Thread by @FriedrichPieter

#RSS4Punjab means disaster, violence, & eradication of the unique call to liberty & equality of the Sikh faith whose holiest shrine, Harmandir Sahib, stands in Amritsar, Punjab. The highest earthly body of the Sikhs, the Akal Takht, stands openly & boldly against the #RSS.

In October 2019, reacting to RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s statement that India is a Hindu nation, Akal Takht Jathedar (leader) Harpreet Singh called for a ban on the organization, explaining, “What the RSS is doing will create divisions in the country.”

Within the Sikh community, the Sangh has been sowing division since its inception. Its chief tactic is to deny the existence of Sikhi as a separate religion. Despite outcry from the Panth, the Sangh insists Sikhs are nothing more than another variety of Hindu.

“If any community in India is Hindu beyond cavil or criticism it is our Sikh brotherhood,” wrote V.D. Savarkar, who conceived Hindutva — the RSS’s guiding ideology — as a religious nationalist political doctrine.

“As soon as you point at a Sikh who was true to his Guru, you have automatically pointed at a Hindu who was true to the Guru for, before being a Sikh, he was and yet continues to be a Hindu,” he declared.

“It is by ceasing to be Sikhs alone that they may, perhaps, cease to be Hindus.” Sikh culture, honor, and interests, he claimed, “are but our own culture and honor and interests.”

It was a “serious mistake” to speak of “Hindus and Sikhs” (italics added). Calling Guru Gobind Singh “poet, prophet and warrior of our Hindu race and our Hindu culture,” he told Sikhs they could “find no just reason to resent the application of the word ‘Hindu’ in their case.”

M.S. Golwalkar, who served as RSS chief from 1940-1973, amplified Savarkar’s perspective as he declared, “The great religious masters, Guru Nanak and his successors, laid the foundation of the Hindu upheaval exhibiting itself in the warlike Sikhs.”

The Sikh Gurus, according to Golwalkar, “rejuvenated the Hindu Nation” by forging a “band of heroes for the protection of Hindu Society.” The “Sikh sect” originated “to contain the spread of Islam in Punjab.”

Labeling Sikhs as a sampradaya (tradition) “in the Hindu fold,” he insisted they were nothing more than the “devoted and heroic ‘sword arm’ of Hinduism.”

Golwalkar accused Sikhs who “declare that they are separate from Hindus” of being “communalists in Hindu Society” guilty of having “torn asunder” the “golden thread” of Hinduism.

Time and again, the RSS proves that the threat it poses to the Panth (the Sikh path) — and its right to exist as a distinct entity — is not just theoretical.

In June 1984, wrote journalist Shiv Inder Singh, “The RSS and the BJP were first in line of those pressuring the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government at the centre to take military action in the Golden Temple.”

Furthermore, “a number of BJP and RSS leaders were involved” in the November 1984 Sikh genocide.

Calling it “a fact that the Sangh Parivar wants to forget and hide,” Singh explained, “At least 49 members of the BJP and Sangh are named in the 14 first information reports registered at the Delhi City police station after the massacre.”

In 1985, following the genocide, the RSS adopted assimilation as a tactic when it founded a new branch — the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat. The group’s aimed, wrote journalist Hartosh Singh Bal, “to propagate what Golwalkar had articulated: the inseparability of Sikhs and Hindus.”

In 2001, the group was roundly rejected by Sikh leadership. “We don't consider them Sikhs,” said Jathedar Joginder Singh. “Anybody with a beard and a turban can't be called a Sikh.”

Noting that the RSS “wants to convert everybody to Hinduism,” he warned, “Its ideology is dangerous not only for the Sikhs but for all other religions.”

In 2004, when the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat planned to celebrate the 400th anniversary of installation of the Guru Granth in the Golden Temple, the Akal Takht issued a hukamnama declaring the group “anti-Panthic” and instructing Sikhs to disavow it.

In 2017, Jathedar Gurbachan Singh reaffirmed the boycott. “We cannot allow assimilation of Sikh history into [an]other religion,” he stated. “It cannot be tolerated. Sikhs are a separate community with separate identity. We have our own unique history.