What Cannot Pass
Where the life of the Panth truly rests — a reflection in the month of remembrance
On Ang 1, in Japji Sahib, Guru Nanak Sahib says:
ਆਦਿ ਸਚੁ ਜੁਗਾਦਿ ਸਚੁ ॥
ਹੈ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਹੋਸੀ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ॥੧॥
Aad sach, jugaad sach, hai bhee sach, Naanak hosee bhee sach.
Plain-English sense: True in the primal beginning, true through the ages, true even now — and, Nanak, true hereafter.
Each June, Sikhs remember the 1984 army attack on Sri Harimandar Sahib and Sri Akal Takht Sahib. This is a reflection on why that attack — for all its horror — could not end the Panth.
The question that returns each June
Every June the Panth grieves. We remember the assault on Sri Harimandar Sahib and the breaking of Sri Akal Takht Sahib, and we remember those who fell. And every June, beneath the grief, a question returns: how has this people lasted?
The bottom line is simple: the Panth does not live because of worldly success, political recognition, numbers, wealth, or public admiration. Those may be fruits. They are not the root. The root is Sach — the Eternal Reality of the One — to which Guru joins us through Shabad and Naam. What is fastened to that cannot be ended by an army, an empire, or an age.
I was fifteen when our plane landed at Amritsar. We went to Darbar Sahib that night. I had been brought there as a small child, but those visits I cannot remember. This was the first time I truly saw it. Something in me was lit there. It was awe, and it was love.
In the weeks that followed, we travelled across Punjab to the great Gurdwaras. At Takht Sri Kesgarh Sahib in Anandpur, I was up in the Amrit Vela for Asa di Var and present for the darshan of the shastars preserved and revered there in connection with Guru Gobind Singh Sahib Ji and the Khalsa. The joy and energy they stirred in a boy from England were visible to those around me.
From there we went far south by train, first to Takht Sri Hazur Sahib at Nanded, and then further still. Days on the rails, among ordinary Indian travellers and a few fellow pilgrims, all moving across that vast country. I had turned sixteen by the time we flew back, but the love kindled there came back with me. It had been lit by the Guru.
Two years later, the places I had visited and the people through whom that love had reached me were attacked. June 1984, and then the organised anti-Sikh violence that followed after 31 October. Between fifteen and seventeen I grew up. I came to understand our history, and to see how others have seen us and placed us — and that placing I have never accepted.
So when the question returns — how have we endured? — I notice the answer that fills the air. We endure, it is said, because we rose: a Sikh became Prime Minister, we sit in parliaments and boardrooms, our langar has fed the world and the world has noticed. All of it is true. And all of it mistakes the fruit for the root.
This is written to say where the root actually is. It begins where our Guru begins — not with what we have built, but with what was true before we built anything, and will be true long after:
ਹੈ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਹੋਸੀ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ॥
Hai bhee sach, Naanak hosee bhee sach.
True even now — and, Nanak, true hereafter.
What cannot pass
Look again at the line our Guru opens with.
ਆਦਿ ਸਚੁ ਜੁਗਾਦਿ ਸਚੁ ॥ ਹੈ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਹੋਸੀ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ॥੧॥
Aad sach, jugaad sach, hai bhee sach, Naanak hosee bhee sach.
Plain-English sense: True in the primal beginning, true through the ages, true even now — and, Nanak, true hereafter.
Before the line says anything about us, it has already said the thing that matters: there is a Sach that does not begin and does not end, that no age brings into being and no age takes away.
Notice what kind of word endurance becomes once it is set beside this. We speak of the Panth “surviving”, as though survival were something a people achieves by its own strength — by being hardy enough, clever enough, numerous enough to outlast its enemies. But the Sikh’s endurance is not of that kind. It is not that we are strong. It is that we are held by what cannot pass.
A people anchored to the aad sach does not last because it is mighty. It lasts because the One it is fastened to was never in danger of ending.
This is the quiet reversal at the centre of Sikhi, and it changes everything that follows. The strength is not ours and was never meant to be. Guru Nanak Sahib does not begin by telling us what we can withstand. He begins by naming the One who simply is — ਹੈ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ, hai bhee sach — present tense, this moment, through every age, when the Takht is broken and when it is rebuilt.
The army that came in June could end lives and break stone. It could not touch the hai bhee sach, because the hai bhee sach was never theirs to reach.
I once saw a small image of this in water. Far south of Punjab, at Bidar, Sikh tradition remembers Guru Nanak Sahib bringing sweet water from rock for people who had none. A spring still flows there, and the place is remembered as Gurdwara Sri Nanak Jhira Sahib. I drank from it. Rulers have passed, seasons have worn the rock, but the spring remains a living reminder: what the Guru gives does not run dry.
And so the question “how have we endured?” turns out to have been asked from the wrong end. It assumes the Panth is the thing under examination — will it last, has it lasted, what kept it going? But the Sikh does not generate the lasting. The Sikh joins it.
We do not create our own endurance. We receive it from Guru. It is the continuity of Sach, shared with a people who fasten themselves to it. Take a person who measures the Panth by its visible strength, and a hard enough blow will convince them we are finished. Take a person who knows what we are fastened to, and no blow can convince them of any such thing — because what holds us does not pass, and ਹੋਸੀ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ, hosee bhee sach: it shall be true still.
The Guru who did not leave
If Sach does not pass, the next question is the one a grieving people actually asks: but is it here?
It is little comfort to be told that Truth is eternal if Truth is also absent — far off, behind some veil, reached only after this life. The Sikh’s answer is not that we climb up to an absent Truth. The answer is that Guru joins us to Sach through Shabad and Naam, and the Guru is present in Shabad.
On Ang 982, under the heading ਨਟ ਮਹਲਾ ੪ ॥, Guru Ram Das Sahib says:
ਬਾਣੀ ਗੁਰੂ ਗੁਰੂ ਹੈ ਬਾਣੀ ਵਿਚਿ ਬਾਣੀ ਅੰਮ੍ਰਿਤੁ ਸਾਰੇ ॥
ਗੁਰੁ ਬਾਣੀ ਕਹੈ ਸੇਵਕੁ ਜਨੁ ਮਾਨੈ ਪਰਤਖਿ ਗੁਰੂ ਨਿਸਤਾਰੇ ॥੫॥
Bani Guru, Guru hai Bani, vich Bani Amrit saare. Gur Bani kahai sevak jan maanai, partakh Guru nistaare.
Plain-English sense: Bani is Guru, and Guru is Bani; within Bani is Amrit. The Guru speaks Bani; the servant accepts it, and the manifest Guru carries the servant across.
This is not merely metaphor or nostalgia. It is the plainest statement of where our Guru is: in the Shabad, now, addressing whoever opens to it.
This is why, for a Sikh, the events of 1984 could not be the ending they were meant to be. An army can reach stone. It can reach bodies. It cannot reach the Shabad, for the Shabad is not contained by any building and is not reducible to any wall.
Sri Akal Takht Sahib could be broken and devastated — and it was — but the Guru it stood before was untouched, because the Guru is Shabad Guru Granth Sahib Ji, the living word, and not the masonry near which that word was read.
They struck the seat. They did not reach the Timeless One to whom it bore witness.
Our tenth Guru settled this for all time at Nanded in 1708, vesting the Guruship not in a body that could be killed, but in Shabad Guru Granth Sahib Ji. The Panth remembers the command as Guru Maneyo Granth.
From that day, the Guru of the Sikhs is Shabad Guru Granth Sahib Ji. The Panth has authority only when it gathers under that Guru, listens, and obeys.
This was the most far-sighted of gifts: a Guru no assassin’s blade, no emperor’s order, no army’s entry could remove. One cannot martyr a Shabad. One cannot exile the aad sach. The continuity of the Panth was placed, by the Guru’s own hand, beyond the reach of every force that has since tried to end it.
I have stood at that place. On the banks of the Godavari at Takht Sri Hazur Sahib, where our tenth Guru left his earthly form and, as the Panth remembers, gave the Guruship to Shabad Guru Granth Sahib Ji. As a boy I had already stood at Kesgarh, where the Khalsa was revealed. Now I stood where the Guru was received, for all time, as the living Shabad.
Two years later I would see the third of these seats, Sri Akal Takht Sahib, broken. But what I had travelled all that way to be near was never the masonry of any of them. It was the Guru given at Nanded — and that, no army reached.
The Guru had not moved, does not move, and ਹੋਸੀ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ, hosee bhee sach, will not move. What is present as Shabad cannot be taken.
This is the second half of the answer: not only does Sach not pass — Guru has not left the Panth.
The throne answers the question
There is one more thing to see, and the army that came in June saw it without understanding it.
The seat they broke and devastated was Sri Akal Takht Sahib.
Hear the name.
Akal — the Timeless, the Deathless — is a name of the One.
Takht is a throne.
They had turned their guns upon the Throne of the Timeless.
In the first years of his Guruship, our sixth Guru, Guru Hargobind Sahib, raised this throne facing Sri Harimandar Sahib and gave visible form to miri and piri — temporal responsibility beside spiritual authority. The platform itself announced what empire could not comfortably tolerate: Sikh sovereignty does not descend from any earthly throne. It is held from the Akaal. No Mughal granted it. No republic grants it. And what no earthly power has the standing to give, no earthly power has the standing to take away.
On Ang 6, in Japji Sahib, Pauri 27, Guru Nanak Sahib says:
ਸੋ ਪਾਤਿਸਾਹੁ ਸਾਹਾ ਪਾਤਿਸਾਹਿਬੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਰਹਣੁ ਰਜਾਈ ॥੨੭॥
So paatisaahu saahaa paatisaahib, Naanak rahan rajaaee.
Plain-English sense: He is the Emperor, the Emperor over kings, the Sovereign of sovereigns; Nanak, we abide in His Will.
Sri Akal Takht Sahib bears witness to His throne. Every earthly throne — Mughal or modern — is a tenant’s seat beneath it.
This is the answer the throne itself gives to the question we began with. We asked how the Panth has endured, and we are tempted to answer by pointing to our standing in the world — a Sikh at the head of a government, our names in parliaments, our service admired.
But our standing was never there to begin with. It is not a seat we have climbed towards in the world’s order. It is a throne we were given — the Throne of the Timeless — and it sits beyond the reach of every order the world can build or break.
A charter may protect a Sikh, and we may be glad of it. But no charter confers a Sikh’s dignity, for that dignity was conferred long before, and from far higher up.
Our own history shows it even where sovereignty took worldly form. At Nanded, Guru Gobind Singh Sahib met Madho Das, the recluse who became Banda Singh Bahadur, and sent him towards Punjab under the Guru’s command to confront tyranny.
Notice the direction of it. Sovereignty was not seized by a strong man who then claimed the Guru’s blessing. It was conferred through Guru’s hukam upon one who submitted. Among Sikhs, rule descends from the Guru. It is not climbed towards through worldly success.
So when they broke the building, they did the very thing one does who mistakes the fruit for the root. They struck the throne’s housing and believed they had struck the throne. But the throne belongs to the Timeless, and the Timeless does not pass. ਹੋਸੀ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ, hosee bhee sach — it shall be true still.
You may shell a building in Amritsar.
You cannot unseat the Timeless.
The love was real
That journey took many days, going and returning. We travelled in every class the trains had, and by bus and coach when no ticket could be had in advance. Again and again along the way there was love. Strangers made room for us on crowded benches, gave up their own seats when space ran short, talked with us through the long hours — Sikhs and non-Sikhs alike, and it did not matter which.
Every day was new.
Every day was an adventure.
The world was on that train too. One night, half asleep, I felt hands at my wrist working my watch loose. My father came down from the upper bunk in a single movement, and the thief was gone. The grasping was real.
But so was what I saw a few days later. A Sikh couple travelling near us had kept their distance, cool towards us. Then their money was taken, everything they carried. When my parents learnt of it, they did not pause over the coldness. They gave — money, and whatever the couple needed to go on.
I was young, and I learned something on that train I have not unlearned: you give because the Guru teaches giving, not because warmth was returned to you.
The hand opens to the one in front of you.
That is all.
So when the organised anti-Sikh violence came later in 1984, I could not at first understand it. How does a land in which I had seen so much of that — the strangers, the seats given up, the open hands — turn in a single season to organised hatred, to Sikhs dragged from homes and trains and killed?
The boy I was could not hold the two together.
I can hold them now, because the Guru holds them.
When love appeared on those trains, it was not something to boast of as our own achievement. It was a glimpse of the Jot the Guru shows us when hearts turn towards compassion. The hatred was real, and it wounded us beyond telling. We carry our dead from those days as witness for as long as the Panth shall last.
But the hatred was of the world, and the world passes. For a Sikh, such love is not self-made; it is Guru-given, and it flows from the life of Shabad and Naam. What the Guru joins to Sach does not pass: ਹੋਸੀ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ, hosee bhee sach — it shall be true still.
That is why the hatred, for all its horror, does not get the final word on what we are. The open hand on the train has the final word.
The Guru has it.
What continuity actually is
What, then, keeps a people?
Not the things we are tempted to count.
A people is kept by what it is fastened to, and Guru has fastened the Sikh, from Guru Nanak Sahib’s first breath of Bani, to the Sach revealed by Shabad and remembered through Naam.
That is the whole of it.
Everything else we are proud of grows from there — or it grows from nothing.
We are sometimes told that we must learn our survival from other peoples: that we need their institutions, their networks, their careful machinery of memory, if we are to last. There is no shame in learning from anyone. But let us be clear that the architecture of our continuity was not borrowed and does not need to be. It was given, and it stands on gifts we already hold.
Shabad — the living Guru, present in Shabad Guru Granth Sahib Ji, the same word in every land and every century.
Sangat — the gathered Panth, drawn together not by committee power, but by Guru. And from Sangat comes a way of meeting the stranger: the open hand, the shared seat, the refusal to let need pass unseen.
Naam — the Guru-given remembrance of the One, by which the Sikh lives in relation to Sach.
It is Naam we are most in danger of forgetting, because it is inward, and the inward root is the part you cannot see.
Langar, seva, kirat, public respect, and Sikh names in high places are real fruits. But fruit does not keep the tree alive. The root is Guru-given life: Sach revealed by Shabad, remembered through Naam. Kirat and seva flow from that, or they become only labour and charity.
A Panth that keeps the fruit and forgets the root will, in some season that strips away its high places, believe it has lost itself — for it was measuring itself by the wrong thing all along.
A Panth living from Naam cannot lose itself, whatever else it loses, because what holds it does not pass.
This is why the question we began with — how has this people endured? — was answered before it was asked.
We did not endure because we were strong, or clever, or at last admired. We endured because Guru joined us to ਹੈ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ, hai bhee sach, the Sach that is, and ਹੋਸੀ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ, hosee bhee sach, the Sach that shall be — present to us through Shabad, remembered through Naam, sovereign from a throne no army can reach.
They could break a building.
They could not break that.
They never could.
I was a boy whose love was lit at the feet of his Guru, and who grew to watch the places and people through whom that love had first reached him come under attack. I know now what I could not have said then: the love was never mine to lose, nor theirs to take. It was the Guru’s gift; it came through Shabad and Naam; and the Sach hosee bhee — shall be.
That is where the Panth’s life comes from: Sach revealed by Shabad, remembered through Naam, lived in Sangat.
That is where it has always come from.
And that is why it does not end — not because we cannot be struck, but because what we are held by was never within reach of the blow.
Verification
Checked 7 June 2026.
Each Gurbani line quoted, with Ang and attribution:
ਆਦਿ ਸਚੁ ਜੁਗਾਦਿ ਸਚੁ ॥ ਹੈ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਹੋਸੀ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ॥੧॥ — Japji Sahib, opening salok, Ang 1, Guru Nanak Sahib.
ਬਾਣੀ ਗੁਰੂ ਗੁਰੂ ਹੈ ਬਾਣੀ ਵਿਚਿ ਬਾਣੀ ਅੰਮ੍ਰਿਤੁ ਸਾਰੇ ॥ ਗੁਰੁ ਬਾਣੀ ਕਹੈ ਸੇਵਕੁ ਜਨੁ ਮਾਨੈ ਪਰਤਖਿ ਗੁਰੂ ਨਿਸਤਾਰੇ ॥੫॥ — Nat Mahala 4, Ang 982, Guru Ram Das Sahib. This quotation is stanza 5 of the Shabad; the Rahao appears earlier in the same Shabad.
ਸੋ ਪਾਤਿਸਾਹੁ ਸਾਹਾ ਪਾਤਿਸਾਹਿਬੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਰਹਣੁ ਰਜਾਈ ॥੨੭॥ — Japji Sahib, Pauri 27, Ang 6, Guru Nanak Sahib.
Not Gurbani: Guru Maneyo Granth is the traditional hukam remembered from Nanded and associated with Bhatt Vahi / rahit tradition. It is cited here as Sikh tradition, not as a line from Shabad Guru Granth Sahib Ji.
Cross-check
Readers are encouraged to cross-check every Gurbani line against Shabad Guru Granth Sahib Ji directly. SearchGurbani, SriGranth, Dekho-Ji, SikhiToTheMax, and other digital tools may be used for checking. Guru Granth Darpan may be consulted as teeka and interpretive aid, not as authority above Shabad.
Romanisation here is a learning aid, not a Santhia guide. For paath and uchaaran, learn from competent Gurmukh teachers and listen carefully in sangat.
Correction note
This article combines Gurbani vichaar, Sikh historical memory, and personal recollection. Where a statement rests on Sikh historical tradition — such as the memory of Guru Maneyo Granth at Nanded, the shastars preserved at Takht Sri Kesgarh Sahib, and the spring at Gurdwara Sri Nanak Jhira Sahib, Bidar — it should be read as tradition and historical remembrance, not as a line of Gurbani.
The memories of the 1982 journey are the author’s own recollections. The train passengers are not presented as all being pilgrims; the journey included ordinary Indian travellers and a few fellow pilgrims.
If any Ang, attribution, historical detail, transliteration, or plain-English sense is found to be in error, the error is mine and should be corrected.
Source note
The Gurbani lines were checked by Ang against digital Gurbani resources including SriGranth, SearchGurbani, and SikhiToTheMax. Guru Granth Darpan may be consulted as teeka and interpretive aid, not as authority above Shabad.
Historical references in this essay concern: the founding of Sri Akal Takht Sahib under Guru Hargobind Sahib and the miri-piri tradition; the conferral of Guruship on Shabad Guru Granth Sahib Ji at Nanded in 1708 as remembered in Sikh tradition; Takht Sri Kesgarh Sahib and the revelation of the Khalsa in 1699; the spring tradition at Gurdwara Sri Nanak Jhira Sahib, Bidar; the June 1984 assault and the damage to and destruction of parts of Sri Akal Takht Sahib; and the organised anti-Sikh violence that followed after 31 October 1984.
Date note: Sri Akal Takht Sahib is often associated in Sikh memory with the 1606 miri-piri moment, while SGPC gives 1609 for the establishment of Sri Akal Takht Sahib. This essay therefore avoids making an exact date central to the claim.
Language note: Naam and Sach are not treated here as flatly interchangeable words. Sach names the Eternal Reality of the One. Naam is the Guru-given remembrance and presence of the One, through which the Sikh lives in relation to Sach.
Bhul chuk maaf.
Gurjit Singh Sandhu
PanthSeva