Terming the attack on an 80-year-old Sikh by a British girl as yet another shameful example of hate crime, the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal lamented that Sikhs’ hopes on ‘turbaned PM’ have been shattered by the mute government.
SAD secretary and spokesperson Daljit Singh Cheema said: “The attack is unfortunate and horrifying. It has shaken the Sikh community across the world.”
He added that when Manmohan Singh became the Prime Minister there were expectations that he would take up the issue of hate crimes with the concerned governments. “But practically reverse has happened,” he said. “In spite of this alarming situation, the Centre has not taken up the matter seriously with the authorities concerned,” he said.
Cheema urged the Prime Minister and Minister of State for External Affairs Preneet Kaur to take concrete steps in this regard to mitigate the problems of the Sikh diaspora.
SAD president and Punjab Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Badal said the incident had hurt feelings of the entire Sikh community and the nation and asked the Prime Minister to take up the matter with the British government immediately.
The SGPC, the apex religious body of the Sikhs, said the attack showed the members of the community living abroad were not safe and could be targeted anytime.
BJP vice-president SS Ahluwalia on Sunday sought Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s immediate intervention, and expressed his agony over the Sikh turban being compared to the headgear worn by Afghans, and reiterated that Sikhs are Indians.
“The turban issue is being raised time and again in Europe and they want to compare the turban of Punjab to that of Afghanistan. But we are not Afghans and, we have seen after 9/11, there was lot of problem in America also. They treated Sikhs as Afghanis. But we are not, we are Sikhs, we are Indians,” said Ahluwalia.
A video of the incident went viral on the web, and grabbed attention as well as condemnation. The video shows the elderly victim being punched in the face and pushed to the ground. His turban had fallen off and he had been left with a bloodied nose and a black eye. The 19-year-old girl abused the Sikh man and spat on him before walking off.
The attack, allegedly unprovoked, occurred near a bus station in Coventry’s Trinity Street at 8.30 pm local time on August 10.
Four days before the incident in the UK, on August 6, Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Management Committee president Manjit Singh GK and other delegation members were told to remove their turbans during a security check at Rome Airport. However, he, along with other members of the DSGMC delegation, refused to do so and decided not to board their Dubai-bound Emirates flight.
Ironically, the delegation was returning after attending a turban awareness day event organised by a Europe-based TV channel and felt the removal of the turban, in the name of security check, in foreign countries is a direct assault on Sikh identity. Previously, president of Indian overseas Congress, Karamjit Singh Dhillon along with 10 other Sikhs were forced to remove turbans at Rome Airport in February 2011 and also Amritinder Singh coach of golfer Jeev Milkha Singh was also forced to remove turban twice within a span of eight days — May 15, 2011 and May 23, 2011— at Milan airport.
Following protests, the Italian Government had declared that Sikhs
will not have to remove their turbans at airports for security screening.