Akali Dal owes its birth as a political organisation
to the Sikh movement for control over its religious institutions during the
British colonial rule in India. Before the British annexation of Punjab in 1849 and the eventual merger of Punjab with the rest of colonially occupied India,
Punjab existed as a sovereign state for 50 years under the rule of a Sikh
emperor Ranjit Singh. During the pre-Ranjit Singh era, the eight-eenth century
witnessed a long and bloody period of armed conflict between the Mughals rulers and
the Sikh rebels.
The control of many important religious shrines of the Sikh
community, the most important being the birth place of Guru Nanak, the founder
of the Sikh faith, had during this period passed on into the hands of a pacifist
sect amongst the Sikh community. This pacifist sect’s control of Gurdwaras, the
Sikh religious places, suited both the Mughal rulers as well as the Sikh
guerrilla bands. The Mughals rulers by accepting or even supporting the pacifist
Sikh pacifist Sikhs control of the Gurdwaras wanted to discourage the rebellious
tendency amongst the Sikhs while the guerrilla Sikh fighters knew that they
could not logistically manage to run the gurdwaras while involved in armed
combat against the rulers and tacitly agreed to let the pacifist sect keep
managing the gurdwaras. The Sikh community was also respectful to the sect
since its founder Sri Chand was one of the sons of Guru Nanak. Therefore, the
control of gurudwaras by the sect was allowed to continue even duringthe Ranjit
Singh era.
The agreement of the mainstream Sikh community to
the sect’s manage-ment of gurdwaras came to an end when it became widely known
in the early twentieth century that the management indulged in financial and
religious malpractices.A movement to replace that management by demo-cratically
elected representatives of the Sikh community achieved success and the
volunteers who participated in the movement were called Akali. Bringing
together all the Akali volunteers under one umbrella organisation resulted in
the founding of Shiromani Akali Dal in December 1920.
The major achievement of
the Akali move-ment was the creation of a central management committee (SGPC
i.e.Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandhak Committee) to look after the gurudwara. The
election to this committee was to involve the entire Sikh community leading to
this committee being called the mini-parliament of the Sikhs. This historical
association of Akali Dal with the founding of this com-mittee has had a
long-term impact on the public image and perception of Akali Dal as an
organisation primarily concerned with politics of religious issues concerning
the Sikhs. This perception is certainly historically grounded but it also acts
as a barrier in building views of Akali politics that transcend this religious
focus.
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