Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu is the southern state where a small group of Dalit activists has taken up Sikhism and built a party around it. Onmanorama reported in October 2024 that the Bahujan Dravida Party (BDP), described as a party of mostly Tamil Sikhs who follow Periyar and Kanshi Ram, began as a movement in 2019 and became a party by 2023. Its national president, Jeevan Singh, a Supreme Court lawyer born in Thoothukudi, began studying Sikhism and reciting Gurbani in 2014 and was initiated in 2023.

Key moments

• 2019: the BDP began as a movement. When Jeevan Singh told a Punjab gurdwara that he wished to become a Sikh he was asked to grow a beard and return after six months.
• 2020 to 2021: Seetha Kaur, convenor of the party’s women’s wing, said the farmers’ protests, in which Punjab’s farmers stood united for 16 months, inspired her and others to take the step; she was initiated in 2023.
• 2024: the BDP fielded seven Tamil Sikh candidates in Tamil Nadu in the Lok Sabha election, among them Seetha Kaur at Tenkasi and Rajan Singh at Kanyakumari, and Jeevan Singh stood in Hoshiarpur in Punjab (Onmanorama).
• March 2026: the BDP allied with T. Velmurugan’s Tamizhaga Vazhvurimai Katchi for the state assembly election, to contest 10 constituencies with many SC, ST and OBC voters. Jeevan Singh said the DMK and AIADMK had failed the lower castes and that Sikhism is needed in Tamil Nadu (The News Mill, with ANI).

What it means today. The movement is small. Onmanorama counted around 25 practising Tamil Sikhs, who meet at Jeevan Singh’s home at Korampallam in Thoothukudi, which he has turned into the School of Miri Piri. The sources opened do not give the number of Sikhs in Tamil Nadu or the BDP’s result in 2026. What they show is a Dalit political movement turning to the Sikh Panth because, as its members put it, Sikhism could end caste.