Kabul Attack: Solutions Beyond Now

ਗੁਰੁਬਰ ਅਕਾਲ ਕੇ ਹੁਕਮ ਸੋਂ ਉਪਜਿਓ ਬਿਗਿਆਨਾ। ਤਬ ਸਹਿਜੇ ਰਚਿਓ ਖਾਲਸਾ ਸਾਬਤ ਮਰਦਾਨਾ।
ਇਉਂ ਉਠੇ ਸਿੰਘ ਭਬਕਾਰਿ ਕੈ ਸਭ ਜਗ ਡਰਪਾਨਾ। ਮੜੀ ਦੇਵਲ ਗੋਰ ਮਸੀਤ ਢਾਹਿ ਕੀਏ ਮੈਦਾਨਾ। 
ਬੇਦ ਪੁਰਾਨ ਖਟ ਸਾਸਤ੍ਰਾ ਫੁਨ ਮਿਟੇ ਕੁਰਾਨਾ। ਬਾਂਗ ਸਲਾਤ ਮਿਟਾਇ ਕਰਿ ਮਾਰੇ ਸੁਲਤਾਨਾ। 

24 Sikhs, including one 4 year old child, and their Afghan security guard were killed in a terrorist attack at Gurdwara Guru HarRai Sahib in Kabul, Afghanistan. The attack took place on Wednesday 25th of March during the morning Diwan. According to eye witness Narender Singh Khalsa at around 7am three attackers threw grenades and burst into the Gurdwara complex and started firing indiscriminately into the Sangat. Narender Singh Khalsa lost his wife, daughter, and father in the attack. Several children lost both parents and grand parents, becoming orphans. Harinder Singh lost seven members of his family including his 6 year old daughter Tanya Kaur, his wife and his mother. 

“They (attackers) killed my mother and my wife with my small child with bullets in front of my eyes”
Harinder Singh from Kabul, to TOLONews

These losses for an embattled and dwindling Sikh population are devastating, a horrific echo of the Jalalabad suicide attack in 2018 in which 19 Sikhs were killed, and the violence Sikhs have experienced throughout their history.

Between 150-200 Sikhs that have been living in the Kabul Gurdwara complex were held hostage for several hours during a gun battle between Afghan special forces and the attackers. 80 Sikhs were rescued by Afghan special forces and at least 8 Sikhs were injured.

Having spoken to the local Sangat we found out that Maharaj’s Saroop was safe during the attack as the main attack took place away from Sachkand and the Thaktposh. Maharaj’s saroop has been taken to a nearby Gurdwara. Several Gutkeh Sahib were damaged in the attack as the Sangat had been reciting Sukhmani Sahib for the welfare of humanity given the current COVID-19 healthcare pandemic. Reports on social media had pictures of Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji’s Takhat, but no mention what had happened to Maharaj’s Saroop.

Darbar Sahib gurdwara guru harrai sahib kabul

Initial news reports described multiple gunmen and suicide bombers dressed in police uniform, later news reports named the attacker, Abu Khalid al-Hind and described him as a lone gunman, with ‘IS Khorasan’ claiming responsibility for the attack.

Increasing the intensity of the violence directed at Sikhs IS orchestrated another attack on Thursday afternoon detonating a bomb targeting the funeral procession of the 24 Sikhs that died. Local Sangat became alerted to the bomb attack and managed to avoid further casualties. The following day IS planted IEDs outside the Gurdwara and Sikh businesses with the police warning Sikhs not to leave the Gurdwara complex. These two further attacks were attempted despite a huge police and military presence in the area of the Gurdwara Sahib. 

“Afghan security forces at the site of the attack in Kabul [Mohammad Ismail/Reuters]” - aljazeera

“Security forces had cordoned off the area, located in old Kabul [Rahmat Gul/AP Photo]” - Aljazeera

marker shows the shor bazar area in central kabul, the capital of afghanistan

Guru HarRai Gurdwara has 400 years of history in Kabul and is located in Shor Bazar central Kabul. It is less than 10km from the presidential palace, the Afghan national parliament, and the foreign embassies that have a presence in Afghanistan. This type of attack is unprecedented and pulls into sharp focus the question of whether Sikhs have any future in Afghanistan. Kabul is the last significant centre of Sikh population, followed by Jalalabad and Ghazni the birth place of Bhai Nand Lal Goya.

"We are about 70 to 80 families who are left in all over Afghanistan. It used to be many more, but as of today, we are maybe 400 to 450 adults and about 100 to 200 children. So we are not more than a total of 700"

"We used to get threats every now and then, but except one attack 40 to 45 years ago in Jalalabad, never had anyone ever attacked a Gurudwara. Not even during the years of war in the last four decades."
Raj Sutaka, an Afghan Sikh from Kabul, to Aljazeera

As many Sikh commentators have discussed, the Sikh population in Afghanistan has been drastically reduced over the years, in significant part due to the instability caused by Soviet and American invasions, with 90% of the Sikh population having left Afghanistan by 1996. From a population greater than 250 thousand, today there are a few hundred Sikhs left.

The Panth is familiar with the history of Sikhs in Afghanistan. The lessons from this history however seem to have become irrelevant to ‘modernised’ Sikhs, forgotten and fragmented, historicised along with our sovereignty. Sikhs settled and established towns and fortifications in Afghanistan, and what today is called the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan, under the Nishaan Sahib as a sovereign military power. The demilitarisation of Sikhs in Afghanistan is wholly reflective of the wider Citizenized-Panth, whose social and political authority has been relegated to the State, and with this abdication of authority the protection of ‘Sikh (and Hindu) lives’ is something we also appeal to the State for.

Fathegarh fortress built by hari singh nalwa at jamrud to secure the Khyber Pass, occupied british colonisers, today a pakistani military facility.

Sikh safety is tied to our autonomy, when a sovereign Nihsaan Sahib flew over Sikh settlements our existence and security was entirely in our hands. Our safety has decreased directly in proportion to our ability to assert military/political power as a sovereign Panth. Relegating this function to the State has seen mass violence inflicted upon Sikhs.

What is stark about today’s reality of Sikhs in Afghanistan is that the violence is vivid and visible, whereas the ceaseless violence that enables the existence of ‘the West’ as “civilised” is relegated simultaneous to a chronological ‘past’ and geographically ‘backwards’ cultures that exist outside of the “civilised” here and now and its ‘quality’ of being modern and western. This view that violence is something far off and distant, the purchase of “uncivilised” cultures, allows relocation to settler colonies to appear as the grandest solution from Sikh interests/structures that:

“…locate themselves in whiteness, ‘the personification of diversity, of life itself,’ becoming junior partners in civil society – a society built upon the bodies of the slave, the dead native, and, today, brutalized Muslim…Through these attachments to the American political project and, thus, to the white-settler state, Sikh organizations cultivate, what Lauren Berlant (2011) calls, cruel optimism, binding Sikhs to ways of life that are inimical to their own flourishing within the structure of the Guru’s hukam (Will, Command) and outside haumai (egotism). Sikh advocacy organizations become inimical to Sikh life, because their whiteness does not remain tied to the cadre of Sikh elite assembled in these privileged spaces. Instead, in their lobbying, advocating, and public relations efforts that look to secure Sikh and American together, they also fasten Sikhi conceptually to whiteness and its violent moorings.”
- Guru Nanak is not at the White House: An essay on the idea of Sikh-American redemption Rajbir Singh Judge & Jasdeep Singh Brar

By embodying the genocidal geographies of being modern and western we somehow temporarily suspend the application of “backwards culture” to ourselves taking up a role of civilised saviours in/of the west, whose political structures and energetic appeals will work ‘this time’ in rescuing those we consider “most endangered”. After all we’ve worked very hard to elect Sikh MPs to get closer to Whiteness, we’ve told them we are British-American-Canadian, our values are their values, and we’ve fed the broken masses of capitalism Langar, and we’ve opened up Gurdwareh to help Our Country! So we tenderly carry pictures of our brutalised corpses to the leaders with renewed urgency in the desire to prove our humanity to Whiteness and hope thoughts and prayers will turn into immediate action this time. Inevitably the urgency will be short lived, in a world of corpses ours ‘like the Syrians’ will soon become another memory of another place. After all, pictures and memories of dead bodies weigh as much as corpses, and we have been carrying so many photos and memories since we wrote our Ardaas.

With dispossession of sovereignty comes dispossession of humanity, and this current situation in Afghanistan is reflective of the macro realties of the Panth. When dispossession manifests as dichotomy the responses between panthic naujawan and entrenched organisations/interests that have become more domesticated to existence in a colonised world dominated by Whiteness, appear on the surface as polarised.

The ground realties of Afghanistan are complicated for Sikhs, with elders in the community not wanting to appear antagonistic, Sikhs are vastly outnumbered and don’t have the bodies or training to effectively maintain a consistent armed guard, and living ‘TyarBarTyar’ is incredibly difficult. Mostly unaware of these realties Sikh youth have been calling for an armed intervention all over Sikh social media spheres and ideating what this would look like, from visions of Nihang Dal mobilising, local Sangat purchasing weapons and training, and the hiring of private military contractors. Whilst more ‘sane’ voices have been calling for State intervention, direct sponsorship programs, perhaps by way of a temporary relocation to that most violent prison of Sikh dreams; india.

Shor Bazaar after the attack on gurdwara guru har Rai sahib

It would be unjust and certainly against the possibility of the existence/emergence of a sovereign Panth Khalsa capable of managing its own affairs to view these seemingly polarised positions from a lens of what may be considered “practical”. Practicality in reality is a question of leadership and imagination, the ability to journey over time towards an imperceptible as yet unrealised destination. When Sant Jarnail Singh Ji pulled at the hearts of Sikhs with their immortal words “first enter your home of Anandpur” they spoke to what must be practical for the Khalsa. For some maintaining the status quo is practical, for others it is an existential crisis symptomatic of our dispossession, the limit is the courage, or perhaps conditioning, of our imagination.

It can be argued that it is practical and expedient to raise money, mount a political appeal to the State, and have the Sikh families relocated. It can also be argued that is it practical and expedient to raise money, purchase weapons, and train the Sangat, with Sikh bodies arriving in Afghanistan, and defend the Sangat and the Gurdwareh with our own hands. What both courses of action have in common is they will take similar amounts of time and money. Since 2015 till now 20 families have been relocated to Canada. It could easily be at least 5 years before the Sikh families remaining in Afghanistan are able to travel to Canada. In terms of funding, currently, United Sikhs have raised £54,000 in one donation drive and $15,000 in another, private fund-raising appeals have raised, $3,300, $9,600, and £5,900. With the Bhullar Foundation publicly raising $20,000, and as yet undisclosed amounts privately, and another group raising £5,200 who have put their appeal on hold until they “find the best way to deliver funds to the affected families”. The path that Sikhs choose will largely be determined by the world we want to live in.

When you penetrate the surface the polarisation disappears, because the underlying question is not one of relocation vs armed resistance, it is one of dispossession and conditioning. In this situation the readiness to take up arms against ‘Muslim terrorists’ exists on the same plane in which ‘Sikh MPs’ and Sikh organisations/interests make unequivocal condemnations of ‘Islamic terrorism’ and ask the State to share in this condemnation. It is politically expedient and socially acceptable to do so in a global (westernised) environment where War on Terror = War on Islam. Perhaps by showing Whiteness that we too suffer at the hands of ‘Islamists’ we can renew a bond of colonial servitude and add further credentials to our status as Junior Partners to Whiteness.

When we take the same responses, to a different context, one where the aggressor is an economic and political ally of ‘the West’, asking Whiteness to unequivocally condemn india for State terrorism, demanding ‘immediate action’ of some kind, celebrating those Sikhs that picked up arms to fight Hindutva fascism, then the so-called dissent evaporates. The conversation becomes neutered in its search for acceptable nuance, one of Sikh genocide where we can only be victims, nothing more, even questions of why this genocide against Sikhs occurred, and why and how epistemic violence continues, become “too political”.

Sikh political power cannot be measured in lobbying efforts, or how many MPs are from Sikh families. Sikh political power must be measured in its ability to exercise Sikh sovereignty, otherwise it is not true political power, only a surrogate, a messenger for another.

A lasting solution to the situation in Afghanistan, beyond hopes of an awakening Khalsa or the years of pending heartache and hard work for geographic relocation, is a reframing of the discourse to centre on Sikh sovereignty. Taking the ‘situation’ in Afghanistan and placing it in the context of the Khalsa Panth, not seeing it as separate, or racialised violence, but as part of the continuum of violence against the Panth. Looking at, and actually seeing the never-ending-never-arriving forced migration from Punjab to Afghanistan as something that cannot be solved by ‘relocation’ of bodies alone. Much is left behind and even more never arrives. Our problems are not solved by painting forced migration as relocation, they’re deferred generationally through the trauma and crisis of “fitting in”, being violently “civilised” only to never actually fit in. Dispossession is not solved by relocation.

Sikh bodies and Gurdwareh have been attacked in America, Canada, the UK, and most spectacularly in india, The problem isn’t one of where we live, more so the world we’re striving to live in. A world where our sovereignty is relegated to the State, stolen form the Guru to be given to the White man by Sikh hands, and this violence is re-enacted every time we appeal to the State to recognise our humanity. In our history, they only source of our humanity remains constant - Guru.

“Wouldn’t it be justice to some degree for those slain Afghan Sikhs if we were to choose now to collaborate, cooperate and organise, to help those left behind in Kabul by bringing about the change needed? Perhaps that would be a fitting tribute to the lives they led – unflinching in their faith, identifying as Sikh at the cost of being labelled ‘Kaffir’ and taking their last breath at the feet of the Guru.”
Harwinder Singh, Naujawani

“Sikh-Afghans await our response. Charities need accountability and transparency. Governments need to go beyond their rhetoric and red tape.”
SikhRI

From the grassroots to institutions the hope is that Sikh organisations with numerous employees and large budgets work together to coordinate efforts, maybe even form a transparent working group, and organise a fact finding and aid mission. This is all in the realm of the possible, just as is the work to centre the discourse on Sikh sovereignty Khalsa Raj, Khalistan as the only viable long term solution to the displacement of Sikhs. The only limit is our acceptance of what we want to be possible, the world we want to live in, and in that Guru Sahib has placed no limits on their beloved Panth.

Media sources: TOLONews, Aljazeera, Aljazeera The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC News, NWA Online, Global News