The name Babbar Khalsa is taken from the Babbar Akali Movement of 1920, which agitated against British colonial rule in India. The modern-day Babbar Khalsa was created as a result of the bloody clash on April 13, 1978, between a group of Amritdhari Sikhs of Akhand Kirtani Jatha who went to protest against a gathering of the rival Nirankari sect. The confrontation led to the murder of thirteen demonstrators. When a criminal case was filed against the Nirankari leader, he had his case transferred to neighboring Haryana state, where he was acquitted the following year.[9] This gave rise to new organisational expressions of Sikh aspirations outside the Akali party, and an angry sentiment that if the government and judiciary would not prosecute enemies of Sikhism, taking extrajudical measures could be justified to avenge the death of Sikhs.[10] Among the chief proponents of this attitude was the Babbar Khalsa founded by Talwinder Singh Parmar. Contrary to popular belief the Akhand Kirtan Jatha had no original ties to Babbar Khalsa but later took majority control of the group after Parmar was incarcerated in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1983.[citation needed]
When Gurbachan Singh, the Nirankari Baba responsible for what Sikhs perceived to be the innocent deaths of the aforementioned thirteen, was shot dead on April 24, 1980, it was Ranjit Singh who surrendered and admitted to the assassination. The Babbar Khalsa was considered the most dangerous, well-armed, and puritanical of the various Sikh militant organisations fighting Indian rule in Punjab. Whereas other militant organisations made some compromise with the tenets of Sikhism during the militancy period, Babbar Khalsa stood alone in its insistence on the strict compliance of the rules of the Khalsa brotherhood. According to C. Christine Fair, Babbar Khalsa was more concerned with propagating the ideas of Sikhism, than with the actual Khalistan movement.[11]