On 14 October, Giani Harpreet Singh, the chief of the Akal Takht, the highest temporal seat of Sikhism, called for a ban on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, during an interaction with journalists in Amritsar. Singh’s remark came in the backdrop of a statement by Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief, during an annual Sangh event the previous week, stating that “Bharat is Hindustan, a Hindu Rashtra” and that “all Bharatiyas are Hindus.” In response, Singh noted, “The remarks by RSS leaders are not in the interest of the nation. It would hurt and draw a new line of division in the country and destroy it.”

Historically, the RSS’s vision for a Hindu Rashtra has been in conflict with the Sikh faith and the Akal Takht. In 1985, the RSS had floated a Sikh wing called the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat. In the following excerpt, from an April 2018 piece on the RSS’s position on a separate religion for the Lingayats, Hartosh Singh Bal, the political editor at The Caravan, traced the backlash that the Sangat faced in Punjab when it began to advocate its ideology—the inseparability of Sikhs and Hindus. Bal wrote, “In Punjab, where the mix of religion and politics is often combustible, the Sangat’s activities remain one of the biggest sources of mobilisation for Sikh hardliners.”

The RSS’s ideologue and second chief, MS Golwalkar’s view of the Sikhs as “communalists” who are “tearing asunder” the golden thread of Hinduism has been the basis for much of the RSS’s activities among the Sikhs in Punjab. In 1985, at the height of the crisis in Punjab, the RSS floated a body called the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat. Initially, the Sangat was supposed to focus on spreading the message of a shared Sikh and Hindu heritage but in truth its aims were to propagate what Golwalkar had articulated: the inseparability of Sikhs and Hindus. The journalist Dhirendra Jha, in his book Shadow Armies, devotes a chapter to the Sangat (much of the work of the Sangat noted here relies on Jha’s exposition). Jha writes:

Rashtriya Sikh Sangat: An introduction, a booklet in Punjabi published by the Sangat’s office in Ludhiana after the completion of its first decade … explains the “conspiracy” of the British government and Macauliffe (historian of the Sikhs) to “artificially” create an independent identity for Sikhs … It further claims that during “the Muslim period”…the Sikhs “considered themselves Hindus” and their Gurus never thought of forming a separate religion. “Now it is our responsibility,” the booklet says…, “to understand the root cause of the problem and to make people aware of the truth.

As the militancy in Punjab came to an end and a Bharatiya Janata Party government came to power in the state in a 1997 alliance with the Akalis, the Sangat more overtly followed its goals. At one of its meets, a resolution was passed, demanding “that a magnificent temple of Shri Ram should be made.” It was a move that had no resonance among the Sikhs, but was reflective of the ideology that the Sangat was advocating.