A YOUNG MAN sat shivering next to a tea shack in Kapurthala district’s Nizampur village. It was about 4.30 am in the early hours of 19 December 2021, when Amarjit Singh took him into the gurdwara next door, where he was a caretaker. Jasbir Kaur, who runs the tea shack, witnessed this and thought that perhaps Amarjit was helping the youth, as he looked “mentally upset” and hungry. But soon, Amarjit started streaming a live video on Facebook, calling for Sikhs to reach the gurdwara as fast as possible, because, he claimed, the young man intended to commit beadbi—sacrilege.
Given the recent context in Punjab, invoking “beadbi” would have immediately created alarm. In 2015, under a coalition government of the Shiromani Akali Dal and the Bharatiya Janata Party, Punjab saw a spate of sacrilege incidents. Parkash Singh Badal, the chief minister from the SAD, had called the cases “a deep-rooted conspiracy aimed at inciting communal tension and destabilising the peace in Punjab.” The sacrilege incidents of 2015 led to protests, violence and widespread discontent across the state, because successive governments failed to bring the culprits to book.
In 2021, the atmosphere was tense across Punjab. For over a year, the mainstream media and the ruling BJP had portrayed Sikhs as separatists, because they were leading vociferous protests against three farm laws that the union government had introduced the previous year. Just a month before the farm laws were revoked, in November 2020, Nihangs lynched a Dalit farm labourer on the allegation that he planned to desecrate a Sikh scripture at Singhu—the largest protest site on Delhi’s borders. The alleged intention to commit sacrilege was again labelled as a conspiracy, even by the leaders of the protests.
But, in my investigation into cases of sacrilege in Punjab, spread over two years, I found that few cases, barring the ones in 2015, could be labelled a conspiracy. In fact, multiple police officers told me this year that, over the past nine years, they could not find evidence of a larger conspiracy in any case.