A Committee Instead of an Elected Body

In June 1984 the Indian Army stormed the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar to remove the militant leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his followers, an operation the government called Blue Star and much of the Sikh community experienced as an assault on its holiest site. The Akal Takht itself, the seat of temporal Sikh authority standing opposite the Golden Temple, was heavily damaged in the fighting and rebuilt afterward by the Indian government, a fact many Sikhs found as objectionable as the damage itself: reconstruction by the state that had caused the damage was, for many, no reconstruction at all.

Against that backdrop, a Sarbat Khalsa gathered at the Akal Takht in early 1986 and moved against the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, the elected body that had administered Sikh gurdwaras since 1925 and that many at the gathering considered too accommodating toward the government in the aftermath of 1984. The assembly passed gurmatas dissolving the SGPC outright and replacing it with a five-member Panthic Committee, and separately called for the Akal Takht to be torn down and rebuilt by the community's own hands rather than left standing as the government had restored it. More than 100,000 Sikhs are reported to have attended, a scale that gave the gathering real claim to speak for a significant portion of the community, whatever the institutional dispute over its authority.