Sikh Controversies
Calendars
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Curiously, not every disagreement within the Sikh community occurs simply between conservatives and liberals. One significant point of debate regarding the Sikh calendar has resulted in an unusual alliance of some conservatives and liberals on one side with other liberals and conservatives on the other side. Religion, as with politics, can make for strange bedfellows.
For determining the dates of religious festivals, Sikhs use the Vikrami Calendar. Like most ancient religious calendars it is a lunar calendar, and it also happens to be employed by Hindus in northern India. In addition, like other calendars, it accumulates errors - 20 minutes every year, in this case. The result is that the timing of religious festivals changes gradually over the course of decades and centuries.
Not everyone is happy about that, and some have worked to develop a new calendar which prevents the timing from changing. One, a solar calendar developed by a Canadian Sikh named Pal Singh Purewal, has received the most attention and has become the source of the most strife.
There are two principle groups which constitute the Sikh religious leadership: the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) and the Akal Takht. Unfortunately, they do not agree on using this new calendar. The SGPC started using this calendar in 1999, while the Akal Takht decreed that no new calendars be used until a general consensus among Sikhs could be achieved. The disagreement continued until February of 2000, when the SGPC backed down and returned to using the old calendar. Several leaders of the SGPC had to submit to punishment with one being excommunicated.
What is unusual about this disagreement is how people have lined up on either side. One might imagine that progressives would support the use of a new calendar while conservatives would support the use of the old one, yet it's not quite that simple. There is another division among Sikhs which complicates things: politics.
In India, Sikhism is for many a hot political issue because of the desire of many Sikhs to separate from Hindu-dominated India and create a new Sikh nation. There is a great deal of strife between Hindus and Sikhs, and as a result, those who do not want to exacerbate matters wish to see the old calendar retained, even if they are otherwise progressive on religious matters. For them, retaining the old calendar is not simply a matter of preserving traditions, but also of preserving a common link with the Hindus with whom they live.
Those with more radical politics, however, are often in favor of changing to a new calendar. This would symbolize Sikhism's break from Hinduism - a step in the direction of both religious and political independence. Not surprisingly, those who are most anxious to emphasize the distinction between Sikhs and Hindus also tend to be among the more conservative when it comes to religious issues.
As a consequence, we have both liberals and conservatives joining together on one side to support a new calendar, while a different collection of liberals and conservatives join together on the other side to fight any changes in which calendar is used. Their reasons are different, but they manage to make common cause with their erstwhile religious opponents when it comes to this issue.
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