Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Sikh Assemblies gathers three exercises of one institution, the Sarbat Khalsa, the general assembly of the Khalsa summoned at the Akal Takht in Amritsar, whose resolutions taken before the Guru Granth Sahib bind the whole community; it is an institution rather than a single event, at its strongest in the eighteenth century and repeatedly revived since.

The Sarbat Khalsa of 1748, held at Amritsar on Baisakhi, is the institution's defining early exercise: Nawab Kapur Singh brought together some sixty five independent Sikh fighting bands, then contesting Mughal control of the Punjab piecemeal, into eleven misls under a single combined force, the Dal Khalsa, with Jassa Singh Ahluwalia given its supreme command, a reorganization adopted as a gurmata binding on the whole Khalsa once passed before the Guru Granth Sahib.

The Sarbat Khalsa of 1986, convened at the Akal Takht in the aftermath of the Indian Army's Operation Blue Star and the violence that followed it, drew more than 100,000 Sikhs. It passed gurmatas dissolving the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, the elected body that had administered Sikh gurdwaras since 1925, replacing it with a five member Panthic Committee and calling for the state-rebuilt Akal Takht to be reconstructed by the community's own hands; that Panthic Committee went on to issue a Declaration of Khalistan the same year. Between these two exercises of the same assembly lies the whole range of what a Sarbat Khalsa can do, from military reorganization to a direct challenge to the Indian state.