India recorded 20,833,116 Sikhs at the 2011 census, about 1.72 per cent of the population, the great majority in Punjab. World figures are usually given as twenty-five to thirty million, which is a range rather than a count. The diaspora is large and well enumerated where censuses ask: Canada recorded 771,790 in 2021, England 520,100 in the same year, and Australia 210,400.
The events of 1984 remain the defining modern wound. The Indian army assaulted the Golden Temple complex in June, in an operation directed at an armed movement that had occupied it; the Akal Takht was heavily damaged, and the community rejected the government's reconstruction and rebuilt it itself. Casualty figures are disputed, the official account and independent estimates differing by an order of magnitude. The assassination of the prime minister in October was followed by organised killings of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere, for which prosecutions have been few and slow.
The committee that administers the shrines faces standing criticism from within the community: over corruption, over caste practice that Sikh teaching rejects outright, over the exclusion of women from performing devotional music at the Golden Temple, and over the handling of historic buildings.
What travels best is the langar: the free kitchen attached to every gurdwara, which feeds anyone who comes, seated on the floor without distinction of rank or religion. It is the most visible institution the tradition has, and it was designed in the sixteenth century precisely to make a point about caste that the community is still arguing about.