On June 26, members of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee—or SGPC, the elected apex body managing the religious affairs of Sikhs—assembled at its headquarters in the Teja Singh Samundri Hall at the iconic Golden Temple complex in Amritsar. It was a special general house session of the SGPC convened with a single-point agenda: to condemn the recent amendments in the Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1925, pushed by the Bhagwant Mann-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) regime in Punjab.
Just a week earlier, the state assembly had cleared a bill to make it mandatory for the SGPC to broadcast Gurbani from the Golden Temple uninterrupted by advertisements and available to all media platforms across the world for free. Mann justified the move, claiming it would liberate the telecast of Gurbani from the undue control of “modern-day s”, alluding to the officially appointed tithe collectors in early Sikhism in an edgewise swipe at Shiromani
