ ਚੇਤਹੀ ਇਹ ਜਪਨੀ ਕਿਆ ਹੋਇ ॥੭੫॥

kabīr japanī kāṭh kī kiā dikhalāvahi loi | hiradai rāmu na chetahī ih japanī kiā hoi ||75||

“Kabīr, why do you show people your rosary of wood? If you do not remember Rām in your heart, what use is this rosary?” (Salok Kabīr 75, aṅg 1368; the site’s translation.)^[56]

The same scripture makes the Name itself the rosary. Guru Arjan writes, “These two syllables, Har Har, are my rosary” (Āsā, aṅg 388), and Kabīr, “My rosary is my tongue, and Rām is on it” (Salok Kabīr 1, aṅg 1364). Manmohan Singh and Sahib Singh read a line in one of Kabīr’s hymns the same way, “a mālā at the throat, Rām on the tongue” (Āsā, aṅg 479), taking the Name on the tongue for the rosary; Sant Singh Khalsa reads it as a rosary worn at the neck.^[57]​^[58]​^[59] Consensus on the texts. Bhāī Gurdās, early in the seventeenth century, says that the true devotees of the gathering “broke the mālā and the tasbīh” and made a hundred beads the same as a hundred and eight, the counts of the Muslim and Hindu rosaries (Vār 39.11).^[60]​^[53] Majority on the reading. Kāhn Singh summed the matter up in the Mahān Kosh: “In the Sikh religion there is no rule of repeating the Name by count.”^[53] Majority

In practice some Sikhs do use beads, and two orders are known by them. The Nihaṅgs wear steel rosaries on their high turbans, and in their sarab-loh (“all-steel”) discipline even rosaries must be of steel; the Nāmdhārīs (§8) initiated by Bābā Rām Singh were marked out by a woollen rosary and white dress.^[52] Majority Beyond the Mahān Kosh’s general definitions, no survey or reliable source states how many Sikhs use a rosary, or of how many beads.

The Nanakshahi calendar

Sikh anniversaries were kept by the Bikramī calendar, which is lunar-solar: most dates move against the solar year and fall on different days from year to year, as Hindu festivals do. Pal Singh Purewal, a Sikh engineer in Canada, devised a solar calendar, the Nanakshahi, counting years from Guru Nānak’s birth in 1469 and fixing anniversaries to the solar year.^[6] Consensus

Its adoption was itself a dispute. The SGPC under Bibī Jagīr Kaur tried to introduce it from 1999, against a direction of the Akāl Takht to wait for consensus. The jathedār, Giānī Pūran Singh, excommunicated her by a hukamnāmā in January 2000, which she did not accept; SGPC members then removed him, and his excommunications were later annulled.^[61]​^[6]​^[62] Consensus On 16 January 2003 the Sikh clergy approved the calendar, and on 28 March a meeting under the Akāl Takht’s jathedār approved the final draft; the SGPC brought it in that year. As adopted, it left Guru Nānak’s birthday on the full moon of Kārtik, not in Vaisākh, and the festivals shared with Hindus, among them Bandī Chhoṛ (at Diwali) and Holā Mahallā, on their old lunar dates.^[6]​^[63] Consensus

Opposition came from the Sant Samāj and the Damdamī Ṭaksāl, who held that the old calendar was the community’s own and that the change would divide Sikhs from Hindus who keep the same festivals. In January 2010 amendments made by a two-member committee, the SGPC president Avtar Singh Makkar and the head of the Damdamī Ṭaksāl, Harnām Singh Khālsā (Dhummā), were approved by the SGPC’s executive on 3 January; they returned more anniversaries to lunar dates, and the amended calendar was released by the Akāl Takht’s jathedār on 14 March 2010.^[64]​^[12]​^[65] Consensus In 2015 the SGPC was reported to be returning in effect to the Bikramī reckoning under the Nanakshahi name.^[65] Majority Supporters of the original calendar, among them some gurdwaras in the diaspora, kept the 2003 version, so that some anniversaries are now marked on two days. Majority

At the centre is Guru Nānak’s birthday. It is kept at the full moon of the lunar month of Kārtik (October–November), following the Bālā janamsākhī; most of the earlier janamsākhīs, including the Purātan, put his birth in Vaisākh (April), and Purewal and other supporters of the solar calendar argue for that month (§0, §2).^[66]​^[67]​^[68] Contested The calendar dispute is about the authority to fix the community’s time as much as about astronomy. Majority

Women

The Rahit Maryādā gives women a place in every rite: a woman may be one of the five who administer amrit, may lead the marriage ceremony, and “only a Sikh” is required to perform kīrtan in the congregation, with no restriction by sex.^[42] Consensus on the text. Women sing kīrtan in many gurdwaras, often in set women’s sessions, but full-time posts as rāgī (hymn-singer) in the large gurdwaras are held by men; a former SGPC member told The Week in 2019 that the SGPC had no women rāgīs.^[69] Majority

The Harmandir Sāhib is the exception that matters most. Women are not among the rāgīs who sing in its sanctum day to day (they have sung there by invitation on occasion), and they do not take part in the night-time ritual of washing it.^[69] Majority In August 2005 the SGPC, under Jagīr Kaur in her second term, sought the Akāl Takht’s approval for initiated women to sing kīrtan there and to clean the sanctum; its Dharam Prachār Committee had already approved. The jathedār declined to sign a paper setting up a committee to frame a code of conduct for them, and in September rival groups of women demonstrated for and against the change outside the Akāl Takht. The proposal was not taken further.^[8] Consensus On 7 November 2019 the Punjab Legislative Assembly passed a resolution asking the Akāl Takht and the SGPC to allow women to sing kīrtan at the Harmandir; it was a request, and some members objected to the state’s interference in religion.^[70] Consensus The practice in the sanctum had not changed when this chapter was written. Majority

Both sides cite the Gurus. Supporters of change quote Guru Nānak’s verse on women, “why call her bad, from whom kings are born?” (aṅg 473, below). Doris Jakobsh has argued that the verse and others like it were read as statements of women’s equality chiefly from the late nineteenth century, and that the egalitarian reading, like the name Kaur (§5), is a modern settlement as much as an inheritance.^[71]​^[72]​^[73] Contested Bibī Jagīr Kaur’s election as SGPC president in 1999, the first woman to hold the office, came three centuries after the Khālsā’s founding. Consensus

Kartārpur and the farmers’ laṅgar

The corridor

Partition left Kartārpur, where Guru Nānak spent his last years and died, a few kilometres inside Pakistan, visible across the border from Ḍerā Bābā Nānak in India (§2, §9; and Islam §11). India and Pakistan signed an agreement on a visa-free corridor on 24 October 2019, and it opened on 9 November 2019, three days before the 550th anniversary of Guru Nānak’s birth by the lunar reckoning, with ceremonies on both sides of the border.^[15] Consensus It was closed during the pandemic from 2020 and reopened in November 2021. On 22 October 2024 India’s Ministry of External Affairs announced that the agreement had been extended for five years, but the corridor has been closed by India since 7 May 2025, and the government told Parliament in July 2026 that it remained suspended.^[74]​^[75]​^[76] Consensus on the dates. In October 2026 the Punjab Legislative Assembly passed a resolution asking the central government to reopen it.^[77] Consensus

Laṅgar at the borders

In the farmers’ protests against India’s farm laws (November 2020 to December 2021), gurdwara committees, ḍerās and volunteer groups ran laṅgars for the camps at the borders of Delhi until the protest ended in December 2021.^[16] Consensus; Political on the protests themselves, which this site does not assess.

Canada and India, 2023

On 18 June 2023 Hardeep Singh Nijjar, president of the Guru Nānak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia, was shot dead outside it. India had designated him a terrorist under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in July 2020; his supporters described him as a Sikh activist who campaigned for Khālistān.^[78]​^[79] Political On 18 September 2023 the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, told the House of Commons that Canadian security agencies were pursuing, in the words widely reported, “credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India” and the killing, and the foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, announced the expulsion of an Indian diplomat, whom she described as the head of Indian intelligence in Canada. On 19 September India’s Ministry of External Affairs rejected the allegations as “absurd and motivated” and expelled a Canadian diplomat.^[19]​^[20]​^[79] Political In July 2026 an indictment unsealed by US prosecutors in Los Angeles charged Lawrence Bishnoi, the leader of a criminal gang, held in jail in India, and his associate Satinderjeet Singh (Goldy Brar) with ordering the killing; it does not allege a role for the Indian government. An RCMP deputy commissioner, Lisa Moreland, told CBC that there was “no evidence to suggest through this organized crime investigation and the charges and the indictment laid forward that Indian officials were charged or involved”; CBC noted that this differed from earlier statements by Canadian officials, among them the RCMP’s commissioner in 2024.^[80]​^[81] Consensus on the statements; Political This site records the statements and does not assess them, or the court cases in Canada and the United States that followed.

What changed and what didn’t

The baseline is §2: the teaching of Guru Nānak in the hymns, a community gathered round a teacher at Kartārpur, and, in the tradition’s telling, a shared meal. Set beside it, the Sikh world of the 2020s has kept the core and added almost everything around it.^[1]​^[82] Majority

Majority What is continuous is the scripture and, as the tradition tells it, the shared meal; what is new is nearly everything that marks who belongs.

The evidence ledger

Primary sources

What is absent

• A count of amritdhārī Sikhs. No census asks, and estimates of the share of initiated Sikhs are guesses. Consensus
• A completed Indian census since 2011. All current Indian figures are fifteen years old; the count of the population is due in February 2027. Consensus
• A US census count of Sikhs. The census asks no religion question, and the 2020 race write-in is not a count. Consensus
• A single Sikh calendar. Two versions of the Nanakshahi and the old Bikramī reckoning are all in use. Consensus
• A usual count for a Sikh rosary. Beyond the Mahān Kosh’s general definition of a hand rosary, no survey or reliable source says how many Sikhs use one or how many beads it usually has. Consensus
• A decision on women’s kīrtan in the sanctum. The SGPC proposed it in 2005 and the Punjab Assembly asked for it in 2019; the Akāl Takht has not approved it. Majority
• Comment on open court cases, including the challenge to the 2016 Act and the prosecutions in Canada and the United States over Nijjar’s killing. This site describes them only as facts.

Debates

Who should count as a Sikh?

Contested; Political

Is Sikh caste “caste”?

Contested; Political

Which calendar?

Contested

Further reading