Gandhi tells Sikhs at Gurdwara Sis Ganj that the Congress will not betray them

Who: Mahatma Gandhi and a Sikh congregation in Delhi. Gurmit Singh's History of Sikh Struggles prints Gandhi's reply, which begins by answering Sardar Madhusudan Singh, who had asked for an assurance that the Congress would do nothing to alienate the sympathies of the Sikhs.

What: Gandhi spoke at Gurdwara Sis Ganj in Delhi. He told the congregation that Sikhs had no reason to fear the Congress would betray them, because the moment it did so it would seal its own doom and that of the country. He pointed to the resolution the Congress had passed at its Lahore session that it would not endorse any settlement of the minority question that failed to satisfy the minorities concerned, and said he could not see what further assurance the Congress could give. On the flag, he said no blame attached to the Congress: the design had been suggested by him and the Congress had not formally adopted it. He added that the Sikhs are a brave people who know how to safeguard their rights by the exercise of arms if it should ever come to that, and that if the Congress played false afterwards the Sikhs could settle scores with it, because they held the sword. A footnote to Kapur Singh's speech, printed in the same book, says that when Gandhi was asked what the Sikhs might do in case of betrayal, he said they could take their kirpans in hand with perfect justification before God and man. In the same speech Gandhi said that if thirty lakh Sikhs obstructed Indian independence, they would be dealt with non-violently.

The date is given differently. The chronology of Gandhi's life at Gandhiserve lists a speech at Sisganj Gurdwara on 26 February 1931, days before the Gandhi-Irwin agreement of 5 March 1931. Kapur Singh dates the gathering 16 March 1931 and says Gandhi's reply was published in Young India of 19 March 1931.

Where: Gurdwara Sis Ganj in Chandni Chowk, Delhi. Gurmit Singh says the shrine stands where Guru Tegh Bahadur was publicly executed in 1675.

Why it mattered: Sikh writers have kept the speech as a promise on the record. Kapur Singh quoted it in a footnote to his speech in Parliament on 6 September 1966, opposing the Punjab Reorganisation Bill, as one of the assurances given to the Sikhs. Gurmit Singh argues in the same book that the Congress promises of 1929 and 1931 were later broken when the Constituent Assembly withdrew Sikh safeguards in 1949.