The Punjabi Suba and 1984

After partition, Master Tara Singh and the Akali Dal asked for a Punjabi-speaking state. In 1955 the States Reorganisation Commission recommended instead that Punjab absorb Himachal Pradesh and the union of Patiala and the East Punjab States, and a Sikh convention at Amritsar on 16 October 1955 rejected this. A march at Amritsar in February 1956 drew at least 100,000 people by the estimate of the writer Michael Brecher.

Talks produced the Regional Formula of 1956, which split the state into Punjabi and Hindi regions with their own committees. In May 1960 a larger campaign began. Official figures say about 30,000 people went to jail, and Akali figures say 57,129.

Sant Fateh Singh fasted for twenty-two days from 18 December 1960. Master Tara Singh fasted for forty-eight days in 1961 and gave up without winning the demand. A panel of Panj Piare declared he had broken his vow and set him a penance of cleaning shoes and dishes. Sant Fateh Singh set up a rival Akali Dal in 1962 and won the 1965 gurdwara elections.

Sant Fateh Singh planned another fast and self-immolation for September 1965, and put it off when war with Pakistan broke out. Sikh soldiers and border villagers played a prominent part in that war, and on 23 September the government set up committees to consider the demand. Hukam Singh's parliamentary committee backed a Punjabi-speaking state, Indira Gandhi's government accepted this on 23 April 1966, and Punjab and Haryana became separate states on 1 November 1966. The sharing of Chandigarh, river waters and some Punjabi-speaking areas stayed unresolved.[EoS][EoS][EoS][Grewal]

Punjab led India's Green Revolution, in which high-yielding seed varieties were first introduced in the state in 1966-67. Grewal says the policies of Chief Minister Partap Singh Kairon had laid the ground before his fall in 1964, and that consolidation of landholdings was finished in 1969, with better power, irrigation and rural roads.

The gains were uneven. By the 1970s farmers with more than ten acres, about 23 per cent of landholders, worked nearly 65 per cent of the farmland. Poor peasants, who were 57 per cent of landholders, worked about 15 per cent. Many Sikhs left to find work elsewhere: by 1971 more than a fifth of India's Sikhs lived outside Punjab.[Grewal][Web]

After heavy election losses in 1971 and 1972, the Akali Dal set up a committee whose programme was adopted at Anandpur Sahib and became known as the Anandpur Sahib Resolution. The text asked for more powers for the state and for Punjabi-speaking areas to join it. It also became the most disputed document in Sikh politics, and the government's White Paper of 1984 itself lists several versions.

On Vaisakhi in 1978 Sikhs marched on a Sant Nirankari convention at Amritsar, and Nirankari guards opened fire. The Encyclopaedia counts thirteen Sikhs killed and seventy-eight wounded. The marchers included followers of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, head since 1977 of the Damdami Taksal, and the Akhand Kirtani Jatha. The accused Nirankaris were acquitted on 4 January 1980.

Violence grew from 1981. Lala Jagat Narain, a newspaper owner, was assassinated on 9 September 1981, and Bhindranwale was arrested and then freed for lack of evidence. In 1982 Sant Harchand Singh Longowal's Akali Dal moved its campaign over river waters and other demands to Amritsar as the Dharam Yudh, and Bhindranwale joined it. Talks with Indira Gandhi's government did not reach a settlement.

Grewal counts about sixty violent incidents in 1982 and nearly 140 in 1983, including attacks on police and public figures and the murder of Hindu bus passengers near Dhilwan in October 1983. There was also mob violence against Sikhs in Haryana in February 1984. President's rule began on 6 October 1983, and Bhindranwale moved into the Akal Takht on 15 December, where former Major-General Shahbeg Singh prepared its defences.[EoS][Src][EoS][EoS][Grewal]

The government called in the army on 2 June 1984, and on 3 June Punjab was sealed and placed under curfew. Many pilgrims were in the Darbar Sahib complex for the anniversary of the martyrdom of Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji, which fell on 3 June that year. Human Rights Watch says 41 other gurdwaras were raided at the same time.

Fighting began on 4 June according to Grewal and Human Rights Watch. The main assault came on the night of 5 to 6 June, and tanks were used against the Akal Takht on 6 June. Bhindranwale's body was found at the Akal Takht, in the basement according to the Encyclopaedia and on the ground floor according to the White Paper. The Encyclopaedia says the Akal Takht was destroyed, and Human Rights Watch reports heavy damage across the complex.

The government's White Paper of 10 July 1984 says troops had strict orders to protect the holy buildings, faced heavy fire from fortified positions, and killed no women or children. Grewal writes that many pilgrims, including women and children, were killed in crossfire, that troops shot some young men whose hands were tied, and that some prisoners suffocated. Human Rights Watch says thousands were believed killed, most of them pilgrims.

The attack outraged Sikhs of many political views. Two Congress Sikh MPs resigned, and Sikh soldiers in several places mutinied and marched toward Amritsar. The government rebuilt the Akal Takht with the help of the Nihang Santa Singh, who was excommunicated in July 1984. Sikhs rejected that building, and it was pulled down in early 1986 and raised again by voluntary labour.[Src][EoS][Grewal][Web][EoS][EoS]

Indira Gandhi was shot by two of her Sikh guards, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, on 31 October 1984. Violence against Sikhs started in Delhi that evening. The Nanavati Commission's report says the first attacks came from angry crowds, and that from the morning of 1 November the pattern changed. It describes mobs brought in by bus, supplied with kerosene and an inflammable powder, shown which houses were Sikh, and men beaten and burned alive with tyres around their necks.

The most contested questions are how many were killed and who organised it. The official count and other estimates are set out below. Attacks also took place in Kanpur, Bokaro and other cities.

Three groups gave accounts of responsibility. A joint inquiry by two civil rights bodies, PUCL and PUDR, concluded in November 1984 that attacks were planned, with Congress(I) politicians and officials involved. Human Rights Watch calls them pogroms orchestrated by senior politicians and police officers. The Mishra Commission, reporting in 1986, had found a spontaneous reaction that turned into riots through anti-social elements and police passivity. It ruled out the Congress(I) as a party, while finding that some of its members took part on their own.

The Nanavati Commission reported in 2005 that local leaders and workers of the Congress(I) had incited or helped the mobs, that police were negligent, and that there was no evidence Rajiv Gandhi or other top leaders had organised the attacks. Some critics rejected the report. The activist Uma Chakravarti, quoted by the 1984 Sikh Archive, called it a whodunit without an ending.[Src][Src][Web][Grewal][EoS][Web]

Rajiv Gandhi and Sant Longowal signed an accord in July 1985. Sant Longowal was shot dead on 20 August at a gurdwara at Sherpur. The Akalis won the September elections and formed a government under Surjit Singh Barnala, but the accord's terms on Chandigarh and water went unfulfilled and his government was dismissed. Punjab was under President's Rule from 1987 until early 1992.

The insurgency claimed thousands of lives. Militants fought for an independent Khalistan and, according to Human Rights Watch, massacred civilians, attacked Hindu minorities, set off bombs and assassinated political leaders. The South Asia Terrorism Portal records 21,677 deaths between 1981 and 2019, nearly all before 1994, with 5,265 in 1991 alone. It counts 11,799 civilians, 1,761 security personnel and 8,117 militants.

The security forces' record is also heavily disputed. Human Rights Watch reports arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial killing and enforced disappearance of thousands of Sikhs between 1984 and 1995, under laws such as the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act and a system of rewards for police. K. P. S. Gill, Director General of Police in the early 1990s, denied any systematic abuse and called the human rights campaign propaganda, according to Human Rights Watch. Wikipedia's account credits police operations under him with ending the mass killings.

Jaswant Singh Khalra, a human rights activist, used crematoria records to reveal more than 6,000 secret police cremations in a single district. Police abducted him on 6 September 1995 and killed him that October. The government later acknowledged 2,097 illegal cremations in Amritsar, and six officers were convicted of his murder in 2005. Chief Minister Beant Singh was assassinated in 1995, in what is often counted as the last major militant attack of the period.[EoS][EoS][Grewal][Web][DB][Web]

The Ahuja Committee, set up after the Mishra Commission, found in 1988 that 2,733 Sikhs were killed in Delhi. Further committees followed, and the Nanavati Commission, appointed in May 2000, reported in 2005. Human Rights Watch says that no senior politician or police officer named by survivors had been held criminally responsible by 2007, when the Central Bureau of Investigation said it would close its case against some Congress politicians.

In August 2005 Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the country's first Sikh prime minister, told Parliament that he had no hesitation in apologising to the Sikh community and the nation. His minister Jagdish Tytler, whom the report had named, resigned.

The Delhi High Court overturned a 2013 acquittal in December 2018 and sentenced former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar to life imprisonment for the killing of five relatives in a Sikh family at Raj Nagar. He received a second life sentence in 2025 for the killing of two men at Saraswati Vihar, and was acquitted or discharged in several other cases. He died on 20 August 2026 while serving his sentence.

The name for these events is itself disputed. The Jathedar of the Akal Takht called them a Sikh genocide on 15 July 2010, and the Ontario legislature passed a similar motion in 2017, which the Indian government opposed. Official Indian usage has mostly been riots, though Prime Minister Modi spoke of genocide in 2019.[Src][Web][Web][Web][Web][Web][Web]