Zee News Exclusive
Kabul: Forced to wear yellow patches in the days of the Taliban, the homesick Sikhs of Afghanistan still hide in back alleys and yearn for India. In the Taliban's birthplace, the southern city of Kandahar, their children cannot go to school and locals stone or spit on the men in the streets, who mostly try to hide in the narrow alleys of the mud-brick older quarter of the city.
''We don't want to stay in Afghanistan,'' says 40-year-old Balwant Singh. ''The locals tell us 'You are not from Afghanistan, go back to India'. Sometimes, they throw stones at us, the children. We feel we have to hide.
''I am even afraid to go to parts of the city.''
Their temple, or Gurdwara, in Kandahar is a simple traditional yellow pole capped by the orange Nishan Sahib flag.
It sits outside a stark prayer room in an obscure courtyard reachable only after knocking on two sets of unmarked heavy timber doors down a cramped mud-brick tunnel-way.
The pole does not rise above roof level, unlike the splendid Gurdwaras across India where they tower above the temples and the countryside, visible for kilometres.
There are about 10 Sikh families in Kandahar -- fewer than 50 people. Another 22 lonely men, all their families back in India, live as traders in the neighbouring province of Uruzgan, another Taliban stronghold.
Similar numbers are scattered across Afghanistan, a strictly Islamic nation where most people do not recognise Sikhism's close links with Islam. Founded about 600 years ago in the western plains of India, Sikhism combines elements of Hinduism and Islam.
In the late 1980s, there were about 500,000 Sikhs scattered across Afghanistan, many here for generations. The country's Islam was moderate, based on the Sunni Hanafi sect.
Sikhs, Hindus and Jews were prominent in the economy, mainly as moneylenders -- often underwriting the wars of various kings.
Most Sikhs, along with the country's handful of Hindus, came with the British from the Indian empire in the 19th century.
But after the Mujahideen civil war and the 1994 rise of the Taliban, most had fled by 1998.
In 2001, the Taliban ordered Sikhs, Hindus and other religious minorities to wear yellow patches, ostensibly so they would not be arrested by the religious police for breaking Taliban laws on the length of beards and other issues.
It is not clear how widely the rule was enforced.
The Sikhs who have returned since, like those of Kandahar and Uruzgan, are mainly small-time traders who complain of the pittance they make here, but say it is more than India offers.
Most come from poor families who fled to Delhi when Britain arbitrarily divided its Indian empire into Muslim Pakistan and secular but mainly Hindu India in 1947, forever splitting the Sikh homeland, the fertile plains of the Punjab.
''We don't want to stay in Afghanistan. But we have no choice,'' says Santok Singh, 39, whose family is in New Delhi.
Almost all have no papers or visas and are at the mercy of authorities in a country where corruption is rife -- one of the biggest challenges to Afghanistan ever succeeding as a nation.
''They take our homes, they take our businesses,'' says Hem Singh, a 42-year-old trader from Uruzgan. ''We can't do anything.
''We have no rights.''
Most are general traders or pharmacists. Forced to sell their goods cheaper than their Afghan competition to win business, they are too ashamed to tell their families what life is really like.
''We keep it secret,'' says Hem Singh. ''We don't tell our families how bad our life here really is.''
They cannot travel to Afghanistan via the fastest route through Pakistan because of the decades of enmity between New Delhi and Islamabad so they use alternative routes which can be difficult and sometimes dangerous.
In a cramped room in Kandahar, a dozen turbaned Sikh men drink Afghanistan's ubiquitous sugary green tea.
Several show scars from bomb blasts suffered travelling the roads of the dangerous south to stock their shops or wholesale to Afghan traders too scared to travel themselves.
The resurgence of the Taliban is making their lives worse: the highways are more dangerous with a new spate of suicide bombings and a resurgence of fundamentalist Islam is making their differences from Afghans more pronounced.
The Taliban is the strongest it has been since US-led forces ousted its hardline government in 2001. This has been the bloodiest year since then, with more than 3,700 people killed, almost a third of them civilians.
''We are always afraid someone will kill us or hurt us because we are Sikh,'' says Sabrat Subir Singh, a 62-year-old trader from Uruzgan. ''But what can we do? We need the money.
''No one here is happy. We are angry and sad.'
Afghan Sikhs forced to lie about miseries
-
star_munir
- Posts: 1670
- Joined: Tue Apr 22, 2003 12:55 am
- Contact:
-
star_munir
- Posts: 1670
- Joined: Tue Apr 22, 2003 12:55 am
- Contact:
Afghan Sikhs feel abandoned, ponder their future
By RAMESH RAMACHANDRAN
Kabul, Sept. 28: Angry Afghan Sikhs marched down the streets of Kabul a week ago after locals prevented them from cremating a community elder. Tension was resolved after the police chief intervened but the embers have not died down completely.
Mr Autaar Singh, one of only two representatives from the Afghan Sikh community in Parliament, cannot understand the opposition to cremation as per Sikh rites.
He wonders why anyone should want to dissuade them, when even the Taliban did not see it as a sacrilege and stop the practice.
Mr Amrik Singh, a small trader who peddles his wares near a gurdwara in Kabul, in turn, feels the minuscule Afghan Sikh community is still trying to come to terms with the downturn in relations with the majority population. Their womenfolk live in perpetual fear.
Children cannot attend school regularly. Families are beset by financial worries.
He is certain that if the situation deteriorates, the only option of the community will be to migrate to India, the spiritual homeland of the Sikhs. What is not certain is whether they can afford to pay for the journey.
The ambassador of India to Afghanistan, Mr Rakesh Sood, says the government of India is seized of the matter but there is only so much it can do. "We cannot support migration of people to India merely because they share a faith with us," he said in an interview to this newspaper. "India," he hastens to add, "does not support financially in any case."
Mr Sood explains: "First of all you must understand that these are not people of Indian origin. These are Afghan Hindus and Afghan Sikhs who've been here for centuries. So I mean this is not going back. It's not as if it's not like you know you had Indian labour that migrated to Mauritius maybe even two centuries ago and therefore wants to go back [but] they've always been here. They are Afghans. So it is not a question of going back [to India.] If they want to migrate they can migrate ... that's a different matter."
Mr Sood dismisses turf war between the ministry of external affairs and the ministry of overseas Indian affairs. "We have the ministry of overseas Indian affairs [which] looks at problems of overseas Indians ... like Indian labour going to Gulf ... that is whole different ballgame but here it is a question of these people who are Afghans finding their rightful place in Afghanistan," he says.
The ambassador points out that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is extremely conscious of the need to keep the Afghan Sikh and Hindu community in his country and not allow them to leave. "He is very sensitive to this. One reason of course is that he speaks Hindi and has studied in India and therefore, he always holds India's multi-ethnicity as something which is an important asset and a requirement in democracy," he says.
Mr Sood feels that the Sikh community could be offered an alternative land for cremation in order to resolve the issue.
The genesis of the dispute, according to him, can be traced back to 60-odd years ago when a community elder, who was a diwan in the king's rule, received land as gift. He decided to give a part of that land for a dharamsala (as temples and gurdwaras are known in Afghanistan) . The community never put up a boundary wall around it although the inner complex has one. The land near the inner complex was used for cremation.
"What has happened is there is pressure on land after 2002. That land is now being encroached upon or occupied by Afghans ... nobody seems to have a title to it, so when they took body for cremation recently the locals objected [saying it was] unhygienic," Mr
Sood says. "I do not foresee any difficulty in terms of their either getting an alternative site or because ... I doubt ... if the dharamsala does not have a clear title to this piece of land which is now encroached upon or occupied, then they'll probably get an alternative piece of land [for] cremation which they can then enclose and use it."
There were an estimated one lakh Afghan Sikhs and Hindus till a decade or more ago but their number has dwindled dramatically. Today, their population is expected to be not more than 2,000.
Ironically, there are more Indians in Afghanistan today than Afghan Sikhs and Hindus. About 4,000-odd Indians are engaged in the reconstruction of the war-torn country. There are over 9,000 Afghan refugees in India under the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. An overwhelming majority of them are Sikhs and Hindus.
Kabul, Sept. 28: Angry Afghan Sikhs marched down the streets of Kabul a week ago after locals prevented them from cremating a community elder. Tension was resolved after the police chief intervened but the embers have not died down completely.
Mr Autaar Singh, one of only two representatives from the Afghan Sikh community in Parliament, cannot understand the opposition to cremation as per Sikh rites.
He wonders why anyone should want to dissuade them, when even the Taliban did not see it as a sacrilege and stop the practice.
Mr Amrik Singh, a small trader who peddles his wares near a gurdwara in Kabul, in turn, feels the minuscule Afghan Sikh community is still trying to come to terms with the downturn in relations with the majority population. Their womenfolk live in perpetual fear.
Children cannot attend school regularly. Families are beset by financial worries.
He is certain that if the situation deteriorates, the only option of the community will be to migrate to India, the spiritual homeland of the Sikhs. What is not certain is whether they can afford to pay for the journey.
The ambassador of India to Afghanistan, Mr Rakesh Sood, says the government of India is seized of the matter but there is only so much it can do. "We cannot support migration of people to India merely because they share a faith with us," he said in an interview to this newspaper. "India," he hastens to add, "does not support financially in any case."
Mr Sood explains: "First of all you must understand that these are not people of Indian origin. These are Afghan Hindus and Afghan Sikhs who've been here for centuries. So I mean this is not going back. It's not as if it's not like you know you had Indian labour that migrated to Mauritius maybe even two centuries ago and therefore wants to go back [but] they've always been here. They are Afghans. So it is not a question of going back [to India.] If they want to migrate they can migrate ... that's a different matter."
Mr Sood dismisses turf war between the ministry of external affairs and the ministry of overseas Indian affairs. "We have the ministry of overseas Indian affairs [which] looks at problems of overseas Indians ... like Indian labour going to Gulf ... that is whole different ballgame but here it is a question of these people who are Afghans finding their rightful place in Afghanistan," he says.
The ambassador points out that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is extremely conscious of the need to keep the Afghan Sikh and Hindu community in his country and not allow them to leave. "He is very sensitive to this. One reason of course is that he speaks Hindi and has studied in India and therefore, he always holds India's multi-ethnicity as something which is an important asset and a requirement in democracy," he says.
Mr Sood feels that the Sikh community could be offered an alternative land for cremation in order to resolve the issue.
The genesis of the dispute, according to him, can be traced back to 60-odd years ago when a community elder, who was a diwan in the king's rule, received land as gift. He decided to give a part of that land for a dharamsala (as temples and gurdwaras are known in Afghanistan) . The community never put up a boundary wall around it although the inner complex has one. The land near the inner complex was used for cremation.
"What has happened is there is pressure on land after 2002. That land is now being encroached upon or occupied by Afghans ... nobody seems to have a title to it, so when they took body for cremation recently the locals objected [saying it was] unhygienic," Mr
Sood says. "I do not foresee any difficulty in terms of their either getting an alternative site or because ... I doubt ... if the dharamsala does not have a clear title to this piece of land which is now encroached upon or occupied, then they'll probably get an alternative piece of land [for] cremation which they can then enclose and use it."
There were an estimated one lakh Afghan Sikhs and Hindus till a decade or more ago but their number has dwindled dramatically. Today, their population is expected to be not more than 2,000.
Ironically, there are more Indians in Afghanistan today than Afghan Sikhs and Hindus. About 4,000-odd Indians are engaged in the reconstruction of the war-torn country. There are over 9,000 Afghan refugees in India under the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. An overwhelming majority of them are Sikhs and Hindus.