Minorities Commission of India

The Minorities Commission was a Government of India commission to which Sikhs and others brought their complaints in the early 1980s. Wikipedia names a "Minorities Commission 1978" as the body that came before the National Commission for Minorities, which the Union Government set up under the National Commission for Minorities Act, 1992. The 1993 notification named Sikhs among its first five communities, and its functions include monitoring the safeguards given to minorities and looking into complaints of deprivation of their rights. This page covers the Commission as Sikhs met it in 1981 and 1982, through documents printed in the first volume of Gurmit Singh's History of Sikh Struggles. He says in his preface that he has included excerpts from its report.

Key moments in those documents

• 4 to 7 August 1981: the Commission resolved that preventing Sikhs from wearing kirpans on Indian Airlines flights violated Article 25 of the Constitution, and asked that the Ministry of Civil Aviation and the Home Ministry be written to.
• 10 November 1981: after the hijacking of an Indian Airlines Boeing to Lahore on 29 September 1981 by five Sikh youths, the Commission asked its Member, Gyani Sujan Singh, to examine the kirpan question in that light. His note says there was a move by the Government to ban kirpans on national and international flights.
• 30 April 1982: Gyani Sujan Singh's note recommended that Explanation I to Article 25, which says that wearing and carrying kirpans is part of the profession of the Sikh religion, should not be touched.
• 3 May 1982: at its 54th meeting, on a representation from Sant Singh, honorary secretary of the Chief Khalsa Diwan, Amritsar, the Commission resolved to forward his report to the Government for favourable consideration. It said that misuse of kirpans by some misguided persons should not lead to a total ban, which would be contrary to Article 25.
• The Terai: the Commission took up a report in The Spokesman Weekly of 27 July 1981 that Punjabi settlers in the Terai of Uttar Pradesh were being threatened with eviction, although it had received no complaint. The Uttar Pradesh Government told it that a June 1981 Ordinance protecting the tenancy rights of tribal people applied to any non-tribal settler, whatever his religion, and that about 16,000 acres had been occupied without authority after June 1969. The Commission's press statement said there seemed no cause for panic among legally authorised settlers, and that it would consider any genuine grievance.

Gurmit Singh also prints, under the heading Home Ministry's Note on Khalistan and labelled Annexure XVIII, a note prepared by the Secretariat on the Sikh demand for Khalistan.

Where it stands: Wikipedia says that in December 2025 the posts of chairperson and members of the National Commission for Minorities were vacant, and that a petition in the Delhi High Court seeks to have the body reconstituted.