The Sikh voting behaviour isn't any different wherever they are a minority within India. (Image for representation: Reuters)

In Canada, the Sikhs largely support Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party; they support the Democrats in the United States and Labour in the United Kingdom.

The political forces they support overseas share one thing in common -- respect and political accommodation of diversities -- ethnic, racial, religious and sexual.

So, the Sikh voting behaviour isn't any different wherever they are a minority within India.

DELHI'S STRAINED TIES WITH SIKHS

Delhi is home to the largest concentration of the community in any city outside Punjab.

But historically, the same Delhi hasn't been too kind to Sikhs or to Punjab. Guru Tegh Bahadar was executed opposite the Red Fort under Aurangzeb's orders in 1675.

The Mughal emperor's troops from Delhi and his 21 royal Hindu allies in the hills surrounding Anandpur attacked Guru Gobind Singh multiple times. In 1704, Aurangzeb's governor in Sirhind savagely executed the Guru's two younger sons.

Banda Singh Bahadar, who broke down 700 years of slavery and established the first sovereign state in Hindustan in seven stormy years starting 1709, was tortured to death in this city in 1716.

In independent India, New Delhi under Jawaharlal Nehru and his successors Lal Bahadur Shastri and Gulzarilal Nanda kept rejecting the Sikh proposal for a Punjabi-speaking state -- with 57 per cent Hindus and 43 per cent Sikhs -- on linguistic lines of Andhra formed in 1953, Kerala and Karnataka in 1956, and Maharashtra and Gujarat in 1960.

New Delhi's open hostility towards the statehood of Punjab ended only after the 1965 war with Pakistan. But even then the Congress government of a free republic truncated Punjab, carving Himachal and Haryana out of it on November 1, 1966. Uttar Pradesh, seven times its size back then, was left untouched.

Under then PM Indira Gandhi, New Delhi unleashed the might of the Indian army on the Darbar Sahib (the Golden Temple) to flush out a few hundred militants from inside in 1984. The same year in October, the capital city witnessed the massacre of thousands of Sikhs on its streets as the police looked the other way.

Guided by New Delhi's iron-fisted policy against insurgency in Punjab, thousands of Sikhs were "disappeared" by security forces or killed in staged encounters the 1980s and the 1990s as various rights groups alleged.

For the many Indian liberals in New Delhi, the perpetrators of police and paramilitary atrocities against the Sikhs are still super cops and gallant officers and their political masters the statesmen.

SIKHS AND BJP/BADALS

The community's support to the BJP, especially outside of Punjab, stemmed from anti-Congress-ism.

In Delhi, for instance, then Chief Minister Madan Lal Khurana enjoyed a good rapport with the city's Sikhs.

But when Bill Clinton came to India in March 2000, the first by a US President in 22 years, his visit during the Vajpayee rule began with the killing of 35 Sikhs in Jammu and Kashmir's Chattisinghpora.

In 2006, Clinton, in an introduction to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's book, blamed "Hindu militants" for the attack. The reference, which was edited out by the publishers later, left the Sikhs across the world in a state of shock.

When the Badals, who appoint Takht jathedars and heads of Sikh religious administrations, appointed an IPS officer accused of anti-Sikh breaches as Punjab's DGP, their popularity in their core constituency suffered a blow.

It reached its nadir in 2015, when the state under their rule was rocked by the desecration of the Guru Granth Sahib and subsequent police firing on peaceful Sikh protestors.

The Badals never recovered politically and were routed in the 2017 state elections.

As that happened, their alliance partner, the BJP, escalated Hindutva aggressively as its main ideological plank.

The Sikhs were not the direct target of the Hindutva resurrection under the BJP rule starting 2014.

But the way the hawks in the Modi government and some of the so-called liberals allied together in undermining the Sikh diaspora during Prime Minister Trudeau's visit in 2018, their attitude did hurt and alarm the community.

SIKHS AND AAP

The Sikhs have been the first victims of ultra-majoritarian politics under the Congress. They are committed ideologically to side with the disenfranchised. All that drove the community to support the Kashmiris post revocation of Article 370. They also showed up at the Shaheen Bagh in full solidarity with the Muslims in their anti-CAA agitation.

Politically, Arvind Kejriwal's AAP has come across as a natural choice for the Sikhs of Delhi because its doctrine embodies governance and not sectarian issues.

That explains the Aam Aadmi Party's impressive victories in Sikh strongholds of the city both in 2015 and 2020 elections.

CAN AAP REVIVE IN PUNJAB?

So does the 2020 verdict mean there could be an AAP revival in Punjab? Not anytime soon.

The Modi phenomenon, which seeks to bump up the Hindi heartland polity to the centre stage, has spurred regional sentiments across India, Punjab being no exception.

AAP -- which is headquartered in Delhi, which has its own history with the Sikhs and Punjab -- might have a long journey to cover before it fills the space that the downfall of the Badals has created in the state.

But yes, the Aam Aadmi Party's sterling success will certainly push governance to the top of political agenda in Punjab, as it will elsewhere.

If Arvind Kejriwal nurses Punjab ambitions in the time to come, he has to undo the mistakes he committed in the past and a) build local leadership with decision-making powers, and b) prepare his strategy beforehand to counter possible communalisation of politics.

His rivals, who claim to be secular outside of the state, are capable enough to consolidate Hindu vote against him by raising the Khalistani bogey. That's what precisely happened in 2017.

SIKH SHORTAGES IN BJP

In all pragmatism, the BJP also needs the Sikhs on its side in order to maintain some semblance of fair dealing with minorities.

Remember, the pilgrim passage between Dera Baba Nanak and Sri Kartarpur Sahib across the border was inaugurated not during a thaw but in the middle of heightened tensions between India and Pakistan. Only a strong-willed leader like Prime Minister Narendra Modi could throw open the historic corridor, which he did.

But the BJP suffers from a terrible shortage of credible Sikh faces.

The Sikhs don't really identify with Sikh representatives with an RSS background.

But they'd likely encourage the BJP to accommodate their own representatives instead, representatives who are relatively young, educated and well-versed with Sikh identity issues.

Some of the current turbaned faces in the BJP don't fit the bill. On the contrary, they drive the community further away.