Leaders from around the world have spoken. Where you at, realDonaldTrump? More Videos Sikh shooting investigated as hate crime Highly visible. Read More. In a statement, the Sikh Coalition, America's largest Sikh civil rights group, said that Sikhs are often targeted for hate crimes in part "due to the Sikh articles of faith, including a turban and beard, which represent the Sikh religious commitment to justice, tolerance and equality.
In , Guru Gobind Singh commanded all Sikhs to wear the " Five Ks " in order to identify themselves as a member of the Khalsa Panth, an army of the devout. Young Indian Sikhs participate in a turban tying competition in Devout Sikh men don't cut their hair or shave because they believe you must maintain your body in the way that God created you. Turbans are worn as a way to keep heads covered out of respect when in public and in religious spaces.
Sikh women often cover their heads with a long scarf called a chunni or dupatta. The United States' complaint alleges that the Essex County Department of Corrections first suspended the officer, then terminated her, for wearing her headscarf, and that the county failed to provide her with a reasonable accommodation to its uniform policy. The United States reached a consent decree with the county on November 12, , requiring implementation of a procedure for religious accommodation of all employees.
The complaint had alleged that residents of public housing in San Francisco have been victims of racial, ethnic, and religious harassment including verbal abuse, racial slurs, threats, assaults, vandalism, and robbery, and that the Housing Authority had failed to take reasonable steps to protect its tenants from this harassment.
The complaint identified some of the victims of harassment as Iraqi and Muslim public housing residents, and alleged that the harassment had increased following the terrorist attacks of September 11, Under the consent order, the Housing Authority will modify its civil rights policies and employee training, and compensate the victims. Georgia Courts: In August , the Civil Rights Division closed a compliance review of the courts of the State of Georgia which it had opened in January of that year after receiving complaints that three Muslim women had been barred from courthouses for wearing headscarves.
The Georgia Courts is a recipient of federal funding under the Safe Streets Act, and are required as a funding condition not to discriminate on the basis of race, sex, religion, and other protected bases. The Civil Rights Division closed the review after the Georgia courts modified its policy to permit headcoverings for those with religious or medical reasons for doing so. Springfield, Virginia: On September 23, , a Sikh man at a restaurant and pool hall was told by a manager that he would have to remove his turban, due to a policy that barred hats other than baseball caps and cowboy hats.
The Sikh man reported to the Civil Rights Division that prior to September 11, he had worn his turban at the restaurant without objection. The agreement permits patrons to wear religious headgear at the establishment and requires the owners to post non-discrimination signs at their restaurants, place ads in local newspaper, and hold non-discrimination training for their employees.
The settlement also included a formal written apology to the Sikh patron. Des Moines, Iowa: On August 15, , the Department of Justice entered into a settlement agreement with Marriott International and the Midwest Federation of American Syrian-Lebanese Clubs to resolve allegations that the Des Moines, Iowa Marriott discriminated against the group on the afternoon of September 11, , when it revoked its offer to host the annual convention of the Midwest Federation.
Six days earlier, Marriott had faxed a signed contract to the Midwest Federation for its signature agreeing to host the Midwest Federation's convention. The Justice Department investigation was opened pursuant to Title II of the Civil Rights Act of , which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, and religion in places of public accommodation, such as hotels, restaurants and places of entertainment.
Lilburn, Georgia: On September 1, , the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Georgia entered a consent decree resolving the Civil Rights Division's lawsuit against Lilburn alleging discrimination in its refusal to allow the expansion of a mosque. The consent decree requires the city to allow the mosque project to go forward, training of city officials and employees on RLUIPA, adoption and publication of a non-discrimination policy on its website and elsewhere, and record keeping and reporting requirements.
The plaintiffs in the case, Estes v. Rutherford County, made the remarkable claim that Islam is an ideology rather than a religion, and that mosques are thus not places of worship under RLUIPA.
The court agreed with the Division's assertion that Islam is a religion and, therefore, subject to the same protections under the Constitution and federal law as other religions, and denied plaintiffs a preliminary injunction in November , then dismissed the case in May This antagonism was made all the more acute by the conversion issue.
Christian mass conversions, mostly of low castes and untouchables, led Hindu, Sikh and Muslim reform movements into an aggressive and competitive proselytism, of which Panjab became the privileged ground from the s. It is noteworthy that the first Singh Sabha was set up in Amritsar, in reaction to the conversion of Sikh students to Christianity in Besides the Arya Samaj and the Church, the Ahmeddyia were also prominent in these conversion activities, targeting specifically Sikhs.
But Arya activism was increasingly perceived by Sikh reformists as the greatest of all threats, all the more that this perception found an echo in colonial ideology. For instance, a recurring theme of British orientalism, that of Sikhism in danger of re-absorption into Hinduism, was re-appropriated by the Tat Khalsa and fed their antagonism with the Arya Samaj. According to a famous phrase by Macauliffe:. Hinduism … is like the boa constrictor of the Indian forests.
When a petty enemy appears to worry it, it winds round its opponent, crushes it in its folds and finally causes it to disappear … in this way it is disposing of the reformed and once hopeful religion of Baba Nanak … [that is] making a vigorous struggle for life, but its ultimate destruction is inevitable without State support Macauliffe Within a complex social fabric characterised, in 19 th century Panjab, by the plurality, the flexibility and the interpenetration of communal identities, the Singh Sabha reformers undertook to draw clear-cut boundaries between Sikhs and other Panjabis, and to impose these boundaries on Sikhs and non-Sikhs alike.
I shall come now to the Singh Sabha usage of martyrdom, alluded to above, in establishing the limits of this separate identity, as superbly analysed by Fenech This rhetoric of martyrdom, to use his phrase, appears quite relevant to our present study as it entails a specific construction of the Self as victim and of the Others as inimical figures.
To understand this correlation, we have to come back to the heroic period of the Panth, the 18 th century, as it is perceived by Sikhs since the Singh Sabha period. Sikhs were persecuted, so the tradition goes, by a tyrannical enemy and resisted till death to uphold their faith.
As the Arabic term shahid widely used by Sikhs since the 19 th century to refer to their martyrs implies, they were witnesses to truth through the sacrifice of their life. It is particularly in defence of the visible symbols of the faith—especially kesh , the hair and the turban—that they were martyred.
Their sacrifice became, in the hands of the Singh Sabha, a powerful tool firstly to promote Khalsa identity and deligitimize non-Khalsa ones, and secondly to proclaim the separate identity of the Sikhs. Their martyrdom rhetoric therefore consolidated both inner boundaries between Khalsa and non-Khalsa and outer ones between Sikhs and non-Sikhs.
This is not specific to the Singh Sabha, as their Muslim and Hindu counterparts have engaged in the same task. I have already mentioned how some key events have given way to very different, often contradictory, communal interpretations see for instance the martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur or the reign of Ranjit Singh, hailed by the Sikhs, dreaded by the Muslims.
I wish now to underscore firstly how the Singh Sabha has fashioned Sikh history as the history of martyrdom and secondly how it has established continuity, contemporaneity between selected past events and the present. Likewise Sikh participation in the communal riots of the s and s and in the carnage of the partition is not acknowledged.
As stated by Veena Das , all acts of violence are constructed as the violence of martyrdom, any evil acts being projected on the Other Hindu or Muslim. It is true at the turn of the 20 th century, when the Arya Samaj first and later, during the Gurdwara Reform Movement in the s, the Mahants Hindu custodians of the Gurdwaras are equated with the dreaded Afghans and Mughals of the 18 th century.
It is also true in the s, during the confrontation of Sikh neo-fundamentalists with the central Indian State, perceived as a dominating and aggressive Hindu entity, a confrontation projected as the continuation of a long series of struggles to preserve Sikh identity. Hence, the Singh Sabha concern to demonstrate that Sikhs are not Hindus tended to euphemize the anti-Muslim theme and to identify the Hindu as the new enemy.
Hence, after a relatively peaceful communal climate following the imposition of the Pax Britannica in Panjab in the second half of the 19 th century, the first half of the twentieth was a contrario characterised by an increasingly tense and conflictual context, marked out by the issue of a separate electorate granted to Muslims in , by the heightened competition between communities for a larger share of political representation and power, and by the launching of the Pakistan movement by the Muslim League in the early s.
The resulting communal riots of the s and s followed a well known pattern, with Sikhs and Hindus allied against Muslims. Fenech opens his analysis of the Singh Sabha rhetorical use of martyrdom with the story of Lachman Singh, hanged in June for the murder of three Muslims, who had converted to Islam a Hindu lambadar village chief Fenech This seemingly anecdotic event is in fact highly revealing. As discussed above, it raised, among community leaders, fear of numerical and therefore political decline and increased communal competition and conflicts.
And in the case of Sikhs, one cannot fail to draw a parallel with the spectre of persecutions and forced conversions to Islam of the 18 th century. Remarkably, Lachman Singh story follows the same pattern of the martyr-victim-oppressor triangular relationship that I have already mentioned.
A period of great instability and uncertainty for the Sikhs, who greatly objected to the creation of Pakistan then to the idea of partition, and supported various counter-schemes such as Azad Panjab, Sikhistan or Khalistan, opposed by both the Congress and the League. Your trials await you. Be ready for self-destruction like the Japs and the Nazis ….
Similar speeches were delivered by leaders of the three communities, equally busy in preparing for civil war. The carefully nurtured memory of past conflicts played a major part in the outburst of violence surrounding partition—and this is especially true of Muslim-Sikh antagonism.
This partition of memory was all the easier in the case of Panjab that partition of the territory led to an entire exchange of population, to the extent that there are no Hindus and Sikhs left in West Panjab and hardly any Muslims in East Panjab except for the former principality of Malherkotla and Qadian. But did they really meet in the diaspora? Here is the question I wish now to address. Sociologists have established a linkage between colonial representations and policy vis a vis the various communities the British ruled—in particular their role in fostering sharply defined communal identities—and British policy towards immigrants in post-colonial Britain.
This policy, as it culminated in the s, deals with communities, not individuals as in France, defined primarily, in the case of South Asians, in terms of religious affiliation. It has more specifically institutionalized and legitimized the most conservative or orthodox definitions of these identities.
This has had several consequences: South Asian community leaders are primarily religious leaders specially so in the case of Sikhs and Muslims ; religious-based organisations have received the greatest share of public support and funding, they have been more successful at mobilising immigrants than pan-Asian or pan-Indian ones and they do so on religious issues the turban of the Sikhs, the provision of halal meat in school for Muslim children….
In short, communities are encouraged to stress their cultural specificities, while competing for public resources and recognition, and in this process minority identities tend to be reified and institutionalised. Their mobilisation for the right to wear the turban as a bus driver, then on a motorcycle or in school culminated in a House of Lords ruling of , granting them the status of an ethnic group.
This specific recognition allowed them to benefit from the legislation against discrimination paradoxically defined on ethnic or racial grounds, not religious one that has been so far denied to Muslims. British multicultural policy, although officially striving for the opposite, has resulted in stiff competition between communities, defined internally as homogenous and externally by rigid boundaries.
So much so that I quickly decided to avoid direct questioning on the issue of relations with the Muslims. But it popped in by the backdoor, so to say, and in that respect, the most interesting information was definitely drawn from participant observation and informal interviews. Community literature published by various British Sikh organisations and gurdwaras has also been a valuable source.
The first one, particularly prominent among Sikh students, revolves around the proselytism of Muslim fellow students on campuses. Christian proselytism is also resented, and Sikhs perceive themselves as easy prey to the allegedly aggressive conversion activities of those two groups. The issue of conversion, discussed above in the colonial context, is crucial in perceptions of the Self and the Other s.
Sikhs impute proselytism to Christians and Muslims and despite the thousands of Western converts the Gore Sikhs claim that Sikhism is a non-proselytising religion. Through the course of time, we were harshly taught the futility of hatred. Moreover, it asserts that Sikhs must never be the ones to draw the sword first.
Our collective history has been witness to violence, disruption, Partition, detachment, harassment. At the same time, asking one generation to pay for the faults of another is simply nonsensical at best and unacceptable at worst.
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Support Our Journalism. Enough of the violence from the government. Its time for the Balkanization of India! Carve out a new country from India to create a new homeland for the Muslims, called Urduistan.
Along with a homeland for Sikhs as well, called Khalistan. Urduistan Zindabad! Khalistan Zindabad! We have already given muslims two countries one is Pakistan and other us Bangladesh now if they dont want to stay in india can go to Pakistan and Bangladesh and they have 56 countries more to go and what khalistan are you talking about in which you will take only India Punjab what about Pakistan punjab which have so many Sikhs religious sites.
Beautiful response to the idiot above. All they want is khalistan and causing problems and now taking sides with the Muslims. If some sikhs saved their muslim neighbors from attacks, they did what their religion ordains them to do in such a situation.
They would do the same to hindus caught in a similar situation. Koi bole ram ram koi khudai……………. I am proud to be Sikh and til there is blood in my veins, will save every victim of majoritarian violence. We know how to protect our land..
You can leave this country if you do not wish to live peacefully. Even Hindus were found helping Muslim, But, i would like to tell you this country has seen a lot of blood bath of baba banda singh bahadur. If these mughals sons try again to break any part of this country. It is better to not have problems.
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