SGPC general election 1979

Who: The Shiromani Akali Dal, which had held the SGPC for years; Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale's followers, among them Bhai Amrik Singh, president of the All India Sikh Students Federation; the Dal Khalsa; and, as backers of the challengers, Giani Zail Singh, Darbara Singh and the Congress, according to Khushwant Singh and Grewal.

What: This was the first election to the SGPC General House since January 1965, when, Grewal writes, Sant Fateh Singh's group won 90 seats and Master Tara Singh's 45. Sangat Singh says the elections due in 1971 were put off by Indira Gandhi's Congress and became possible in 1979 because the Janata Party held power at the Centre and in Haryana and shared it in Punjab. The sources opened for this page do not give the polling date.

The sources count the contest differently. Khushwant Singh writes that Zail Singh and Darbara Singh courted Bhindranwale and encouraged him to put up candidates against the Akalis, that he put up forty, and that all but four were defeated. Grewal says the Dal Khalsa fought the Akalis without success, and that Bhindranwale fielded about forty Congress-backed candidates of whom only four were elected. Sangat Singh, citing the journalist Surjeet Jalandhary, says Bhindranwale put up only one candidate, Amrik Singh, from Beas, against Jiwan Singh Umranangal, who resigned his ministerial post to contest, that Dal Khalsa and Jagjit Singh Chauhan's group put up about 45 candidates, and that only four of them won, with 136 seats going to the Akalis. Tarlochan Singh, in an article on SikhNet in October 2022, says only six candidates put up by Bhindranwale were elected, and that Sanjay Gandhi told Congress leaders including Zail Singh to help his group.

In a footnote Khushwant Singh reports, on the authority of Kuldip Nayar's Tragedy of Punjab (p. 31), that Sanjay Gandhi had approved Zail Singh's choice of Bhindranwale as the more aggressive of two sants, and that Kamal Nath, then an MP, told Nayar the Congress "would give him money off and on".

Where: The Sikh religious electorate of the SGPC, in Punjab.

Why it mattered: Khushwant Singh reads the result as showing that, whatever his following as a preacher, Bhindranwale did not count for much in Sikh politics at that time. Grewal reports the Akali dominance as unbroken. Gurmit Singh, writing in 1981, says Bhindranwale emerged as a possible leader during the gurdwara elections and the Nirankari struggle but lacked the resources to meet the challenge from what he calls the Akali trinity, which had the Punjab Government and the SGPC at its disposal. Grewal adds that in the elections of 1980 Bhindranwale supported some of the Congress candidates.