Akal Takht excommunicates SGPC chief

CHANDIGARH, JANUARY 25: It was an apparently innocuous attempt by an NRI Sikh to fix the dates for all Sikh religious festivals that start...

CHANDIGARH, JANUARY 25: It was an apparently innocuous attempt by an NRI Sikh to fix the dates for all Sikh religious festivals that started it all. This 8220;calendar debate8221; not only caused a schism among the entire Sikh community, it pitted high priests against each other and on Tuesday boiled over when Akal Takht Jathedar excommunicated SGPC chief Jagir Kaur from the Sikh Panth.

The Nanakshahi Jantri was formulated by Canada-based Pal Singh Purewal who sought to fix the dates of Gurpurabs for all time to come, somewhat like fixing Christmas Day as December 25 every year. Purewal attempted to shift Gurpurabs from the traditional Bikrami calendar which is lunar-based, to the solar calendar and arrived at dates for 33 different Gurpurabs. His reasoning was simple. The birth anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh often falls twice in one year and does not appear in the subsequent year. So why not fix the date for his birth anniversary and all other Gurpurabs?

Purewal worked out these dates by an interpolation of the Gregorian calendar and the lunar calendar. An attempt was made to find out the exact dates of Gurpurabs as they occurred in history. The new calendar so prepared was called the Nanakshahi Jantri and handed over to the SGPC.

The SGPC, then headed by Gurcharan Singh Tohra, passed it in the meeting of the general house without much of a debate. The Institute of Sikh Studies too organised a series of interactions of Purewal with scholars.

But when the time came to implement, differences surfaced. Between the Sikh high priests, the various Sants, scholars, the political leadership as well as the entire community.

The Sant Samaj, a conglomeration of various Sikh religious deras, was the first to oppose saying it would stick to the traditional dates. Faced with reservations from the two Takhts of Patna Sahib and Hazur Sahib, Bhai Ranjit Singh, the then Akal Takht Jathedar, stalled the implementation. Giani Puran Singh, the present Jathedar, did the same and insisted that the birth anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh be celebrated on January 14, which was arrived at by the lunar calendar. Jagir Kaur, however, announced she was going ahead with the celebrations on January 5, which had been fixed by the Nanakshahi calendar. This was the flashpoint, following which Jagir Kaur was excommunicated from the panth on Tuesday for not honouring the hukum of the Akal Takht.