NEW DELHI— Election results in India show a crushing defeat for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in the northern farming state of Punjab, the heart of Sikhism. While Punjab has never been a BJP stronghold, it’s the worst performance for the party in the state in two decades.

The Hindu-first party campaigned heavily in the state, hoping to sway Sikhs to the BJP as well as polarize Hindus. But in the end, the BJP only bagged two seats out of 117 in the state’s legislative assembly. The Aam Aadmi Party — which until now has only ruled Delhi, India’s capital, at the local level — won 92 seats in Punjab. The win could turn the fledgling party into a national party that competes with India’s historic Congress Party as the main opposition against the BJP. About 21 million Indians follow Sikhism — less than 2 percent of the national population but 58% of Punjab.

The Punjabi Sikhs’ rejection of the BJP is due to a growing perception that there is anti-Sikhism among Modi’s party — even though Modi toured Punjab in three political rallies for the BJP ahead of polling in February and party leaders have tried to cast Sikhs as being close to Hindus and opposed to Muslims.

In January, Modi’s cavalcade was prevented from holding a political rally in Punjab. Several farmers’ unions protested his visit to the state by blocking roads so that Modi’s vehicle had to turn back to Delhi. Tens of thousands of farmers, many Sikhs from Punjab, protested in camps near Delhi in 2020-2021 against three farm acts passed by India’s parliament in 2020. The protesters argued for minimum price supports for crops to prevent corporations from controlling the prices. Many farmers in India earn low incomes on small-scale agriculture, battling high suicide rates and crippling debt.

The forced cancellation of Modi’s rally became a cause for concern for the Sikh community in India. BJP officials alleged a security breach and a threat to the prime minister’s life. While leaving, Modi reportedly told airport officials, “Thank your chief minister, I was able to escape alive.”

The allegation of a security breach and a threat to Modi’s life in Punjab, a Sikh-majority state, was followed by a deluge of online hate speech against Sikhs in India. Threats of a “repeat of 1984” were widely shared online, some of which even came from BJP leaders.

An extensively shared tweet was, “A tree had fallen in 1984 and the earth shook. He (Modi) is Mount Everest. There will be total devastation.” The tweet was a derivation of a speech from former Congress Party Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi — remembered as his justification for the anti-Sikh “pogrom” — organized killings — that took place after his mother, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated by her Sikh body guards in 1984. While the Indian government recorded less than 4,000 deaths, independent estimates counted as many as 17,000 Sikhs killed in riots nationwide.

The online calls for a new Sikh genocide drew sharp reactions from Giani Harpreet Singh, the chief of the Akal Takht, the highest spiritual seat of Sikhism, who asked the BJP government to take action against “hate terrorism.”

Speaking to ReligionUnplugged.com, Harjinder Singh Dhami — president of the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, the top elected body of the Sikhs — said, “The genocide calls and threats of repeating 1984 Sikh massacre was an attempt to murder Sikh sentiments, which is unacceptable.”

This, however, was not the first time anti-Sikh hate speech was witnessed in India but rather the latest in a series of similar targeting of Sikhs.