This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Why did the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb have the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, executed in Delhi in 1675? The question has been argued over for more than three centuries, and it matters for how the whole Mughal-Sikh conflict gets read, as religious persecution or as a more ordinary contest for territory and power that happened to run along religious lines.
The traditional account, which Guru Gobind Singh himself set down in the Bachittar Natak not long after his father's death, holds that Tegh Bahadur died specifically defending the right to religious practice: he had traveled north to protest the forced conversion of Kashmiri Pandits under Aurangzeb's rule and offered himself in their place. This reading treats the execution as continuous with the earlier killing of Guru Arjan in 1606, part of a settled Mughal pattern of religious intolerance toward a growing rival faith.
Joseph Davey Cunningham, an East India Company officer who wrote the first serious English-language history of the Sikhs in 1849, offered a different account. Cunningham argued that Tegh Bahadur had built up an independent territorial and revenue base in his years leading the Panth, levying contributions and sheltering fugitives from Mughal authority in ways that made him a political threat regardless of doctrine, and that Mughal action against him is better read as a provincial power struggle than a holy war.
Modern historians, including J.S. Grewal in the standard academic history of the Sikhs, generally decline to choose between the two accounts outright, treating Tegh Bahadur's martyrdom as carrying real religious and real political weight at once, each reinforcing rather than canceling the other.