Guru Nanak, Punjab & Partition: A Shared Sikh-Muslim History | Shiv Inder Singh

A State That Keeps Surprising Delhi

Senior journalist Shiv Inder Singh opened his conversation with Nous host Bushra Khanam Fahad by pushing back on how Punjab tends to be seen from outside the state — reduced, in his telling, to bhangra beats and a Bollywood soundtrack. Singh, who has covered Punjab for more than two decades, argued that its political character cannot be read off those images. What defines the state, he said, is something built over centuries: a shared inheritance, or sanjhi virasat, that keeps resurfacing in its politics however much outsiders misjudge it.

Singh traced that inheritance back to the confusion colonial administrators recorded when they first tried to count Punjab's population by religion. British census officers, he said, could establish caste easily enough but struggled with religion, because the same people would register as Hindu in one census and Sikh in the next, worshipped at Muslim shrines regardless of their own professed faith, and generally blurred boundaries the colonial state wanted fixed and countable. It was the British, in his account, who hardened those categories — tying government jobs and reserved seats to a declared religious column, and eventually making a specific article of Sikh faith a condition for army recruitment.

Guru Nanak's 'Neither Hindu Nor Muslim'

For Singh, that blurring reflected something older and more durable than administrative confusion. He located its roots in Guru Nanak's teaching that there is neither Hindu nor Muslim, and in Sufism — together, he said, the two intellectual traditions that gave Punjab its shape, joining people to each other ahead of any religious identity.

He backed the claim with specific history. Guru Nanak's lifelong companion on his travels, he noted, was a Muslim, Bhai Mardana. The foundation stone of the Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, was laid by the Sufi saint Mian Mir. Sikh tradition holds that Emperor Akbar bowed at Guru Amar Das's court and later granted the land on which Amritsar itself stands, and that Humayun, after a military defeat, sought Guru Angad Dev's blessing. Even the land beneath the historic Nankana Sahib gurdwara, Singh said, was gifted by a Muslim chieftain and still carries his name. Casting the history of the Sikh gurus and the Mughals purely as communal war, Singh argued, misreads a relationship that was, for long stretches, one of close alliance rather than enmity.

A Solidarity That Keeps Showing Up

That inheritance, Singh argued, still shapes Punjab's contemporary politics. He pointed to how Punjabis mobilized after Kashmir's Article 370 was revoked in 2019, joined protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, and above all sustained the year-long farmers' protest against the 2020 farm laws — a movement that, in his account, could not have reached the scale it did without Punjab's participation, even though farmers from Haryana and Uttar Pradesh also took part and paid a heavy toll, with more than 700 protesters dying over the course of the agitation.

Manufacturing an Enemy

Singh described what he sees as a deliberate strategy by the BJP to fracture that unity — elevating figures who look Sikh but, in his phrase, end up setting the BJP's own agenda. He cited Deep Sidhu's sudden prominence during the farmers' protest and the rapid rise of Amritpal Singh, a preacher who, Singh said, arrived from Dubai with a visa that eluded even credentialed foreign journalists covering the same protests, and who went on to win a parliamentary seat while in custody.

He linked this to the amplification of Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a diaspora figure Singh said was barely known even among committed Khalistan sympathizers six years ago — until an Indian government ban and heavy domestic media coverage made him a national reference point. Each time Pannun issued a threat, Singh said, Indian media gave it oxygen, and the government pointed back at Pannun as proof of a Khalistani threat animating the farmers' movement itself. The state and the fringe separatist rhetoric, in Singh's description, functioned as each other's complement.

Two Different Rulebooks

Asked why Sikh dissent and Muslim dissent get treated so differently, Singh offered a distinction he called central to RSS and BJP ideology. Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists, he said, are treated as being of this soil — recoverable, embraceable, even electorally useful, which is why Amit Shah will wear a turban in Punjab but would never wear a skullcap. Muslims and Christians, by contrast, are cast as permanently foreign. The design toward Sikhs, Singh argued, is to embrace the community so completely that its separateness eventually dissolves, while Muslims are targeted far more openly — through lynching, he said, in a way that has become almost routine in political rhetoric. That asymmetry, in his account, is not accidental: Hindutva can afford to make temporary enemies of a small, geographically concentrated minority it ultimately wants to absorb, but it needs Muslims to remain permanently outside for the project to hold together at all.

Caste, Volatility, and a Wary Electorate

The conversation also turned to Punjab's caste and electoral landscape. Singh put the state's Dalit population above 32 percent — proportionally the highest of any Indian state — but fragmented across roughly three dozen sub-castes with real internal divisions, which he said is part of why Kanshi Ram had to build the Bahujan Samaj Party's base in Uttar Pradesh rather than in his home state of Punjab.

Singh argued Punjab's voters have grown wary of every established party in turn: rewarding the Aam Aadmi Party in the 2022 state election out of exhaustion with Congress and the Akali Dal, then just as quickly punishing AAP's own candidate in a Sangrur bypoll only months later, despite the party having just won 92 of 117 assembly seats. That volatility, Singh said, is exactly what worries him — a political vacuum that progressive forces need to fill, because if they don't, right-wing ones eventually will.