ECB is about differentiating Sikhs
from the word 'Asian.'
Its a Vision to help raise awareness
of Sikhs in the Western World,
their history,beliefs and identity.
Published: January 25 2008 18:17 | Last updated: January 25 2008 18:17
A few months ago in Punjab, as grain farmers set fire to harvested rice fields to clear their land, Jagroop Singh spent the afternoon reflecting on his good fortune farming cows. Singh, a tall Sikh who tends his herd in a white tunic and pale pink turban on a farm near the north Indian village of Aliwal, owns 60 somewhat bony brown animals, which he keeps in an open-air shed on the edge of the fields behind his house.
Keeping cows, like farming wheat, has been an immensely profitable business during the past year, because Singh gets paid a lot more for his milk than he used to. He receives about Rs15 a litre – a third more than two years ago – from Nestle India, which collects the milk and blasts it through machines at a nearby factory, evaporating the water and creating a fine white powder.
“The prices are very good, we are very happy,” says Singh as he looks over his herd. He’s planning to build a new shed soon, as he’s running out of room to house his cows. By this time next year, he aims to have 150, which would be exactly 148 more than he owned a decade ago.
Not far away, another Sikh farmer, Jatinder Singh, is equally optimistic about the future. He started his farm a decade ago with just one cow but today has 65, which are kept outdoors in concrete-paved yards and dirt paddocks. Over the next few years, he plans to breed cows and double his milk production.
But what’s good for the farmers is hard on consumers. In India, where milk has traditionally been bought fresh every day and boiled to make tea and curd (this stops it going bad in a country where electricity is intermittent and many people do not have refrigerators), people are now paying around Rs24 a litre – Rs3 more than six months ago.
And milk is not the only basic foodstuff rising rapidly in price, nor India the only country in which people are spending more money on food. Bread, pasta, eggs, coffee, chicken, pork and beef – it is difficult to find a staple food that has not become more expensive over the past year, or a country in which food prices have not gone up.
British food producers increased prices by 7.4 per cent last year – the biggest annual increase since the country’s National Statistics office began tracking them 15 years ago – due to big jumps in the cost of producing bread, butter, eggs, milk and meat. In Russia, prices went up so sharply – milk rose by some 30 per cent and bread went up 22 per cent – that the government froze prices towards the end of the year. This month, China warned it may take similar action after food prices soared 18 per cent last year.
The speed at which food prices rose in 2007 has shocked not just farmers and consumers, but also governments. “Rarely has the world witnessed such a widespread and commonly shared concern on food price inflation,” the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation says.
Why are food prices going up so fast all over the world? For a start, the world’s stocks of grain have been falling, partly thanks to droughts in Australia and Ukraine (both countries are among the world’s-biggest wheat exporters). This has helped push up prices. Higher grain prices make food derived from animals – such as poultry, pork, eggs and milk – more expensive, because farmers who buy grain to feed their animals pass on the extra costs.
Meanwhile, biofuels are also having an effect. As global demand for non-oil-based sources of energy rises, some farmers are choosing to turn their crops into biofuels rather than food.
But the biggest cause of higher food prices is not biofuels or the fall in grain stocks: it is the remarkable changes occurring in the kinds of foods people eat, particularly in the fast-developing nations of India, China, Russia and Brazil. These changes are so big – and so swift – that their impact is being felt all over the world.
This is particularly acute in India, as is clear at New Delhi’s Khan Market branch of Cafe Coffee Day. Khan Market is a dusty group of shops, boutiques and restaurants on the south side of the city that attracts affluent locals and foreigners, and Cafe Coffee Day is one of the most popular places to meet.
On a Thursday morning in October, a group of men and women in their early twenties sit outside on the cafe’s balcony smoking, while inside, an older couple ignore the flat-screened television on the wall and talk over a glass-topped table. Other customers sit on cane lounge sets and read the paper or talk on their mobile phones. As the Cafe Coffee Day chain has expanded (there are now almost 500 in India), it has developed an extensive food menu. Along with a cappuccino, patrons can now order a chicken burger, a teriyaki chicken ciabatta, nachos with salsa, fish and chips, Greek salad, pasta in Alfredo sauce, apple pie, a blueberry muffin or dozens of other savoury and sweet snacks.
A few years ago, such a diverse menu would have been rare. But as Indians have become wealthier, they are travelling abroad and eating out more often, which exposes them to a wider variety of food.
“People have a lot more money to spend and people are a lot more adventurous,” says Naresh Fernandes, editor of Time Out Mumbai. “Until 20 years ago, we had rationing and food shortages. Going out to enjoy yourself didn’t exist until recently.”
Every fortnight, two or three new independent restaurants open in Mumbai, charging between Rs500 and Rs1,000 per person for a meal; Indians can increasingly afford these prices because incomes are rising quickly. About a third of India’s population live in cities. During the next 15 years, three-quarters of these are expected to earn enough money to join the country’s middle class, each earning between Rs200,000 (£2,600) and Rs1m per year, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, the economic research group. Only 10 per cent of urban Indians earn this much today.
This means that by 2025, India’s consumption of food and other products will quadruple to $1,500bn, creating the world’s fifth-biggest consumer economy after the US, Japan, China and the UK (India now ranks 16th, trailing Spain, Canada and Italy).
The new shopping mall Select Citywalk, a concoction of steel and glass in south Delhi, shows how closely the consumption habits of Indians are starting to mirror those of people in more developed countries. Inside the mall, which is so vast that it is impossible to see from one end to the other, most of the shops are expensive international brands such as Tissot, Esprit, Lancome, Mac, Mango and L’Occitane.
Familiarity with fashionable clothing brands and restaurants is being encouraged by new magazines such as Vogue India, which declared India’s “arrival” on the global fashion scene when it launched its first issue in September, and Time Out, which has a Delhi edition as well as a Mumbai one and shortly plans to start publishing in Bangalore.
Meanwhile, restaurants are now doing so well that many are opening up branches in different cities. Some are fast-food chains that have emulated McDonald’s, which has been in India for more than a decade and is one of its most established foreign restaurants. It remains a popular destination: in the evenings its restaurants are full of families queuing for Chicken Maharaja Macs, McAloo Tikki burgers and Paneer Salsa wraps – now made with “multi-cereal” bread for the health-conscious diner.
But these days McDonald’s is facing more competition. Newcomers include Jumbo King, which has taken a popular street food called vada pav, a spiced potato patty topped with chutney and served in a bun, and created a fast food chain around it, and Yo! China, which markets itself as “Chinese food, Chinese prices”.
Rachna Singh, a 34-year-old doctor who lives in Delhi, is one of the new generation of Indians who eat out regularly. She and her husband, who works in IT, go to restaurants three or four times a week and prefer non-Indian food when dining out, particularly Thai, Chinese, Middle Eastern and Italian. On weekends, Singh gladly drives for an hour to eat at her favourite Thai restaurant. But she restricts her three-year-old daughter, Avaka, to once-weekly sessions of junk food such as chips.
New food that was unheard of until recently has also found its way into Singh’s home. “We didn’t know what a kiwi was two or three years ago,” she says. She has also taken to buying foods that her mother would have made when she was growing up. Indian families traditionally make roti (round flat bread) by hand with a small rolling pin. But Singh buys frozen roti and parantha, another type of bread. She swears they taste like homemade ones. “They are excellent! You can’t tell the difference.” But she admits: “My parents think I am crazy.”
Singh often dines with her parents, Dipak and Anju Khannee, in their home in the south Delhi neighbourhood called Greater Kailash I. On a recent evening, they sat at a long dining table laden with typical Indian dishes. Big bowls were filled with kali dhal (black lentils), paneer (Indian cheese in sauce), rasala (a salad of cucumbers, red onions and coriander); chicken, raita (a type of yogurt) and roti.
The meal is traditional, but there are some new twists. Singh’s parents spoon pickle on to their plates from a store-bought jar. Singh’s mother used to make this tangy condiment of peppers herself but now finds it is easier to buy it.
Does Singh ever make pickle? “Me? No!” she shakes her head. “In our generation, no one would know how to make pickle. I’d rather buy 10 different kinds. It’s impossible to make a small amount.”
A glass dish of butter slices sits on the table, and Singh spreads some on her roti. A generation ago her mother would have made butter at home, but these days the family buys it too. “No one has got time or inclination to do so much stuff,” she says, even though both she and her parents employ housekeeping staff.
Indians have typically bought their fruits and vegetables in outdoor markets, and packaged foods in small stores with limited selections of products. But supermarkets, where young professionals such as Singh can find rare fruits like kiwis and chilled foods like butter, are now popping up around the country. In Gurgaon, the booming business district on the outskirts of Delhi, where cows wander along dusty streets between newly built office blocks, shoppers walking into a Spencer’s supermarket will find a pizza stand, Chinese food “X-press” and shelves filled with many of the same brands that they would see in London or Paris.
Lurpak butter, Red Bull energy drinks, and Tropicana orange juice are just some of the foreign brands available, and there is an entire aisle dedicated to foods such as peanut butter, pancake syrup and cranberry sauce beneath a sign saying “Taste America at Spencer’s”. Every month, 40 new Spencer’s supermarkets open around the country.
India, which is still trying to lift millions of people out of poverty, is having problems satisfying its appetites. One of the reasons the Punjabi dairy farmers are doing so well is that demand for milk, and milk-derived products, is increasing so quickly that farmers can’t keep up. India, despite being the world’s largest producer of milk, temporarily halted exports of milk powder last summer to try and stop domestic milk prices from rising too fast after some dairy farmers were tempted by record high global prices and sold their product to exporters rather than local food producers.
Milk isn’t the only hot commodity. After restarting wheat imports in 2006, for the first time since the late 1990s, India banned wheat exports last year. The country can, of course, try and produce more food. But Ajay Shankar, a government secretary in the ministry of commerce and industry, says that while India wants to increase its agricultural yields (which are low compared with the rest of the world), expanding the amount of land farmed is difficult in a country already struggling to support more than one billion people. In Punjab, the state that produces a hefty chunk of India’s wheat, rice and milk, decades of intensive farming and heavy fertiliser use have taken a heavy toll on the land, and water tables are falling sharply.
Although India’s economy is expanding at about 9 per cent a year, its agricultural sector is slowing, with growth declining from 4.7 per cent between 1992-1997 to just 1.5 per cent between 2002-2006.
If India can’t produce enough of its own food, it will have to import more. Shankar says it is unclear how much more food India will need, but acknowledges that significant increases in imports would affect the global economy. “If we become a major importer of food grains as some fear, clearly it will have an impact on global prices,” he says over tea in his Delhi office.
And India is not the only country expected to import more food in coming years. Over the next decade, per capita income in China is expected to triple, which means the Chinese will be eating more – and better. They are already each eating twice as much meat as they were in 1990 and the country now accounts for one third of all meat eaten in the world, according to research by Goldman Sachs.
Even in India, with its large vegetarian population, people are eating 40 per cent more meat. In Brazil, the amount of meat eaten by each person has risen by more than one third over the past 15 years. Brazil is better placed than most countries to meet its own needs due to its fertile soils and vast land mass, but many other countries will need to find more arable land if they are to satisfy the appetites of their citizens.
For dairy farmers such as the two Singhs, the implications of these global shifts are good news: after a decade of poor returns, farming appears to have a bright future. For everybody else, it’s a different story: get used to paying more for what you eat.
Jenny Wiggins is the FT’s consumer industries correspondent. Additional reporting by Amy Yee.
For an online special report on food prices, go to www.ft.com/food
United Sikhs, a UN affiliated international advocacy NGO, joined other civil rights organizations over the weekend in asking Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh to discuss the Sikh turban issue in France with President Sarkozy.
Mr Sarkozy's high profile visit to India began on 25 January 2008. Last week, Sikh organizations across the world mobilised for a change in the 2004 French law prohibiting all overt religious dress or symbols in schools and certain other public places.
“No Sikh organization has been granted a meeting with Dr Manmohan Singh or the External Affairs Minister, but we will persist in our request for a meeting so that we are able to effectively apprise him of the issues,” said Mejindarpal Kaur, the United Sikhs director who is leading the legal challenge to the French ban on the Sikh Turban in schools and on ID document photos.
“We are concerned that the details of the problems faced by French Sikhs and the legal arguments that have been presented in the French and in the International courts are not known to Dr Manmohan Singh,” she told a press conference at the Meridien Hotel in Delhi.
“We understand that Dr Manmohan Singh may be preoccupied presently, but we hope that he will grant us a meeting by next week,” said Daljeet Singh, chair of the Dharam Parchar Committee of DSGMC.
“Dr Singh, a Turban-wearing Sikh, cannot turn a blind eye to the injustice suffered by Sikhs in France," he added.
"Since the law was passed, France has also not issued passports, driving licence and residence cards to Sikhs who refuse to remove their turban for their ID photos,” said Gurdial Singh, an Indian national living in France, who has traveled to New Delhi to campaign for the Sikh Turban ban to be lifted in France.
On 16 January 2007, United Sikhs director, Gurpreet Singh, and other members of a Sikh delegation presented a memorandum, addressed to Mr Sarkozy, to the French Ambassador in Delhi, Jerome Bonnafont.
The ambassador informed the Sikh delegation that the French government takes a serious view of the concerns of the Sikhs and he will raise with Mr Sarkozy the issues raised in the memorandum.
The memorandum stated forcefully that the Sikh Turban is the most recognizable feature of a Sikh. Unlike other head coverings, it is an inextricable part of the Sikh identity and is worn by Sikhs at all times to cover their unshorn hair, a mandatory article of their faith. As a part of the core identity of a Sikh, this law essentially has the effect of banning the practice of the Sikh religion in France.
As a top presenter on TalkSport radio and star columnist on The Sun, Jon Gaunt has the reputation as the most rabid right-wing ranter in British media. He tells Ian Burrell about being the scourge of the liberal press and his college friendship with Simon Le Bon
Monday, 28 January 2008
He used to dye his hair five different colours with his friend Simon Le Bon. He read drama at a red brick university before becoming the toast of liberal theatre-goers, with his avant-garde plays. He heads off to Stratford-upon-Avon to watch Shakespeare at weekends. When he was younger, he marched in sympathy for the women of Greenham Common and stood on the picket lines in solidarity with striking miners. And he likes it to be known that when he goes to watch his favourite football team he sits with three pals who are respectively Muslim, Sikh and Hindu.
Meet Jonathan Gaunt, 46, the most rabid right-wing ranter on British radio, the bogeyman of the liberal media and the bete noir of this newspaper's Matthew Norman. "You don't get punished in this country," wails "Gaunty" to listeners of his weekday morning show on TalkSport radio, in a familiar lament over a nation turned soft, before pining for the return of the Poll Tax. "It was fair!" he screams, blaming the demise of Margaret Thatcher's hated levy on the "great unwashed, the students, the layabouts and the lefties", who, he claims, never pay their taxes anyway.
In his column in The Sun, where he is a replacement for Richard Littlejohn, he rails against lax immigration controls and castigates the Home Secretary's lack of support for the police, describing her as "Jacqui Spliff...dopey old bird", because of her university toking.
Never mind that he makes no secret of having inhaled industrial quantities of amphetamine sulphate and cocaine as a young man. A complex character is Gaunty. Such are the apparent contradictions that if a psychiatrist was ever so misfortunate as to have to diagnose what makes him tick, the session might end with the shattered shrink lying on the couch while Gaunt lectured him from an armchair.
As he sits now in a studio at TalkSport, dressed in a black shirt, just as his detractors would imagine him, he makes no apology, setting about other media figures from as far apart in the political spectrum as Johann Hari and Simon Heffer.
His confidence is born of his success. "I'm Jon Gaunt. I've got a column in The Sun, which gets the biggest reaction, a national radio show and I'm constantly on telly."
He says that he is not a shock- jock, which is strange when his autobiography is titled Undaunted: The true story behind the popular shock-jock. "I'm not a shock jock. It's an easy term to use but I don't set out to shock and I don't think the great talk jocks in America do, they just say what they feel. I say what I think and don't care whether it's to you or David Cameron."
The Tory leader has been a guest on Gaunt's show three times, though the presenter does not regard himself as a Tory ("No. I would vote one way locally and another way nationally.") Although he never misses an opportunity on air or in print to stress his working-class credentials, he says he has no problem with Cameron's Old Etonian background. "If he starts saying things that I agree with I'm not going to disagree just because he's a posh boy."
Indeed, Gaunty has sent his own children private.
Yet his sworn enemies in life are the bourgeoisie, the "Jeremys and Mirandas", as he calls them. "It is always white middle-class twits (with an A) who cause trouble within our disunited kingdom," he opined in a recent Sun piece on English identity.
Gaunt sees himself as the ally of the ignored masses, from whence he came. "My whole career has been aimed at talking to people who aren't represented in mainstream media and aren't involved in the democratic process. I've always seen myself as some sort of conduit for them to speak," he says. "My audience are ordinary guys and women who are struggling to turn a pound."
Gaunty himself, of course, is not struggling financially. He gleefully tells listeners of his "Jag-waar" car and his "big house" in Northamptonshire, so big that it is a running TalkSport on-air joke that he needs an Albanian worker to keep the grounds in order. "I don't think my audience, my fans, resent that. I'm the clever kid from their neighbourhood who went to college. But I'm the one who hasn't forgotten where I came from, "he says. "The only people that don't like you talking about being successful are middle class twerps – Jeremy and Mirandas whose mummy and daddy did everything for them and now they haven't quite made it."
His distaste for the middle-classes stems from his time at the University of Birmingham, where he studied drama and moved in a circle that included Le Bon and senior BBC television executive Kate Harwood. By comparison with most of his fellow students, Gaunt had a harsh upbringing in nearby Coventry. His mother had died of a brain haemorrhage when he was 12, leaving his father, an old-school, hard-drinking, hard-smoking Detective Constable of the pre-politically correct era, to bring up three sons alone.
Gaunt spent his early teens in a care home. He won a place at university after becoming a member of Coventry's Belgrade Youth Theatre, where he began long-standing friendships with Clive Owen, now a celebrated Hollywood actor, and Laurence Boswell, the respected director.
At Birmingham, Gaunty felt gauche. "I remember asking Le Bon, 'Why are we having spaghetti on toast for a dinner party?' He had to explain to me that spaghetti comes in a packet and you make a sauce that goes with it.
He must have told the others because they all took the piss. I realised that at university you can either pretend that you are one of them or you are the clown and I was not going to be either."
Nonetheless he felt obliged to sign up to the anti-Thatcher student political consensus that emerged after the 1979 election. "When I was at university all my politics came out of one file. I was left-wing, so I had to be pro CND. I walked round Coventry city centre with a fucking coffin on me shoulder when the Greenham Common missiles arrived. I can't believe I did those things," he remembers.
But it was also the era of British ska, when bands such as The Specials and The Selecter put the concrete jungle of Coventry on the musical map.
When Gaunt returned home after university he set up a theatre co-operative called Tic Toc (theatre in Coventry, theatre of Coventry), inspired by The Specials's original record label Two Tone and working with original members of that band, Jerry Dammers and Lynval Golding. Tic Toc became a hub for the city's musical and acting talent and Gaunt plays, such as 'Meat' and 'Hooligans' ("very anti Thatcher and that dole culture she had created") became nationally successful.
But the dream ended when the venture went bust. Gaunt lost his home and, disillusioned and angry, became the kind of layabout that he now rants about. "I spent six months doing nothing, staying in bed until about noon, having a bath for about three hours, then sitting around, drinking cheap lager from the off licence."
Persuaded by his wife Lisa to scrape some change from the back of the sofa and go into the city centre, he met an old acting friend, Moz Dee, who persuaded him to audition for the local BBC radio station for which he worked.
The radio microphone gave Gaunt the outlet he had been seeking, an opportunity to find his own voice and unleash some pent-up invective against the Jeremys and Mirandas.
"On air one day, I just looked up and the red light was on. It was like my road to Damascus moment," he says, a little misty-eyed. "I thought this was why my mum died, this was why my dad was a bastard to me, why I was an outsider at university and why I went bust, this is why I had my house repossessed, this is it, this is what I was born to do." Gaunt moved from Coventry to Luton's BBC Three Counties Radio where his show won three Sony Gold awards.
He was hired by BBC London but knew that his phone-in style put him on borrowed time with the corporation. "I knew full well that the moment the figures dropped those lefty liberals would have me out of the door quicker than they could order their next skinny latte," he writes in his book.
The end came in 2005 when he was offered a job on The Sun. Gaunt says the decision that he could not work for Rupert Murdoch's paper and the BBC at the same time was taken at the top. "I said what about [Jeremy] Clarkson? What about Vanessa Feltz? They said 'But she doesn't do current affairs.' It was just nonsense."
Still, he is happy enough with his current set up.
He tries to write his Sun column in the manner he delivers his TalkSport show, which he started in May 2006, shooting from the hip with minimal preparation. He reads the liberal press but detests its "Londoncentric, metropolitan view" and what he sees as its predictability. The Independent, for example, will always cover transport from a green perspective.
The "Jag-waar" driver is hardly enigmatic on this subject. When "Ed", a caller to his TalkSport show, last week suggested that cars with bigger than 3-litre engines were unnecessary, Gaunty cut the "plonker" off, telling him: "Shut up and get back to Cuba."
He says this newspaper's Johann Hari is "not old enough to shave let alone write a column." But he also attacks right-wing commentators such as Simon Heffer and Peter Hitchens ("we are not living in the fifties anymore"). When it's put to him that Hitchens also underwent a left to right conversion, he says: "He hasn't come from the background I've come from, he's not been bankrupt, he's just not real."
He also despises the output of "Radio 5 Dead", ridiculing presenters Shelagh Fogarty and Victoria Derbyshire and citing one listener to the station who revealed she ate Eggs Benedict and "three grilled cherry tomatoes" for breakfast. "If I ever attract those ponces to my show you can take me out and shoot me."
Gaunt is convinced that his upbringing gives his words a deeper truth. He is "straight". Not that he gets credit for it by an intelligentsia that "sneers" at the likes of him. "They paint me as some sort of right-wing bloody bigot, that left-wing liberal chattering class, none of which have ever done a proper day's work. I know because I used to promote them all, they've all come straight out of university and gone straight into arts and media."
The presence of loyal listeners such as Sid (Muslim taxi driver Siddiqui Khan, who gave the presenter a Christmas card before the holiday "is banned") says otherwise. "I say immigration has been good for the country, I say it repeatedly and I believe it passionately but it has to be controlled and well-managed," says Gaunty. "They can call me a fucking bigot as much as they want, or a racist, but I know what I am."
His views have made him hated by the BNP, he says. "I hate 'em. It's foul, filthy, horrible, to judge somebody by the colour of their skin." And though he is vehemently anti-abortion, he is "not anti-gay at all".
If Gaunty's not careful, an invitation to Jeremy and Miranda's next dinner party could be in the post.
Published: January 25 2008 16:15 | Last updated: January 25 2008 16:15
French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is visiting India at the head of a large trade delegation, is coming under pressure to exclude the Sikh turban from the ban on ostentatious religious symbols in France’s schools.
It is the latest side-issue to distract attention from Mr Sarkozy’s own agenda for the visit – the development of stronger trade and investment ties with the world’s second-fastest growing big economy – following weeks of discussion of his love life.
“Prime minister Manmohan Singh, a Sikh never seen without his turban, is the best evidence France needs to be convinced that a Sikh is inseparable from his turban,” said Manjeet Singh, president of the Akali Dal (Panthik), a political party in Punjab.
Indian foreign ministry officials, known for their fastidious attention to protocol, had been irritated by Mr Sarkozy’s failure to state whether Carla Bruni should be treated as a normal member of the delegation or given the status due to a president’s wife.
Coverage of his visit in the Indian press has been dominated by his romance with the former model, with many wondering whether he might be planning to propose to her at the Taj Mahal. Mr Sarkozy, who is the guest of honour at India’s Republic Day parade today, in the end decided to leave Ms Bruni behind in France.
The visit started badly on Friday when Mr Sarkozy was grilled on the stability of the French financial system in the wake of the record fraud perpetrated against Société Générale by a rogue trader. He tersely replied that its “solidity and reliability” was unaffected.
In a speech to Indian businessmen, he expressed support for an Indian seat on the United Nations Security Council and for civil nuclear co-operation with India, but also pointedly urged New Delhi to “assume its responsibilities” in the fight against climate change.
Sikh groups, which have been holding protest marches in New Delhi, yesterday distributed grainy black and white photographs of turban-wearing soldiers in the Champs-Elysées in 1919. About 80,000 Sikhs fought in France during the two world wars.
“Today Sikhs are fighting for their right to wear the turban in the same country,” said Mejindarpal Kaur of United Sikhs, an advocacy group. “The prime minister of India must raise the turban issue with the president of France.”
Intended to affirm the neutrality of the French state vis-a-vis all religions, the 2004 law prohibited “ostentatious” religious symbols – taken to include the Sikh turban, the Muslim hijab, the Jewish Kippa and Christian crosses – in public schools in France.
Visiting French politicians have in the past promised to find an acceptable compromise that satisfies both secular fundamentalists at home and France’s tiny Sikh community, but failed to follow through on that commitment, Sikh groups say.
Sikhs in France complain they are accidental victims of legislation intended to curb what was perceived to be the growing trend for Muslim schoolgirls to wear headscarves. There are an estimated 5m Muslims in France and 6,000 Sikhs.
Sikhs say the turban is not a religious symbol but an integral part of their way of life. Sikhs are prohibited by religion from cutting their hair and complain that the ban is tantamount to forcing them to give up their religion.
Aberdare girls' school has temporarily excluded Sikh student, Sarika Singh, for wearing her religious kara bracelet. Photograph: Barry Batchelor/PA
The case of a 14-year-old Sikh girl excluded from school for wearing a religious bangle will be heard in the high court, it was decided today.
Sarika Singh, a pupil at Aberdare girls' school, south Wales, has not attended school since being told she cannot wear her bracelet, known as a kara.
The case brought by the human rights group Liberty follows unsuccessful legal attempts to extend the boundaries of Muslim dress acceptable in schools. A Luton schoolgirl, Shabina Begum, sought to wear a full-length jiljab to classes and, although her case was upheld in the court of appeal, it was reversed by the House of Lords.
A young teaching assistant in Dewsbury, Aishah Azmi, failed in her attempt to prove religious discrimination after she was prevented from wearing a veil in the classroom.
In the Singh case, which is not expected to be heard for several months, Liberty argues the school has breached race relations and human rights laws.
Ann Fairclough, Liberty's legal officer who is representing the Singhs, said: "Nothing less than our traditions of religious freedom and racial tolerance are on trial in this case.
"Individuals from any religion who wish to modestly express their faith should not be denied a proper education, as Ms Singh has."
Liberty claims the school is also breaching a 25-year-old law lords' decision allowing Sikhs to wear items such as turbans to school.
An interim hearing will be held in the next two weeks to decide whether Singh, the only Sikh at her school, can return to classroom while the case is continuing.
She had been taught in isolation at the school for two months, and has been excluded since the beginning of November. The school has banned students from wearing any jewellery other than plain ear studs and wrist watches.
Singh has refused to remove the bangle and her family has said it is an important Sikh reminder to do good with the hands, and should not be regarded as jewellery.
Liberty claims Aberdare girls' school is violating the Race Relations Act 1976, the Equality Act 2006 and the Human Rights Act 1998.
Members of the GTA Sikh community are rallying to save their lead priest from being sent home to India after eight years as their main spiritual adviser.
Gurdeep Singh, 38, was refused landed immigrant status last year and community members fear he may be scooped up and sent packing by immigration officials.
He is one of many foreign priests being allowed here to work, but not reside, their Toronto lawyer said.
Singh was sponsored here in 1999 to act as a lead priest and adviser of the Gurdwara Nanaksar, on Timberlane Dr. in Brampton, said temple secretary Gurmeet Singh.
Gurmeet Singh said the refusal has left the priest without status in Canada, but he can't be removed yet because an application for a visa extension is pending.
'OUTSTANDING'
"He is an outstanding priest who was educated and trained in India," Gurmeet said yesterday. "The community wants to keep him here as their spiritual adviser."
He said the priest doesn't receive wages but his expenses are paid for by the temple, which has a congregation of about 10,000.
Gurmeet said community leaders have had unsuccessful meetings with immigration officials in a bid to sponsor Singh here as a landed immigrant.
'WELL-LOVED'
"This man leads all the services and is invaluable to the community," he said. "He is very highly qualified and well-loved by the community."
Lawyer Mendel Green said Singh was refused landed immigrant status because his English skills were lacking and officials fear he may go on welfare.
"Immigration is treating these highly skilled priests as temporary workers," Green said yesterday. "The community must have the stability to know their leader will be here tomorrow."
Green said Ottawa is cracking down on foreign priests. "There seems to be a big problem with communities getting their priests," Green said. "The immigration department is not using any common sense in dealing with this situation."
Immigration spokesman Madona Mokbel said there's no conspiracy to ban priests.
"All these cases are dealt with on a case-by-case basis," Mokbel said yesterday.
AN EVENING of celebration has been held to mark the birth anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh Ji.
The Sri Guru Singh Sabha Gurdwara in Wilbury Way, Hitchin, marked the anniversary of the Sikhs' 10th guru by holding an evening of events which included holy songs as well as offering free food and holding a fireworks display.
Born in 1666 Guru Gobind Singh Ji was a saint, soldier and poet who fought against oppression and in 1699 changed a two-century-old Sikh tradition by creating a new order known as Khalsa, which refers to the collective body of all baptised Sikhs.
Sikhs from across the world will be joining in moral and practical support of a peace march in New Delhi, India, today to protest against a French secularity law that bans the wearing of sacred turbans in schools and other work places throughout the country.
The one kilometre march from Gurudwara Bangla Sahib to Jantar Mantar, prefiguring the arrival of the controversial French president next week, will be followed by a candle light vigil.
The new law in France prohibits all “ostensible” religious articles - including the Sikh turban, the Muslim hijab, the Jewish Kippa and Christian crosses in public schools in France.
For Sikhs, the turban is one of five key symbols of their faith. For those who wear it, it is not just a head-dress but an extension of who they are as a person. It is also a willingly accepted obligation in a way that a cross, for example, is not for Christians.
Eastern Orthodox Christians wear a cross which is consecrated for them at the change of name they have through baptism, but it is usually worn under the clothing, for example.
Civil rights campaigners say that the French law is unacceptably prohibitive, and an example of "eliminative secularism" - a version of secularity which is not simply about equal treatment and the denial of privilege to any one group, religious or non-religious, but a deliberate attempt to deny any visibility to religion in public life.
The march is taking place a week ahead of French President Sarkozy’s arrival as chief guest at the 58th Indian Republic Day celebrations.
Six Sikh schoolchildren and two adults have unsuccessfully turned to the French courts for redress. They are now appealing their cases to the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
United Sikhs, a body which brings together Sikh people from the India, the USA, Canada, Britain, Ireland and elsewhere, will file for third party intervention in these cases in order to reinforce the importance of the turban to Sikhs.
The turban, they point out, poses no security threat as a Sikh is recognizable only with and because of the turban and not without it. Further it does not interfere with identification in today’s age of biometric photos.
A number of national and international Sikh organizations are participating in the march.celebration. Over 2,000 Sikh school pupils and 1,000 Sikh college students will join in the candle light vigil.
Delegates from Dharmik Ekta Mission, Shromani Akali Dal (Panthic), Shromani Akali Dal Delhi, and the International Sikh Confederation are expected to take part in the nonviolent protest.
United Sikhs aims to "recognise the human race as one" and to work with minority and underprivileged communities for empowerment, spiritual development, education and understanding.
A Queens man has been charged with a hate crime for breaking the nose and jaw of a Sikh worshiper.
David Wood, 36, allegedly approached Chadha Bajeet on Monday night screaming, "Arab, go back to your country," as the 63-year-old man parked his car outside a Sikh temple in New Hyde Park.
Wood was arraigned Tuesday night and is being held on $10,000 bail. He is charged with second-degree assault as a hate crime, second and thirddegree assault and second-degree aggravated harassment.
She was portrayed in the press as a victim of cruel religious discrimination - a poor persecuted Christian who had been "banned" by British Airways from wearing a simple cross at work. And all this while her Muslim and Sikh colleagues were parading about in hijabs and turbans.
The Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Tony Blair came out in her defence. The Daily Mail took up the cudgels on her behalf. One hundred MPs spoke out in her favour. Bishops demanded a boycott of BA. Evangelical Christians went into paroxysms of righteous fury. At last - here was proof that they were innocent victims of Christianophobia - as practised by our very own national airline.
An open and shut case, you might think. Nadia Eweida was a Christian martyr, pure and simple.
But hang on a moment. The employment tribunal, to which she complained, has just published its judgment, and it tells a rather different story. Not only did it kick out all her claims of religious discrimination and harassment, it also criticised her for her intransigence, saying that she:
"... generally lacked empathy for the perspective of others ... her own overwhelming commitment to her faith led her at times to be both naive and uncompromising in her dealings with those who did not share her faith."
One example of this was her insistence that she must never be required to work on Christmas Day, even though she had signed a contract that made it clear that she, like her colleagues, would be working in an operation that functions 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and therefore required shift working and bank holiday working, too.
In order to be fair to everybody, BA used a union-approved ballot system to ensure that those who worked on Christmas Day were fairly and objectively chosen. If their name came up, they were at liberty to negotiate with their colleagues to change shifts and days on a like-for-like basis. But not Nadia. She insisted that, because she was a Christian, she must not be required to work on Christmas Day - or Sunday, come to that.
The tribunal commented:
"[Eweida's] insistence on privilege for Christmas Day is perhaps the most striking example in the case of her insensitivity towards colleagues, her lack of empathy for those without religious focus in their lives, and her incomprehension of the conflicting demands which professional management seeks to address and resolve on a near-daily basis."
Eweida was originally suspended from work as a BA check-in clerk when she refused to wear a cross on a necklace underneath her uniform rather than on top of it. This breached stated uniform policy, which stated that no one was allowed to wear visible adornments around their neck.
But Eweida and her Christian activist backers managed to foment such a backlash that BA was forced into changing the policy. Now she can wear her cross visibly, and the airline offered her £8,500 compensation and a return to her job, with her point successfully made.
But no - she decided to continue pursuing the airline at the industrial tribunal. She was funded in her action by a rightwing religious law firm in Arizona called the Alliance Defence Fund, whose affiliated lawyer was Paul Diamond, a familiar figure in court cases demanding religious privilege.
The tribunal - unlike the Daily Mail - was required to look at all the evidence, and not consider only Eweida's account of events. And having done so, it kicked the case out on all counts, saying that Eweida did not suffer any discrimination.
The tribunal concluded:
"The complaint of direct discrimination fails because we find that the claimant did not, on grounds of religion or belief, suffer less favourable treatment than a comparator in identical circumstances."
The tribunal also heard how Eweida's attitude and behaviour towards colleagues had prompted a number of complaints objecting to her: "Either giving them religious materials unsolicited, or speaking to colleagues in a judgmental or censorious manner which reflected her beliefs; one striking example," said the judgment, "was a report from a gay man that the claimant had told him that it was not too late to be redeemed."
Indeed, the proselytising motivation of her desire to wear the cross over her uniform instead of underneath it was underlined when she said: "It is important to wear it to express my faith so that other people will know that Jesus loves them."
The details of this case make it clear that this is a woman who is wearing religious blinkers. In several instances she brought grievances and complaints against BA that had no basis in fact. She was convinced that BA was anti-Christian, and nothing would dissuade her from that opinion, despite the company jumping through hoops trying to accommodate the many and varied religious demands being placed on it. Indeed, there is a BA Christian Fellowship group that did not support Eweida's fight, and confirmed that BA was already "making available facilities, time, work spaces, intranet use and supporting Christian charitable activities throughout the world" - but strangely we haven't heard about them in the newspaper reports.
The tribunal notes that on the original claim form, Eweida states "I have not been permitted to wear my Christian cross; whilst other faiths (Sikhs, Hindu, Muslims) are permitted to manifest their faith in very obvious fashion. Secular individuals can show private affiliations." The tribunal found the first and last assertions to be untrue. But Eweida would not be persuaded.
Her numerous demands for special treatment because of her religion showed a complete indifference to the effect it would have on the lives of others. Indeed, in one instance she made an accusation against the Christian Fellowship group that turned out to be completely fallacious, and the tribunal felt compelled to say: "We find it demonstrates to a degree the extent to which the claimant [Eweida] misinterpreted events, as well as her readiness to make a serious accusation without thought of the implications."
Now we read that there is another case in the pipeline for British Airways. An orthodox Jewish man is bringing a case of religious discrimination because he is required to work on Saturday, the Jewish Shabat.
And a demonstration by Sikhs has just taken place outside the Welsh assembly, demanding that a schoolgirl be permitted to breach the school's uniform policy by wearing a ceremonial bangle, the kara.
As Jonathan Bartley, of the religious thinktank Ekklesia said of the Eweida case:
"Like many of the other claims of discrimination being made by Christians, this has turned out to be false. People should be aware that behind many such cases there are groups whose interests are served by stirring up feelings of discrimination of marginalisation amongst Christians. What can appear to be a case of discrimination at first glance is often nothing of the sort. It is often more about Christians attempting to gain special privileges and exemptions."
The National Secular Society has demanded that employers should be permitted to declare their workplaces secular spaces if they want to, without penalty. Attempts by employers to accommodate everyone have turned many workplaces into religious battlegrounds. It should now be OK to say: "Leave your religion at the door, please. And if you won't and your religion doesn't permit you to work in the way that this jobs demands you do, then please find another job that will."
Canadian Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day has blasted Indo-Canadian supporters for resisting deportation of failed refugee claimant Laibar Singh.
Twice they have stopped police attempts to deport Singh who entered Canada on a false passport five years ago and is currently sheltering in a Surrey gurudwara (Sikh temple) after exhausting all legal avenues.
The first attempt to deport him failed Dec 10 when over 2,000 supporters blocked police access to him.
They foiled another attempt last Wednesday when they blocked police entry to the gurudwara. whose management had promised to cooperate in Laibar Singh's deportation.
Stung by their non-cooperation, the minister said Singh might be in a mall or a gurudwara; he was not entitled to stay in Canada any more and will be deported.
Hitting out at the gurudwara management for sheltering Singh, he said: 'There are a few and there are rare circumstances across the country where places of worship are used as sanctuary. There is no law that actually provides for that.
'When people are ... defying a removal order - whether they are taking refuge in a place of worship or whether they are taking refuge in a mall - they are in defiance of the rule of law.'
Urging the Indo-Canadians to cooperate in Singh's removal, the minister said, 'I would encourage those who are supporting somebody at a time like this to remember that those representatives gave their word and they asked for a time of reconsideration, and then the reconsiderations were given and at the risk of them being seen as people who do not keep their word, I would hope that they would respect that. We believe in the rule of law in our country.'
He said over 12,000 illegal people were being removed from Canada each year, and the Canadian Border Security Agency was delaying this case only because they didn't want to hurt the sentiments of Sikhs by entering the gurudwara.
Meanwhile, Gulzar Cheema, a doctor who examines Singh regularly, has come under fire for breaking patient confidentiality after he had said Singh could travel to India under medical support.
Singh's supporters said it was unethical on the part of Cheema to speak publicly about his health.
Singh was paralysed in 2006 and his supporters say he should not be deported, as he will not get proper medical care in India.
A teenage Sikh girl, who was kidnapped by her own family at a Leicester cinema as she fled an arranged marriage, has told of her ordeal.
She revealed her story just days after an inquest ruled that Muslim teenager Shafilea Ahmed, from Cumbria, was unlawfully killed by her parents after she refused to go to Pakistan to marry.
The Sikh girl, who is in hiding, was 16 when she was snatched by her mother and uncle outside a cinema in July last year.
ABOUT 200 Sikhs gathered at the Samabula Sikh Temple in Suva yesterday to commemorate the 340th ceremony for their tenth Guru.
Guru Gobind Singh Ji, the 10th and last Guru of Sikhism, was born at Patna, Bihar in India and died in the 1700s.
The Sikh Association of Fiji national treasurer, Sardar Balminder Singh said Guru Ji had preached philosophies like love, tolerance and had fought for the abolishment of the caste system.
Every year, Sikhs converge at the temple to commemorate the birth, work and teachings of Guru Gobind Singh, prior to his death.
The celebration is also called Khalsa Panth.
Sikhs hold prayers, kathas (religious readings) and kirtans (hymns) followed by a feast.
Balminder said the tenth Guru's father, Guru Tegh Bahadur had nominated him as the tenth Guru.
"After Guru Tegh Bahadur's death, Guru Gobind Singh became Guru on November 11, 1675," he said.
Before Guru Gobind left his body, he nominated Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji the Holy Book of Sikhs, as the next perpetual Guru of the Sikhs. Hence, there was no human Guru of the Sikhs thereafter. Balminder said Guru Gobind Singh was highly regarded by the Sikhs for his monumental role in the development of the Sikh faith.
He said Guru Ji infused the spirit of both sainthood and soldier in the minds and hearts of his followers to "fight oppression in order to restore justice, peace, righteousness and to uplift the down-trodden people in this world."
A legal challenge has been filed in the High Court on behalf of a 14-year-old girl excluded from a Cynon Valley school for wearing a Sikh bangle.
Sarika Singh has been excluded from Aberdare Girls' School since 5 November and will not be attending when classes start back next week after Christmas.
Campaign group, Liberty, has made the challenge, saying the school had breached race relations laws.
The school bans all jewellery and has said their policy ensures equality.
After filling the challenge, Liberty said the school has also breached human rights laws.
It says it also breaches a decision made by the House of Lords which allows Sikh children to wear items representing their faith, including turbans to school.
Liberty wants Sarika to be allowed to attend normal lessons at the school while wearing the Kara, and for the school to amend its uniform policy to comply with the Race Relations Act.
Sarika was excluded from her school three times last term and was taught in isolation for two months before that step was taken.
Aberdare Girls' School only allows ear studs and a wrist-watch
School governors rejected her request to wear the bangle after a "significant period of research" examining the uniform policy and human rights legislation in detail.
The school's governing body must lodge its defence in the High Court by 11 January and then the court will consider the case during the following week.
Anna Fairclough, from Liberty, said: "Sarika Singh has suffered humiliating isolation and is being denied a proper education simply because she wears the Kara, a small bangle worn by virtually all Sikhs both in and out of school and work.
"It is astonishing that the school continues to exclude her despite almost universal condemnation and 25-year-old House of Lords precedent." United Sikhs, an international advocacy charity, will also apply to file a third party intervention.
A spokeswoman for the Welsh Assembly Government has previously said school uniform policy was a matter for the governing body.
However, she said the government would shortly be issuing guidance on school uniform policy considering issues including health and safety as well as equality and discrimination.
More than 2,000 people have joined an online group in support of Sarika on the social networking site Facebook.
Peel Region's Sikh community played a key role in establishing Brampton's gleaming new hospital. It has played an equally major role in the troubled institution's first major crisis. Depending on who you ask, two recent deaths illustrate the danger of pu
Dec 22, 2007 04:30 AM
Francine Kopun Feature Writer
The opening of Brampton Civic Hospital was supposed to be an occasion for celebration, especially among the city's burgeoning Sikh community.
They had been actively courted by the hospital foundation, and responded with tremendous enthusiasm, raising $2.8-million with a Punjabi radiothon and an incredible $200,000 during a 48-hour Sikh prayer ceremony in July.
The new $790-million facility, built in a field in northeast Brampton, was meant to take pressure off the aging Peel Memorial Hospital downtown, with its water leaks and occasional blackouts, and offer the community an improved level of health care.
Instead, the new hospital, which opened two months ago, has become a public relations nightmare for staff and administrators, with unproven allegations of mismanagement and substandard health care sparking street protests among the very community that worked to help raise funds for the project.
The deaths of two hospital patients, both Sikhs – one of them a man whose family donated $25,000 to the foundation – have been held up as examples of how the hospital is failing the community. Hamstrung by privacy legislation that prevents them from talking about individual cases, hospital administrators have been forced to limit their response to press releases outlining hospital procedures.
Responding to community pressure, the province appointed a supervisor to oversee the hospital in a bid to restore public confidence in the new facility. How it went wrong is a puzzle. In five pieces.
The press Rajinder Saini was listening to a local Punjabi radio program about Brampton Civic Hospital when local MPP Vic Dhillon called into the show to say one his close family friends had recently died there.
As the publisher of the Parvasi Weekly newspaper, Saini had been receiving complaints for years from readers about the quality of health care in Brampton. Things were supposed to be different at the new Brampton Civic Hospital, a state-of-the-art facility that had opened on Oct. 28.
Dhillon, Saini remembers, described how his friend had waited eight or 10 hours in the emergency room at the new hospital, and that during the man's subsequent 10-day stay at the hospital for pancreatitis, his family complained that he was not properly cared for.
Saini called Dhillon, who put him in touch with the family. The next day, Nov. 20, the family's story was front-page news in Parvasi Weekly, which has a circulation of 20,000 in the GTA, Vancouver and India.
Local Punjabi radio shows picked it up, and Saini talked about it on his own radio show, which runs on CJMR 1320 AM. The Times of India picked up the story, says Saini. He was invited to talk about it on television.
"It was big news," says Saini. "Everybody talked about this story. There was big outrage in our community."
Saini regards himself as an investigative reporter. A story he wrote for his paper in 2003 about a company that was stealing thousands of dollars from customers trying to wire money back home to India was picked up by the national press and launched an international police investigation.
"It's a very small kind of community newspaper, but still I am trying to run it very professionally," says Saini, who operates out of a small office opposite a strip mall in Mississauga.
"We have nothing against the hospital staff or management. We are trying to raise the voice. The voice of the people."
The doctor By the time stories of what was happening in the emergency department of Brampton Civic Hospital reached the ears of the man who runs the place, the facts had been distorted beyond recognition.
"`I know somebody delivered a baby on the sidewalk outside the emergency department...while this man was dying on the floor of your waiting room,'" Dr. Naveed Mohammad was told at a dinner party.
"There was a lot of misinformation out there," says Mohammad. "That was one of the most painful parts for me. It really painted our hospital and the emergency department in a negative manner and that wasn't the truth."
Neither of the two cases that became lightning rods for controversy involved medical error in the emergency room, says Mohammad.
"Nobody waits 10 hours in emergency to see a doctor. Everyone is assessed in a timely fashion"
The problem was one of expectations, says Mohammad. The community was expecting that the hospital would open at full capacity, with 608 beds. It has 479. The remainder will open over the next four years. Physicians, nurses and staff didn't anticipate the challenges that would come with moving to a spanking new hospital, from mastering the computer system to finding the stairs.
They didn't anticipate that demand would soar as it did – the new facility drew 20 per cent more emergency-room traffic than predicted, and the number of very sick patients to emergency doubled. Mohammad is Punjabi. He says he understands the culture. He understands why members of the community are upset. He even understands why the same people who told him they understand his position took to the streets in protest.
"A lot of community leaders had to decide whether to support the hospital or the community," says Mohammad. "The community is large, it's what's around you all the time. If you're someone who has to depend on the community for business...it's difficult."
The patients The first patient death to draw media attention was Harnek Sidhu, 52. His family told Parvasi Weekly that he was not properly attended to in the emergency department at Brampton Civic Hospital, despite the fact that Sidhu was vomiting and in acute pain.
His son Sandeep later told the Star that it took 12 hours for his father to be assigned a bed. His father died 10 days later of pancreatitis.
Sandeep blamed it on the fact that the hospital was built and is operated as a public-private partnership, with the private sector operating non-clinical services, such as housekeeping.
He said the hospital is understaffed and the focus is not health care, but on moving patients through the system as quickly as possible.
The family had donated $25,000 to the hospital.
Amarjit Narwal was home when he suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right arm and leg. He was treated at Trillium Health Centre in Mississauga, the regional centre for acute stroke care.
Early Saturday morning, Narwal was transferred to Brampton Civic Hospital. Friends and family visited with him all day and were reassured by the fact that he was talking and asking for juice. Sunday morning, his cousin, Inderjit Nijjar, returned to find him in a coma.
"I started acting up. I started calling the nurse, asking her to call the doctor and look at him," says Nijjar.
The nurse paged a doctor at home. The doctor called back, but did not come to the hospital, not even after Narwal began having seizures, according to Nijjar. Finally the nurses brought a doctor down from the intensive care unit. He read the file and told the family that nothing could be done.
Narwal, 42, with a 2-year-old son in India, died that night.
Nijjar said he tried to get help for his cousin – he called someone he knew on the hospital board, he called someone he knew involved in fundraising for the hospital committee.
"`Do me a favour, there's no point in screaming. Write up a written complaint, give it to me Monday. I will follow up,'" Nijjar was told.
The opposition
Some of the groundwork for community discontent was laid down by the Ontario Health Coalition, which began calling members of the Punjabi press in September to organize a series of town hall meetings on the topic of health care in Brampton.
The Ontario Health Coalition is opposed to hospitals built on the Brampton Civic Hospital model – so-called P3s – which involve partnerships between the private and public sectors.
The coalition represents, among other community groups, the Council of Canadians and several powerful unions, including health-care unions. Executive director Natalie Mehra says that under P3 models, hospital profits are siphoned off to the private sector, at the expense of health care.
The town-hall meetings, which took place a month before the hospital opened, were designed to bring attention to the issue in time for the provincial election in October, Mehra said.
"We wanted to push the province to make some promises leading into the election and coming out of the election," she said.
It was through the Ontario Health Coalition that journalists like Parvasi Weekly publisher Rajinder Saini learned that the newly opened hospital would have fewer beds than originally thought and that the old Peel Memorial Hospital would be closed once the new hospital opened.
"Until then, I don't believe that anybody in the community knew that if we are getting this new hospital, they are snatching away Peel Memorial hospital, too," says Saini. "That's how it started simmering around, you know. People started complaining that, `Why are they closing down Peel Memorial?'"
The community
Brampton is home to a large and politically important South Asian population.
South Asians make up 83,245 of the 206,185 immigrants in the city, which now has a total population of 400,000.
The overall population of the suburb northwest of Toronto has grown by 60 per cent in 10 years, to 400,000, resulting in gridlock, crowded schools and, critics say, social and community services that have failed to keep up. The accusation that there aren't enough services, including libraries and community centres, to serve the growing population is a frequent topic of heated debate on local Punjabi radio.
Health care has long been an issue in the city – until the new hospital was built, one-third of patients seeking emergency care travelled outside of Brampton to get it – to hospitals in Etobicoke and Mississauga.
The hospital foundation has actively sought the support of the Sikh community, says Anne Randell, president and CEO of the William Osler Health Centre Foundation, which includes Brampton Civic Hospital, Etobicoke General Hospital and Peel Memorial Hospital. A radiothon in the community two years ago raised $2.8-million.
This summer, 15,000 people attended a weekend Akhand Paath ceremony at the hospital – a continuous reading of the Sikh scripture from beginning to end. In all, $200,000 was raised.
The new emergency department was named for Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism. Two Sikhs sit on the foundation board and three on the hospital board.
"This was a collective effort by a portion of our community to do a lot for the hospital, so it's not that person who donated $10-million that expects you do to something for them, it's the whole community," says Dr. Naveed Mohammad, corporate chief of emergency services.
A court asked India's federal police to reinvestigate anti-Sikh riots in 1984 after a witness surfaced to implicate a former minister in the violence that killed nearly 3,000 people.
The riots in New Delhi, among India's bloodiest in modern times, were in retaliation against the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. Most of those killed were Sikhs.
About eight cases related to the riots are either the subject of tortuous trials or are still being investigated. Around six have resulted in convictions.
But the one most keenly followed involves former federal minister Jagdish Tytler, a leading member of the ruling Congress party, who is accused of inciting violence against Sikhs.
He was forced to resign as a junior minister in 2005 after protests sparked by an inquiry that said he might have instigated the riots. Tytler, implicated by two judicial commissions, has denied the charge, and this month the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) told a Delhi court it did not have any evidence against him and that a lone witness was untraceble.
It had asked that Tytler be exonerated of all charges.
But the Indian media quickly traced the witness, Jasbir Singh, who said CBI did not contact him despite being aware of his whereabouts.
On Tuesday, the court asked the CBI to reinvestigate Tytler's involvement, record Singh's statement and file a report by January 16.
"The judge said reinvestigate Tytler's involvement and record Jasbir Singh's statement and any other statement the CBI wishes," H.S. Phulka, counsel for the riot victims, said.
Singh, who lives in California, told the CNN-IBN television channel that he saw Tytler incite a mob and lead an attack on a Sikh temple in November 1984.
"I can come anywhere I am asked to depose against that killer," Singh told the news channel.
Gandhi's assassination, in October 1984, was carried out in revenge for her decision to send the army to flush Sikh separatists out of the Golden Temple - Sikhism's holiest shrine - in the northern city of Amritsar in June 1984.
The raid damaged the shrine, enraging Sikhs.
The government says nearly 3,000 Sikhs were killed in the riots following her death, while human rights activists say the figure was closer to 4,000.
Activists accuse Congress of having turned a blind eye to the killing of Sikhs and say some of its leaders helped orchestrate the rioting. Sikhs make up around two percent of Hindu-majority India's population of more than 1 billion.
Chandigarh, Dec 16 - The burst from a malfunctioning automatic weapon may have injured her but not her spirit to be where the action is. Ranbir Kaur, 21, a Jat-Sikh girl born in India, is headed back to Iraq - one of the most troubled spots in the world - to make up on lost work as part of the US armed forces.
Being in the middle of hotspots is nothing new for Kaur, who is attached with the US National Guards.
She was assigned duty in war-ravaged Iraq earlier this year after having done a stint in patrolling the streets of another hotspot, Kabul city in Afghanistan.
After her injury in November, Kaur rested for four weeks and on Saturday she headed back for Iraq.
'She is very determined. The accident in Iraq meant a cooling off period for her in the US. But she is now headed back to work in Iraq. She seemed quite enthusiastic about going back there,' Hoshiarpur-based horticulturist-author Khushwant Singh, who featured her in his book 'Sikhs Unlimited' this year, told IANS after speaking to her in the US this week.
Kaur's new assignment in Iraq will be as a trucker and a gunner at an undisclosed Iraq city.
The dauntless Kaur slung an M-16 rifle on her shoulders when she was 17. At 20, she patrolled the streets of Kabul in 2006. 'I have test-fired almost every weapon in the US Army now,' Kaur told the author in his book that featured successful Sikh men and women among the Indian diaspora. He referred to her as 'Specialist Kaur' - a name she acquired in the US forces.
She was the first Sikh girl to join the US Armed Forces, becoming one among the over 200,000 women soldiers in the force. That was in 2003. Her work in Afghanistan and Iraq has ranged from protecting airports, streets of Kabul and heritage and religious buildings.
For a girl whose favourite conversation line is 'If I gotta go, I'm gonna go', things were not as easy even after she joined the US Armed Forces. She received hate mails and one criticism levelled against her was that she found it convenient to join the US forces in order to get citizenship. The truth, however, is that she got her citizenship before she joined the forces.
'In countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, everything is frontline. If death does not deter me, nothing else can,' she told Khushwant. She took an 'awesome' fascination for the uniform while still in high school where marines and regulars from forces used to distribute fliers to students outside the school career centre.
Born in Nijjran village of Punjab's non-resident Indian (NRI)-dominated Jalandhar district, the young girl reached US shores as a seven-year-old after her father Mahan Singh, pursuing dollar dreams, secured a US green card in 1990.
Singh, who lives with his large family in San Joaquin Valley, Earlimart-California, is now a grape-grower.
Ever since 18-year-old Ishmeet Singh won the glitzy American Idol-inspired Voice of India contest on Star TV last month, the phone hasn't stopped ringing at his family's home in Ludhiana, the busy industrial hub of Punjab. But the kudos is about more than Singh's impressive singing prowess; he has earned it by the fact that he is a keshdhari (turban-wearing) Sikh. "It is his sabat-surat [appearance conforming to the Sikh ideal] that has brought him where he is today," says his proud father Gurpinder Singh. "He has shown other Sikh boys that they don't need a trendy hairstyle to attain stardom." At a time when more and more young Sikh men are relinquishing the turban — considered the very core of a Sikh man's cultural and religious identity — community leaders have hailed Singh's win as, literally, a godsend. Sikh blogs have been pointing out that Singh was declared a winner on Guru Nanak Jayanti, the anniversary of the birth of the founder of Sikhism. And he has been honored by the Akal Takht, the highest seat of the Sikh clergy.
Founded by Guru Nanak in northern India during the 15th century, Sikhism drew from Sufism, Islam and Hinduism, but rejected what it saw as their worst traditions, such as the Hindu caste system. It later incorporated the teachings of nine other Gurus, or teachers, which are collected in the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy book revered as the eleventh Guru. The religion claims 23 million followers today, 76 percent of whom live in the Indian state of Punjab. Although they comprise only 2% of the wider Indian population, they are a close-knit and prosperous community with a strong cultural affiliation. But the battle to preserve the turban may well be the toughest facing the Sikhs since they were first rallied as a martial nation by their tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, in 1699, to fight the oppressive Mughal rulers of India. A rehatnama, or book of ordinances, dating back to this period enjoins Sikh men to wear their hair long and sport a turban. But Sikh scholars estimate that in some regions of Punjab — home to 60% of India's 14.6m Sikhs — as many as 80% of Sikhs no longer comply. And that may reflect the generational conflict in many a Sikh household, between conservative parents and children who want to break free. Dr Rajesh Gill, a sociologist at Panjab University whose 18-year-old son sports a turban, speaks for many Sikh parents when she says, "A turban is a Sikh's pride, and I don't want my son to shear his hair once he becomes more independent."
Cutting one's hair is not new among Sikhs, but the number of turban-less, clean-shaven Sikhs has grown astronomically in the last two decades. "Thanks to the onslaught of satellite TV, there's a drive towards mainstreaming," says Gill. "Women aspire to marry men who look like Bollywood stars, and men aspire to look like the men these women want. 'The look', unfortunately, doesn't include a turban." As young people travel far for work, they feel less obligated to adhere to the demands of their culture. Jitender Singh Sandhu, a young management professional who hails from Punjab and now lives in Bangalore, cut his hair following a head injury four years back. He has since kept his hair short. "It's great not to have to tie a turban every morning and maintain long hair," he says. "It helped that I didn't have to deal with disapproving looks from my family and neighbors." Convenience is a huge factor for Sikh mothers, too — young, working mothers have no time for the elaborate, early-morning practice of tying turbans and washing boys' long hair on weekends. Moreover, community leaders feel, efforts to preach their values to young Sikhs have lagged. "In India, education has become so secular that even Sikh schools do not preach Sikhism," says Dr. Kharag Singh, editor of the journal Abstracts of Sikh Studies. "As a result, children don't realize the philosophy behind wearing a turban."
The euphoria over Ishmeet Singh's victory reflects the need of the Sikh community's elders to find turbaned role models. While Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, always seen with a spiffy turban, is an obvious example, Sikh leaders also hail pop culture icons such as the "turbanator" — cricket hero Harbhajan Singh — and popstar Daler Mehndi, whose glittering turbans are said to have inspired many a short-haired Sikh to take to the turban. Sikh organizations from Vancouver to Melbourne are renewing efforts at prachar, or preaching, to the 3 million-strong Sikh diaspora. Schools to teach young Sikhs how to tie a turban have opened in many cities, and an organization called Akal Purakh Ki Fauj has brought out "smart turban software" to help users identify the style of turban that would best suit them. Turban-tying competitions are held across Punjab on Baisakhi, the Sikh New Year, and a Mr. Singh International contest is held for turbaned Sikhs every year — as all Sikh men use the surname 'Singh', which means lion — in which participants get points on how well they tie their turbans. Sikh clergy are to meet this week for an annual convention at which their battle plans will be refined in the escalating culture war to restore the turban to its place atop the head of the Sikh male.
Amritsar, Dec 11 (IANS) Bowing to pressure from various quarters, the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) Tuesday removed the portrait of British General Reginald Dyer, who had ordered his troops to open fire on innocent Indians at the Jallianwala Bagh in 1919, from the Sikh museum inside the Golden Temple complex.
Hundreds of unarmed men, women and children fell to the bullets of the British soldiers in the unprovoked firing ordered by Dyer at Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed garden inside the walled city, located close to the Harmandar Sahib (Golden Temple), on April 13, 1919.
He has been labelled as the 'butcher of Jallianwala Bagh'.
Dyer's portrait remained in the Sikh museum for several years before a local organization, Shaheed Bhagat Singh Youth Forum, objected and forced the SGPC to remove it.
The forum has questioned how the SGPC never thought of installing a portrait of freedom fighter Bhagat Singh in the museum instead. SGPC sources here said Bhagat Singh's portrait is likely to be installed shortly.
Bhagat Singh's birth centenary is being celebrated this year. The Parliament House in New Delhi will also soon have his portrait.
The SGPC is already facing criticism for the controversial installation of a portrait of separatist Sikh leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in the museum recently. He has been mentioned as a Sikh general who fought the Indian Army. In official records though, he remains a terrorist who was killed in the army's Operation Bluestar here June 1984.
Chandigarh, Dec 11 (IANS) A descendant of Sai Hazrat Mian Mir, a Muslim Sufi saint from Lahore in Pakistan who laid the foundation stone of the holiest of Sikh shrines - 'Harmandar Sahib' (Golden Temple) - demanded that area in the one-kilometre radius of the shrine should be declared a holy zone.
Sai Makhdoom Syed Chan Pir Qadri, the 19th descendant of Mian Mir, called on Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal Tuesday, and demanded that shops selling meat, wine and tobacco should be banned in the one-kilometre holy zone around the shrine in view of the sanctity of the shrine.
Qadri was here on a visit from Pakistan.
Qadri showed a few belongings of the fifth Sikh guru - Arjan Dev - to Badal. These included a prayer beads, a necklace and another necklace belonging to the guru's wife.
He also demanded the setting up of a visa office at Amritsar to facilitate people wanting to visit shrines and other places in Pakistan.
Mian Mir had laid the foundation stone of the Sikh shrine in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar in 1588. The shrine, under the supervision of guru Arjan Dev, was completed in 1604. Mughal emperor Akbar donated the land for the shrine in 1574.
Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims joined Britain's equality watchdog in urging Britons to enjoy Christmas without worrying about offending non-Christians.
"It's time to stop being daft about Christmas. It's fine to celebrate and it's fine for Christ to be star of the show," said Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
"Let's stop being silly about a Christian Christmas," he said, referring to a tendency to play down the traditional celebrations of the birth of Christ for fear of offending minorities in multicultural Britain.
Suicide bombings by British Islamists in July 2005 which killed 52 people in London have prompted much soul-searching about religion and integration in Britain, a debate that has been echoed across Europe.
The threat of radical Islam, highlighted by the London attacks, prompted reflection about Britain's attitude to ethnic minorities and debate about whether closer integration was more important than promoting multiculturalism.
LONDON (Reuters) - Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims joined the country's equality watchdog on Monday in urging people to enjoy Christmas without worrying about offending non-Christians.
"It's time to stop being daft about Christmas. It's fine to celebrate and it's fine for Christ to be star of the show," said Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
"Let's stop being silly about a Christian Christmas," he said, referring to a tendency to play down the traditional celebrations of the birth of Christ for fear of offending minorities in multicultural Britain.
Suicide bombings by British Islamists in July 2005 which killed 52 people in London have prompted much soul-searching about religion and integration in Britain, a debate that has been echoed across Europe.
The threat of radical Islam, highlighted by the London attacks, prompted reflection about Britain's attitude to ethnic minorities and debate about whether closer integration was more important than promoting multiculturalism.
Phillips, reflecting on media reports of schools scrapping nativity plays and local councils celebrating "Winterval" instead of Christmas, feared there might an underlying agenda -- using "this great holiday to fuel community tension."
So he joined forces with leaders of minority faiths to put out a blunt message to the politically correct -- Leave Christmas alone.
"Hindus celebrate Christmas too. It's a great holiday for everyone living in Britain," said Anil Bhanot, general secretary of the UK Hindu Council.
Sikh spokesman Indarjit Singh said: "Every year I am asked 'Do I object to the celebration of Christmas?' It's an absurd question. As ever, my family and I will send out our Christmas cards to our Christian friends and others."
Their sentiments were echoed by British Muslim leaders, who were also forthright last week in condemning Sudan for jailing a British teacher for letting her pupils name a teddy bear Mohammad.
Muslim Council of Britain spokesman Shayk Ibrahim Mogra said "To suggest celebrating Christmas and having decorations offends Muslims is absurd. Why can't we have more nativity scenes in Britain?"
More than 70 percent of Britons -- some 41 million -- said they were Christians, according to figures from the 2001 census.
Muslims were the largest religious group after Christians -- at the time there were 1.6 million Muslims in Britain, while there were over half a million Hindus and Sikhs numbered just over a third of a million.
A prominent Sikh businessman told the Air India inquiry Friday he's concerned his cultural community has become unfairly associated with terrorists since the high-profile 1985 bombing.
Gian Singh Sandhu, founder of the World Sikh Organization of Canada, said the bombing of Air India flight 182, which killed 329 people, devastated the Sikh community in British Columbia — but they were also stigmatized in its wake.
"The Sikh community as a whole was torn apart.... The majority of the Sikh community was categorically against these type of events," he testified in Ottawa.
However, the onslaught of news coverage and allegations of Sikh involvement in the bombing tainted his community, he said.
Sandhu described to inquiry commissioner John Major being approached while taking part in a parade in B.C. one week after the disaster.
"Kids were asking me when was the next plane going to go down," he testified.
A prominent Sikh businessman told the Air India inquiry Friday he's concerned his cultural community has become unfairly associated with terrorists since the high-profile 1985 bombing.
Gian Singh Sandhu, founder of the World Sikh Organization of Canada, said the bombing of Air India flight 182, which killed 329 people, devastated the Sikh community in British Columbia — but they were also stigmatized in its wake.
"The Sikh community as a whole was torn apart.... The majority of the Sikh community was categorically against these type of events," he testified in Ottawa.
However, the onslaught of news coverage and allegations of Sikh involvement in the bombing tainted his community, he said.
Sandhu described to inquiry commissioner John Major being approached while taking part in a parade in B.C. one week after the disaster.
"Kids were asking me when was the next plane going to go down," he testified.
The inquiry is looking into the investigation of the bombing of flight 182, which exploded off the coast of Ireland as it was flying from Canada to India on June 23, 1985. The disaster claimed the lives of 280 Canadians — the country's worst mass murder.
The luggage carrying the bomb and another explosive that killed two baggage handlers at a Tokyo airport was loaded at Vancouver International Airport.
Investigators believe the bombings were carried out by extremists who wanted India to create an independent Sikh homeland.
Sandhu testified Friday that in 1985, no more than "two to three dozen people" from the 200,000-strong Sikh community in B.C. espoused violent acts against the Indian government.
He named one such organization, Babbar Khalsa, a group of Sikh radicals founded by Talwinder Singh Parmar, the suspected ringleader in the Air India bombing.
But that sentiment was held by the minority, Sandu said.
"Respect for life is paramount in the Sikh religion.... Incidents of this nature are not only abhorrent, but are taken to task in the Sikh community," he said.
Only one person has ever been convicted in the plot. Inderjit Singh Reyat pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2003 and received a five-year sentence.
Parmar died in India in 1992. The RCMP's two main surviving suspects, Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri, were both acquitted of conspiracy and murder in March 2005 after a 19-month trial.
SIKH students would be allowed to carry small daggers to school under a plan that has outraged teachers and principals.
A Victorian parliamentary committee has also given the green light for Muslim students to wear hijabs in the state's classrooms.
The inquiry into uniforms found all schools should accommodate clothing or other items that are religiously significant.
The Education and Training Committee report recommended that schools should work with the Sikh community to allow male students to carry a kirpan - a small, curved ornamental steel dagger carried by all initiated Sikh men.
The committee found there were concerns from principals and teachers about students carrying the kirpan - which is hidden under the school uniform - but the item was important to the Sikh community.
Victorian Association of State Secondary School Principals head Brian Burgess said kirpans should not be allowed in schools.
"It is potentially very dangerous and should not be brought to school," he said. "If it was misused, it could hurt kids. And it may not be the students that bring it to school but others who know about it and misuse it."
Mr Burgess said other weapons were not allowed on school grounds and the kirpan should not be the exception.
The Sikh Interfaith Council of Victoria did not want to comment but previously told the committee that only a small number or Sikhs have been initiated and an even smaller number of students carry the kirpan. The kirpan, carried in a sheath and worn on a strap, is one of five articles of faith that initiated Sikh males have to carry. It is not allowed to be used as a weapon.
The council rejected suggestions by the Department of Education that students carry a replica or pendant to school.
New York, Dec 6 - Sikhs are set to get prayer facilities at John F. Kennedy airport here.
At a meeting convened last week for the community by New York City assemblyman Rory Lancman, the Port Authority agreed that there was a need for a prayer room for Sikh travellers.
Lancman, who represents the Queens borough said: 'The Sikh community is growing in Queens and many Sikhs go back and forth to India regularly. Sikh travellers deserve a place to worship at JFK airport alongside those currently set aside for other faiths.'
So far, there are four prayer rooms at JFK airport - for Catholics, Protestants, Jews and a multi-faith room. The Port Authority has agreed to subdivide the multi-faith prayer room to cater for the needs of Sikh travellers.
'It will take more than a fortnight for the Port Authority to finalise their plans,' said Diane Barrett, Lancman's chief of staff.
The participation of Sikhs at the meeting was coordinated by Amarjit Singh, multi-faith coordinator for the United Sikhs, an activist group based in New York.
Balbir Kaur, community services director of United Sikhs, said: 'Most airports have 'meditation rooms' used for prayers by passengers. After JFK, we hope that other port authorities in the US will also accommodate the need for prayer facilities for Sikhs travelling through.'
The Dalai Lama [Images] said on Tuesday that his successor would be chosen outside of Tibet if he dies in exile. "If my death comes when we are still in a refugee status, then logically my reincarnation will come outside Tibet," the he said on the sidelines of an inter-faith meeting in the Sikh holy city.
The Dalai Lama said he welcomed the promotion of good relations between India and China. He said he was always ready to negotiate between Tibetans and Chinese government and would always give priority to talks.
"My mission is to spread the message of peace, prosperity and love and this reason brought me here to the holy city of the Golden Temple," added the Dalai Lama.
The Tibetan spiritual leader visited the Golden Temple and paid obeisance in the sanctum sanctorum where he was honoured by the Sikh priest with a scarf. The Dalai Lama also paid obeisance at Akal Takht, the highest Sikh temporal seat, at the Golden Temple.
The Dalai Lama was honoured by the Shriomnai Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee president Avtar Singh Makkar and jathedar of the Akal Takht, Gyani Joginder Singh Vedanti, with woollen shawls, a set of Sikh religious books and a replica of the Golden Temple.
The Dalai Lama is in Amritsar [Images] to participate in the third meeting of the Elijah board of world religious leaders, a group founded in 1996 to promote inter-faith dialogue, that brings together prominent Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Christians and Buddhists.
As a Sikh, Sukhvir Singh says he has encountered racial harassment before, but he never feared it could lead to his death.
But on Saturday, police say, the Orange Cab driver withstood a violent attack from a drunken passenger who punched him, bit off a piece of his scalp, called Singh an "Iraqi terrorist" and threatened to kill him. The attack ended after a Metro bus pulled up to the cab and a passenger called 911.
Luis Vázquez, a 20-year-old construction worker from Kent, was charged Tuesday with third-degree assault and one count of malicious harassment, the state's hate-crime law. If convicted, Vázquez faces up to a year in jail, according to a spokesman for the King County Prosecutor's Office.
After the attack, Singh was treated at Harborview Medical Center and released. He was later admitted to Valley Medical Center in Renton and remains hospitalized because of kidney problems. He said it's unclear whether the problems are a result of the attack.
Speaking from his hospital bed Tuesday, Singh said it is difficult to talk about the attack, but he is grateful for the outpouring of support from the community.
"I live here, and I love America. I love to serve my community and my people here," said Singh, of Kent, a father of two. "It's very hard to think about."
Intoxicated passenger
Singh was stopping at a Montlake neighborhood grocery to grab dinner Saturday before 8 p.m. when Seattle police escorted an obviously drunken man to his cab, said the cabdriver's attorney, Hardeep Rekhi. Singh, a cabdriver for seven years, said it's not uncommon for police to place intoxicated people in his cab so they can be driven home.
Authorities say the passenger was Vázquez. They said he had been kicked out of the Apple Cup football game at Husky Stadium.
While Singh was driving Vázquez home, Vázquez started calling him a terrorist and threatened to kill him, according to court charging documents. Singh said he worried for his life and the lives of other motorists as he drove down Interstate 5 at 60 mph.
Singh pulled over just south of the exit for Interstate 90, according to charging papers.
Vázquez followed Singh as he left the cab and continued the attack, court papers said. It was only when a Metro bus pulled up and Vázquez tried to board that the attack stopped, according to charging papers.
Vázquez later told investigators that he was afraid of Singh because Vázquez "had a buddy in Iraq," according to charging papers. Singh isn't Iraqi. He's an Indian-born member of the Sikh religion, which claims up to a half-million followers in the U.S.
Because the case appears to be a hate crime, the FBI has launched a civil-rights inquiry, said spokeswoman Robbie Burroughs. The facts gathered by agents will be sent to the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and if attorneys there think more information is necessary, the FBI will launch a full-blown investigation, Burroughs said.
The New York-based Sikh Coalition was pushing for prosecutors to file the case as a hate crime.
Rekhi, the Seattle attorney representing Singh, said his client is pleased with the filing decision.
Singh said that even though he has never been called such awful names, his fellow Sikh cabdrivers have faced worse violence and terror.
On Sept. 13, 2001, Farwest Cab driver Kulwinder Singh was assaulted and accused of being a Middle East terrorist by an intoxicated passenger he picked up in SeaTac. Raymond Isais Jr., 21, of San Diego, pleaded guilty to malicious harassment.
"Safe transport"
Explaining why officers placed a drunken man in Singh's cab, Seattle police Sgt. Deanna Nollette said the department's protocol with intoxicated people is to simply find them "safe transport."
The State Patrol, which is also investigating the attack, doesn't believe Seattle police did anything wrong by putting Vázquez in Singh's cab.
"The goal of law enforcement at that venue was getting him home. There was no lawful reason to detain him," said State Patrol spokesman Jeff Merrill. "For some particular reason, this guy in this scenario snapped."
More than 50 members of the Sikh community and a delegation of OC Transpo employees bid an emotional farewell yesterday morning to the four members of the Brar family found dead in their Grandpark Circle home on Nov. 21.
Santbir Brar, his wife, Amarjeet, and their daughters Manmeet, 20, and Dildeep, 22, died as the result of a murder-suicide. Police believe Mr. Brar, an OC Transpo supervisor, killed his family before turning a rifle on himself.
Four hearses backed up to the crematorium at the Capital Memorial Gardens on Prince of Wales Drive and one by one, the flower-bedecked caskets were carried into the building.
Mr. Brar's brother, Gurinder, who returned from a visit to India following the deaths, had to be helped from the building, overcome with grief. His wife had to be lifted from the ground after she collapsed into the slush after the coffins were taken inside.
Mr. and Mrs. Brar were cremated in the morning following final prayers, while their daughters were cremated later in the day.
A family friend, who did not want to be identified, talked briefly afterwards, calling the afternoon service for the sisters "very emotional" for everyone.
"We just want to remember them," said the woman, adding nobody really knows what happened at the Brar family home a week ago.
She called Mr. Brar and his wife loving parents.
She said they cared about their family and that is why last week's events are so hard to understand.
Baldev S. Vij, an Ottawa real estate agent, said members of the community had been deeply shocked by the deaths. "God knows what happened," Mr. Vij said. "The community will come together to try to figure out what took place."
He said that while the family was known to the Sikh community, in general they tended to keep to themselves.
A woman who declined to be identified said the ashes will be given to family members, who will take them to India to be scattered on a river that is holy to Sikhs.
Before the ceremonies inside the crematorium, mourners were led by the priest from the Ottawa Gurudawara, or temple, in prayers.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone points to bullet holes in a wall at the site of the 1919 massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, yesterday. On April 13, 1919, British Indian Army soldiers under the command of Brigadier Reginald Dyer opened fire on an unarmed gathering of men, women and children in Jallianwala Bagh holding a protest rally. The firing lasted about 10 minutes. According to official estimates, nearly 400 civilians were killed. However, according to private sources, the number was over 1,000, with more than 2,000 wounded. Livingstone is on a week-long trip to India.
Kabul, Nov 25 - 'Waheguru Ji ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji ki Fateh,' the traditional chant of the Sangat, reverberated in the large hall of the gurudwara at the Dharmasala in Kart-e-Parwan district of Kabul as more than 300 members of Sikh community gathered there to celebrate Gurparb, the birthday of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikh religion.
The nearly three-hour ceremony Saturday at the 45-year-old gurudwara in the district, which is home to most of the Sikh community, was filled with religious chants, prayers and devotional songs.
School children recited their self-composed poems in the honour of Guru Nanak, while several speakers repeatedly conveyed the message of religious harmony, universal brotherhood, peaceful coexistence and humanitarian assistance through their speeches during the ceremony.
India's Ambassador to Afghanistan Rakesh Sood, who was an invitee to the ceremony, conveyed his greetings and good wishes to all members of the community on the festive occasion. 'I am impressed by the organisation and your ability to cherish and celebrate the tradition and culture,' Sood told the attentive gathering.
He also congratulated the children for composing and reciting poems on the occasion.
Afghan Sikhs moved to Afghanistan generations ago and they feel at home in this country. All of them are fluent in Dari and Pastho with some able to converse in other languages like Uzbeki.
'We are Afghans and think like any other Afghan,' said a contented Avatar Singh, a member of Dharmasala management committee, who appears no different from other Afghans with his neatly tied blue turban and shiny and flowing black beard.
Pointing to sizeable presence of Afghan Muslims at the function, Ravinder Singh, another member of the gurudwara management committee, said, 'All these are our friends. We treat them as our own brothers and sisters. Though our worship system may be different, we are part and parcel of Afghan society.'
Ravinder Singh, who speaks Pastho and Dari fluently, is a fourth generation Afghan Sikh living in Kabul. Though his clothes business keeps him busy through out, he makes it point to come regularly to gurudwara to pray with his family.
With a broad grin, he said, 'This is an important festival for Sikhs. The Gurparb in Dharmasala attracts devotees from Kabul but all over in Afghanistan'. For him, functions like Gurparb is also important for renewing the bonds and contacts within the community members.
Gurparb ended with the traditional 'langar' (community meals) served to all the devotees and invitees.
A MEET your Sikh neighbour event is being held in the Capital today as part of Inter-Faith Week.
The colourful Sikh Gurdwara on Sheriff Brae in Leith is hosting the first official event of the week between 2pm and 3.30pm.
The event is an opportunity to gain a brief insight into the beliefs and lives of Edinburgh and Scottish Sikhs. Visitors will be treated to an introductory talk on Sikhism, followed by a short question and answer session.
Sikhs are holding their own three-day celebrations, which started yesterday with continuous 24-hour reading of sacred Sikh scriptures.
They will also have a flag-changing ceremony outside the Gurdwara today at 1pm. Wege Singh, pictured, of the Edinburgh Sikh Gurdwara, said: "This is a significant celebratory and commemoration weekend."
London, Nov 21 - As the issue involving a Sikh girl's suspension from a Welsh school for wearing a kada, a symbol of Sikhism, appeared headed for the courts, hundreds of people from around the world backed the girl through a website set up to support her. Sarika Watkins-Singh, 14, of mixed Welsh-Punjabi parentage, has been suspended three times from the Aberdare Girls School for wearing the kada. The school says that wearing it goes against its code, which only allows watches and stud-earrings. Human rights organisation Liberty, which is directed by Shami Chakrabarti, has taken up Sarika's case. It is arguing that by excluding Sarika, the school's governing body has violated violating the Race Relations Act 1976, the Equality Act 2006 and the Human Rights Act 1998. Angry, passionate messages against the school authorities have been left by visitors on the website www.supportsarika.co.uk. The website features press and video coverage of the case that has hit the headlines across Britain and elsewhere. Anna Fairclough, Liberty's legal officer representing the Singhs, said: 'The governing body of the school has ignored established race and equality protections and shamefully turned a young woman into a pariah by isolating her.
'Legal precedents established 25 years ago make clear that she should be allowed to wear the kara without being intimidated by the school.'
Over the past 18 months of writing on Cif, I have been consistent in my criticism of "community leaders" who claim to speak on behalf of people of minority religious backgrounds. This is for two main reasons: firstly because their motives are never as benign as they claim; secondly because they have a rather cosy relationship with religious extremists of the same backgrounds. This applies to Sikh and Hindu organisations as much as it does to British Muslim ones, though the former attract less media interest for obvious reasons.
Even if they don't command grassroots support, these organisations remain relevant by riding on legitimate concerns. For example, though there is little backing for an independent Sikh state, the Sikh Federation UK retains support by emphasising human rights abuses against Sikhs in India to bolster its cause. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) similarly rides on concerns that Muslims as a whole are being demonised and actively voices their opposition to the war in Iraq. The MCB benefits by taking a hardline position on issues and clearly makes people more wary of British Muslims thanks to its over-the-top assertions and contradictions. There is little point to its existence.
But this should not detract from the fact that the threat of terrorism is being used by anti-democratic forces to subvert our parliamentary traditions. The first is an attack on our civil liberties, from the threat of extending the 28-day detention period to locking up people for "thought crime". Those who maintain this is business as usual are deluding themselves.
The second problem relates to the continuing media scaremongering about Muslims. There are legitimate concerns such as finding hate literature in bookshops of course, but the scale of outright lies, hysterics and rubbish coverage is really quite disturbing.
In case you missed it, a recent speech by the director general of MI5, Jonathan Evans, essentially said the media was doing the terrorists' work for them. It doesn't get more stark than that.
The inevitable retort is that the threat of terrorism makes this not only inevitable but necessary. But I don't subscribe to the view that a liberal democracy, founded on the principle of equality before law, should discriminate against an entire group based on their faith due to the violent actions of a few. The Japanese American internment of 1948 was wrong and similarly it would have been disgusting to launch a witch-hunt against homosexuals in the 1980s over Aids. Why should ordinary Muslims be lumped with the jihadis?
We know this new legislation is aimed solely at British Muslims and no one else. If British whites were under serious threat of being convicted for thought crimes, there would be a furore. Instead we have a few embarrassing coughs.
Similarly, Martin Amis's racism and the Evening Standard's perniciously titled debate ("Is Islam good for London?") points to the same thing: the intentional demonisation of Muslims has become legitimate discourse.
All the while, British Muslim leadership on these issues is seriously lacking. The MCB's Dr Abdul Bari and Inayat Bunglawala are great at worsening media relations, annoying other religious groups and generally worsening social cohesion. They care about the latter when Muslims are being demonised but not when the hatred is being spewed by Muslims. New Labour can afford to ignore its protests because most Britons view it very negatively.
The MCB can even be relied on to make excuses for the racism of extremist organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir, thereby alienating the left even more. Ordinary British Muslims cannot do anything but watch their civil liberties erode further.
There is only one way out of this impasse. Rather than treating British Muslims as a monolithic group represented by the likes of the MCB, we should regard them as fellow citizens and actively defend the attack on their civil liberties. If we don't do it then the Islamists will step in.
This is vital not only to defeating terrorism but also protecting our democratic rights. On Sunday Henry Porter said "We must not tolerate this putsch against our freedoms". I agree. Under the threat of terrorism this government is doing everything it can in order to curtail our freedoms, hoping it will succeed by tacitly indicating that it will only apply to Muslims.
We can either get organised and resist this or be willing participants.
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — The Clinton campaign's abrupt cancellation of scheduled appearances here is leaving members of the Sikh community dismayed and demanding an explanation.
Traditional food, elaborate costumes, and ritual sword fighting were on display as thousands of Sikhs celebrated a religious festival here yesterday, but the expected guest of honor, Senator Clinton, was a no-show. Mrs. Clinton also scuttled a fund-raising breakfast at a nearby fairgrounds where Sikh leaders had hoped to raise $1 million for her presidential campaign.
Some organizers cited "security reasons" for the candidate's sudden withdrawal. An advertisement in a Sikh newspaper said the fund-raiser, which was also to have featured President Clinton as a guest, had been postponed "due to the advice of the Secret Service." Others involved said some of those planning the fund-raiser failed either the campaign's vetting process or a Secret Service review.
Whatever prompted the late change, many of those who attended yesterday's festival and parade were upset, underscoring the risks of a backlash against Mrs. Clinton as her campaign tightens its standards in an effort to avoid another fund-raising scandal.
"We don't know what the reason is," a trucking company owner who helped arrange the celebration, Tejpal Singh of Bakersfield, said. "They just tell us last night. … Everybody's shocked. They want to see her."
Mr. Singh said he was informed a week or two ago that Mrs. Clinton planned to spend about 30 minutes at the festival, which marks the birthday of one of the founders of the Sikh religion, Guru Nanak Dev Ji.
So here we go again. There was the 'silver ring' case of a girl barred by her school from wearing a piece of jewellery which turned out to be more a campaign symbol than an essential expression of faith. Her parents lost her case, but are appealing. There have been a couple of complaints about airlines, religion and dress codes. Now there is the matter of a Sikh girl told that she cannot wear a bangle to school.
Each of these instances is different. Some involve what looks like the politicisation of the 'presentation' issue, while the latest seems to be about the definition of equal and fair treatment for different sections of the community in relation to specific company or organisational policy.
As for Sarika Watkins-Singh, aged 14, a pupil at Aberdare Girls’ School, who has refused to remove her kara, which reminds its wearers to do good, her case has been backed by the non-religious civil rights group Liberty. So trying to turn this into a catch-all complaint about 'religion' won't work, either. It has wider ramifications for free expression. There are race equality considerations, too.
With some activists trying to push to 'keep religion out of the workplace' altogether, and some religious lobbyists using the power of symbolic representation to reassert themselves at a time when they perceive their influence to be under threat, there is a danger that all sense of perspective and proportion will be lost.
Until recently, with the odd exception, most organisations have come up with pragmatic approaches aimed at keeping everyone on board and included within the bounds of a common (legally sound) policy. That is how it should be, and it is the situation we need to encourage. Less heat, more light for everyone to share.
We should not look at religious clothing and symbols as if they are something entirely separate from the way in which we dress generally, either. We live in a consumer-driven society that encourages us to be distinctive, to be individual, to express ourselves in ways that are different to other people as well as peer-associated.
It seems extraordinary for someone to feel threatened just because one expression of difference (or solidarity) in an intentionally plural society is religious. In monocultural, illiberal or theocratic orders the issue is quite different, of course.
In a fast-changing world, there will always be things that appear strange to others. If it’s not the way people dress, it’ll be the colour of their skin; if it’s not the colour of their skin it will be something else, such as customs, patterns of thought, or language. The question is: how can we learn to cope with that, and even benefit from it?
You cannot and should not ban something just because it makes you feel uncomfortable. Instead of building walls, we should build relationships. We should strive for a situation in which people are prepared to be open towards others, including the variety of their appearance and presentation.
People dress in all sorts of ways that reflect their lifestyle. And it isn’t always straightforward to identify what is, or isn’t, inspired by religion. For example, some people wear a cross for religious reasons, while others wear one simply as jewellery.
I am certainly not opposed to a company or school having a dress or symbol policy that reflects corporate image, equal respect or health and safety concerns. Nevertheless, the idea of introducing a blanket ban on religious symbols in public institutions (such as the Iranian campaigner Azar Majedi has advocated) is only dealing with something by repressing it, rather than by encouraging people to understand each other better, which is the principle a modern, peaceful and fair society should be built upon.
So long as the form of dress is not dangerous, unhealthy, contrary to the needs of the task undertaken, or deliberately designed to menace or threaten someone else — in which case it becomes a public order issue — then we should seek to allow it wherever possible. That should be the default, though there will be exceptions and local circumstances.
Mediation and mutual adaptation should be viewed as the appropriate way forward, rather than prescription and litigation.
I personally feel great sympathy with the view that some Muslim veils can be seen as a tool of oppression. Complete covering is also not part of the tradition, and compulsion is to be deplored. Muslims have argued that, too. But I also respect the views of some women who say that it can be about protecting themselves from the invasive gaze of a male-dominated order.
As a plural society, we’re not going to reach an agreement on whether such veiling is a good or bad thing — but a ban wouldn’t solve anything. It would simply push the issue underground, up the ante for those who wish to squeeze political capital out of it, and cause more bitterness.
Indeed, the debate over religious symbols and dress is often a proxy for more complex political and cultural concerns. In some cases is has been picked up by groups with bigger agendas linked to racism or xenophobia. For individuals, a small fight over a personal item might reflect a sense of injustice about wider issues that are not being addressed.
We should acknowledge that living in a multicultural society has made some individuals feel anxious about their identity. But that anxiety - about self or toward others - will not be resolved by legal measures.
Like Azar Majedi, I believe in the positive virtue of secularity in the public square. But for me that does not mean one in which religious (or indeed anti-religious) expression has to be hidden away — it is one in which we acknowledge that we have to share public space and find ways of communicating with one another across our differences.
A PREGNANT Muslim teenager, allegedly stabbed to death by her Sikh love rival, was disappointed with her arranged marriage, a court heard today.
Sana Ali, aged 17, told her mother she was feeling lonely in the days leading up to her death because her husband was staying out late.
Birmingham dental student Harmohinder Kaur Sanghera, 23, had been having an affair with the victim's husband, Sair Ali, for nearly two years, Manchester Crown Court heard yesterday.
Sarika Singh, with the bangle on her wrist, leaves school with her mother Sanita Singh
Sarika Singh, 14, has refused to remove the silver bangle, or Kara, which she regards as a sign of her faith.
Aberdare Girls' School, in South Wales, said the bangle broke its code of conduct. Pupils are allowed to wear only a wrist watch and one pair of plain metal stud earrings. It added that the rules had been in place for many years and had been set up to ensure equality.
Sarika is the only Sikh at the school. Her mother, Sanita Singh, 38, has taken legal advice and plans to challenge the school's decision.
Mrs Singh, her daughter, and a representative from the Valleys Race Equality Council, a self-styled charitable voluntary organisation, attended a meeting at the school yesterday with the head teacher, Jane Rosser.
Wayne Lee, a spokesman for the council, confirmed that the pupil had been excluded from school again.
"Sarika is very upset and wants to go back into school. She is a good student and she wants to see her friends like any other 14-year-old."
Sarika was taken out of her classes and taught separately for nine weeks pending the outcome of an appeal. She was excluded this month when she continued to ignore the ban.
Her mother said: "We feel very strongly that Sarika has a right to manifest her religion. She is not asking for anything big and flashy, she is not making a big fuss."
Sarika, from Cwmbach, near Aberdare, said: "It is very important for me to wear the Kara because it is a symbol of my faith and a constant reminder that I should only do good work, and never do anything bad, with my hands."
The governors rejected the girl's request to wear the bangle after examining the uniform policy and human rights legislation.
The school said it would not comment until it had told Mrs Singh of the latest suspension in writing.
Liberty, the human rights group, which is providing legal representation for Mrs Singh, said the law lords had ruled that Sikh pupils could wear items representing their faith, including a turban.
Anna Fairclough, Liberty's legal officer, said: "Legal precedents established 25 years ago make clear she should be allowed to wear the Kara."
A spokesman for the Welsh Assembly said rules on uniform were a matter for schools' governing bodies, but issues such as equality and health and safety should be considered. The spokesman added: "Whether a school uniform policy breaches the Race Relations Act 1976 is a matter for the courts."
The Valleys Race Equality Council, whose director is Ron Davies, the former Welsh Secretary, was set up 10 years ago with the aim of working towards "eliminating racial discrimination".
Mr Davies has twice resigned from political office after speculation about his private life.
He left the Labour cabinet in 1998 after a "moment of madness" involving two men on Clapham Common, south London. He denied the incident had anything to do with sex.
He won a Welsh Assembly seat in 1999 but stood down before the elections in 2003 after a newspaper claimed he had been visiting a cruising spot near a motorway layby.
Mr Davies said he was actually badger-watching.
He resigned from the Labour Party in 2004, citing its stance on Iraq as one of his reasons.
My encounter with Monty Panesar does not get off to the best of starts. The publishers of his autobiography, Monty's Turn, have organised several one-on-one interviews on the terrace of a hotel overlooking the Thames at Hampton Court, and after The Daily Telegraph it is my turn. But first of all the Telegraph's photographer, for reasons known only to himself, wants his man in a rowing boat. Looking understandably bemused, Panesar clambers into the boat and rows out to the middle of the river, the photographer snapping away frantically as they almost come a cropper in the wash of a passing pleasure cruiser. Mudhsuden Singh Panesar, it has to be said, is no Steve Redgrave.
This surreal episode concludes after almost half an hour with their safe return to shore, but by then heavy clouds have started to invade Panesar's naturally sunny nature. Who knows, maybe that was the Telegraph man's fiendish intention. Whatever, I make what in retrospect is an unwise attempt to introduce some humour into the situation. For The Independent's photograph, I tell Panesar, we would like him to swim to the opposite bank. As an attempt to break the ice it is a spectacular failure. He glares at me. In his dark brown eyes there is fiery pride and indignation, which, were they not directed my way, I would be pleased to see. There is steel in this man, as well as sunshine.
Swiftly changing the subject, I ask whether he goes to Sri Lanka for the forthcoming Test series feeling the burden of expectation. After all, when he last played against Sri Lanka in a Test match, at Trent Bridge in June last year, he took 5 for 78 in the second innings. And one of the five was the barnstorming Sanath Jayasuriya. The Sri Lankans know his capabilities.
"No," he says, "I still have a lot to prove to earn expectations. With more experience there will be expectations of me, but I don't feel it."
Whatever he says, his reputation already precedes him. In just 20 Tests, he already has six five-fors and one 10-wicket haul. His first Test wicket was that of his childhood hero Sachin Tendulkar. His first Ashes wicket was that of Justin Langer. His 73 Test victims also include Rahul Dravid (twice), Younis Khan (twice), Inzamam-ul-Haq (three times), Adam Gilchrist (for a duck), Matthew Hayden, and Shivnarine Chanderpaul (twice). And he snared Tendulkar again, lbw for 16 at Lord's this summer. It is by any standards an impressive set of scalps, although it is less the identity of the batsmen than the manner in which he celebrates their downfall that has endeared him to the English public; whirling dervishes are less animated than Panesar when he takes a wicket.
In Sri Lanka, on turning pitches prepared for Muttiah Muralitharan, there will doubtless be more of the euphoric high-fiving. Not that he is counting any chickens, let alone wickets. "They [the Sri Lankan batsmen] are very skilful players of spin," he says. "It will be very testing for me. But it's really exciting. I'll be bugging Michael Vaughan a lot. He's toured Sri Lanka before and he's a great player of spin. He's scored a hundred against Murali, so I'll be picking his brain all the time. I hope he doesn't get annoyed. I'll be bugging him so much."
Panesar still has limited experience of Vaughan's captaincy; it was Andrew Flintoff who held the reins at the start of his Test career and Flintoff who told him, in the team meeting the evening before the first Test against India in Nagpur in March 2006, that he was going to make his debut the following day. In his book he recalls, sweetly, that he went straight back to his room, lay on the bed with his eyes closed and whispered to himself again and again that he was about to play cricket for England. He then found some sheets of paper and started marking down the fielding positions he wanted for each batsman. These he took along the corridor to Flintoff's room. In the book he records the captain's response.
"When I knocked on Flintoff's door and handed over the results he seemed a bit bemused. 'This is what I'm thinking of doing,' I said. 'Ah, OK,' he replied, sounding as puzzled as he looked. 'No worries at all, mate. I'll take it on board and you have a good night's sleep.' I decided I ought to leave quickly because I wasn't sure whether he wanted me in his room."
Vaughan, I suppose, might have been less thrown by the debutant's uncommon diligence. "He is different to the other captains I've had," Panesar says. "He sets different fields. Like for example, he has two men on the drive. Normally you will have an extra cover and a drive man. He has a drive man and an extra cover as a drive man. When I bowled at Trent Bridge to Dravid, he pushed one out and got caught at extra cover on the drive. That shows Michael Vaughan's thinking. It's amazing. Sometimes I'll be thinking, 'I want a gully', and I'll turn round and he's already got a gully in. I have total faith in what he says. Blind faith."
The 25-year-old is plainly sincere in his wide-eyed admiration for the most accomplished of his team-mates and the disbelief that he belongs in their orbit is diminishing only gradually. As for the adulation that he gets from the fans, it is hard to imagine him ever taking it as his due.
"It has been unbelievable," he says. "I treasure it, because it doesn't happen to everyone. When I'm fielding, I turn around and see people with fake beards and bandannas. So much warmth and love. I enjoy every minute of it."
I ask him whether he has occasionally felt in danger of becoming a figure of fun? After all, it is not every cricketer whose autobiography contains a reference in the index to catches, dropped. It is a subject covered on pages 39, 105-106, 109, 111, 112, 114, 123, 124, 127 and 140. Catches, held, by contrast, gets only page 112. And here is his description of a skier not so much dropped as mislaid in Mumbai's Wankhede Stadium.
"I ran forward, looked up and saw a bit of sky, a lot of sun, but no red dot. Eventually I spotted the ball... And then I lost it again... I put my hands where I thought the ball would come down, held them there and felt nothing. I've read that it landed between two feet and three metres to my right."
He has been working hard, he tells me, to excise such moments of comic haplessness from his game. "I'm doing a lot of catching stuff with [the England coach] Peter Moores and [team analyst] Mark Garroway. We use these new fusion bats, which has a kind of cushioning on the bat and sends the ball so much higher than a normal bat. I'm getting closer [to becoming a decent fielder, I think he means, not to the descending ball]. But I'm not a natural athlete. I know it's something I need to keep working on."
Let's turn to what he is very good at already: orthodox left-arm spin. I ask whether he has developed a doosra (the off-spinner's delivery that turns from leg to off) for the Sri Lankan tour, in honour of its greatest exponent, Murali? He laughs delightedly, showing perfect, preternaturally white teeth.
"No, I haven't tried bowling the doosra. It will take time. It has taken Muralitharan time. It's good to have a doosra, definitely. But you can work on some new things so much that you forget what you've already got." Which is what? "An orthodox stock ball, with different variations of pace and different angles at the crease." Is there no secret weapon, then, like Murali's doosra or Shane Warne's flipper? He chuckles again; he appears to have forgotten his rowing-boat tribulations. "Not unless you know something I don't..."
There must have been times, though, when he has breached a batsman's defence by sheer guile, outwitting him? "To be honest, I'm still learning to really outwit batsmen. I'm not there yet, not like Shane Warne, bowling off stump, off stump, off stump, then slider ... lbw."
Panesar's modesty becomes him, but he is a fellow, I remind him, with 10 wickets in a Test match to his credit. "Yes, well, the man upstairs helps out, a few blessings from him. All I do is bowl stock ball, stock ball, stock ball, with little variations of pace. Outwitting a batsman is a different skill and I'm still only 25, which is pretty young for a spinner.
"I wouldn't say I've ever outwitted a batsman. If the ball kicks a bit more at pace and there's a chance for a bat/pad [catch], I might move a fielder close to get a bat/pad, but I think outwitting batsmen is a different kettle of fish. Bowling wide, wide, wide, then hitting off stump with the arm ball, that's an amazing skill, such a subtle art. David Parsons [England's spin-bowling coach] is helping me with that."
Is there anyone whose repertoire he covets? "Daniel Vettori; if I could be half as good as him ... or Bishan Bedi, you know. My father has talked a lot about him. His flight, his smoothness of action, all that artistry."
He considers the best spinner he has ever faced, however, to be Warne. "He makes you wait between deliveries, and you just feel his presence. In Sydney I came out as a nightwatchman, and Kevin Pietersen said to me 'Watch out for his slider, he'll beat you lbw with the slider'. He tossed it wide, wide, wide, then the slider came. Such a skill he has. Amazing."
There is a lovely story in Panesar's book about an episode during the third Test in Perth last year, when, while batting against Warne, he got so excited about picking the googly that he shouted "Googly" as the ball travelled towards him. The Aussie fielders made hay. "You're finished Warney, Monty's sussed you out," called Ricky Ponting. But when the series was finished, Warne sat with Panesar in the Australian dressing room at the Sydney Cricket Ground, sharing his insights into the art of spin. "I was a little bit afraid to ask him," Panesar tells me. "But Terry Jenner [Warne's coach] was in there, and I know him a bit, so I said, 'Do you think he'll talk to me?' He talked for about half an hour. He's a great, great man."
Panesar is endearingly eager to heap praise on all spin bowlers bar himself. He admits to studying Phil Tufnell scrupulously and adopting some of his methods. It's a good job, I venture, that he did not also adopt Tufnell's famously relaxed work ethic. Nobody will ever be able to criticise Panesar for not putting in the hours. On which subject, does he think it fair to conclude that his Sikhism, and the self-control it entails, has intensified his discipline as a cricketer?
"For me, religion is a faith and cricket is a dream; they are separate," he says, with a frown. Nonetheless, the discipline of teetotalism, for example, must be useful for a sportsman? Especially in the light of certain revelations about England cricketers getting tanked up.
"Any religion gives a sense of discipline," he says, impassively, "and that helps in cricket, just as the discipline in cricket helps in religion. They complement each other." He does not disapprove of occasional carousing on tour, he insists. "There is nothing wrong with a drink. We all want to enjoy ourselves sometimes, but it is not good in anything to go overboard." Especially in a rowing boat on the Thames, I almost add, but think better of it.
'Monty's Turn – Taking My Chances' by Monty Panesar is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £18.99
I'm delighted to send my warmest greetings to everyone in our Hindu and Sikh communities on the auspicious occasion of Diwali.
Diwali is such a wonderful inclusive festival, which reaches beyond your communities to people of many backgrounds all over the world. The symbolic lighting of lamps, representing life, hope and new beginnings sends a powerful message of unity and peace to us all.
I know that Diwali is a special time for families, who come together to celebrate and reflect on the year gone by.
And it also gives me an opportunity to recognise and reflect on the huge contribution made by British Hindu and Sikh communities to our country's prosperity and our culture. Your involvement in every sphere of our national life is something we can all immensely be proud of.
Once again, my very best wishes for a joyous occasion.
A Sikh teenager has been suspended from school for refusing to remove a religious bangle.
The parents of Sarika Singh, 14, are now considering a legal challenge against the school, a girls’ comprehensive school in Aberdare, South Wales, that taught the girl “in isolation” for nine weeks before excluding her.
Jane Rosser, the headmistress of Aberdare Girls’ School, said that the code of conduct permitted only two items of jewellery, a watch and a pair of plain metal stud earrings. The school bans all visible religious symbols, including Christian crosses and Muslim headscarves.
Miss Singh has won the backing of the Valleys Race Equality Council and her parents are now considering a challenge in the High Court.
The metal bangle, called a kara, is one of five items all Sikhs are expected to wear. It is supposed to be a visual reminder to do only good work with the hands. Miss Singh, who has been suspended for five days, began wearing it two years ago after a family visit to India, but the school took action only in September.
Her mother, Sanita Singh, said: “Sarika told us, ‘I don’t go to school any more, I go to prison’.”
Ian Blake, chairman of the school’s governing body, said: “We made our decision only after prolonged research into the previous stated cases across the UK, interrogation of the law, including human rights and race relations legislation.” The governors have rejected an appeal.
The mother of a 14-year-old Sikh girl is planning a legal challenge after her daughter was excluded from her school for wearing a religious wrist bangle.
Sarika Singh was sent home by the school after she refused to remove her silver Kara bangle as she felt it was “a constant reminder to do good.”
Aberdare Girls School in south Wales said it had a clear code of conduct and it had temporarily excluded a pupil for refusing to accept a ruling from the governors.
Jane Rosser, the head teacher, said that wearing the Kara was against regulations because it was a piece of jewellery.
The only two forms of jewellery that girls were allowed to wear in school were a wrist watch and one pair of plain metal stud earrings.
However the Sikh girl's supporters claimed the school's decision infringed her human rights.
The girl's mother Sanita Singh, 38, said she was taking legal advice and was considering seeking a judicial review.
She had the support of several local politicians and the Sikh Federation UK, she added.
She said the teenager would remove the bangle for gym classes, or wood and metalwork, for safety reasons.
She added: “It is not jewellery. It is part of our faith and symbol of our belief.”
She added: “We feel very strongly that Sarika has a right to manifest her religion. She is not asking for anything big and flashy, she is not making a big fuss, she just wants a reminder of her religion.”
Her daughter's interest in the Sikh faith intensified after the family visited India, including the Golden Temple in Amritsar, two years ago.
"I don't believe in putting pressure on children to follow a certain religion, but Sarika decided for herself that she wanted to be a practising Sikh,” Mrs Singh, a mother-of-two, added.
Sarika, of Cwmbach, near Aberdare, said: “I am a Sikh and it is very important for me to wear the Kara because it is a symbol of my faith and a constant reminder that I should only do good work, and never do anything bad, with my hands.
“It is a comfort to me and a confidence booster when I am doing my exams. The reason I am fighting for my right to wear the Kara is because I want to stand up for the right of all the other Sikh pupils across the country to wear their Karas in school.The governors rejected the girl's request to wear the bangle after examining the uniform policy and human rights legislation in detail.
The family has been backed by the Valleys Race Equality Council, whose director is the former Welsh Secretary Ron Davies.
He said: “We have arranged for her to see a solicitor and an application will be made to the High Court for a judicial review of the school's decision.
“We believe the school is acting in contravention both of the 1976 Race Relations Act and of human rights legislation.”
A leading member of the Sikh community and a south Wales AM have spoken in support of a 14-year-old excluded from school for wearing a religious bangle.
Sarika Singh has been temporarily excluded after Aberdare Girls School said her bangle or Kara broke its code of conduct, aimed at ensuring equality.
The secretary of Sikh Federation UK said the Kara was an article of faith and the school was breaking the law.
Leanne Wood AM said she was "surprised" by the school's decision.
Governors said they had made their decision after significant study of the legal background.
Sarika Singh was excluded for a day on Monday, and on Tuesday her mother said she was told she had been excluded for a fixed period.
Sarika has said of wearing the bangle: "It's very important to me, it constantly reminds me to do good and not to do bad, especially with my hands."
Jagtar Singh from the Sikh Federation UK claimed the school was breaching the 1976 Race Relations Act.
He said: "The department for education and schools in England have said that if a head teacher or governing body were to deny a Sikh child one of their articles of faith such as the bangle then they would be breaking the law.
"If you are a practising Sikh, you have no choice, you have to have the Kara. It is the one symbol that virtually every single Sikh wears."
Sarika's mother Sinita Singh has said the teenager would remove the bangle for gym classes, or wood and metalwork, for safety reasons.
She has spoken of her intention to take legal advice, saying: "She's not asking for anything big and flashy, she's not making a big fuss, she just wants a reminder of her religion."
Governors rejected Sarika's request to wear the bangle after a "significant period of research", examining the uniform policy and human rights legislation in detail.
When she continued to wear the bangle to classes, Sarika was excluded by head teacher Jane Rosser.
Ms Rosser said the school's strict code of conduct had been in place for many years and had been established to ensure equality.
She said: "The code clearly states the only two forms of jewellery that girls are allowed to wear in school is a wrist watch and one pair of plain metal stud earrings."
Ian Blake, chair of the school's governing body said the school continually reviewed the code to reflect the population of the school and its surrounding community.
"The fact remains the code has to be upheld and we made our decision only after a significant period of research into previous cases across the UK, interrogation of the law, including human rights and race relations legislation and seeking legal guidance from the Local Education Authority," he said.
'Discrimination issues'
South Wales Central AM Leanne Wood called for the assembly governnment to issue clear guidance for schools about pupils wearing religious symbols.
She said: "I'm surprised and disappointed at the decision of Aberdare Girl's School to exclude Sarika, and I've yet to be convinced that they've got a good reason for doing so."
A Welsh Assembly Government spokesperson said there was no legislation in place specifically covering school uniforms, and whether a school's policy unlawfully breaches the Race Relations Act 1976 was a matter for the courts.
The spokesperson added: "School uniform and appearance issues including the wearing of jewellery, are local matters for individual schools to decide upon.
"The Welsh Assembly Government will shortly be issuing guidance on a range of issues associated with school uniform policies and the wearing of school uniform including equality, health and safety and discrimination issues."
BEAUTIFUL paintings, colourful clothing and informative displays were among the many exhibits seen by the many visitors to an exhibition depicting the fascinating world of Sikhism.
Scores of school pupils and residents have viewed the collection being shown at Sri Guru Singh Sabha Gurdwara temple, in Newark Road, Fengate, Peterborough.
The exhibition was opened by chief exective of Peterborough City Council Gillian Beasley during a special ceremony attended by a host of city dignitaries including leader of the city council John Peach, Cllr John Holdich and Cllrs John and Judy Fox, and former chairman of Peterborough Race Equality Commission Harmesh Lakhanpaul.
Also attending the event were representatives from the Royal Anglian Regiment whose soldiers, many of whom have recently returned from serving in Afghanistan, were urging young Sikhs to choose the Army as a career option.
Sikhism in Peterborough has only a relatively short history. It started when a dozen Sikh families moved to the city to find work in the city’s brick factories in 1970, and a temple was soon built in Cromwell Road.
But as Peterborough has grown in the last 35 years, so has the Sikh community, and today there are more than 1,000 Sikhs living in the city, who worship at temples in Royce Road and Fengate.
The exhibition has been prepared by the Kohinoor Project Trust, a Leicester-based voluntary group which is supported by The National Lottery’s Awards for All scheme and Peterborough City Council.
It also received extensive help from the Punjabi Indian Community Association in Peterborough, and its president Ram Singh Kalra said it was proving a huge success so far.
Mr Kalra said: “We have had lots of schoolchildren coming in to look around the temple. We even had a group from Sleaford, in Lincolnshire, who were overwhelmed by it all.
“We want to make sure people know all about our religion and this is a great way of doing so.
Sikhs like to help people and welcome people from all walks of life. “A problem we do have is a perception that we are linked with the Taliban. Of course, this is not the case, and hopefully this festival will help get rid of this misconception.”
Visitors are able to make chapattis – a traditional Punjabi food – and also learn about other traditional recipes during their visit. They can also learn about the traditional Sikh costumes such as turban tying and trying on Punjabi suits.
Mr Kalra added: “This was a huge success, and I was told that the regiment (Royal Anglians) got a good response from the Sikhs who looked at their exhibition.”
The festival continues until November 25, to celebrate the birthday of the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak Dev Ji.
n Group visits can still be arranged by calling 01733 562048 or 01733 324594. For more information, visit www.sikhwebsite.com
WASHINGTON (Map, News) - A Sikh civil rights group has filed a complaint with Fairfax County police after an officer allegedly used a religious slur to justify searching a man outside of a Centreville bar.
The complaint, filed last week, stems from an Oct. 5 dispute between Inderpal Singh Chawla and a bouncer at O’Tooles Restaurant Pub and Billiards. It alleges Chawla was turned away from the establishment after refusing to remove his turban. During the confrontation, a patron commented that he “probably has a bomb on his head,” according to the complaint. A nearby officer then told Chawla to “turn around and put his hands on the wall,” according to the document.
“Mr. Chawla responded ‘are you serious?’ To which the police officer stated, ‘Yes, apparently you have a bomb on your head,’ ” the complaint said.
The officer is not named in the Oct. 24 complaint, filed by the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Fairfax County police have begun an administrative investigation into the group’s claim, said Lt. Chris Marsh, commander of the department’s internal affairs investigations division. Marsh would not comment on specifics of the case. The review, he said, could take as long as 60 to 90 days.
“We have a strict policy against any sort of racial or religious discrimination. We take it very seriously,” he said. “This case will be investigated as thoroughly as possible.”
But neither side has been able to identify the officer, which could complicate any investigation. The Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund was able to describe the officer only as a “white male,” according to Marsh.
The inability to name him “doesn’t inspire any confidence in us that the investigation is going to go well,” said Rajbir Singh Datta, the group’s national director. The department receives a “tremendous number of baseless complaints,” though all are taken seriously, said Marshall Thielen, president of the county’s police union. Thielen said he was not familiar with Chawla’s case. Practicing Sikh men refrain from cutting their beards or hair, which is often wrapped and covered with a turban.
Neither Chawla nor the owner of O’Tooles Restaurant Pub and Billiards could be reached forhttp://www.examiner.com/a-
A delegation of British Sikhs this week demanded in parliament that they should be permitted to carry their ceremonial dagger, the Kirpan, through security checks at the European Parliament, at Windsor Castle, the London Eye and other places protected by tight security.
The delegation met the All Party Parliamentary Group for UK Sikhs and told them in a briefing document: “The Passport Office, Immigration Offices, Driving Standards Agency offices, some schools, London Eye, Windsor Castle etc. are all operating security policies without conducting a proper evidence-based risk analysis regarding the Sikh Kirpan. Institutions such as the European Parliament and the UN Human Rights Council have also denied practising Sikhs from the UK the right to meet elected representatives in person in Brussels or raise issues about religious freedoms in Geneva. Practising Sikhs are therefore being denied free access to public places in the UK and elsewhere, unless they are prepared to compromise their religious identity.”
The Sikh delegation insisted that the dagger was an essential “article of faith” that all observant Sikhs must carry. The Government had promised to create a code of practice that would offer guidance on this matter, but had so far not come up with it. Since 9/11 the situation had changed dramatically.
Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said: “This is utterly ridiculous. I was stopped and interrogated at an airport in the United States because I had omitted to remove a very small corkscrew from my hand baggage. I had forgotten it was in there and, of course, gave it up instantly it was detected on the x-ray machine. The idea that a large dagger could be permitted on air liners or in places such as parliamentary buildings that are prime targets for terrorists is completely crazy. Don’t these people know that knives were used to hijack the planes that were used in the attack on New York?
Mr Sanderson continued: “Who is to say that once such an item is through security it can’t be stolen and misused or even that its owner might have malign intentions. This is taking the religious symbols argument way too far – and those requesting this exemption are quite obviously looking to create a confrontation in which they can once again portray themselves as victims of discrimination. They may well find that on this occasion it will backfire on them.
“They claim to want equality. If that’s true, then they shouldn’t demand ‘rights’ that are denied to everyone else on the planet.” 2 November 2007
A GROUP of 15 Sikhs from Slough joined 150 others lobbying 25 politicians, including Slough MP Fiona Mactaggart, at the houses of Parliament on Tuesday.
The group raised issues concerning human rights in Punjab and a possible code of practice covering Sikh articles of faith to ensure their rights in public places.
The group also held a candlelit vigil for the 20,000 Sikh victims of the pogroms of November 1984 in Parliament Square
Allegations of financial irregularities in the Metropolitan (Met) Police's Sikh Association are being investigated.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) launched the inquiry after concerns were raised that members' funds may have been misused.
The Met's directorate of professional standards (DPS), which is responsible for collecting evidence in such cases, said the association co-operated fully.
Accounts, reports and meeting minutes were handed to the IPCC on Monday.
IPCC commissioner Nicola Williams said: "The Metropolitan Police Sikh Association has made allegations of potentially serious conduct matters that must be investigated.
"We will use the services of an experienced accountant to assist our independent investigators.
"I will ensure that the investigation is proportionate and fair to everybody involved."
FIREFIGHTERS are urging Hindu, Jain and Sikh communities celebrating Diwali next Friday to follow simple fire safety guidelines.
Candle fires increase by more than a third during Diwali and over 20 per cent of deaths caused by candles occur at this time.
Mark Cashin, Cheshire's deputy chief fire officer responsible for community risk reduction, said: "It is ironic and tragic that during periods of celebration there is a dramatic increase in the number of fires among many communities.
"It's often that safety comes second to celebration.
"Our aim is to make communities more aware of their surroundings and ensure that they are actively thinking about fire safety in the home."
The Fire Service is asking people to ensure they have a working smoke alarm fitted in their homes.
To book a free Home Safety Assessment including the free fitting of smoke alarms call 0800 3890053.
HYDERABAD: The Sikh community of the twin cities on Sunday celebrated the 473rd birth anniversary of the fourth Sikh Guru, Guru Ramdasji, who built the famous Harimandir Sahibji, popularly known as Golden Temple, at Amritsar.
The festival was marked with fervour and devotion. Prayers to Guru Granth Sahibji and recitation of Gurubani Keertans were followed by a colourful holy procession.
The main celebration was organised under the aegis of the Prabhandak Committee, Gurudwara Sahib, Ramdas Nagar,Rehmathnagar where Sikh devotees took part in ‘Vishaal Deewan’ (mass congregation) held near the Gurudwara Sahib premises.
Gurubani Keertans were recited by renowned Ragi Jathas specially invited from various parts of the country. Later, Guru-ka-Langar was served to the devotees.
In the evening, Nagar Keertan was taken out from Gurudwara Sahib Rehmathnagar to Gurudwara Sahib Ameerpet.
Guru Granth Sahebji was carried on a decorated vehicle along with ‘Nishaan Saheban’. Shabad Keertans were rendered by the Keerathani Jathas and Sikh youths displayed ‘‘Gatka’ skills.
As the son of Punjabi immigrants, I was not surprised to read a report from the Financial Services Authority showing that among Britain’s major faith groups, Hindus and Sikhs are the best at making ends meet. Of course they are! They never go on holiday. They never eat out. And they haggle over everything: I spent my childhood being dragged around Wolverhampton as my mother bartered over everything from secondhand sofas to sultanas.
I kept the most excruciating of these memories suppressed until I read the results of another study this week, showing that most business negotiators are bad at bargaining. Researchers divided 266 Chicago MBA students into either buyers representing a motorcycle maker, or sales reps for a parts supplier. After three negotiations lasting 45 minutes each, they compared the deals that had been struck against the limits that the teams had decided in advance and found that each side had underestimated how much the other was willing to give away.
While these Chicago MBAs may have been bad at haggling, they at least tried, which is more than can be said for most British people. Apparently only two out of five British consumers ever try to barter and failing to haggle when buying a new car costs British consumers £512 million a year. Research has found that one of the reasons why women get paid less for doing the same jobs as men is that they are less likely to try to negotiate pay rises.
Are Brits simply too embarrassed to haggle? Or do they just not know how to do it? In case it is the latter, I thought I would provide a four-point Punjabi guide to haggling, the basic principles of which, I would argue, are applicable to negotiations everywhere, from the boardroom, to the corporate purchasing department, to your local branch of Greggs:
Three young Sikh men who drowned in the Lake District last year died accidentally, an inquest has ruled.
Harvinder Singh, 15, Satvir Singh, 17, and Tajinder Singh, 21, all from Wolverhampton, died in Ullswater in September 2006.
The three were paddling on a trip with a martial arts group in Cumbria when one of them slipped.
An inquest into their deaths was held in Kendal, in Cumbria, on Wednesday morning.
Coroner Ian Smith praised the actions of bystanders who stepped in and tried to save them.
The inquest heard that a total of 26 young men had been in the water at the time recreating a Sikh dipping ceremony.
Safety notices
Several others were pulled out unconscious from the lake.
Mr Smith said that without the intervention of the onlookers, more of the young men could have died.
A joint statement released by the families after the hearing said that it had been a tragic accident and they hoped other people would learn from what happened.
Mr Smith said that the stretch of water was a hazardous one, and ideally needed safety notices placed around it to warn people of hidden dangers.
However, he said as it was so large, at 20 miles (32.2km) long, it would be impractical.
NEW YORK -- Sikh children facing harassment can find resources for help from a new website, reports India Journal. "Khalsakids.org” was launched after it was found that 75 percent of Sikh students in Queens in New York City face some kind of harassment, usually because of religious symbols they wear like the turban. The Sikh Coalition has launched the site to help Sikh children find others of their age to chat with. Teachers are invited to use the site to find out more about Sikhism. The site also documents hate crimes against Sikh children.
Saturday, 20 October 2007, 2:39 pm Press Release: Caritas People of all faiths to gather to Pray for Burma
October 20, 2007
Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and people of all faiths and spiritualities will join in solidarity with the people of Burma this Sunday October 21st.
“Following the recent upheavals in Burma, led by courageous monks and nuns, Australians will come together for a day of cultural celebration and reflection. They are responding to an invitation issued by the National Council of Churches in Australia and Caritas Australia to participate in a National Day of Prayer for Burma”, said Jack de Groot, Caritas Australia’s CEO.
“Around the country, faith communities will include special prayers for the people of Burma during their weekend services,” Mr de Groot said.
An interfaith gathering will be held in Sydney’s Martin Place. Buddhist monks will commence the main event with incantations, followed by a cultural reflection of dance and traditional music.
Leaders of major faiths in Australia will then lead a prayer or reflection from their respective traditions in remembrance of those people affected by the brutal Burmese regime. A silent procession to St James Church in Phillip St will follow and culminate in Hyde Park with a symbolic water ritual of solidarity for the people of Burma.
Participants will create a wave of red as they dress in a colour to express solidarity with the monks and nuns who have been killed, injured and interred following their courageous calls for an end to oppression in their country.
NEW DELHI (AP) India's government has failed to fully investigate and prosecute officials who allegedly took part in thousands of killings and disappearances during a counterinsurgency campaign against separatists in northern India, rights groups said Thursday.
Throughout much of the 1980s and early 1990s, Sikh insurgents waged a brutal campaign to establish their own country in India's Punjab state, massacring civilians, bombing crowded markets and attacking Hindus. India's security forces responded by allegedly killing thousands - many of whom were suspected militants, many others later described as innocent. To this day, about 3,000 people remain missing, many after being detained by police.
In a report released Thursday, two rights groups, Human Rights Watch and Ensaaf, a Punjabi group, said India's government had failed to properly investigate the alleged killings and disappearances by the security forces.
The report highlights a long-running investigation by India's National Human Rights Commission into accusations that police killed thousands of people from 1985 to 1995 and secretly cremated the bodies.
The commission, which is investigating the cases at the request of India's Supreme Court, has examined evidence from just three of Punjab's thousands of crematoriums and is only seeking to identify the dead - not who killed them, the rights groups said.
Officials at the National Human Rights Commission were not immediately available for comment, and officials at the Home Ministry, which oversees India's domestic security forces, said they could not comment on the report because they had not yet seen it.
The allegations from Human Rights Watch, based in New York, and Ensaaf, based in Fremont, Calif., are the latest in a series of accusations against security forces in India, a democracy whose leaders say the rule of law prevails.
In Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim Himalayan region that has been wracked by an Islamic insurgency for nearly two decades, police this year began investigating five cases of allegedly staged shootouts in which security personnel are suspected of killing innocents and then claiming they were rebels to earn rewards and promotions.
On Tuesday, a court convicted 10 policemen of murder in the deaths of two businessmen slain in a hail of bullets in downtown New Delhi in 1997. The policemen claimed they had opened fire in self-defense, but the court found the shooting had been an unprovoked attack on a car that the officers believed was carrying a gangster.
There have also been a handful of prosecutions of police accused of excesses during the insurgency in Punjab. But most cases, in Punjab and elsewhere, have slowly faded away.
Sikhs make up just 2 percent of India's 1.1 billion people and are concentrated in Punjab. The insurgency left an estimated 25,000 people dead, including 1,700 police. Since it tapered off in the early 1990s, calls for a separate Sikh state have all but disappeared.
Randeep Ramesh in New Delhi Thursday October 18, 2007The Guardian
The families of thousands of civilians "disappeared" during the Indian government's violent suppression of a campaign for a Sikh homeland more than a decade ago are still waiting for perpetrators of the crimes to be brought to justice, human rights monitors have warned.
In a new report entitled Protecting the Killers, Human Rights Watch says the Indian government needs to "hold accountable members of its security forces who killed and tortured thousands of Sikhs" during counter-insurgency operations in Punjab that ended only in 1995.
By then the unrest, sparked by a call for Khalistan, or a Sikh nation, had lasted more than 10 years. Democracy was suspended as the Indian army occupied the state.
The security forces eventually crushed the Khalistani movement by adopting a "bullet-for-bullet" policy of extra-judicial killings in which more than 40,000 people died. The embers of resentment have not completely burned out: a bomb blast on Sunday in Punjab, which killed seven, was blamed on Sikh separatist groups.
One of the key cases highlighted by Human Rights Watch is that of the mass cremation of 2,097 bodies in Amritsar, the Sikh holy city. The country's human rights commission, civil rights groups say, has for more than a decade failed to investigate a single case of the "mass crematorium" and explicitly refuses to identify any responsible officials.
The scale of the deaths was uncovered by a local civil rights lawyer, Jaswant Singh Kalra, who was later murdered. Five policeman were convicted of abducting and killing Mr Kalra.
His widow, Paramjeet, is still campaigning for the "missing thousands". "It took a decade for these men to be found guilty," she said. "What about the thousands of others?"
Rajinder Bains, a civil rights lawyer in Amritsar, estimated that 25,000 people were "still missing".
"There were 35 police and officials charged but none were prosecuted," he said. "The charges were set aside by the supreme court on technical grounds. The state has the money and the power to protect its own."
Human Rights Watch says India is fostering a "culture of impunity" around its counter-insurgency operations, giving a free hand to its security services to act without supervision.
However, senior Indian officials dismissed the report, describing it as "propaganda worthy of Goebbels". KPS Gill, a former director of police in Punjab during the counter-insurgency, said the New York-based organisation was "ill informed and biased", asking: "Do these people think about the innocents killed by terrorists?"
Mr Gill, who Human Rights Watch claim has led "the attack against the pursuit of justice", said the bodies in the crematorium in Amritsar were those of "beggars, vagrants, possibly some Bangladeshi migrants. In India, unclaimed and unidentified bodies found by the police must, by law, be cremated."
New procedure sensitive to Sikh turban and other religious head coverings
Washington, DC - Oct 16, 2007 (PRN): This afternoon the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announced a new security screening policy that will go into effect at U.S. airports on October 27 and apply to all religious head coverings. The change is a direct result of collaboration between TSA, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials, the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF) and other Sikh organizations in response to the concerns of the Sikh American community over a procedure implemented on August 4, 2007.
The August 2007 procedure disproportionately targeted Sikhs for secondary screening due to their turban, an article of faith, like the Jewish kippah (yarmulke) and Muslim hijab. The turban is an integral part of the Sikh faith and identity, and removal of the turban in public is akin to a strip search. The procedure resulted in Sikh travelers being forced to undergo an invasive pat-down or removal of the turban.
The turban was the only religious article listed as potentially requiring additional screening. Furthermore, the procedure may have resulted in a misallocation of national security resources due to the heightened focus on Sikh passengers solely because of their religious practice of wearing a turban.
"The new policy is encouraging and addresses most of the concerns of the Sikh American community," said Kavneet Singh, SALDEF's Managing Director. "Our collaboration with TSA has resulted in a solution that strengthens TSA's ability to protect our nation's airports, while also respecting the civil liberties of all travelers of faith. We will continue to work closely with TSA to ensure that the implementation of the new procedure does not result in the inappropriate profiling of Sikhs and other travelers of faith."
Under the new procedure, a Sikh traveler's turban will be accommodated during the screening process by providing additional options to satisfy the security requirements. According to TSA, the revised procedure states:
"TSA will now include the screening procedures for headwear within the overall category of bulky clothing and will not call it out as a separate category. Removal of all headwear is recommended but the rules accommodate those with religious, medical, or other reasons for whom removing items is not comfortable. Transportation security officers have several options for screening passengers who choose not to remove bulky clothing, including headwear."
Additionally, all 43,000 TSA screeners will undergo Sikh cultural awareness training before the Thanksgiving holiday travel season. The trainings will include two tools developed by SALDEF in collaboration with the US Department of Justice:
1. A training video: On Common Ground: Sikh American Cultural Awareness Training for Law Enforcement [watch video]; and 2. A poster called, Common Sikh American Head Coverings [view poster], that TSA is distributing to all 450 airports across the country.
SALDEF thanks TSA Administrator Kip Hawley for his leadership along with officials at TSA and DHS for their collaborative efforts in finding a solution that balances both national security and protects the rights of all travelers going through America's airports.
About SALDEF: Founded in 1996, SALDEF is the nations oldest and largest Sikh American civil rights organization. SALDEF protects and promotes the civil rights of Sikh Americans through legal aid, advocacy and educational outreach. SALDEF's mission is to create a fostering environment in the United States for future generations of Sikh Americans. Sikhism is a distinct religious faith that is over five hundred years old. There are approximately half a million Sikhs living in the United States.
Washington, Oct 17 - Sikh air passengers will no longer have to remove their turbans at US screening checkpoints if doing so makes them uncomfortable under new guidelines coming into force Oct 27. The new Transportation Security Administration (TSA) guidelines announced Tuesday give airport screeners the option to pat down headwear at the metal detector if a passenger does not want to remove it for personal reasons. Experts say mixing up the screening techniques is good security. 'We must use security measures that are unpredictable, agile,' TSA Administrator Kip Hawley told a Senate panel Tuesday. New York based Sikh Coalition, a leading US Sikh civil rights organisation, welcomed the change because it both protects national security and is respectful of religious pluralism. But it also asked the TSA to create safeguards that provide better protection against religious profiling. Under the new policy, a Sikh, or any person wearing religious headwear can pat down his or her own head covering, and then have their hands swabbed with a cotton cloth to check for chemical residue. The new policy is a direct response to Sikh concerns, raised after the TSA in August listed 'bulky' headwear such as cowboy hats, berets or turbans should be patted down. The TSA has now removed turbans from its screener guidance. In addition, the TSA will provide all its field employees with mandatory cultural awareness training about Sikh practices. The Sikh Coalition said it nevertheless remains concerned that screeners have sole discretion to decide when to perform additional screening. Screeners may pull aside passengers for additional screening if they believe the person's head covering to be 'bulky'. 'While the TSA has assured us that trainings and supervisor oversight will stem improper use of this discretion, the Sikh Coalition is unconvinced that this is the best solution,' It said. Asking TSA to collect data with regards to additional screenings in US airports to ensure that screeners are not profiling, the coalition said it was also concerned that Sikh travellers have to assert that they do not want their turbans touched by a screening officer. 'As we understand it, the TSA is not requiring screeners to inform passengers that they have a right to conduct a self-pat-down, although this is the stated policy. 'We are encouraged that the TSA has found a solution that does not single out turbans for additional screening. Indeed, it is possible to secure America's safety and be true to the principles of religious freedom,' said Amardeep Singh, executive director of the Sikh Coalition.
A few months ago in Punjab, as grain farmers set fire to harvested rice fields to clear their land, Jagroop Singh spent the afternoon reflecting on his good fortune farming cows. Singh, a tall Sikh who tends his herd in a white tunic and pale pink turban on a farm near the north Indian village of Aliwal, owns 60 somewhat bony brown animals, which he keeps in an open-air shed on the edge of the fields behind his house.
Meanwhile, restaurants are now doing so well that many are opening up branches in different cities. Some are fast-food chains that have emulated McDonald’s, which has been in India for more than a decade and is one of its most established foreign restaurants. It remains a popular destination: in the evenings its restaurants are full of families queuing for Chicken Maharaja Macs, McAloo Tikki burgers and Paneer Salsa wraps – now made with “multi-cereal” bread for the health-conscious diner.
Indians have typically bought their fruits and vegetables in outdoor markets, and packaged foods in small stores with limited selections of products. But supermarkets, where young professionals such as Singh can find rare fruits like kiwis and chilled foods like butter, are now popping up around the country. In Gurgaon, the booming business district on the outskirts of Delhi, where cows wander along dusty streets between newly built office blocks, shoppers walking into a Spencer’s supermarket will find a pizza stand, Chinese food “X-press” and shelves filled with many of the same brands that they would see in London or Paris.
Aberdare girls' school has temporarily excluded Sikh student, Sarika Singh, for wearing her religious kara bracelet. Photograph: Barry Batchelor/PA
