Punjab had been annexed eight years earlier. When the Bengal Army mutinied in May 1857, the Punjab administration disarmed the Bengal regiments in the province within days, at Lahore, Ferozepur, Peshawar and elsewhere, and raised new levies from Punjabis.
Sikh, Punjabi Muslim and Dogra troops made up a large part of the force that besieged and retook Delhi. The Phulkian states sent contingents and kept the road open.
The reasons given at the time and since include the recency of the Company's victory, the unpopularity of the Bengal sepoys who had been the instrument of the annexation, the memory of Mughal Delhi, and simple calculation. All of them are argued.
There were risings in Punjab, at Jhelum, at Sialkot, at Ropar and elsewhere, and they were put down hard. The blowing from guns of mutineers at Peshawar and Lahore was done deliberately in public.
The consequence was that Punjab became the trusted province and the recruiting ground, and 1857 became the event that Punjabi and north Indian nationalism read in opposite directions for the next century.
The Corps of Guides marched from Mardan to Delhi in the summer of 1857, about five hundred and eighty miles in twenty two days, and went into action on the ridge the day it arrived. The Punjab Movable Column was formed to march on any station that showed signs of rising and to be there before it did.
John Lawrence stripped the frontier of regular troops to send them east and came to terms with Dost Mohammad at Kabul so that the border could be left thin. The gamble was that Afghanistan would not come through the passes while the province behind them was empty, and it did not.
The mutinied regiments in Punjab were destroyed. The remains recovered from the well at Ajnala in 2014 are from one of them.