In India-Canada row, a tug toward faith

As the two nations debate the killing of a Canadian Sikh, Hindus and Sikhs across the Indian state of Punjab help Muslim neighbors erect and restore places for Islamic worship.

The Monitor's View

A bit of shocking news last week forced much of the world to study up on a long-simmering rift in India. Canada accused the Indian government of killing a Canadian citizen near Vancouver who was a prominent activist for an independent Sikh state in his native homeland. While much of the focus has been on Sikh separatists and the diplomatic fallout for India, another spotlight turned on Punjab, the Indian state where Sikhs are in the majority.

There the separatist sentiments that fueled a decade of violence between Sikhs and the state half a century ago have significantly diminished. Instead, many of today’s Sikhs are bridging divides, joining hands with Hindus to restore historic Muslim mosques in Punjabi villages. Some of the funding comes from Sikhs living abroad. Sikh and Hindu families have donated land where new mosques now stand.

These projects – more than 165 so far, according to one Islamic association’s count – demonstrate that religions can lay a foundation for unity by practicing their shared tenets, such as meekness and sincerity. “This kind of brotherhood should prevail across India,” Mohammad Mursalin, a resident of the Punjabi village of Kutba Bamaniya, told Religion Unplugged. “Love must be nurtured, and animosity must dissolve. ... All religions emphasize love; none advocate hate.”

The mosque-building marks a healing counterpoint to the lingering tense relations between Sikhs and India’s nationalist Hindu government. Many Sikhs living abroad still worry they are being surveilled by Indian intelligence services, yet even “hard-core faith groups” in the Sikh diaspora have become apolitical, says Gurharpal Singh, an emeritus professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. The reason for that shift is significant. “They’ve become much more spiritually oriented,” he told The New Yorker last week.

That coincides with a prevailing sense of spiritual accommodation at home. A comprehensive Pew Research poll on religious tolerance in India in 2021 found that 95% of Sikhs feel very proud to be Indian. Some 70% of Sikhs said a person who disrespects India cannot be a Sikh, while 82% of Sikhs said they feel very free to practice their religion.

As new mosques rise, the community affections they represent may be aiding calls for a formal process of reconciliation to address the violence against Sikhs during the 1980s, especially now amid rising Hindu nationalism under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Erasing communal divisions, wrote Dharamvira Gandhi, a Hindu former member of Parliament from Punjab, in a newspaper opinion piece, requires repentance, forgiveness, “large-heartedness and broad-mindedness.” Those qualities are consistent with Sikhism’s core tenets of equality, humility, and love-inspired service to others.

It isn’t just mosques. The unity felt in many Punjabi communities has led to shared religious festivals and joint restoration projects of historically significant Hindu and Sikh temples. Such actions are solvents for the fears and suspicions that now have set two democracies at odds with each other.