As the 25th anniversary of “1984” approaches us, TLH posts have covered some activities commemorating this devastating time in our history.
My most vivid memories of “1984” are watching Indira Gandhi’s funeral on television and the border of photos inside my local Gurdwara’s Langar Hall of the men who had been tortuously killed during the Khalistani movement. As I got older, I always wondered how Sikh women were impacted by these events, aside from the infamous photo of a widow crying with her child in her arms.
I read about a woman who was strongly involved in the Sikh student movement in Punjab but now lived on the East Coast (USA). At the Fremont Gurdwara, I remember the single picture of a woman who helped make the border of Shaheeds’ photos hung high in the Langar Hall. I recall the emotional testimonies of widows left deserted by our community and the Indian government in the film, “Widow Colony”. Most recently, I came across this poem, “Don’t Feel Sorry For Me, I Am The Daughter Of A Shaheed” written by woman who lost her family in the 1984 riots in Delhi.
The conflict between modern ideals of beauty and the requirements of the Sikh faith came up in a prior post. Recently, Sukhmandir Kaur Khalsa spoke eloquently on this issue in an Arkansas publication. Excerpted below are Khalsa’s perspectives on hair, beauty, and truth.
“I liken the inherent programming of the body’s ability to grow hair to truth,” Kaur said. “Truth always asserts itself and cannot be covered for long by a falsehood. Similarly, we can shave, pluck, bleach, color, trip, tweeze, and wax hair, but it will continue to be true to its programming. The hair follicle must be killed or removed to prevent hair from appearing on the face or body. . .”
Kaur had trouble with her own self-esteem in the beginning. “I had a lot of difficulty embracing my natural identity,” she said, “until I realized through a series of experiences that I was disgracing and defacing my God-given natural beauty.”
She said she developed a high degree of self-confidence through her self-acceptance. “I realize,” she said, “that many women do not have the confidence to face the world without masking themselves with cosmetic makeup and procedures such as hair removal. . .” [link]
I have my own memories of kirtan class. During my prepubescent days, learning the harmonium was an option, but then as puberty struck this male, I quickly switched to the tabla. My days were soon coming to an end as I was entering 8th grade and I overnight, radically I came to believe I was “too cool” for such things. While at times I regretted my decision, still in a private moment near a harmonium or piano, I can still play the notes to “Jo Mange Thakur Apne Te Soi Soi Deve”.
The UN Special Rapporteur for freedom of religion or belief visited India last year and just released her report on the country, highlighting, amo
ng other things 2 matters that are of special concern to Sikhs: (1) the situation of religious or belief minorities (generally) and (2) justice for victims and survivors of communal violence (including Operation Bluestar in particular).
This report will serve as a great tool for future advocacy and education campaigns, as the UN Special Rapporteur is by mandate, an independent entity (though also a diplomatic entity whose mandate is funded by the States she monitors, so of course there are limits to what can be said and done). The office is also a widely respected authority, whose reports are persuasive and create pressure in courts and government offices. Having official international support and recognition of issues that have long been a struggle for Sikh activists to legitimate (lack of accountability, lack of compensation) should advance the Sikh movement to hold accountable Indian government authorities identified as responsible for innocent civilian deaths. Between this report, and the recently released Ensaaf report, 2009 looks like it’s going to be a good year for advancing accountability for crimes by Indian authorities against Sikhs in the 80s and 90s.
In 2006, Professors John Mearsheimer (University of Chicago) and Stephen Walt (Harvard) published a book titled The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. In the book, Mearsheimer and Walt raise the following point – that since 1967, America’s relationship with Israel has been the centerpiece of its Middle East foreign policy.
They then ask the question:
Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides…. So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel, how are we to explain it?[link]
The answer:
The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. We use ‘the Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally attached to Israel.[link]
While the Israeli Lobby remains one of the most powerful groups in Washington DC, there is a rising group in town – the India Lobby. Sometimes I am shocked by the naivety of Sikh-Americans that have NO understanding of the power of the Indian lobby. They are generally completely ignorant of the vast prestige and increasing power of this group. (Then of course, there is the other extreme that believe ‘agents’ lurk around every corner and never hesitate to call anyone that disagrees with them, a ‘sarkari agent.’)
Stuck in Punjab? Want to go abroad? Just buy an airplane.
Not a real one of course, that would be silly. A toy plane will do. Buy one, donate it to a gurdwara and wait. All your vilaiti dreams will soon come true. If you think I’m pulling your leg, just ask the people at Tihan gurdwara near Jalandhar. They’ll tell you it works.
In the realm of “truth stranger than fiction”, here’s an absurd story that simultaneously highlights how desperate people are to move abroad and how fantastical they imagine living in the West to be.
Who are the smartest guys in this whole tragi-comedy? The guys who’ve set-up shop outside the gurdwara to sell, yep, toy airplanes.
We covered the El Sobrante Gurdwara expansion — and the subsequent PR fallout — a while ago. Earlier this week, the county halted expansion plans pending a further environmental review. Local residents filed a petition for re-review, claiming the “regional service area” proposed in the expansion documents underestimated projected population growth/use in the area:
The appellants, El Sobrante Valley Planning and Zoning Advisory Committee and Quail Hill Homeowners Association, say the mitigated negative declaration does not adequately address their concerns regarding traffic, parking, noise, possible landslides, drainage, wildlife and emergency vehicle access.
Gurdwara leadership says that community members have it all wrong, though, and that they are off the mark in understanding how regional is defined and what it means for the future of the center.
Sikh leaders said they have spent the past 10 years fine-tuning the project to satisfy the county as well as neighbors.
“We have spent more than half a million dollars” — not including volunteer time and effort — “to comply “… and keep our neighbors advised…”
When we discussed this last time, I asked about the challenges we face explaining our presence and integrating into the fabric of religion in the U.S. We could revisit that conversation, but this time I thought it was curious that the project has been stalled in the face of a staggering economic slowdown in this region. Could this have generated jobs and funding at a time when the area could benefit from economic development? Or was this not worth the end result?
Pawandeep holds a framed photo of her sister. In the photo, Amandeep is wearing a pink salwar-kameez, a Punjabi dress. “She dreamed of a better life for herself and her family. All she wanted was to live happily with her husband and son like any other woman.”
I don’t even know where to begin with this story. The grisly facts of Amandeep Kaur Dhillon’s murder and her father-in-law’s arrest have been covered before, but this weekend, the Toronto Star’s Raveena Aulakh wrote a detailed story. You can read the full article here and it will break your heart, not just because of Amandeep Kaur’s tragic story, but because her story is all too common in our community.
Baldev Mutta knows the stories of immigrant women all too well.
The executive director of the Punjabi Community Health Centre in Brampton says hundreds of young Punjabi brides arrive in Canada every year. Many have arranged marriages. “They don’t know anyone, don’t have any support system and battle pressures most people can’t even imagine exist,” he said.
In the Punjabi culture, men are raised to be dominant while women are expected to be subservient. “The level of thinking of men in the Punjabi community leaves a lot to be desired,” said Mutta, a Punjabi himself. Mutta, who runs programs at four Sikh temples in Brampton, Rexdale, Malton and Oakville, and hosts a radio show, wishes he had been able to reach Amandeep.
Some women are so isolated that they are not allowed to have any communication even with their parents, said Kripa Sekhar, executive director of the South Asian Women’s Centre on Lansdowne Ave. in Toronto. “There are times when we get emails or phone calls from a woman’s family saying they haven’t heard from her ever since she came to Canada, can we check on her,” says Sekhar.In some cases women, bruised and beaten, have been locked up in their homes, not allowed to make or receive any calls. “It’s a problem women face everywhere, but what is unique among South Asians is that we don’t acknowledge it or want to talk about it.”
We can deny it all we want but here’s the sad reality for many (not all) Punjabi families:
Continue Reading »
Although the Hothi murder has been covered by my fellow Langa(w)riters, the case has re-appeared in the news.
To catch everyone up, in 2007 Gurparkash Singh Khalsa is alleged to have killed Ajmer Singh Hothi in Stockton, after he felt “dishonored” by a relationship and possible aborted pregnancy between Hothi and his daughter.
Khalsa is now behind bars in a San Joaquin prison. In the latest twist, the Times of India reports “Sikh Man slapped with USD 15million lawsuit.” (Why his religion is relevant, I am not sure as even the article in the Stockton Record is only “Victim’s family sues suspect in honor killing“, but I digress).
The city of Fremont in the Bay Area probably doesn’t need much introduction for most California Sikhs. A turn onto Gurdwara Road takes one into the residential area that houses the famous Fremont Gurdwara. A site of community energy, it has also been sporadically the site of community violence. Still the story of the Sikhs in Fremont is just one of Fremont’s stories.
From a sleepy white city of 23,000, Fremont has become the Bay Area’s fourth largest city with a population of over 200,000 and an Asian-majority. The city is home to the largest Afghan population in the US. The city has a prominent role in Khaled Hosseini’s Kite Runner movie and novel, as many Afghans came to this city following the violence in their homeland during the Soviet invasion in 1979. My own experience with the Afghans living there was limited to the Afghan-Punjabi youth violence during the early/mid 1990s.
We have often heard about the Sikh regiment in the British and Indian Armies. Recently, the Gurkhas, a South Asian group, who also has made-up a large portion of the British Army, are seeing a U-turn in an earlier policy that did not allow Gurkhas soldiers to settle in Great Britain.
The Tribune reports:
In a U-turn of its earlier policy, Britain is set to allow an estimated 36,000 Gurkhas who served in the British Army before 1997 and their families to settle here, conceding a long-pending demand by the former soldiers.
The home office was forced to take action after a ruling from high court judges in October that the government needed to review its policy on whether the Gurkhas who had served the army before 1997 — the year Hong Kong was handed over to China — could live in Britain.
However, the Nepalese government is concerned about the loss of so many soldiers and their families along with their army pensions, that they have warned the Home office that, “ … Nepal might scrap the 1947 agreement under which its young men have been recruited each year” to serve in the British Army. Since the signing of the agreement, the Nepalese economy has heavily relied on the army income.
Today’s Toronto Star has another article on the sad but all too frequent cases of immigration fraud. In this case, a Sikh family was swindled out of tens of thousands of dollars but a crook that promised the son a $450 a week job as a cook in a Toronto hotel.
One morning in February 2007, Harvinder Singh read an ad in a local newspaper that promised to change his life.
The ad offered a visa to Canada and a $450-a-week job as a kitchen helper at a Crowne Plaza hotel in Toronto. Singh answered the ad, and agreed to pay an immigration consultant a $12,500 advance and an equal amount when his immigration documents were prepared.
Today, however, Singh, 31, is still working for his father in this blue-collar city in the northern Punjab region, manning the family photo shop and tending 1.2 hectares of wheat fields on the outskirts of town.
Police say the rise of unregulated immigration consultants is the most troubling crime trend in the state, ahead of a burgeoning drug problem and sectarian violence.
The details of the case are absurd enough to make one laugh if it wasn’t so tragic.
Monday marked notable achievements in the human rights world, for Sikhs affected by the Indian government’s abuses in Punjab in the 80s and 90s, as well as in the arena of international criminal justice.
First, Ensaaf recently partnered with Benetech, a technology organization that has created data analysis software to measure whether documented human rights abuses occurred on a systematic, widespread scale or whether they were arbitrary. On Monday, Ensaaf and Benetech’s Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) released their findings.
The report by Ensaaf and HRDAG, Violent Deaths and Enforced Disappearances During the Counterinsurgency in Punjab, India, presents empirical findings suggesting that the intensification of counterinsurgen
cy operations in Punjab in the early 1990s was accompanied by a shift in state violence from targeted lethal human rights violations to systematic enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions, accompanied by mass “illegal cremations.” Indian security officials have dismissed claims of human rights violations as unavoidable “aberrations” during the counterinsurgency against alleged terrorists in Punjab from 1984 to 1995.
“This report challenges explanations by Indian security forces for enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions using more than 20,000 records from independent sources which have been analyzed using statistical methods,” said Romesh Silva, a demographer at HRDAG and co-author of the report. “This scientific analysis reveals that answers given by the government regarding the nature and extent of these violations are implausible given the available evidence. The victims and their families have a right to the truth.” [ensaaf]
A Sikh gentleman has been involved in a Ontario Human Rights Tribunal matter relating to alleged discrimination against him for wearing a turban at work.
The case centers around treatment that this gentleman received at the hands of a Home Depot employee while posted by a third party security company to provide security detail for a Home Depot construction site. What is particularly disturbing about the allegations are the allegations of racial bias as the employee is alleged to have refused entry to Mr. Deepinder Singh Loomba but also to have stated that he had been successful in the past in not allowing any turbaned persons to work at his site.
Mr. Loomba is a well educated professional who has worked with international companies in other countries and had recently immigrated to Canada, working in security while he was getting settled here. He has decided to take up this case on account of what he saw as a racial bias and a refusal by a large retailer like Home Depot to recognize and deal with the bias. Mr. Loomba has been supported by the Ontario Gurudwara Committee and now needs your moral support.
After over a year of legal haggling he has his day in court and will be in hearings today and tomorrow at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (located at 655 Bay St., 14th Floor, Toronto). The hearings started on Monday and will continue until Wednesday (three days) from 9.30 to 4:30 each day and are open to the public. Moral support and awareness would be appreciated – all the press we can get would also help to put some pressure on Home Depot to do the right thing.
All along Mr. Loomba has insisted that this outcome include an apology to the community and an acknowledgment by Home Depot that they need to implement more racial awareness and sensitivity training in the company. He has stuck this out for the good of the community and it would be great if people could show support and help him out at this crucial time in his case”
Bleak is all I can say!
Some posts require a soundtrack – click on the following to play along as you read.
Last week, Raja Parkash Badal crowned his son, the young prince, the new Deputy Chief Minister of Punjab. In a move unprecedented even in the nepotistic land that is India, Parkash Singh Badal coronated his son. Maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising in the land of five rivers, where Badal Senior had already elevated his family members to 5 of the top 18 cabinet seats.
Is the question facing Sikhs in Oxford, England, as they try to find a central location to pray as a sangat without having to convert private property into religious property.
A religious community in Oxford is reeling after the city council ordered members of its congregation to stop worshipping at a house in Marston.
The city’s Sikh community has been meeting at 69 Cherwell Drive to pray for nearly three years. [link]
The neighbors’ chief complaints have been around parking and noise in the area. The story saddened me on two levels. First, because of the general difficulty Sikhs face in finding community space, and second, because of the underlying challenge to our practice of Sikhi.
As the economy’s downturn affects millions of North Americans, you wonder how documented/undocumented immigrants are impacted by it; particularly, when many left friends and families in their home-countries for economic opportunities in the West. Maple Leaf Sikh gave us some insight into how the Punjabi Sikh population is being affected in Canada.
Last week, a KGET news report (view below for video report), focused on the undocumented population in California’s Central Valley. Despite economic hard-times in Kern County, its large undocumented population, who are primarily Latino, has no intention of going back to their home-countries. Regardless of soaring unemployment rates, US economic recession, and a major downturn in California’s construction, service, and agriculture industries, many undocumented workers maintain a tremendous amount of faith in the US economy.
Yesterday, the newly inaugurated president said, “… the world has changed and we must change with it.”
But just what has changed? In the euphoria of yesterday’s ceremonies, some seemed to expect that from now on, the sun would always shine and no one would ever go hungry again. The inaugural ceremony itself provided ample examples of both what had and hadn’t changed.
What ha
d changed, at least for a few days in DC was that people were exuberant. Strangers became friends. Hugs, high-fives, and tears were shared with neighbors crowding the national mall, cafes, and homes throughout the city. People were generous. An older woman from California gave her flannel shirt to a younger woman who had been waiting beside her in the bitter cold since 6:30 in the morning.
But in some areas where organization was lacking, the chaos vividly showed that when people’s expectations were unfulfilled, survival of the fittest remained the governing natural law. A Congressman reportedly tried to drive through people waiting in line and got stuck in the crowd when they surrounded his vehicle. At least 4 ambulances were seen transporting people injured by the crushing crowd. These scenes resembled a Delhi train station more than the Washington DC I’m used to.
So, what’s changed?
In Richmond Hill, early Sunday morning, another Sikh youth became a victim of a hate crime. Jasmir Singh’s hair and beard were pulled, and he was stabbed in the eye. He may lose his eyesight. [link]
Word has passed through the grapevine that a Sikh candidate is up for election as council member-at-large in the upcoming Hoboken City Council race. Meet Ravinder (“Ravi”) Bhalla, a New Jersey native and attorney currently serving as a committee member for his district. A Democrat, Bhalla is running on a platform that centers around limiting property taxes and “increasing fiscal responsibility” in addition to focusing on transparency and modernization of public archives/resources:
Hoboken is a great city, but as many people feel these days, we can do much better. Property taxes and spending are out of control. Too many important decisions are made in the shadows of City Hall and without the knowledge or involvement of ordinary citizens. [link]
Bhalla is running in an overwhelmingly white suburb of NYC that currently has only one non-white city councilmember. In exploring his own background as a practicing Sikh and as an attorney, some of his work has featured relatively prominently around civil rights issues and freedom of religion:
Prince Harry has been roundly criticized for using the term “Paki” in refering to another miliary cadet and for suggesting that another cadet looked like a “raghead.” To his credit, he has apologized.
What’s been interesting to me about this subject, first, is the discussion of whether Prince Harry deserves a pass. In a BBC article, Sunny Hundal, a Sikh, rightfully recognizes that the Prince’s casual use of “raghead” is troublesome. But, Hundal dismisses the attention paid to Prince Harry’s blunder as simple youthful indiscretion: “He’s a young person messing around and all the rest of it. Young kids say stupid things,” he said in the same BBC piece.
Sure Prince Harry is relatively young, but he is a public figure; more specifically, he is royalty who has had a fine education and upbringing, who has been on notice for years and years that what he does and says will be scrutinized and examined by the people. He should especially know this after his costume gaffe, in which he wore a Nazi uniform to a party. The mistakes of youth may explain some things, but Prince Harry is no ordinary person; nor is he so young that we can discount everything he says or does.
The other aspect of this story that piqued my interest is the apology offered by Prince Harry with respect to the “raghead” comment. On this point, a royal spokesman said, “Prince Harry used the term ‘raghead’ to mean Taliban or Iraqi insurgent.”
This apology totally misses the boat — the concern is not whether Prince Harry “meant” to apply the term to a certain group (even if the group is terrorists or horrible elements of our society); rather the concern is that the term itself is inherently inappropriate because it is used to brand and insult anyone that wears a headdress, including an Arab or a Sikh. In other words, using “raghead” does not suddenly become okay if it is correctly targeted. When it comes to this particular word, context does not matter — it is only used in a derogatory fashion, unlike other charged terms, like the “n-word”.
I hope Prince Harry learns his lesson and removes “raghead” from his vocabulary. I also hope he — or his staff — won’t come up with such lame explanations when and if he commits the next faux pas.
