In 1913, during the construction of New Delhi, a wall of Gurdwara Rakab Ganj was demolished to straighten a road.
The Sikh response was immediate and sustained. The Chief Khalsa Diwan petitioned; when that failed, a shahidi jatha was prepared to march on Delhi and rebuild the wall regardless of consequences.
The First World War intervened and the agitation was suspended while Sikhs were being recruited in very large numbers.
It was revived after the war and the government conceded in 1920, and the wall was rebuilt.
The episode is the immediate precursor of the Gurdwara Reform Movement: it established that the Sikh community would organise on a shrine question, that petitioning did not work and that mass action did.
Rakab Ganj stands on the site where Lakhi Shah Vanjara burned his own house over the body of Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji in 1675, and the wall in question is a few hundred metres from the Indian Parliament.
A wall at Gurdwara Rakab Ganj in Delhi was demolished in 1913 during the building of New Delhi, and the campaign to have it rebuilt ran for several years.
It was among the first organised Sikh political agitations of the century and it fed directly into the Akali movement that followed.
The wall was rebuilt in 1920. The episode established that the community would agitate over its buildings, which is the premise of everything the Gurdwara Reform Movement did next.