American Sikhs Fear for Safety as Atrocities on Minorities Rise

The Sikh community in the US is finding that it is increasingly becoming the target for religious discrimination.

Pardeep Kaleka spent several days after 9/11 at his father’s Milwaukee gas station, fearing that his family would be targeted by people who assumed they were Muslim. Kaleka explained on behalf of his father, who wore a turban and beard and spoke only in broken English, that the family was Sikh, a south-east Asian religion based on equality and unrelated to Islam.

But amid a new wave of anti-Islamic sentiment since the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Kaleka is vowing to take an entirely different approach.

“For us it does not matter who they’re targeting,” said Kaleka, a former Milwaukee police officer and teacher whose father was one of six people killed in 2012 when a white supremacist opened fire at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. “This time we cannot differentiate ourselves; when hate rhetoric is being spewed we cannot be on the sidelines.”

Across the US, Sikhs and Muslims are banding together to defend their respective religions. Someone bent on harming Muslims wouldn’t understand – or care – about the distinction between the two faiths, they say. Whatever their differences, however, both deserve to live in peace.

Need of Awareness

So they planned educational sessions and rallies creating awareness among the masses. They successfully pushed the FBI to track hate crimes against Sikhs. They tried conveying their issues to lawmakers and supported each other’s legal actions, including a lawsuit filed over a New York City police surveillance program targeting New Jersey Muslims.

“We are in this fight together,” said Gurjot Kaur, a senior staff attorney at The Sikh Coalition, founded the night of 11 September.

There are more than 500,000 Sikhs in the US. Reports of bullying, harassment and vandalism against Sikhs have risen in recent weeks. Last week, a Sikh temple in Orange County, California, was vandalized, as was a truck in the parking lot by someone who misspelled the word “Islam” and made an obscene reference to the ISIS.

Atrocities on the Rise

Former NCAA basketball player Darsh Singh said that he has been through similar atrocities and has heard insults throughout his life, including recently when someone recently yelled “Osama!” at him as he was crossing a street in Phoenix.

For most Sikhs, much of the backlash has been frequent stares or comments and occasional online insults.

A Sikh woman said she recently was forced to show her breast pump before taking her seat on an airplane in Minneapolis because another passenger thought she might be a terrorist. Several Sikh football fans said they initially were not allowed into Qualcomm Stadium to watch the San Diego Chargers game against the Denver Broncos last Sunday because several of them were wearing turbans.

Ninety-nine percent of Americans are good, then a person who just came out of a tavern after a few beers, you don’t know what he’s thinking at that point.

Rajinder Singh Mago, Director, Sikh Religious Society, Chicago

In another incident, white supremacist Wade Michael Page killed six people and wounded four others at the Oak Creek temple. Pardeep Kaleka said his father, Satwant Singh Kaleka, was the last person killed inside the temple, after Page broke into an office where the elder Kaleka was calling police for help.