Sikh Leaders Commence Hunger Strike Outside Vancouver Art Gallery in Support of Bhai Gurbaksh Singh Khalsa

VANCOUVER, BC, Canada—The presidents of eight Lower Mainland Sikh Gurdwara societies are on hunger strike today from 8am to 8pm, outside of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The leaders are protesting in solidarity with Gurbaksh Singh, a farmer in Punjab who has been on hunger strike for 40 days to demand the release of political prisoners in India.

Survival for minority groups in India has been difficult since the partition of 1947, with the movement of Hindu radicals to keep India as a nation of Hindus at any cost.

For over 3000 years, the lower caste Dalit, or “untouchable,” people, who make up almost a fifth of India’s population, have been forced to work in menial jobs, marginalised from mainstream society, and targeted in hate crimes. Every 18 minutes, a hate crime or caste-based assault takes place against a Dalit.

More than 24 hate crime attacks have taken place on Christian clergy and places of worship in the last four months of 2013 alone. Armed with the security support of police, criminals feel empowered to target minority groups with impunity.

India’s army and police have repeatedly been misused for the agenda of hate groups like the Sangh Parivar and RSS, which form the base of the BJP, India’s official opposition and potentially the ruling party if candidate Narendra Modi wins next year’s national elections.

Narendra Modi is no stranger to the state-facilitated oppression, often propagandised as “communal violence.” Modi was Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2002 and turned the other cheek when nearly two thousand Muslims were massacred by gangs of Hindu radicals. The Gujarat massacre was not the first – another occurred in Bombay in 1992, and before that in 1984 – against the Sikhs.

After the assassination of Indira Gandhi, politicians and police worked together to circulate election database records of Sikh homes and places of business in Delhi and Punjab, enabling hired mobs to loot, rape, and massacre. Over 10,000 people were killed in the Sikh massacre of 1984, while the politicians who instigated or supported the violence have gone unpunished.

The states of Manipur, Nagaland, Assam, Kashmir, Punjab and others have been targeted by Indian security forces under the guise of counterinsurgency. Civilians who dissent are routinely arrested without probable cause, falsely charged and convicted, or simply killed in “false encounters” and “disappeared.” Before he was murdered by Indian police, human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra uncovered – from the governments own cremation records – approximately 6,000 secret, illegal cremations in the district of Amritsar alone.

This month, India’s government has been in a fury over alleged mistreatment of one of its foreign diplomats – a diplomat who no doubt was involved in fraud. Meanwhile, India turns a blind eye to the abuse, unlawful arrest, rape, torture, and murder of millions of its own people by its own government, army, and police.

It is time to knock India’s conscience out of its slumber. If the leadership in India is not ready to wake up to the suffering of its people, we must remind them that the world is awake; the world is watching.