Facing the temple across the causeway stands the Akal Takht, the throne of the timeless one, raised by the sixth Guru, Hargobind, in the early seventeenth century after his father Arjan had died in Mughal custody. Hargobind is described as wearing two swords, one for spiritual and one for temporal authority, and that pairing, miri and piri, is why the tradition has never treated religious and political questions as belonging in separate rooms. The Akal Takht is the senior of the five seats of authority in Sikhism; edicts issued from it bind the community, and a summons to appear before it is a serious matter for any Sikh in public life. Assemblies of the whole community, the sarbat khalsa, have been convened there at intervals since the eighteenth century.
In June 1984 the Indian Army entered the complex to remove an armed group that had fortified it, in an operation that killed large numbers of pilgrims present for a martyrdom anniversary and destroyed the Akal Takht building. The government rebuilt it; the community then demolished what the government had built and raised it again through kar seva, voluntary labour, on the ground that a structure put up by the state was not theirs. The assassination of the prime minister by her Sikh bodyguards later that year, and the killings of Sikhs that followed in Delhi and elsewhere, belong to the same sequence. The atlas records the site as contested rather than settled.