Hardeep Singh is deputy-director at the Network of Sikh Organisations
Social media isn’t forgiving of politicians who suffer a slip of the tongue, especially when it comes to confusing a Sikh place of worship, a gurdwara, with a mosque. Only this week former John Lewis honcho turned Mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street, has faced the ire of angry Sikhs and wider public criticism for
Growing up I remember my late grandfather, a former commissioned officer in the British Indian Army, being fixated by re-runs of Richard Attenborough’s award-winning film Gandhi. One scene stood out. In the film Attenborough immortalised an event that Churchill referred to as ‘monstrous’, and David Cameron ‘a deeply shameful event in British history’ – the
In the Middle East, Pakistan, India, North Korea and parts of China – hatred and persecution of Christians is well documented. But who would have thought preaching the gospel would become a risky business on the streets of Britain? Last month saw the wheelchair bound preacher Claudio Boggi being threatened and spat at by a
When does a religion become an ethnic group? You may consider the premise of this question absurd – after all ethnicity is immutable, faith a choice. Bizarrely however, this has become the subject of a major dispute amongst British Sikhs. It hinges on whether or not a Sikh ‘ethnic’ tick-box should be included by the
Kicked ‘like a football’ were the words used by a Pakistani Christian to describe a brutal assault that left him unconscious outside a restaurant in Derby last month. The victim, Tajamal Amar, claims Muslim men singled him out for offence he’d caused by displaying a cross and two large red poppies on his car, and
On August 14-15 1947, after a few hundred years in India the British left behind the jewel in the crown of Empire. The Raj abruptly ended, but the struggle for India’s freedom came at a price. The creation of the Islamic state of Pakistan, carved from undivided India or partition, as it became known, resulted
In April each year Sikhs around the world celebrate Vaisakhi. While it marks the Indian spring harvest, the festival has a much deeper significance for adherents of Sikhism – it commemorates the birth of a nation of warrior-saints. Over the weekend some of Britain’s 423,000 plus Sikhs began these festivities with impressive street processions called Nagar Kirtans
On 15 September 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner, was arranging flowers outside his family business in Arizona. He had just returned from Costco, where he purchased some American flags and donated money to a fund for victims of 9/11. Moments later, he was shot dead. Sodhi, a turbaned Sikh, goes down in history
Terror attacks in Germany are becoming remarkably unremarkable. So when a bomb went off in the German city of Essen, near Düsseldorf – and killed nobody – it barely registered. The three teenagers who detonated the device were all members of a Whatsapp group called ‘Supporters of the Islamic Caliphate’, so their intentions seemed pretty
