Dr Karminder Singh Dhillon

Dr Karminder Singh Dhillon is a Malaysian Sikh writer and speaker and a retired civil servant. Asia Samachar records that he was born in 1960 at Teluk Anson, Perak, holds a doctorate in political science, spent 32 years in the Malaysian civil service, and retired on 28 April 2020 as deputy secretary general (management) at the Ministry of Defence. He is the son of a granthi. His book Dilemmas of Development, on Malaysian foreign policy in the Mahathir era, was published by NUS Press.

Key moments

• 1985: begins work in kirtan, katha and parchar (Asia Samachar).
• 2015: former secretary of the Sikh Naujawan Sabha Malaysia, he gives a course on Anand Sahib and Ardaas in Petaling Jaya (Asia Samachar).
• November 2020: publishes five books at zero profit and with no royalty to himself: The Hijacking of Sikhi and Understanding volumes on Sidh Goshat, Anand, Asa Di Vaar and Nitnem (Asia Samachar).
• 17 January 2022: gives a two-hour webinar on the thesis of The Hijacking of Sikhi (Asia Samachar).

His work: He is joint editor of The Sikh Bulletin (USA) and director of the Sikhi Vichar Forum, which promotes what it calls authentic Sri Guru Granth Sahib based Sikhi. Asia Samachar describes him as a writer who takes on difficult and controversial topics.

His arguments, which are his own: In The Hijacking of Sikhi he argues that Sikhi as practised has drifted from the Guru Granth Sahib into a clergy-run religion of ritual and miracle, and that the drift was deliberate (Sikhi Vichar Forum). In a 2021 interview he said the Nirmalas "did more to distort Sikhi than propagate its proper understanding" and that classical texts such as Suraj Parkash were composed by Nirmalas. In a series on the Dasam Granth, republished by the Forum in 2017, he argued that its primary deity is Mahakaal and that the Bachittar Natak passage on the tenth Guru's earlier life, Dushat Daman, was later tied to Hemkunt, a link he questions.

His readings are disputed. A reader of the 2021 interview wrote that his rejection of the afterlife and reincarnation conflicts with Gurbani (Asia Samachar, reader comment, May 2021).