Punjab

Punjab is the land of the five rivers of the Indus basin. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism traces the name to the Persian panj (five) and ab (water). Since 1947 the name covers two halves, an Indian state and a province of Pakistan, and the Panth's history belongs to both.

In the 2011 census India counted about 20.8 million Sikhs, 1.7 percent of its people. About 16 million of them live in Punjab, where Al Jazeera reports they are about 58 percent of the state. It is the only Indian state where Sikhs are a majority.

Key moments

• 1765: the Sikh misls were firmly established. Ranjit Singh, master of Lahore from 1799, then united the territory north of the Sutlej; his state was annexed by the British in 1849.
• 1947: Partition. East Punjab (95,687 sq km, 12.6 million people in 1951) stayed with India and West Punjab (158,347 sq km, 18.3 million) went to Pakistan. The Encyclopaedia's account says about 3.5 million Hindus and Sikhs moved east and about 5 million Muslims moved west, and that estimates of the dead run from 200,000 to 1,000,000.
• 1956: the princely-state union PEPSU was merged into Punjab.
• 1 November 1966: after the Punjabi Suba movement Punjab was divided again. The southern and south-eastern districts became Haryana, hill areas went to Himachal Pradesh, and Chandigarh became a Union Territory.
• October 1973: the Akali Dal's working committee adopted the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, asking for an autonomous region within the Union of India.
• 1984 and after: the army entered Sri Harmandir Sahib in June, and after Indira Gandhi's killing on 31 October mobs killed Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere. A decade of armed struggle and counterinsurgency followed. Jaswant Singh Khalra's investigation estimated that more than 25,000 people were disappeared and killed across Punjab between 1984 and 1995.
• 2020 to 2021: farmers from Punjab and neighbouring states camped around Delhi for more than a year. Parliament passed the bill repealing the three farm laws on 29 November 2021.

Water. The Centre told the Rajya Sabha, as The Tribune reported on 22 July 2026, that Punjab drew 26.27 billion cubic metres of groundwater in 2025, 156.36 percent of what can be extracted each year and the highest rate of any state. Of its 153 assessment blocks, 111 are over-exploited.

What it means to the Panth. Punjab is where the Panth's institutions sit: Sri Harmandir Sahib and Sri Akal Takht Sahib at Amritsar, with the SGPC's offices in the same complex. The Anandpur Sahib Resolution of 1978 listed Chandigarh, the Punjabi-speaking areas left outside the state and control of the river headworks among its demands, and all three remain live questions.