Yuba City Gurdwara: Judge Denies Petition to Elect New Sikh Temple Board

The following article was published by�appeal-democrat.com, it is being republished by Sikh24.com for the benefit of its readers.

:dateline:Claims of violence, corruption, intimidation and election tampering have come to define an ongoing power struggle in Yuba City’s Tierra Buena Sikh Temple.

The ugly fight for control of the Yuba City Gurdwara corporation’s 73-member governing board deepened Monday when Sutter County Judge Perry Parker denied a petition from five board members seeking to force the election of a new board of directors in December.

But the fight for an election is not over and the petitioners said they would use the corporation’s bylaws to bring a vote before the membership anyway.

With four-year term limits set to expire Dec. 9, petitioner Karmdeep Bains and others accused board President Rashpal Purewal and others of “hijacking the temple” when they voted in August to extend their own term limits by another two years and scrapped the upcoming election.

“It’s like the devil is running the temple now,” Bains said Monday. “They’re afraid of elections because they know they’re going to get voted out.”

Before the crucial vote was taken Aug. 25, Bains said Purewal’s group manufactured the support they needed for the term limit extension and forced opposing board members out of the meeting.

“Everybody that was against them, they forced out of the meeting,” Bains said. “The temple was erected in 1969 and, for the first time in history, they kicked people out of their place of worship and changed the bylaws.”

Bains compared it to a congressman extending his own term in an election year and canceling the regularly scheduled election.

Tejinder Dosanjh, a spokesman for the board, said the claim was not true.

“Nobody was forced to leave,” Dosanjh said. “The president asked them to sit down and let him conduct the meeting. But they came in like bullies and tried to be bullies.”

Dosanjh said the term limit extension was necessary to allow the current board to “finish their work” and said the December election was only canceled to save the temple the estimated $160,000 it would cost to have the vote.

Only one person was removed by Sutter County sheriff’s deputies, according to the meeting minutes recorded by Secretary Joginder Dulai, who wrote that opposition members were “rioting” and “disrupting” the meeting.

Capt. Lewis McElfresh confirmed sheriff’s deputies briefly detained one person during the meeting “out of concern the situation may escalate,” but said no arrests were made.

Purewal said most of opposition members simply left the meeting in protest after they realized they would lose the vote.

“I don’t need to manufacture anything,” Purewal said. “We have the majority; they don’t have the votes and that’s their problem.”

Both sides of the power split have accused each other of cheating and manipulating the more than 4,400 members of the Yuba City Gurdwara.

Purewal said he believes the opposition group is trying to grab power.

“They don’t want a fair election,” Purewal said. “They just want to use their money to buy the election.”

Bains denied the allegation and countered by noting it was Purewal’s group that canceled the December vote.

Further conflicting accounts of temple tensions have centered around an incident on Aug. 12 in which one of the opposition directors, Parminder Grewal, claimed he was assaulted at the temple by Dulai and others because of his opposition to the term limit extension, according to court documents.

“The previous president grabbed my cellphone away as I was trying to call 911 for help,” Grewal said in a court declaration. “Mr. Dulai began to hit me.”

Purewal also disputes that claim.

“He wasn’t assaulted at all � and he was the one who started the altercation,” Purewal said.

Tensions have been mounting steadily since the last vote for the board of directors in 2008. Judge Parker ordered the court-supervised election after the board had failed to have any elections for several years, records state.

Dosanjh said many of the people supporting the Bains petition were voted out in the 2008 election.

“They had control for over 30 years and they’re so hungry to come back and come back quickly � that’s what they’re trying to do,” Dosanjh said.

Bains said all the petitioners want is to let the temple members vote directly on corporation’s the board of directors.

“It’s sad and really embarrassing that it’s come to this,” Bains said. “But, the bottom line is there should be an election.”

The opposition group had hoped the judge would force the board to conduct the December election, but Bains said the group can still try to use the corporate bylaws to ask all temple members if they approve of the board’s recent desicion.

Donna Peter, the attorney representing Bains and company, said the group is committed to pushing the election forward.

“They’re going to take it on themselves and let the members decide,” Peter said.

Both Purewal and Dosanjh said if the majority of temple-goers want to have the election, they would welcome it, but neither believed members would support such an election.

“I think the members like the board (as it is) and it’s only a minority of people that is unhappy,” Dosanjh said. “That is always going to happen.”

Michael R. Barrette, the attorney representing the temple board, said the process for calling the vote before the full membership was complex.

“But, that appears to be where we are headed,” Barrette said. “So we’ll just have to see what happens next.”

CONTACT Rob Parsons at�[email protected]�or 749-4785. Find him on Facebook at /ADcrimebeat or on Twitter at @ADcrimebeat.