Hardeep Singh

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 confusing the two. While campaigning in Birmingham over the weekend, he inadvertently referred to a Sikh temple as ‘Guru Nanak Mosque’ on live television. I’ve not met Street, but see him as a friendly fellow who genuinely jumbled up his words in a lapsed moment – something that can happen to the best of us. Perhaps I’m just a big Sikh softy after all. One less forgiving tweeter wrote, ‘ignorance is bliss Andy Street.

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 ONS in the 2021 Census. A voluntary question – ‘what is your religion?’ already exists, with ‘Sikh’ an option which 423,000 readily chose back in 2011. Back then a campaign resulted in 83,000 Sikhs refusing to select the available ethnicity tick boxes (eschewing Indian because of the Indian government’s betrayal of Sikhs in the 1980s), opting instead to write in ‘Sikh’ in the space for ‘other ethnic group.

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 for being a Kaffir – a derogatory term for non-Muslims. As it happens, the attack occurred towards the end of National Hate Crime Awareness Week, and has been recorded as a hate crime. The British Pakistani Christian Association, a group who’ve been supporting Amar, inform me his wife and daughter have been moved to a new location; he remains in hospital. But is his case symptomatic of a broader anti-Christian sentiment brewing in Britain?

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 in both London and Glasgow. The latter included a beturbanned bagpipe player to boot. It’s a family friendly affair, with an abundance of free food (langar), martial arts displays (gatka) and speeches from ‘community leaders’ and politicians.

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 as the first person killed in retribution for the Al Qaeda terror attacks. On his arrest, his murderer Frank Roque told police, 'I’m a patriot and American.' Fifteen years on, Sikhs, both in the US and Britain, are acutely aware that hate does not discriminate. And Sikhs, like Muslims, continue to face the backlash to the Islamist war on the West.