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The lost Sikhs of Afghanistan
By Bobby Bansal
Special to The Post
At their apex, the Sikhs in Afghanistan numbered over 160,000 people.
Today they number a mere 1,000, 1% of that number, and the vast majority of the people left want to leave rather than stay.
In Kabul, Afghanistan’s Sikhs face relentless persecution. The forty families still living in their homes around Gurudwara Har Rai Sahib in Kabul’s Shore Bazaar rarely venture far from their dilapidated homes. Many have taken refuge inside the gurudwara, where within it’s heavily shelled walls there is neither sanitation nor heat.
Yet Gurudwara Har Rai, which is over 400 years old, still functions in war-ravaged Kabul. Prior to 1991, there were eleven active gurdwaras and three Hindu temples that existed in Kabul. Throughout Afghanistan there was 65 Sikh and 21 Hindu temples that existed.
Today, however, in Kabul, a city scarred by Taliban extremism and constant warfare for over 30 years, there are only 4 Gurdwaras still standing – these others however, have been forcibly converted into warehouses.
Afghan Sikh, Narinder Singh who was born in Kabul and lives in the Shore Bazaar area, gave a brief account of life in Kabul.
“I am 26 years old and run a dispensary store where I sell medicines,” he said. “Life is not the same as it was decades back, most of the rich Sikh families have fled and today only the poor Sikhs remain within the Gurdwara complex as they are unable to afford their own properties.”
Singh added there are neither schools nor teachers. Children spend most of their time doing nothing and staying inside.
“We are unable to teach or educate our children with the knowledge they require to acquire a future as there is no future in Afghanistan. If I had a chance to leave, I would leave right now for India,” he said. The history of the Sikh community in Afghanistan goes back the 1820's, to the time of Maharaja Ranjeet Singh who sent missions of settlers to the region during his reign in order to promote trade and commerce.
Caravans travelled from Lahore to Kabul and other communities along this route such as Jalalabad and Ghazni prospered with the growth of Sikh and Hindu settlers during this migration period.
Over the generations, Sikhs in Kabul became successful entrepreneurs who prospered. Many became money-lenders, able to circumvent religious laws that forbade Muslims from practicing usury. Their businesses grew to controlling the city’s money exchanges as well as transport, clothing, commodities, and other key markets.
Though Sikh traders blended into Afghan culture by adopting local customs and language, they found themselves targeted with the rise of the Taliban in the early 90’s.
Wealthier Sikhs and those with foresight started leaving. Eventually when the Taliban’s religious war intensified, the remaining Sikhs left hastily for either neighbouring Pakistan or India. Today many have moved on to England and neighbourhoods like Southall where they have again set up their trading establishments.
An older Sikh women living in the Har Rai gurudwara compound gave the most harrowing account of modern day life in Kabul.
“Our children are discriminated on a daily basis and when we go outside the local Afghans abuse and molest us who compel us to convert to Islam,” her voice thinning out at the end, a harbinger for the end of Afghanistan’s Sikhs.
Bobby Singh Bansal was recently in Kabul to film a television documentary on Afghanistan’s lost Sikhs, ([email protected]).
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