Gurbani Broadcast from Sri Harmandir Sahib

For most of its early history, the Gurbani sung and recited at Sri Harmandir Sahib reached a television audience only rarely. India's state broadcaster began carrying occasional live telecasts from September 1959, but only on Gurpurbs, the major anniversaries of the Sikh Gurus, and a handful of other significant religious occasions each year. For most Sikhs beyond Amritsar, hearing the Golden Temple's own kirtan meant traveling there.

That changed after Operation Blue Star, the June 1984 Indian Army assault on the Golden Temple complex that killed hundreds and left deep wounds across the Sikh community. In its aftermath, All-India Radio began broadcasting the Gurbani live, continuously, every single day, a shift from occasional festival coverage to an unbroken daily presence in Sikh households that has never stopped since. What began as a handful of annual broadcasts became, almost overnight, one of the longest continuously running religious broadcasts anywhere, carrying the temple's own daily worship into homes across Punjab and, eventually, across the Sikh diaspora.

Continuous broadcast created a new question nobody had needed to answer before: who gets to carry it, and on what terms? The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, the elected body that has governed the Golden Temple and Sikhism's other historic gurdwaras since the 1920s, holds that authority, and for two decades it exercised it by granting exclusive rights to a single commercial television channel at a time. The channel ETC held the rights from September 2000, paying into the SGPC's education fund each year; those rights passed to the PTC network, owned by G-Next Media and linked to the Shiromani Akali Dal's Badal family, in 2007, and were formalized in July 2012 into an irrevocable, exclusive, worldwide agreement set to run eleven years.

When that agreement neared its 2023 expiry, the arrangement itself became the controversy. Critics, including dissident voices inside the SGPC, argued that handing exclusive control of a sacred broadcast to a single politically connected channel for over a decade looked less like stewardship than monopoly. In July 2023 the SGPC responded by launching its own YouTube channel and declaring, for the first time, that Gurbani broadcast rights would be reserved to the committee alone rather than licensed out to any commercial carrier. The change did not end the dispute. As of 2025, a rival broadcaster had begun its own unauthorized telecast, and the SGPC had issued it a legal notice, an unresolved argument over who, exactly, is entitled to carry Sikhism's own daily worship to the world.