When Rajinder Singh Khalsa, 57, gets up in the morning, he often sees a ‘white hole’ with his left eye. Sunlight is anathema for him, as he cannot focus on anything for minutes afterwards. Many a night, he gets up screaming from his sleep; he has terrible nightmares of imminent danger, he says. He is obsessively protective of his family. When walking outside his home in New York City, he avoids eye contact with strangers. “I still feel when somebody looks at me, he will attack me,” he explained.
It’s been more than two years since Khalsa was brutally attacked by a group of five white men when he was walking near his home. A resident of Ozone Park, a pocket where more than 25,000 Sikhs live in the borough of Queens, Khalsa had earned an award from the Red Cross for his voluntary service in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
In a city that boasts South Asian-dominated areas like Jackson Heights and Flushing, Khalsa was caught unaware when the men jumped on his chest, punched and kicked him till he lost consciousness. “Bin Laden! Terrorist!” his attackers hollered, as they taunted his turban, religion and his ethnicity and rained down blows.
Only two of the men were convicted under the hate crime law, while the others got off with a bias crime charge. Khalsa pleaded with the judge who convicted the men to various sentences to also include community service at gurdwaras, so that his attackers come to know and understand the Sikh community and religion. To realize that the turban, long beard and the traditional kurta that Khalsa and most other Sikhs wear may have an uncanny resemblance to footage shown on television of Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda members, but in reality the Muslim and Sikh faith are as apart from each other as chalk and cheese.
Pictures of Khalsa’s family adorn the walls and tables of the room where he sits, but he does not want to talk about his family. He is proud of the awards he received for his social service in India, including a “Punjab Ratan” award. Outside, posing for a photograph, he is careful that the address of his house is not inadvertently revealed in the photograph. He does not take the subway anymore – he was taunted once by two men on the subway, “Bin Laden is here.” He drives mostly. On walks, he is accompanied by friends.
“I realize that not everybody is bad,” said Khalsa, dressed in a safari suit, often sighing as memories of the past return to haunt him. “But I cannot shake off this feeling of danger.”
Harjinder Singh Duggal, a veteran Sikh community leader and a resident of Richmond Hill in Queens, says he has almost become immune to racially abusive comments. He has given hundreds of presentations on the Sikh community and attended meets like Irish Day Parade and the U.S. Open tennis tournament. He is willing to talk to anybody who may want to listen as to what the turban and the beard means.
“This 4th of July, I was heckled by a section of the crowd as ‘Bin is Coming Here,’ when I joined the Parade in Queens. On subways, I have been called ‘Iraqi’, ‘Taliban’. Going up to such people and explain that I am a Sikh, they are often surprised and some apologize,” said Duggal. “In New York, the diversity is greater, but elsewhere the Sikh community is suffering.”
One of Khalsa’s friend and neighbors, Charanjit Singh Puri, 72, an engineer and retired Group Captain from the Indian Air Force, takes a pragmatic look at the situation.
“We should reach those communities that do not know the difference between Arabs and Sikhs.” Puri partly blames the Indian-American organizations that, he says, have not done enough to raise awareness of the Sikh community and to protest against attacks on them.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Muslim community, or rather anybody with brown skin color, has faced increased scrutiny and apprehension in the United States and Europe. But it is the Sikh community which has faced the brunt of racially-motivated physical and verbal attacks and abuse for their uncanny resemblance to the Al Qaeda members. Americans who don’t know about the existence of Sikhism view Sikhs as Arabs.
Though only one death – that of Balbir Singh Sodhi who was shot dead working at a gas station in Mesa, Arizona soon after 9/11 happened – has been legally labeled as a hate crime until now, Sikh advocacy and outreach groups contend that at least three deaths of cab drivers shot in the San Francisco Bay Area in the last two years should be classified as hate crimes as well. They also want other cases of physical abuse, which often are labeled as a bias attack and carry a lighter prison sentence, to come under the paradigm of hate crime.
Manjit Singh of the Sikh Amercian Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF), a prominent Sikh outrech and advocacy group, based in Washington, D.C., says that the spate of attacks against the community has remained steady. With increased awareness, more and more cases are getting reported every year, he says.
Though Manjit Singh feels that measures like more involvement by the federal and state governments in increasing awareness abouth the Sikhs, sensivity training for police officers and community presentations are helping to curb a big spurt in racially-motivated attacks. But incidents like the terror plot that was uncovered in the United Kingdom some weeks ago expose the community to a fresh round of mistaken hatred and vengeance.
“We have seen a dramatic number of new cases reported every year since 9/11,“ said Manjit Singh. “Immideately after 9/11, there were around 250 incidents of hate and bias crimes in a six-month period, and since then around 100 cases have been reported every year, although many cases are still not reported.”
Manjit Singh says that even before the U.K. terror plot was uncovered, members of Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Sikh Coalition, another advocacy group, have been in contact with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, since the situation in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East deteriorated.
