With the Taliban’s acquisition of Afghanistan, the history of the country’s tiny but important Sikh community could be on the brink of its end. The World Punjabi Organization along with the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) of Delhi have coordinated with the Government of India for the evacuation of Afghan Hindus and Sikhs. On Monday, the 46 Afghan Sikhs evacuated brought with them to India three of the remaining six snacks from Guru Granth Sahib. Paramjeet Singh Sarna, president of SAD (Delhi), tweeted, “End of a Sikh era in Afghanistan.”
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A History of Sikhism in Afghanistan
Contrary to the common assumption that Sikhs in Afghanistan are recent immigrants of Indian descent, the Sikh community is in fact indigenous to the country and has a long and deep-rooted history in the region. History enthusiast Inderjeet Singh, in his book, ‘Hindu and Sikh Afghans: A Thousand Year History (2019), suggested that the history of Sikhism in Khurasan (medieval Afghanistan) begins with the founder of the Sikh religion, Guru Nanak, have visited the region sometime in the 15th century.
Anthropologist Roger Ballard in his 2011 research paper explained that the Sikh population in the region was made up of “those members of the indigenous population who resisted the process of conversion from Buddhism to Islam that took place in this area between the 9th and 13th centuries, and which was later aligned with the teachings of Guru Nanak – himself a khatri and founder of the Sikh tradition – during the course of the 15th century “.
In 1504, the Mughal emperor Babur captured Kabul and by 1526 he was already the master of northern India. Kabul became one of the provinces of Hindustan and Babur called it “Hindustan’s own market”. It remained part of Hindustan until 1738, when it was conquered by the Persian ruler Nadir Shah. “During this period, Sikh chroniclers record a number of names and cases in which Sikh followers from Kabul came to the region known as Eastern Punjab, to respect Sikh gurus,” Singh wrote. There were also several cases in which the Sikhs of the eastern Punjab went to Afghanistan to spread the teachings of the Sikh gurus.
For example, the 18th century text, Mahima Prakash, written by Sarup Das Bhalla, a descendant of the third Sikh guru, Guru Amar Das, mentions the name of “Kabuli wali Mai” (lady of Kabul) who did his (voluntary service) while digging a well in Gondiawal, east of the Punjab. The same text also mentions Bhai Gonda who was sent to Kabul to spread the teachings of the seventh Sikh guru and who also established a Gurudwara there.
The period between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries is important in the history of Afghan Sikh relations. For about 101 years, the Afghans and the Sikh empire were neighbors and mostly antagonists. In the first decades of the 19th century, the Sikh empire under Maharaja Ranjit Singh had annexed large parts of the Durrani empire under the Afghans. However, during the Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848-49, the Sikhs received support from the Afghans, although they lost to the British.
The 45th Sikh Regiment escorting prisoners during the Second Afghan War. (Wikimedia Commons)
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in reaction to the activities of Christian proselytism after the annexation of the Sikh empire by the British, the Singh Sabha movement, a Sikh reform movement was established. The impact of the movement was also felt in Afghanistan. Akali Kaur Singh, for example, spent a year in Afghanistan, going from house to house spreading Sikh doctrine. His mission led to the creation of several gurdwaras in the region.
The Sikh exodus from Afghanistan
The first major exodus of Afghan Sikhs and Hindus occurred during the reign of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan in the late 19th century. The British called the Khan government in Afghanistan the “reign of terror.” He is known to have executed about 100,000 people in court. Several Hindus and Sikhs had emigrated during this period and it is known that the Afghan Sikh community of Patiala in the Punjab was then established.
But it was in 1992 that the Mujahideen seized Afghanistan when the most widespread exodus of Sikhs and Hindus began. Before the mujahideen took over, the Sikhs were affected by two cases of terrorist activities. In 1988, on the first day of Baisakhi, a man with an AK-47 burst into a gurdwara and killed thirteen Sikhs. The following year, Guru Gurdwara Teg Bahadur Singh in Jalalabad was attacked by rockets fired by the mujahideen, which killed 17 Sikhs. Singh in his work wrote that between March and October 1989 the Mujahideen attacked Jalalabad with the intention of capturing the city. More than a hundred Afghan Sikhs died during the six-month period in which the Mujahideen headed primarily to the city’s Sikh residential area.
El Karte Parwan Gurdwara in Kabul. (Source: Pritpal Singh)
After the mujahideen took over Kabul in 1992, a large number of Sikhs began to leave the country as they were subjected to various cases of kidnapping, extortion and persecution. The problems multiplied even more when the Taliban came to power in 1994. Singh wrote that while in the early 1990s more than 60,000 Sikhs and Hindus lived in Afghanistan, by 2019 it had shrunk to about a thousand. , mainly restricted to Kabul, Jalalabad and Ghazni. “Outside these cities, their gurudwaras and mandirs are now illegally occupied by locals in the majority community. Even within these cities, their homes were heavily occupied during civil war riots and most live in gurudwaras and mandirs, ”he wrote.
“The tolerance for diversity that had hitherto been so characteristic of Afghan Islam began to evaporate rapidly in the face of jihadist and hardline fundamentalist attitudes promoted by the Taliban,” Ballard wrote.
More recently, in 2018, a suicide attack in Jalalabad killed at least 19 Sikhs, and in March 2020, an attack on Guru Gurdwara Har Rai Sahib killed 25 people. Since then, there has been a massive increase in the emigration of Afghan Sikhs. They also hope that with the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act by the Indian government it will be easier for them to get entry and citizenship in India.
About 200 Sikhs and Hindus remain trapped in Afghanistan after Monday’s evacuation.
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