The British demolish the Rakab Ganj wall and Sikhs agitate for years

Who: British officials building New Delhi, among them Chief Commissioner W. M. Hailey; the mahant of the gurdwara; Sikhs across Punjab and abroad; Harchand Singh of Lyallpur, whose weekly Khalsa Akhbar led the protest; the Chief Khalsa Diwan, whose secretary Sir Sundar Singh Majithia backed the government; and later Sardul Singh Caveeshar of the Central Sikh League.

What: Gurdwara Rakab Ganj marks where the body of Guru Tegh Bahadur was cremated, after Bhai Lakhi Shah Vanjara and his son burned their house to hide the cremation. In May 1913 the wall round the gurdwara was pulled down to straighten the road to the new Viceregal Lodge. Rs 39,133 had been deposited for the land in a trust controlled by the mahant. Officials first called it a garden wall, and Hailey proposed an iron railing in its place.

Protest grew slowly, then widely. Telegrams and petitions went to the Viceroy and other officials, some from Sikhs in Burma, China, Hong Kong and the United States. On January 27, 1914 Harchand Singh visited the site and published a pamphlet. In February diwans in many towns demanded that the government rebuild the wall at its own cost. The Chief Khalsa Diwan accepted the railing, and in April its leaders forced Harchand Singh to leave a Jullundur conference when he raised the wall. On May 3 the Diwan held a meeting of about 250 hand-picked people at Amritsar Town Hall. The government threatened Harchand Singh with prosecution and in July confiscated the security of Khalsa Akhbar. The war stalled the agitation.

Afterwards Caveeshar proposed a shahidi jatha of 100 volunteers to reach Delhi on December 1, 1920 and rebuild the wall, and about 700 volunteered. The jatha never marched. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says the authorities agreed with a Delhi Khalsa Diwan committee to a new wall of an approved design and to hand the gurdwara to that body, and prints the date as March 1920, though it places the planned march later that year. Another entry says the government yielded and rebuilt the wall at public expense. A Sikh history calendar gives April 28, 1921.

Where: Gurdwara Rakab Ganj, Raisina, beside the new imperial capital at Delhi; the agitation ran across Punjab.

Why it mattered: A demand to rebuild a shrine wall brought Singh Sabha Sikhs into open conflict with the Chief Khalsa Diwan, whose stand critics called a "stab in the back of the community", and in the end the government gave way.