From Recognition to Power
What Sikhs Can Learn from Stokely Carmichael aka Kwame Ture
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8-10 min. read
Across the Sikh diaspora, there’s a familiar decades-old strategy: push governments, parliaments, and the United Nations to “recognise” Sikh identity, the 1984 genocide, or even the right to sovereignty. These efforts, often led by advocacy groups and diaspora organisations, have gained visibility in Canada, the U.K., and elsewhere, and it could be argued more folk are aware of the issues.
That being said, seeking recognition of this nature is akin to living on a lease, you essentially occupy the space at someone else’s discretion, and the contract can be revoked at any time. One government motion can be reversed by another, or one prime minister’s words can be undone by their successor. Even the UN, often treated as the ultimate arbiter, is itself dominated by the same powers that historically carved up nations and propped up empires.
This raises a sharper question: Is chasing recognition enough?
To answer that, it helps to look back at the words of Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), the radical Black Power organiser who, in the 1960s and 70s, shifted the civil rights struggle from asking for rights to seizing power.
Carmichael believed that oppressed peoples make a mistake when they depend on existing systems to validate them. For him, civil rights legislation in the U.S. was never enough, because it left Black communities still dependent on white-controlled schools, police, banks, and politics.
Instead, he argued for something deeper: self-determination. Build your own institutions, to control your own politics, and align with global liberation struggles. Recognition, he said, should come as a by-product of power, not as a substitute for it.
Here’s where the Sikh case becomes interesting. Recognition from governments or global institutions allows you to occupy space temporarily, but the terms are set by someone else, and the contract can be revoked at any time. Many Sikh activists today focus their energy on lobbying parliaments in Canada, the U.K., and the United States to pass genocide motions or acknowledge Khalistan debates. These gestures do offer visibility and symbolic validation, but from Carmichael’s perspective, they remain fragile, subject to the shifting moods of political parties rather than grounded in lasting power. He would caution Sikhs not to confuse such fleeting acknowledgments with the deeper project of sovereignty and self-determination.
The same logic applies to appeals made to the United Nations. While Sikhs often look to the UN as the ultimate arbiter of recognition, Carmichael’s critique of imperial institutions would cast serious doubt on this strategy. For him, the UN was not a neutral referee, but a body shaped by the very colonial and imperial powers that have historically suppressed the independence of stateless or colonised nations. In that sense, the UN cannot serve as the foundation of Sikh liberation; at best, it reflects the interests of those global powers Sikhs are struggling against.
For Carmichael, the alternative would lie in building independent Sikh institutions that operate outside of these frameworks. That means establishing Sikh-led media platforms capable of controlling the community’s own narrative, political bodies that articulate Sikh aspirations without deferring to outside approval, and economic cooperatives that ensure financial independence. It could also mean creating justice mechanisms rooted in Sikh principles rather than colonial legal systems. In Carmichael’s terms, this is the difference between asking for recognition and wielding power: sovereignty that emerges from within the Sikh community, not sovereignty rented from someone else’s permission.
And crucially, he’d insist Sikhs look sideways, not upward: build solidarity with Indigenous peoples resisting settler colonialism, Palestinians under occupation, Kashmiris, Tamils, and others in similar struggles.
When framed this way, Sikh activism today can be understood as a choice between two divergent strategies. The first is the path of recognition, one paved with petitioning governments and international bodies for acknowledgment, whether through motions, censuses, or symbolic debates. It brings attention to Sikh struggles and occasionally delivers moments of political theatre, but it does so on terms defined by others. Recognition along this path is precarious, granted one day, withdrawn the next, and it keeps Sikhs tethered to structures that will never fully secure their liberation.
The second strategy is what might be called the Carmichael path. Here, the priority is not recognition but power itself. Rather than waiting for approval, Sikhs would focus on building strength from within: developing community-controlled institutions, defining sovereignty in distinctly Sikh terms, and cultivating economic and political independence that cannot be revoked. Just as importantly, this path emphasises solidarity. By linking their struggle with that of Indigenous nations in North America, or other oppressed peoples across the globe, Sikhs can situate themselves within a broader movement against empire. In this model, recognition may still arrive, but only as the natural consequence of power already established, not as the prize at the end of the journey.
Bhai Jaswant Singh Khalra takes this further. In his writings, he rooted Sikhs in their own sovereignty and, like Carmichael, insisted that Sikh power must keep alive the contention between subservient politics and the politics of sovereignty, what in the Sikh tradition is the politics of dharam. This contention is vital because it keeps Sikh energy focused and ensures the community remains politically educated about the systems and structures opposed to its very existence.
Carmichael’s insistence on power over recognition is not a foreign concept to Sikhs. In fact, it echoes the way Sikhs historically mobilised for sovereignty. The Khalsa, established by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699, was never built to wait for approval from Mughal emperors or the Hindu Hill Kings, or later colonial rulers. It was created as an independent force, capable of defending itself, administering justice, and shaping a society according to Sikh principles.
The same spirit carried into the eighteenth century, when Sikhs organised into misl confederacies of sovereign bands that governed territory, levied taxes, and dispensed justice on their own terms. Recognition from Delhi or Kabul was irrelevant; what mattered was the Khalsa’s ability to defend its people and live by its own institutions. This culminated in the Sikh Raj of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, which stood as a powerful state, not as a client of empire.
Even in the colonial era, Sikh resistance movements, from the Ghadarites abroad to the Akali Babbar mobilisations at home, rarely framed their struggle as a plea for recognition. Instead, they built independent networks, newspapers, gurdwara reform movements, and militias that asserted Sikh agency in defiance of British control. The lesson is clear: historically, Sikh sovereignty has never been leased from others; it has been forged through self-determination, discipline, and collective power.
Seen in this light, Carmichael’s call to stop begging and start building is not just a radical import from Black Power or Pan-Africanism. It is profoundly consistent with Sikh history itself. The question for Sikhs today is not whether such a model is possible, but whether they have the political will to return to a tradition of sovereignty rooted in their own institutions rather than external validation. For Sikhs, the pursuit of recognition is not wrong, it can be tactically useful. But if recognition is treated as the endgame, or even as an equal goal to liberation itself, it risks keeping the community tethered to the very systems it should be dismantling.