HSD1

On 05/04/2016 at 9:33 PM, kdsingh80 said:

Question to all scholar of SA , Is this propaganda or truth?

Back then all regiments were issued with two flags. One tended a green/red flag which was the 'Royal House' flag - the other flag could be blue/black/yellow/red/green/white and was the Regimental Flag. Where as most Royal Flags seem similar, Regimental Flags tended to vary based on the decision of the regimental commander. Some used Hindu gods/goddesses, others used symbols associated with Punjab/Indo-Aryan/Aborigine/First Indus Civilization, basically anything that reflected their heritage and a sense of destiny rather than personal religous beliefs.

Could you imagine if an Italian created a website where he tried to appropriate British Royal Navy warships simply because they were named after Roman and Ancient Greek gods/goddesses? These guys just reflect how dim Sikhs in the West generally are when it comes to things that dont involve making money. I dont know how anyone can take them seriously.

Je suis Lahore............anyone?!

Also in the news, tens of thousands have marched on the streets of many Pakistani cities today - to demand Sharia law. It's only a matter of time before the entire country implodes.

Not a massive fan of GOT simply because most people who recommend it seem to love the sauciness anot much else lol. Each season seems to have the first eight episodes as filler, with loads going on in the last two episodes of the season, forcing you to watch over 10 hours per season just to get to the good bits. Not a great series to binge watch to be honest unless you're massively into magic and dragons type fantasy.

TWD on the other hand is amazing. Season 2 is a bit boring but the other seasons more than make up for it.

Otherwise I'd recommend the following:

Spartacus: All Seasons - loads of fighting, great story, twists in the plot all over the place. Great fun to watch.

Black Sails: Spartacus with pirates basically.

Turn: Based on the intelligence side of the American War of Independence it's a lot more interesting and factual than most tv shows.

The Man In The High Castle: A TV show based on the Philip Dick novel, lots to mull over regarding people's values and the effects of colonisation.

There is enough there to keep you going for a few years!

I cant believe this book has taken five years to write. Further on from Dal's point about skewing the narrative, I just hope he's doesnt dumb it down and avoid talking about the political and social climate amongst Sikhs before the war started.

On 19/02/2016 at 9:04 PM, chatanga1 said:

Gough's victory at Gujrat became the winning battle of the war, but this was only because the Sikhs lost the will to encounter the british army any more, even though they were still a formidable force. In terms of numbers and ammunition the Sikh army still matched the British after Gujrat, but lost the will to fight any  more battles. Most likely they fought it futile, and preferred to stay alive rather than lose and die.

In my opinion, the Sikh army made a mistake in surrendering to these warmongers. I think this was the first time a Sikh army surrendered in Sikh history.

The thing was that the Sikh army divided itself after Chillianwallah to stop the British just running every time they got smashed. One division would lure the British along and fight them, the other would swing round to their rear and cut off their escape. The Brits realised what was going on and managed to attack one division before it could link up with the other one. The plan failed and it was obvious from Gujrat that they now had better artillery now (from the siege guns of Multan and Royal Navy) so it was a bit pointless to carry on fighting. Especially as the Brits had started agitating Muslims to revolt and further reinforcements were moving up from Sind.

47 minutes ago, kdsingh80 said:

Europe allowed too many muslim refugees and even fraction of those become suicide bombers Europe is doomed

Tu rendeh, there's 200 million muslims in Pakistan and when their country eventually implodes it will kick off massively in East Punjab.

On 18/03/2016 at 9:54 AM, Guest said:

no body want on sikhraa side

The guy looks like a young rolf harris. I heard he only went to Isisland because he had a letterbox fetish and wanted the authentic Arab experience. Wonder if he's enyjoying Raqqa, the city which the Russian Air Force regularly flies too - I heard it's their #1 destination!

This is a terrible topic, it just gives the fundos a chance to get wound up and show the rest of us how stupid they are. Still better than most of Paapiman's spam topics though.

This is the anniversary article from a local newspaper which gives a more thorough account of what actually happened that night. Strong parralles with what happened in Tulsa and other parts of the US later in the early 20th Century.

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BELLINGHAM — Hundreds of men huddled together all night in the stuffy basement of the city’s new red brick City Hall, worried the mob that had rousted them from their beds, hauled them from their jobs and stiffarmed them to the town jail would have worse in store for them as dawn broke.

The East Indian immigrants, mostly workers in area timber mills, were survivors of Bellingham’s second major race riot in two decades. On Sept. 4, 1907, roving gangs of thugs walked from mill to mill, from boarding house to boarding house, hauling out “Hindus,” roughing them up and ordering them to get out of town.

“Hindu” was the common label in Canada and the U.S. for all East Indians, though most early 20th century immigrants from India were Sikhs from the Punjab region.

The next day, city officials decried the use of force and hooliganism on the immigrants, fretting that Bellingham would get a reputation for lawlessness. But most people — judging by the words of city officials, business leaders and newspaper editors — were pleased with the result.

“While any good citizen must be unalterably opposed to the means employed,” editorialized The Reveille soon after the riot, “the result of the crusade against the Hindus cannot but cause a general and intense satisfaction.”

Within a couple of days, most of the city’s estimated 250 Indian immigrants had boarded trains for points north and south.

By the end of the week, an even larger body of thugs in Vancouver, B.C., emboldened by an anti-Asian rally there and, perhaps, Bellingham’s evictions, trashed the city’s Chinatown district. By the end of the year similar riots erupted along the Pacific Coast. Within a decade, the U.S. would pass restrictions barring most Asians from immigrating at all.

It would be nearly the end of the 20th century before significant numbers of East Indians would call Whatcom County home again.

“Bellingham and a few other places had a reputation as a place that wasn’t really welcoming to Asians,” said Paul Englesberg, director of the Asian American Curriculum and Research Project at Western Washington University.

It’s hard to say whether the men would have stayed in Whatcom County if the 1907 riot hadn’t forced them out, Englesberg said. Like many immigrant groups traveling to follow the work in canneries or timber mills, they might have moved anyway.

“It just seems in other communities, people who might have come originally as laborers set up various kinds of businesses. They get settled here and their kids settle here,” he said. “It seems like in this case, neither the Chinese nor the Sikhs had a chance to do that in Bellingham.”

LABOR FEARS FUEL RACISM

By 1907, hostility against Asian immigrants had long been brewing in the Pacific Northwest. Many of Bellingham’s residents could remember when the town’s Chinese immigrants had been thrown out in 1885. Asian immigrants provided cheap labor for the physically demanding fishing and timber jobs that fueled the booming economy. But white workers also feared the immigrants posed competition for jobs.

“It was a city going through an immense amount of social and physical change, and all these new people coming in, scrambling for jobs,” said Erika Lee, an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota.

“American migrants coming from the East Coast felt a sense of privilege coming to the West. This was part of their pioneer journey. They were coming to make it,” Lee said. They were horrified at the idea of these jobs going to “unassimilable, really foreign, exotic people,” as East Indians were described in the racial hierarchy of the era.

Chinese immigration to the U.S. had been cut off in 1902, but immigrants from Japan, India and the Philippines were arriving to take their places in the region’s resource-based industries. South Asian migration was particularly sudden that year, Lee said, with about 600 East Indians arriving in the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 1907.

The tensions roiled into violence in the days leading up to Sept. 4, writes Joan Jensen in her 1988 book, “Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America.” Union representatives had warned mill owners to fire their East Indian workers by Labor Day, Sept. 2. A Labor Day parade drew a thousand union supporters to the streets of Bellingham, Jensen wrote, but the East Indian workers reported for work the following day nonetheless.

That night, police received reports of vandalism and assaults targeting East Indians, Jensen wrote, setting the scene for the next night’s riot.

‘THE MOB RAN AMUCK’

The town’s three newspapers chronicled the events of that Sept. 4 through lengthy and sometimes conflicting accounts. The descriptions also reflect an era when racism was considered respectable and white supremacy thought to be a mainstream, scientific fact.

According to newspaper accounts, the riots began about 10 p.m., when police were told a “drunken mob was on the rampage, baiting Hindus, destroying property as well.”

Jensen wrote that two East Indians had been knocked down and beaten while walking on C Street. One man tried to escape on a streetcar but was dragged off amid cries of “help drive out the cheap labor.”

The police chief and two officers left the station in the basement of City Hall, now the iconic red brick building that houses the Whatcom Museum of History & Art, and found the group “making no trouble” at C Street, the Bellingham Herald reported. But they heard cries from the tidal flats and found two boys throwing rocks at a naked East Indian man.

An officer handcuffed the boys, but he and the chief quickly released them. The chief later said he worried the mob would have become more violent had he kept the boys in custody. Some would later allege the police knew the riot was planned and had agreed to let it happen as long as no one was hurt.

Either way, the rioters apparently got the signal the police wouldn’t interfere. The group rousted East Indians from a second house on C Street, then another house on D Street, where their landlord turned his partially dressed tenants out into the street. The mob chased the men down the railroad tracks over Squalicum Creek, the city limits, and told them to never return.

“Finding the police unable to cope with the situation,” the Bellingham Herald reported, “the mob ran amuck. With whoops of glee they gathered together the Hindus of old town and escorted them to the station where Judge Williams’ old courtroom was turned over for their use and there the men from India were herded like so many cattle.”

The men were joined in the basement by 18 others who had been pulled off their jobs at Morrison Mill, on the waterfront at the foot of Laurel Street, and about a dozen more yanked from a house on Forest Street.

Descriptions vary of who made up the mob. Some reports say they were teens while others list them as boys and men of all ages. They don’t all appear to have been white. The Herald reported the mob included several Filipino and black men.

The mob met no resistance until they arrived at the gate of Bellingham Bay Lumber mill at the south end of Cornwall Avenue, demanding to be let in to collect the mill’s East Indian workers.

“The gatekeeper calmly pulled out a gun,” the Herald reported, “and said he would shoot the first man who tried to enter. “Not a man made a move.”

It’s unknown if the 35 men working the night shift inside knew they were the target of an anti-”Hindu” frenzy sweeping the town.

IMMIGRANTS SOUGHT MONEY FOR FREEDOM FIGHT

Many of the East Indian immigrants of the time were men in their 20s to 40s who hoped to earn some money for themselves and their families as well as raise money, collect weapons and return to India to fight the British, said Satpal Sidhu, a Whatcom County resident and leader at the Sikh temple Guru Nanak Gursikh Gurudwara.

Vancouver, B.C., was typically the first stop, and many were on their way to San Francisco, a center for Sikh revolutionaries.

“They were actually freedom fighters,” Sidhu said.

The men likely came from families who were struggling to hold onto their farms in India, Jensen said.

“Money lenders were starting to foreclose because times were hard,” Jensen said. “They needed a way to bring in extra money, so essentially, you exported your children.”

But while many mill owners hired East Indians in droves, the workmen got little respect from them. In the aftermath of the riots, one mill owner called them “the poorest workmen we have,” complaining, “We are forced to have men and cannot secure the proper number otherwise.”

Bellingham’s mill owners may have insisted they would rather have hired white men, but East Indian laborers developed a good reputation, said John Wunder, a history professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln who has studied the anti-Asian movement in the American West.

“The Indians were in good demand because they were known for their work excellence,” he said. “They were bright and they were coming from India — many of them could speak English.”

Labor would get a little scarcer that night of Sept. 4, 1907. Hardly discouraged by the guard’s shotgun at the gate of Bellingham Bay Lumber, the mob went around to the side of the property and broke through the fence. Workmen inside told the East Indian workers they should leave, “so the terrified Hindus were quickly collected together and shoved through the hole in the fence.”

Two of the workers were injured in the scuffle. One reportedly fell off a fence while trying to escape and was sent to the hospital. Another fell into the bay, was pulled out by the police and was delivered to the City Hall jail “covered with blood.”

Thirty-five men were taken from Bellingham Bay Lumber, each accompanied by two of the rioters. In their absence, the mill closed.

“The mob was wild with its success,” the Herald wrote, “and while dragging and shoving the unfortunate darkskinned workmen through the streets, yelled and sang songs at the top of their voices. Straight to the station they marched, shoving the thirtyfive with the others into the already stifling room.”

They were joined soon by about 20 more workers from the E.K. Wood Lumber Co., where Boulevard Park is today. By the end of the night, about 200 men were crowded into the basement of City Hall.

“It was one of the most weird sights ever witnessed in this city when the Hindus were marched through the streets,” the Herald reported. “The dusky men, some with little brass lamps, others with bundles, a few with telescopes, but nearly all with baggages of some kind; some clad only in long flowing nightshirts, others in ragged trousers, the collection of headgear included everything from battered derbys and straw sailors to turbans of every color of the rainbow, were hurried to the station. Some of the captives slunk along. Others marched with quiet dignity, but a few had to be dragged.”

CITY PROMISES PROTECTION

The physical treatment the men received was matched by the excoriation East Indians got in the popular press as a threat to Bellingham’s economic and social fabric. They’d work for much less money than white men, it was feared, undercutting their wages. They were so different, with their dark skin, turbaned heads and vegetarian diets, it was editorialized, that they could never contribute to American society.

“The Hindu is not a good citizen,” the Herald editorialized the day after the riots. “It would require centuries to assimilate him, and this country need not take the trouble.”

One newspaper, The American, ran a drawing on the front page the day after the riots, depicting two big-nosed, almond-eyed men in beards and turbans. A smaller drawing showed a robed man playing a flute, apparently charming a snake.

“This is the type of man driven from this city as a result of last night’s demonstration,” read the caption.

Despite the exotic descriptions, a photo of the crowded City Hall basement that night shows many men in suits. A few wore turbans, but most wore Western-style hats. Some were clean-shaven.

Some Sikhs in that era sacrificed their turbans and beards, which hold deep religious significance, for the chance to pass as dark-skinned Italians or Portuguese, Jensen said.

The next morning, the Bellingham City Council held an emergency meeting. Mayor Alfred L. Black, aware that the night’s melee against British subjects might have international implications, assured three English-speaking East Indian men brought up from the basement that the city would protect them. He deputized 50 special officers to help keep the peace.

“You may tell all of your associates,” Black reportedly told the men, “that the entire force of this city and of the state, if necessary, will be called on to protect you in doing anything that you may see fit in this city, so long as you abide by the laws.”

The sleepless night in the City Hall basement seems to have made more of an impression than the mayor’s promise of protection.

That day, most of the city’s East Indians would leave.

A JEERING SEND-OFF

The Reveille reported 135 people left on three trains the day after the riot. Larson mill, part of which is now Bloedel- Donovan Park, had escaped the riots and the following night ran a “Hindu crew” of about 14 men — guarded by 15 deputy sheriffs. But the only East Indian employees who reported to other mills were those looking for their last paychecks, often under police escort.

“Hallama, an employee at the (Bellingham Bay Lumber) Company came to the police station last night and asked to be allowed to stay there so that he would be safe,” the Reveille reported Sept. 6. “He is an Americanized Hindu who wears ordinary clothes and speaks fairly good English, and he declared that he voiced the sentiment of the entire colony when he said that they would leave today, as soon as they could draw their pay, and that no Hindu would ever come to Bellingham again.

“He said he and his brethren were certain that the mob would kill them if they remained here. The police, he said, would do the best they could, according to the belief of the Hindus, but the sons of India feared that they would be caught in dark streets some night when the police were not present and would be either badly slugged or killed outright. He said Bellingham was ‘no good place for a Hindu’ and that none of them would ever return to the city again.”

Many Bellingham residents reportedly lingered at the train station, gawking at the East Indians leaving on trains toward Vancouver, B.C., or Oakland, Calif.

“The crowd at the station offered no violence,” reported the Bellingham Herald the day after the riot, “and aside from jeering and the cries of ‘good’ and ‘don’t come back,’ that followed the train, there was no show of feeling.”

Many of the East Indian workmen’s homes were ransacked in their absence. The police said the mob took bank books, cash and several hundred dollars’ worth of gold jewelry. A mill owner said one of his East Indian workmen lost $200 in photography equipment.

“The places were also turned topsy-turvey,” the Herald reported, “and much valuable clothing and articles owned by the Orientals was destroyed that was not carried off.”

Meanwhile, the police arrested five men alleged to have helped start the riot on C Street and at Bellingham Bay Lumber Co. The men, including a “hack-driver” and a “shingleweaver,” faced a fine of $20 to $200 and jail time of 20 days to a year if convicted.

COUNCIL BLAMES MILL OWNERS

City leaders and editorialists feared the stink of lawlessness.

“This is a time for coolness of head,” warned an editorial in the American soon after the riot. “The law must be obeyed, and while it is desirable to get rid of the Hindus, it must not be done by violence and the shedding of blood.”

A few days after the riots against East Indians, the City Council issued its report on the matter. “Hindus,” they found, were mostly “peaceful and quiet” in Bellingham.

But in keeping with the racial rhetoric of the day, the council found that their manner of living was “demoralizing to family ties, and thus lowers not only the economic, but also the moral standards of the white workman.”

The council’s most sympathetic words were for the rioters.

The “spirit of the mob,” they found, “was not that of antagonism against the Hindu as an individual, but rather the spirit of self preservation, believing that the white worker through the presence of the Hindu, was being dragged down, and would eventually be forced to accept their standard of living.”

The council’s harshest words were for the mill owners who hired the East Indians.

“While we deplore the action of the mob in molesting an innocent people, we condemn the mill owners for introducing to this city a class whom they publicly state are undesirable, and to whom they would not grant the right of citizenship.”

The council’s report was silent on the actions of the police, and whether police should have given the rioters use of the city jail.

The resolution was passed by four of five councilmen. One, who objected to the description of the East Indians as “peaceful and quiet,” voted against it.

No one went to trial for the riots. The five arrested men were soon cleared of all charges.

No witnesses could be found to testify against them.

 

 

 

      http://www.bellinghamherald.com/news/local/article22195713.html

Here is the original article attached to the snake charmer picture above if you cant read it.

Quote

Puget Sound American, Sept. 16, 1906, p. 16

HAVE WE A DUSKY PERIL?

HINDU HORDES INVADING THE STATE

BELLINGHAM workmen are becoming excited over the arrival of East Indians in numbers across the Canadian border, and fear that the dusky Asiatics with their turbans will prove a worse menace to the working classes than the “Yellow Peril” that has so long threatened the Pacific Coast.

Hordes of Hindus have fastened their eyes on Bellingham and the northwestern part of the United States in general, and the vanguard of an invasion which, in the minds of many discerning people, threatens to overshadow the “yellow peril” has reached this city. Encamped in a weatherbeaten and patched building, just east of the E.K. Wood Lumber Company’s mill, within sight of passing hundreds every day, are more than a dozen swarthy sons of Hindustan. Thousands of worshippers of Brahma, Buddha, and other strange deities of India may soon press the soil of Washington.

It is on a peaceful mission these Asian tribes are bound, but they are counted as the enemies in the industrial warfare of the white man, and their coming is regarded with distrust by the average laboring man, who is carefully studying the cause and effect of the new immigration. It was only a few years ago that these men of Asia began leaving their primeval homes for North America, landing in British Columbia. Now there are more than 5,000 Hindus in the Canadian province, and they are regarded with such aversion by the industrial classes that the Ottawa government has been petitioned to take drastic measures to turn back this stream of humanity, which is becoming irresistible.

FLOODS OF HINDUS COMING

Investigation of Hindu immigration reveals the startling fact that more than 2,000 citizens of India have entered British Columbia in the last two months. This is enough to frighten any community where it is essential that white labor should prevail to insure continuous industrial and commercial advancement, and none realize this more than the British Columbia workman, who has asked his national government to exercise extraordinary power to repress the industrious Oriental.

Principally at the behest of the laboring classes, the federal superintendent of immigration in Canada has been sent to the province to investigate the situation thoroughly. As a result of these protests it is considered likely that the federal authorities will take advantage of the authority vested in the governor in council, which can, if it chooses, prohibit the entrance of any class of immigrants. Perhaps the chief reason why the Canadian government has proceeded slowly in championing the popular clamor is found in the fact that the Hindus are British citizens.

If the government does use its extraordinary powers, and Hindu immigration is effectually stopped, the United States will have to bear the brunt of the Indian immigration. Prevented from landing in Canada, the East Indians will come direct to America.

At the present time the majority of Hindus reach the Northwest on the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company lines and its pauper passengers have two chances to find a home. If they find nothing in British Columbia they can come to the United States, provided they pass the physical, mental, and contract labor prohibitions. If Canada shuts the Hindus out, Seattle, Portland, and Tacoma will become the chief ports of entry for the easterners in the Northwest.

STEAMSHIP LINES BUSY

The steamship companies calling at Puget Sound ports can be depended upon to work up a big business in the transportation of Hindus. They are not likely to be outdone by the steamship concerns of the Atlantic, which annually contract with various agents to transport tens of thousands of undesirable Europeans to the United tSates [sic]. Hindus are accorded the same privileges by the immigration laws of the United States as the people of the most favored nations; therefore, in view of Canada’s contemplated action, and even without that perspective, nothing, apparently, will prevent or seriously discourage Hindus from coming to this country by thousands.

Hindu immigration to the United States began early in January, 1906. On January 7 Linah Singh and Pola Singh walked over the boundary line at Blaine without previously passing the required examination for admission. Arriving in Bellingham afoot on the Great Northern Railway they were arrested and confined in the city jail. They were found to be unlawfully in the country and were deported via Sumas.

While in the local prison the Singhs exhibited several peculiarities of their far off home. They, of course, wore turbans, and threatened to die of starvation rather than eat food cooked by other people. They were finally induced to eat rice, but they devoured it sparingly.

NO UNCLEAN RICE

When they were given the opportunity to cook their own rice at the Sumas detention shed they ate big quantities of it. Rice is the principal food of their more fortunate countrymen in Bellingham, and it is said that seventeen men from the land of the cobra and the Bengal tiger surround the pot of rice cooked in the humble Oriental home near the E.K. Wood mill.

Two months after Linah and Pola came to Bellingham five other turbaned beings rode into the city on the Bellingham Bay & British Columbia Railway. They found employment digging ditches, but they did not like the work, and they quit to labor in the E.K. Wood lumber mill. The same liking for timber plants is shown by the majority of Hindus who have settled in the Northwest.

These were soon followed by others who, perhaps, were led to come here through the glowing accounts written by the pioneers. All have been examined by A.J. Ferrandini, the immigration inspector in charge at this port, and he is constantly looking for Hindus who have been rejected at the ports of entry or at the United States immigration headquarters at Vancouver…

NEW MOVEMENT…

Since the Singhs first ate rice in one of Uncle Sam’s prisons, more than 100 of their countrymen have entered the United States to the knowledge of the local immigration office and about an equal number has been denied admission. Admissions were refused to all who failed to pass the physical or mental examinations and to such as could not prove that they were not likely to become public charges or contract laborers.

The immigration offices are given the power to reject immigrants even though they find only an implication of contract labor. As an example, of the officers find that a relative or friend has informed the applicant that he can get work at a certain place that can be construed to mean contract labor and the application can be denied. If the applicant has been merely told that there is plenty of work in this country a construction of prohibition cannot be placed on the information. Frequently disease bars the Hindus. Some suffer from trachoma, and fifteen were rejected a week ago on this account. At Vancouver this year several rejected Indians were bound for Bellingham. Discretionary powers delegated to the officials are often used.

The Hindus who are in Bellingham are, on the whole, remarkably fine-looking men. This is due to the fact that many are ex-soldiers of the Indian army. Their acknowledge handsome appearance does not appeal to the employes [sic] of the mills where they find work and an effort is being made to oust them and this discourage future immigration to Bellingham. Unless the mill owners support the movement against the Orientals and decline to give them work, it will be hard to keep the undesirables out, for the reason that here they receive 50 cents more per day than they do in British Columbia, according to the local mill hands.

WHITES OPPOSE HINDUS

Work is plentiful in the mills, in fact, too plentiful, and this is responsible for the ease with which the foreigners have found employment. The scarcity of white men has led mills to accept the service of those whom American workers regard as a common enemy. They feel that wages will be reduced if suppressive measures are not taken in the beginning. They argue, also, that the presence of several scores or hundreds of Hindus in Bellingham will act as a brake on the city’s progress. A strong point against them, they say, is that they live cheaply and save their earnings to return to India to spend them.

The Bellingham Hindus are tall and well-formed and they stand erect. They seem to be intelligent and are polite, neat and clean. This is the opinion held by immigration officers, but it must be admitted that the Hindus here are of the lowest class. Of the seventeen said to be in Bellingham eleven have served as soldiers, according to Sanda, whose likeness appears on this page. Inspector Ferrandini says he found them honest and willing to reply to questions of examination. Many Japanese and Chinese who apply for admission are far from being so ready of tongue or so courteous.

The land of the Hindus harbors 300,000,000 souls, and it has been called “an epitome of the whole earth,” so varied is its physical characteristics. There the bull, the cow and the monkey are held sacred. In all there are about fifty tribes, which can be traced back to two or three original races. The Hindus form the largest part of the population, and their religion, Brahmanism, is therefore, chief. Of the other principal religions, Mohammedanism has 60,000,000 followers and Buddhism 8,000,000 believers.

Brahmanism dates back to 1200 B.C., and its sacred books, the Vodas, [sic] are the oldest literary documents known. They consist principally of hymns. Brahmanism was originally a philosophical religion, mingled with the worship of the powers of nature. Brahma was represented by four heads to indicate the four quarters of the globe. In practice, in the course of years, the religion became a system of idolatry, with cruel rites and hideous images.

The caste system, a part of the religion, became a grievous burden, and still is. In the first class are the priests. Warriors are next, followed by traders, and they by the common types.
________________________________________________________________

Keep the Hindus Out, Says Writer

Bellingham, Sept. 15, 1906.
Editor, American.
Having resided in India nine years and closely observed the habits of the Hindus, I consider their advent in this country very undesirable. They are strictly non-progressive and adhere to their old established customs with far more tenacity than either the Japanese or Chinese. Their code of morals is bad (from our point of view), and if allowed the freedom, which they naturally expect in America, they will eventually become troublesome. The most of them have been soldiers under the British government and are well-versed in the use of fire-arms. In conclusion, they have the habit of running amuck, when annoyed, in which case a number of innocent people get butchered. By all means keep them out.

G. PERINET

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Days after his 19th birthday, Harjit Masih was at the passport office in Amritsar. His dreams had already taken him to Dubai, a place where he thought a partially educated Indian like him could make it. A few years later, in July 2013, he was seated on the second last row of a flight to Dubai International Airport. Though Dubai was merely a transit stop to Basra in Iraq, it was also a realisation of his dreams. He took a selfie under a giant golden palm tree, he loitered about the gold souk. It was only when he tried on designer aviators and stared at his reflection that he felt like an impostor in this fairytale land far from home.

Home, the village of Kala Afghana in Gurdaspur district, its only market road as long as one of the travelators at Dubai International Airport, is a no-frills place. His house, an old mud construction, had more space for the two cows—their prized possessions—than the five family members crammed into a bedroom. Masih and the men he was travelling with knew each other from other villages in Gurdaspur. These were settlements tucked behind fields of wheat and rice, where the threat of drugs loomed high and opportunity remained low, a circumstance that provided the impetus to go to a place as uncertain and volatile as Iraq.

Not all Gulf countries are equal. Desperation decides the destination. Dubai is the most sought after, as is Doha, but for the downtrodden like Masih, Iraq was a better option. Wages in Dubai range from ₹15,000 a month, but those in Iraq start at ₹25,000 because of the dangers involved.

 

Friends of Kamaljit Singh outside his house in Hoshiarpur.

Masih took a loan against his house and paid his uncle, the agent, ₹1.5 lakh to work in Iraq. When the men landed in Basra, nobody waited for them at the airport, nor was there a job. They made nervous phone calls from a SIM card they had bought at the airport, led by Kamaljit Singh. Kamal, as he was called, was an old hand at the Gulf game, having spent 12 years in the Middle East. He negotiated with the agent in Gurdaspur who mentioned a factory in Baghdad and later, Kamal spoke in fluent Arabic to the taxi driver who dropped them at the factory where Indian labourers had previously worked.

Two weeks went by at the factory but there was no work. On the walls of the labour quarters, names and numbers of previous workers were scrawled in Hindi. The men started calling the numbers. A few misses later, they got lucky: work was available; people needed to build towers in Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. A couple of days of negotiations between the agent in Gurdaspur and the Iraqi owner led to a deal: the men from Punjab would build the University Lake Towers in the Jamia district of Mosul, within the University of Mosul area, at the end of July 2013.

The agent is now in Dubai but he did not reply to Fountain Ink’s calls.

Their place of work and residence abutted the College of Agriculture and Forestry within the University of Mosul. In the pictures they uploaded on Facebook, the green façade of the Agriculture Department is clearly visible. Working in Jamia was also considered safe in a city of sectarian tensions between Shia and Sunni because it was the base of the 2nd Division, an elite unit of the Iraqi army.

Despite the 2nd Division, car bombs and suicide bombers, coordinated explosions and a mounting death toll came to characterise life in Mosul during Masih’s first year in the city. He was ordered to never leave the construction site, and he says he never did.

Masih hadn’t been told life would be so precarious. All he wanted was to transform his small village home into a concrete bungalow like his neighbour who had built his through remittances sent from Muscat.

***

Life was good in Mosul. Payments were regular and Masih wired  ₹65,000 to his mother in his first four months. He struck up a friendship with Hassan, one of the 52 Bangladeshi workers working at University Lake Towers, and together they picked up bits of Arabikc. (Efforts to trace the Bangladeshi workers have been unsuccessful).

During the day, he spent hours working with steel and had learnt a great deal about construction despite being an electrician by trade. He was allotted the bottom bed of a bunker in an air-conditioned tent that housed about 20 workers. A dry ration of rice and rajma was delivered by Abu Kareem (name changed), a local employee of Tariq Noor al-Huda, the Baghdad-based construction firm that employed the workers. Over the months, Abu Kareem would become a father figure to the men—many of them in their early 20s—on site as well as provide recharge coupons for their mobiles.

Other mothers recall their sons as being content with their job. Simranjit Singh ran off without telling his mother and called her from Delhi airport in fits of hysteria.

“I am doing this for us,” he had told her.

She had lost a nephew to smack and had seen her brother spiral into a depression that culminated in suicide. “At least there he would have been safe,” she said on a hot sweltering day in her village of Babowal.

In the last few phone calls, he had promised to buy her an inverter because the power always ran out. He had WhatsApped images to his sisters of himself with an Acer laptop that he promised to pass on to his nieces and nephews.

Kamal, the Arabic speaker in the group who had transformed his village by putting up its first big concrete house through remittances from Dubai, regularly updated his Facebook profile. There were pictures of him and the other men monkeying around with wooly hats outside their tents where lines of laundry hung. Others posted selfies with local workers and Abu Kareem. Manjinder Singh posted pictures of himself with Hamad and Mohammed (names changed), the chief engineer and surveyor, and of the top bunk of the bed he occupied.

But Facebook isn’t real life and what the men withheld was this: the agent who had organised their travel and negotiated their employment had only managed to get them tourist visas. He had left the task of securing work visas to the workers themselves, something they found impossible to accomplish. Their boss, the arbab, seldom if ever showed up and when they approached the manager, he would make excuses: “too busy this week, next week." By June 2014, the men had overstayed by eight months and would incur a stiff penalty upon departure. As is customary, the arbab had taken their passports upon arrival and locked them in a safe at the company’s offices.

Seven months after they started working, in February 2014, the salaries stopped. “Tomorrow. Next Week. Cash flow problems,” were some of the excuses. By the end of May last year, the men just had hope. “We believed we would be paid so we just worked and waited,” Masih said.

Stories about the upheaval in the region took centrestage as local workers talked about how the war in Syria had spilled over into Iraq. They wagered money on whether an al-Qaeda assault was imminent and once Fallujah—the city where US marines fought the bloodiest battle of the Iraq war in 2004—fell to an al-Qaeda affiliate, Masih recalls the local sentiment: “The questions wasn’t if the war would spread all over Iraq, but when.” However, work continued at University Lake Towers.

***

Hamad, the chief engineer on the project, usually a composed man, was a ball of nerves. On the morning of the June 6, 2014, he was scampering about, lifting papers, dumping files into a big black plastic bag. In a conversation from the UAE, he told me that he had told the workers, “Nothing to worry about. Keep working,” even as he reversed out of the compound. Soon the other locals employed at University Lake Towers packed their belongings.

“Not to worry. This is al-Qaeda style. They will make some noise and in two or three days it will be over,” said Mohammed, the surveyor. In a recent conversation from Mosul, he told me that in those days, the labourers were desperate to leave and had even offered to pay the Iraqis money to take them away, but nobody had thought it would get this bad. “You are from another country, they won’t touch you,” Masih had been told.

When the locals departed, they left an inactive construction site with cranes and trucks and three tents of Indian and Bangladeshi workers who had no money and no passports in the middle of the most daring assault ISIS had launched upon an adversary.

***

On the night of June 9, when ISIS made its final push for Mosul, Masih stood under a sky lit by the reds of rocket launchers and oranges of explosions, even as a curfew and a gradual shutdown of street lamps engulfed parts of the city in darkness. University Lake Towers were a road away from the Iraqi army’s 2nd Division and so the labourers had the finest seat in this theatre of war.

“When al-Qaeda was arriving near us, the night would be lit with red lights. Where there were tall buildings, there were bombs. The camps were in the centre of action because they were next to the army base, and when a rocket was launched we could see them take off. We didn’t know anything even though we were neighbours. We just heard the noises, doof, doof, all night. When we heard the noise, we couldn’t go to sleep,” Masih told me.

When the shelling became a near constant, the men broke into the prefabricated rooms that comprised the office. The English speaker of the group Harish Kumar—who had worked as secretary to Hamad, the chief engineer—had the keys to the safe. He took out all the passports, according to Masih. (By the accounts presented to me by Mohammed, the passports were delivered the following morning by a middle man.)

By then it was too late to leave. The city was under lockdown as ISIS chased out the 2nd Division, took Turkish personnel hostage, and massacred civilians and armymen in what is their greatest military victory so far.

The workers asked for help wherever they could. There were a series of pleas that got increasingly desperate, from phone calls to families, to the agent who sent them to Iraq, to the Indian embassy in Baghdad.

Calls to the embassy began in earnest from June 9, 2014. According to a few family members calls began even earlier on June 6.

On the morning of June 9, Harish and Kamal called the embassy and the initial response was that the problem would sort itself out in a few days as it had done in the past. “We were 700 kilometres away, how could we help them?” says a source in the MEA who has knowledge of the events in Iraq.

There was no help. It is this lack of response during an active phase of war that pushed the workers to seek the assistance of the militant group which had conquered the city. On the question of phone calls to the embassy, Vikas Swarup, spokesperson, told Fountain Ink that the information was “misplaced” and that there is no “log sheet” of the calls. He said: “The embassy did get in touch with the company each time a call came. They spoke to people at Tariq Noor al-Huda and the embassy was informed that they (workers) were taken care of until June 16, 2014. It is the company’s duty to deliver them to us.”

He said that the company “did misinform” the government or that they “misread the gravity of the situation”.

On the morning of June 10, when the ISIS victory was all but guaranteed and the world woke up to the news, the workers hadn’t slept a wink. The need for chai led one out of the compound to the milkman across the street who shared tales about the Sunni militants bravado and laughed at the sight of elite army officers who threw away their uniforms and ran into the hills around Mosul. With no calls from their boss and a complete shutdown, Masih recalls the group feeling abandoned.

Then Abu Kareem came to the company.

***

Abu Kareem, the local employee, looked upon the workers as his own children. An elderly man with a large heart and a big stomach, he had been a father figure to the men. It was he who brought chicken soup his wife cooked when one of the men felt unwell, it was he who lent money when they didn’t have enough to buy phone credit, and it was he who showed up the morning after the battle with a bag of rice and rajma.

“Stay indoors my boys,” he said with a look of desperation. “God will protect us all.”

“Help us leave,” the workers pleaded as they gathered around him. “Give us our money and take us out,” said others. Abu Kareem was almost reduced to tears. “Wallahi, I wish I could. Wallahi, I wish I could,” he kept repeating aloud. Abu Kareem confirmed to me that this conversation did take place.

Just as the discussion was about to get heated, two Bangladeshis slipped out to seek the counsel of the militants who had set up base at the headquarters of the 2nd Division, less than a couple of minutes’ walk away. (It is unclear whether this was a group decision or the Bangladeshis acted upon their own will. Masih says he was uninformed. Abu Kareem confirmed this to me.)

Moments later, two pick-up trucks with militants pulled into the compound of University Lake Towers. Armed with assault rifles, they pushed Abu Kareem. “Give them their salaries, give them what you owe them,” said a militant in his 50s. He wore a white kandoora with an agal and gatara, the head dress that indicates seniority. This wasn’t an ISIS fighter in the black uniform with the black ski mask but a tribal leader.

Soon the conversation between the workers and the militants turned to a rescue mission. The militants, to everyone’s surprise, said they would transport the men to Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan where shopping malls were open and construction sites were erecting tall towers.

Day turned into night and the men readied for dinner. Masih was in the kitchen when two sedans pulled into the compound. About 10 men emerged. They wore black T-shirts and black pants and their faces were covered with ski masks. Only the white of their eyes showed.

“These were gunda-types (thugs),” Masih recalls.

They carried two plastic bags and ordered the group to send two men who would speak on their behalf. Kamal, the Arabic speaker, and Harish, the English speaker, were chosen. The militants gave them two plastic bags that contained lentils and salt. Then they ordered the group to sit on the floor.

After half an hour of discussions, the men were told to pack their bags. They would be moved to a safer spot in Erbil, they were told. The fighters asked for their passports. “They said ‘we will stamp an iqamah (visa) and you will be able to leave’,” Masih said.

But these men weren’t government, I asked Masih.

“There was no government. There was just al-Qaeda. They said they were in control now and would soon issue their own currency. Gold coins. We believed them. We trusted them because we had no one else we could rely on,” he said.

So the Indian and Bangladeshi labourers handed over their passports.

A truck pulled in and the men climbed on. They drove for about five kilometres in the dark to Al-Dawassa Road crossing the river Tigris. Al-Dawassa Road is in the heart of Mosul in the Jamhuriya Area, close to the municipality. The group was made to stand at the Al-Qudus Building where about 35 militants had gathered. It was around 10 p.m.

According to an Iraqi source intimately involved with this operation, the aim was to escort the men to a secure location and hold them at the Al-Qudus Building. The plan was foiled when a rocket hit the base of the building. People ran in different directions and minutes passed before the militants regained control.

“Hindia, (Indian) saf. Saf. Saf. Line. Line. Line,” said one militant in plainclothes.

Led by five men in black uniforms, the workers were escorted through dark streets. When someone put on a torch on their mobile to see the road ahead, the militants went berserk.

“No light! No light!” they yelled.

They walked for about 15 minutes until they arrived at a basement in a market place with shops on either side of the street. They were ordered to sit on the floor next to a mobile and apparel store. When one of the men called home, the militants ordered all mobiles switched off. Then they gave workers Coke and Sprite and Fanta with biscuits.

As morning dawned, someone in the group finally said what all of them knew: “I think we have been kidnapped.”

***

The morning of June 12 came with the sound of a garbage van, the only sign that civic bodies were still functioning. There was no traffic light, there were hardly any cars, and the workers were surprised when two men came to open the mobile and clothes store.

“What are you doing here? Get away,” said the mobile store man. The man had taken them for trespassers until he saw two men with black T-shirts and pants and automatic weapons. The shop-keepers said no more.

The captors were vigilant, allowing people to go to the washroom in twos and watching them from the street as they went. Not far from where they were held were two hotels and nearby was a mosque, though the minaret could not be seen. Just before the call to afternoon prayers, one of the shopkeepers gave the men some biscuits and another gave them some water. They also had cold drinks. Soon after, the shopkeepers closed their stores and didn’t return.

At about 4 p.m. a fighter in plainclothes returned with a plastic bag that he held up. “I have your passports, let’s go,” he ordered.

The Indians and Bangladeshis followed. They boarded a truck, crammed together, and travelled for about five kilometres to Al-Mansoor Industrial area. There were many warehouses and the truck stopped in front of a blue and white one. The militants ordered the workers inside and instructed them to “not venture out, not to make too much noise, not to come by the main door”.

Then the militants gave them samoun (unleavened bread) and honey with khubuz, small packets of juice, as well as detergent and soap. Despite being hostages, for a brief moment Masih recalled feeling like a guest.

Soon after the doors to the warehouse were bolted from the outside, the men called home with news of their kidnapping.

Simranjit, from Babowal, told his sister, “They are taking care of us, do not worry, we have not been harmed.”

Kamal, from Hoshiarpur, called his wife and first enquired about his 10-month old daughter and then calmly explained the situation. “Terrorists have picked us up. They are good people, they say they will take us to Erbil. I have been in touch with the embassy,” she recalls him saying.

Manjinder from Bhoewal, called his sister. “We have called the embassy. They say they cannot help us. See whom you can call,” he told her.

Gucharan Singh, from Jalal Usman, told his mother to call the agent “and to buy a ticket and get me out of here”. But she had no way of going into town and his father had been admitted into hospital, she told him.

The workers continued to make phone calls to their families during the course of the day. They told their families they were being kept in a factory that manufactured cottonwool and gauze. They said they were being kept with the Bangladeshis in a massive warehouse about 25 feet high. Confirming Masih’s account, they all stated that they weren’t allowed to go out.

Masih recalls shafts at the top of the warehouse that lit it up by letting light filter through. He had even seen the assembly line and shared the information with his cousin Robin Masih. Life in captivity was normal: they showered and washed their clothes, and at 2.30 p.m. and 8 p.m. they were served hot lunch and dinner. Someone even commented that they were better looked after here than they had been at their arbab’s company. The meals came in white trays and were always the same: rice and samoun and rajma for lunch and dinner. Though they were confined to one space, Masih doesn’t recall feeling threatened.

“We didn’t think they would kill us, we thought they were here to save us. Why would people who have been feeding us for three days kill us?” asked Masih.

On the second day in captivity, Kamal and Harish enquired about how long they would stay. “Until necessary,” replied a militant. On the morning of June 13, when the men ran out of phone credit, the militants brought them recharge cards. Finally, three phones remained operational and the men would “missed call” their families back home from one of the three numbers.

On June 13 and 14, Kamal and Harish called the Indian embassy in Baghdad several times on behalf of the workers, as did their families. They claim to have spoken to D. V. Singh at the Chancery while in captivity but there was no help. Phone calls from Manjinder’s sister, Gurpinder Kaur, to the Iraqi embassy in Delhi yielded no results either. The men were told to have “faith in God” by officials at the Indian embassy in Baghdad. They were also informed about the “700 kilometre” distance between Mosul and Baghdad and how Mosul was under lockdown.

“It was a highly fluid period. Nobody thought Mosul would fall the way it did. The embassy could not have reacted in any other way. But yes, the embassy did miss the distress calls,” says an MEA official intimately involved in the operations in Iraq. Information that 40 Indian workers were being held hostage was known to officials from June 13, but the government went public on June 18.

Then MEA spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin in a June 18 press briefing, cited the International Red Crescent and other sources, and said 40 Indian workers in Mosul had been “kidnapped”. He said the government hadn’t received any ransom demands, and that its main sources of information at that moment were humanitarian agencies.

***

The morning of June 15 was different. The men who brought breakfast had changed. There were more of them outside, about 30-35 militants, and they spoke sternly. At lunch time they brought two plates of food instead of one. They hadn’t done this over the past couple of days. This was at about 12.30 p.m. in Mosul.

Twenty-nine out of the 40 families that I spoke to maintain that the last phone call they received from the workers was between 2-5 p.m. on June 15. Most said they were fine and were being looked after and fed.

The only account that was jolting was Kamal’s, the group’s only Arabic speaker.

“He sounded extremely panicky, which is unusual for him. He said, ‘If anyone comes looking for me, if any one wants my identity, don’t give it to them. Don’t give anybody any proof about who I am,’ and then hung up. I knew something was wrong immediately,” says his mother.

At about 4 p.m., the militants ordered the Indians and Bangladeshis to get into separate groups. “We have the Indian passports, the Bangladeshi passports will arrive later. The Indians must come with us,” they said.

Outside, a truck with a large container waited. When Masih boarded he saw a small blindfolded man with hands tied behind his back. Then the door to the container was closed. Seconds later, it was suffocating. They fanned their T-shirts. Someone passed around a water bottle. There was no air and the truck was swerving from left to right, going over uneven terrain, up and down small slopes.

“We aren’t going to Erbil,” someone said.

***

When the truck was opened half an hour later, Masih was momentarily blinded by the light. “Get out,” shouted one of the militants. The men scrambled out, one after the other, into a barren landscape. They were in the desert that surrounded Mosul, with hills in the backdrop. There were about 10 trucks with 30-40 militants outside. The sun was lower in the sky; it must have been about 4.30 p.m. A slight breeze had set in. At a distance stood a communications tower. On the far eastern side was a rail track, Masih recalls.

According to a source in Mosul who was aware of the movement of the workers, the Indians were taken to the deserts of Badosh on the outskirts of Mosul.

“What have you come to do here in Iraq?” barked a man in an ISIS uniform. Nobody responded.

“Get in line,” he thundered.

It was this order that made Masih realise what was going on. “Abto hamara kam hone wala hai (This is the end for us),” he recalls thinking.

The men began to cry.

They joined their hands together and begged for freedom.

Nobody listened. They were ordered to kneel on the ground. They pleaded some more.

“Please let us go, please. We will become Muslims,” someone said.

They were again ordered to kneel.

Masih was in the middle of the line; to his left was Samal from West Bengal and to his right was the heaviest man in the group and one of the oldest, Balwant Rai Singh from Punjab. The fighters talked among themselves standing behind the kneeling Indians.

Two men stood in front: one was the man from the container whose blindfold had been removed, the other was an ISIS militant who was holding a camera.

Allah-o-Akbar. Dak. Dak. Dak.

As soon as the first shot was fired, Samal dropped to the ground, in spite of the firing starting from the right. Masih followed him. He buried his face in the gravelly sand and just lay there. Seconds later, Balwant Rai Singh fell on him, pressing him deeper into the ground. Balwant’s leg landed on his back pinning him down. With the weight of a dead man on him, he was unable to move.

“One bullet grazed me. I didn’t breathe, didn’t move, didn’t look up. I just lay there,” Masih says.

He says the firing lasted for about a minute and a half and that he couldn’t hear a thing once it stopped. He lay on the ground for about 20 minutes, playing dead and unable to move because of the weight of Balwant Rai Singh’s body. He turned his head left, he turned his head right, and could see the others lying flat on the ground. There were no militants to be seen. When he stood up, he saw bodies strewn all over the place, facing different directions.

“I couldn’t recognise people’s faces,” he says. “I couldn’t make sense of a thing.” Not far from where he stood one man lay flat on the ground his eyes open looking up into the cloudless sky. He was alive but had bullet holes all over him. He was covered in blood.

“Can you walk?” asked Masih. He waved his hands, gesturing no.

“I joined my hands together and said, ‘Sorry, but I have to go’,” and just like that Masih turned his back on the massacre.

***

“I didn’t know where I was going, all I knew was that I wanted to go,” he recalls. He walked towards the sun because his factory faced east. But it was nearing sunset. Time had lost all meaning; when he thought he was walking east, he was going west. Nothing made sense. The desert seemed to stretch forever, the hills shadowed him. There was no man in sight.

He came across two bodies that lay on a rail track. He skirted the hills, careful not to expose himself. Half a kilometre or so later, he came across another heap of bodies.

“I thought I’d come back to the same place but there was a stench here, the stench of decaying flesh,” Masih says. So he knew these weren’t his men.

He kept walking till he reached a highway. Dazed and thirsty, he waved frantically at passing cars. These were few and far between, and no one was stopping for him. A while later, a yellow taxi slowed down only to chuck out a bottle of water. Masih took small sips of the warm water and kept walking.

Forty-five minutes later, a white car slowed and the driver rolled his windows down. “Please take me with you, I am in danger. Khaif. Khaif. Scared. Scared,” he said in the only Arabic he could muster.

The driver opened the front door and Masih got in. He tugged at the red thread around his neck; only disbelievers would wear this, he thought to himself as he yanked it out. After a kilometre, the driver made a call and another car pulled up in front.

“Go with him,” the driver said.

“Please no,” Masih begged. A burly man dragged him out and shoved him in the backseat of the car. A weapon lay on the floor. They will kill me now, he thought.

Masih heard the driver speak on the phone. “Hindia, Hindia, Indian, Indian,” was the one word he could understand.

The car finally stopped at a checkpoint with the hills in the backdrop. It was manned by armed men in black who immediately handcuffed Masih.

“What is your name? Where is your passport? Who are you?” they asked. “My name is Ali, I’m a Bangladeshi and I don’t have my passport,” he said.

“What is your father’s name? What do you do here? Why have you come here?” they asked.

“Khaif. Khaif. Scared. Scared,” he said and pretended to not understand a word of what they were saying. He wanted to go back to his company he told them. An elderly man, about 60, in a white kandoora called Masih him over. He was the only one without a gun and he ordered the men to uncuff Masih. The fighters called him Abu, “father”, a term of respect for an elder or person in a position of seniority.

“He said, ‘don’t worry, I will make sure you are okay.’ He was the kindest man I met that night,” recalls Masih.

As night fell Abu gave Masih a plate of rice and rajma. Masih tried to eat but had no appetite left. About 10 p.m., Abu ordered Masih into the backseat of the car and drove him to a big house in the centre of Mosul.

It was a grand house with marble floors. Many unmasked militants sat in the front of the house and more sat on the floor inside having dinner. Abu ordered Masih upstairs, where the rooms served as small detention centres. One of them held 10-15 men in army uniform. In another, where Masih was held, two handcuffed and blindfolded men were sitting on the floor. There was a small window through which Masih could squeeze through and he was flirting with the idea of jumping out when a militant ordered him downstairs and into a car. He saw a gun on the backseat.

Masih bolted back into the house. “Abu, Abu, where are you sending me?” he asked.

“Wallahi (you have my word), son, nothing will happen to you,” Abu said. Masih was escorted back to the car. The ISIS fighter gave him 5,000 dinars—a present from Abu. He was told to pay the taxi fare with the money. The journey to the factory took about 20 minutes and when Masih put his hands in his pocket, the driver waved him off.

Abu had taken care of it.

University Lake Towers, that barbed wire confinement, had never seemed so free, so promising before. He snuck underneath a gap in the barbed wire and moments later a group of dogs came barking. Already jumpy, he dashed back out and ran to the milkman in his first fit of tears. The milkman lit a torch that shone on his wet face.

“Put that out, it’s me, Harjit,” he said.

“Harjit, what has happened? Why are you crying? Where are the others?” he asked.

Masih was bawling, unable to construct a sentence. He took a sip of water. He cried some more and then he told him his entire story.

“They are all dead?” asked the milkman.

“Yes,” replied Masih.

Masih pleaded with the milkman to let him sleep there until morning but the milkman called Mansoor (name changed), one of the contractors at University Lake Towers. He recounted bits of the tale.

“Send him over at once,” Mansoor ordered and so Masih walked to Mansoor who stood in the dim light of a mobile phone, motioning him over in silence. Then Masih cried some more.

“We need to get you out of here,” Mansoor said. He was transporting the Bangladeshis to Erbil the following morning and Masih could hitch a ride on one condition: he wasn’t to speak a word, nor could he reveal his identity. Mansoor ordered him back in the tent with the Bangladeshis who rushed to Masih as he recounted the tale for the third time.

They had been given their passports back and were allowed to return with their belongings. An hour later he showered, crusted bits of blood running into the water. He changed into a pair of clothes a Bangladeshi gave him and tried to sleep but couldn’t.

***

Soon after daybreak, a car pulled into the compound of University Lake Towers. Mansoor organised the men into two groups and took Masih in his car. They came to a checkpoint manned by ISIS. They were in complete control of the city by now. Mansoor got off and spoke to the gunmen. About 10 minutes later they were allowed to journey onward to Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Further along was an Iraqi army checkpoint, the first sign that they had left the zone of terror. They questioned Mansoor for about 15 minutes and let them go further. At the border of Erbil, where people were arriving in droves, Mansoor and his group were made to stop at the edge of a checkpoint.

The army was trying to scrutinise the massive outflow of people but the scene was too chaotic. Mansoor dropped the boys off and turned back to Mosul while it seemed as though everybody else was trying to get out.

Kala Afghana village in Gurdaspur district. Most of the men were from Gurdaspur.

The checkpoint was a few metres before a bridge and the officers asked the Bangladeshis and Masih for their passports. Masih’s passport had never been returned by the militants. They told the men they couldn’t cross through until their senior gave clearance and ordered them to stay under the bridge. That night they gave them khubuz, onion, cucumber, tomato and water. Masih used a Bangladeshi labourer’s phone to call home. He spoke to Robin who had heard about the incident on TV.

Manjinder Singh’s sister, Gurpinder Kaur, exasperated with the lack of response from the embassy which she had been calling from June 6 onwards, panicked when her brother didn’t call on the evening of June 15. Terrified and fed up with the lack of official assistance of response, she called ANI news agency on June 16, breaking the news about the abduction.

As the mainstream media picked up the news, helpline numbers were being flashed on TV. Masih’s cousin Robin gave him the number and told him to call the helpline and say that one was alive. While Masih waited under the bridge for a second night, Robin called the embassy and informed them that his cousin was alive. The embassy passed on a number for Masih through Robin. It belonged to an Indian restaurant owner in Erbil used as a local asset. Given that the Indian mission has no presence in Erbil, he had assumed the duties of the mission.

***

“I said ‘I have come this far, at least help me now,’” Masih recalled of his first phone call to the man, on his third night under the bridge, June 18, when the government first acknowledged the kidnapping. Many people who had been held were running from the checkpoint by now. A few Bangladeshis were planning an escape. Masih asked if he could run with them but they looked upon him as a liability. So Masih ran alone until an army van rounded them all up. Afraid he would be thrown into jail for not having valid documents, he made an excuse that he was getting water and slipped out and went to a taxi. From there he called the number again. The asset arrived about 20 minutes later.

He pulled up in a red car, a smart looking man with a receding hairline. He walked straight to the guards. After a brief conversation, he walked to Masih and escorted him to his car, and Masih recounted the entire story.

“Are you lying?” he asked. He asked that question several times.

“No,” replied Masih. “Why would I lie?”

That night, the asset took Masih for a meal at a restaurant and assured him that he was safe. Over the next couple of days, he took Masih to meet various officials in Erbil. He got constant phone calls from Baghdad and New Delhi enquiring about Masih.

Images were sent to the man’s phone for verification, to identify if Masih knew the people in the photos. The asset refused to be interviewed for this story.

Four days later, two Indian officials came to meet Masih. They kept asking if he was lying. To verify his story, they called the Bangladeshis who recounted the same tale. The asset bought him clothes and put him up at his house. After the fifth or sixth night, he went for dinner at about 10 p.m. He returned at around 11 p.m. and told Masih to wake up early and be ready.

He was going to India.

Less than a fortnight later, Masih travelled from Erbil to Doha and then New Delhi. In Doha’s shiny airport, with stores of perfumes and showcases of watches, he felt his Gulf dream slipping away. But he knew one thing for certain: if the opportunity to return to the Gulf came up, he would take it in less than a heartbeat.

“That’s where dreams are made,” he said.

***

Harjit Masih was taken from the airport to a safe house. The house was “surrounded by a jungle and enclosed by a wall”. He was under constant surveillance. For a couple of days he was interrogated by a man who identified himself as Ved Sharma. Masih’s guards told him it was dangerous outside. Sometimes they said ISIS was looking for him and other times that he was in danger from the 39 families. He was promised a job and even sent to Bengaluru for two months where he trained to become an electrician.

Then he was brought back to a detention centre in Greater Noida and kept for months because his “certificate from Bengaluru wasn’t ready”. Finally, he was allowed to go home for 10 days and told a job awaited him at Dharamsala.

After his return, Masih is a reviled figure among Gurdaspur families, who refuse to believe his tale.

He was told to tell the media: “I don’t know what happened, I ran, I don’t know if they are alive, according to me they are dead.” He agreed.

After 10 days he called back, asking for a job. There was no answer. It was then that he decided to go to the media. Suddenly, Ved Sharma called back. He told him to go to Dharamsala. So he went with Robin and a man came to collect them. He dropped them off at a hotel and promised to return but never did.

A few days later, Masih returned home. On the advice of a panchayat member, he decided to hold a press conference. The following day, he publicly said 39 Indians had been massacred in Mosul on June 15, 2014.

Harjit Masih is a reviled figure among Gurdaspur families who have made nine trips to New Delhi to meet Sushma Swaraj. Each time they are told the workers are alive and that a search is underway. But an MEA source said there was no proof of life though the government had requested it.

Further, the source said that short of digging around Mosul, there was no way to ascertain whether they were dead or alive. The claim that they were working as unpaid labourers to build a mosque or a stadium remains unverified.

Masih was sent back to India a couple of weeks later and kept in Gurgaon, Noida and Bengaluru by the security agencies for three months. He doesn’t know which agencies—and Fountain Ink couldn’t independently verify this—though external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj told Parliament on November 27, 2014 that Masih was in the “protective care of the government”.The men assigned to him, he says, told him that he should not speak about the killing of others, that he should say he didn’t know anything.

He stuck to his story: Yes, 40 Indian workers at University Lake Towers, Mosul, were abducted and 39 killed. This part has been reported by the media, and denied and dismissed by foreign minister Sushma Swaraj in Parliament. She has said the government has six sources—it is extraordinary for the government to specify the number of sources, a fact of operational detail that has little public importance—that claim otherwise in writing, and that Masih’s account can’t be believed.

The government, on the advice of one its third-party sources, at least once provided medicines to ISIS as a goodwill gesture to ascertain more information on the workers and obtain proof of life, Fountain Ink has confirmed from sources at the highest levels of government. It is learnt that talks on this specific matter came to a stop when no proof of life was provided by the third party in contact with ISIS, though there were more demands for medicine.

Ministry, through its spokespersons, has been more measured, and has said that it refuses to deny hope to the families of 39 Indians till it has more evidence. In all its statements, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has omitted to tell the public that the workers repeatedly called the Indian embassy in Baghdad for help over four days, and asked their families in India to do the same. The embassy is said to have told them to sit tight and wait for the fighting to stop.

Vikas Swarup, spokesperson, MEA, told Fountain Ink that the government has only third-party sources and that it has no direct knowledge of the situation. He also said that the government does not have “any concrete proof of life.”

Fountain Ink interviewed Masih over three days and investigated his account, and was able to verify large parts of his story. The site where he worked exists, the places where he was kept by the militants can be traced—including the place at which Masih claims the workers were executed—and most details he provides are vouched for by Indian and Iraqi sources associated with the workers. The locations have been traced on the basis of information provided by sources in Mosul, and Masih’s account.

All the Iraqi sources confirmed the abduction of 40 Indian workers from Mosul, and those remaining in Mosul were unanimous that they met Masih after his escape. They have neither seen nor heard from any of the others.

Whether the massacre took place could not be independently verified—there are no known witnesses. The battle of Mosul left hundreds dead and disappeared, and which group or unit of the ISIS was responsible for what incident can’t be ascertained.

http://series.fountainink.in/indian-worker-isis-iraq-escape/

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Early one morning last weekend, Amrik Singh Bal, 68, was standing along a stretch of highway in Fresno, Calif., waiting for a ride to work. Two white men pulled up beside him, hollering obscenities out their window.

The Fresno Bee reports that Bal, who is Sikh, has a white beard and was wearing a blue turban, tried crossing the street to get away when the men in the truck pulled a U-turn and drove into him, knocking him to the ground. They got out, launched punches into Bal's face and body, then sped off into the morning fog.

Bal is one of dozens of Sikh Americans attacked in recent years. Some scholars estimate there are about 100,000 Sikhs in the U.S. and 25 million worldwide. They have roots in the Punjab region of South Asia and practice a monotheistic religion based on the 15th century teachings of an Indian guru. The Sikh Coalition, a nonprofit legal group, has analyzed more than 140 actual or suspected hate crimes against Sikhs in the U.S. between 2001 and 2012. The group says that this past December alone, it received a surge of calls from Sikhs seeking legal help — three times as many as during the same time in 2014.

The Washington Post's Peter Holley details a long string of attacks following Sept. 11 when Sikhs in America were attacked because their assailants mistook them for Muslims: the shootings at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis.; the beating of Inderjit Singh Mukker in a Chicago suburb after he was called "bin Laden"; the shooting of a Sikh store clerk in Grand Rapids, Mich., after he was accused of being a terrorist.

But while Sikh Americans have come under increased scrutiny in recent years owing to the misconception that they follow Islam, the history of Sikhs in America coming under attack begins long before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The first documented attack on Sikhs in the U.S. took place on Sept. 4, 1907, in Bellingham, Wash., a coastal city less than two hours north of Seattle. Three decades before, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese citizens from coming to the U.S., and tension between whites and various other immigrant groups was mounting. ("Have We a Dusky Peril?" wondered the Puget Sound American the year before the Bellingham attack.)

Just after midnight on Sept. 4, a mob of men descended upon the city's "Hindoo" immigrants, as some newspapers broadly referred to South Asians. (Newspapers of the day weren't particularly great at parsing minority identities or ethnicity.) "Religious Sikh men, who wore the dastar, a turban head covering that is a symbol of the Sikh faith, were especially targeted," Erika Lee writes in her book The Making of Asian America.

i

Darsh Singh, the first Sikh American to play basketball in the NCAA, became the subject of an Islamophobic meme earlier this year.

Most of the immigrants were Sikh men between ages 20 and 40 originally from Punjab. They had come to the States by way of Vancouver, B.C., traveling on British steamboats to Washington state to find work at lumber mills.

The mob — some newspapers at the time reported nearly 500 people — broke into the boardinghouses where Sikh workers were staying, pulling them from their beds and into the streets to beat them. Some of the Sikh men were robbed of gold and clothing, worth as much as $4,000 per man. The throng comprised white union men who worked in the lumber and milling industries and claimed the Sikhs were taking their jobs.

The mob's message was clear: Get out of town.

Bellingham's leaders and police stepped in and had the Sikh men corralled in a jail under City Hall for the night — for their own safety, it was said. No witnesses came forward, and no one was ever charged. At the time of the beatings, there were reportedly nine police present, according to a new documentary, titled We Are Not Strangers, produced by a Sikh temple near Bellingham.

The Seattle Morning Times argued the incident was "not a question of race, but of wages" and like many newspapers of that time, commiserated with the union members:

"When men who require meat to eat and real beds to sleep in are ousted from their employment to make room for vegetarians who can find the bliss of sleep in some filthy corner, it is rather difficult to say at what limit indignation ceases to be righteous."

And so, fearing for their lives, hundreds of Sikhs fled Bellingham. Many went by train south to Seattle and Oakland; some, north to Vancouver, B.C., where similar riots awaited them.

In fact, just three days after the Bellingham incident, Lee writes in her book, "Vancouver was ripped apart by a related anti-Asian riot that swept through the Chinese and Japanese quarters and left destruction in its wake." In Seattle, a week after Bellingham, a wire report headlined "Hindus Attempt to Slaughter Swedes" tells the story of a bizarre bar fight between "20 Swedes and a hundred 'Hindus' [who were] recently from Bellingham." Midfight, the Swedes, joined by a policeman and a one-legged man, barricaded themselves in a saloon until the so-called Hindus fled.

News reports following these attacks elsewhere in the country were often gleeful. "Every Hindu mill employee in the city has quit work, and nothing will persuade them to remain," a wire service reported. "They are fleeing to more congenial pastures of the North like flocks of sheep."

Decades later, those "congenial pastures" remain elusive for Sikh Americans. From unnamed Sikhs who suffered attacks on "Hindoos" to Inderjit Singh Mukker or Prakash Singh or Amrik Singh Bal, all attacked in recent years for being "Muslim," the justifications may have changed, but the violence is much the same.

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/01/02/461479969/long-before-they-were-apparent-muslims-sikhs-were-targeted-in-u-s

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In a year from now the border state of Punjab would be in the midst of its most crucial electoral battle, a fight that would determine whether the state would embark on a long haul for returning to the path of holistic governance or descend into further chaos. Political change in the state is almost a given now after the coming elections, but the nature of that change is critical for various reasons.

However, before talking about the alternatives for the state, it may be much more appropriate to remind readers the reasons for the collapse of the state under the Akali-BJP government that has been ruling the state for the last decade.

First, the economic and fiscal crisis has turned Punjab into one the most indebted and debt-stressed states in the country. By the end of the 2015-16, the state would be in debt to the tune of $18.79 billion (1 dollar=Rs 66) approximately. Ten years ago, in the last year of the then Congress government, it stood at $7.73 billion.

The debt constitutes over 30% of the Gross State Domestic Product. Twenty one per cent of all revenue receipts go towards servicing it. While the government would like to blame it on the legacy liability of fighting terrorism, it needs to be remembered that active militancy in the state ended way back in 1995. The current situation is a result of economic mismanagement, financial licentiousness and crass populism over the past decade. With a committed interest liability of $1.5 billion per year, Punjab is caught in a debt trap. This has demolished business sentiment, leading to a flight of capital from the state.

Second, the agrarian crisis. Agriculture, the principal occupation of the people, is no longer a remunerative vocation. As I had earlier pointed out in these columns, conventional wisdom holds that 84% of the farmers own less than five acres of land. A family of four or five toiling ceaselessly on a three-acre plot of land can in a good year at best make about Rs 19,350 per month but if there is any unnatural occurrence, there can be a severe drop in income for farmers. A recent example is the whitefly pest attack in southern Punjab that led to dozens of cotton farmers committing suicide.

Third is the narcotisation of the state that has wiped out a generation of young adults. Punjab lost a generation to terror between 1980 and 1995 and is now losing another to drugs. The state apparatus from the highest echelons to the lowest functionaries are allegedly deeply entrenched in the production, sale and proliferation of synthetic drugs. Over 75% of the youth in the state is addicted to one fatal psychotropic substance or the other.

The fourth is the complete subversion of the law enforcement machinery of the state. It started with police sub-divisions being made congruent to assembly constituencies and the in-charge of the sub-division (usually a deputy superintendent of police) being appointed on the recommendation of the ruling party MLA or its defeated candidates designated as the constituency in-charge. The police hierarchy has been obliterated with the deputy chief minister, who is also the scion of the ruling oligarchy, giving instructions directly to police station heads who are usually in the rank of assistant sub-inspectors of police. This subversion of the structure of the uniformed forces has converted the Punjab Police into a virtual front organisation for the Akali Dal-BJP government.

Latest reports suggest even development funding is now being arbitrarily outsourced to elected and defeated political activists of the ruling combine, bypassing all established channels of the civil administration.

The fifth challenge is the sudden resurgence of the separatist fringe in the state. The mishandling of the sacrilege issue as well as the controversy on the question of a religious pardon granted to the head of Dera Sacha Sauda has provided space to the hardliners to reassert themselves. There has always been a minuscule but vocal minority that has clung to the dream of a separate Sikh homeland, mistakenly believing and erroneously propagating that when India was partitioned in 1947, the Hindus got Hindustan, the Muslims got Pakistan but the Sikhs got a raw deal. Their intermittent dormancy should not be misconstrued as permanent redundancy as they have a resonance with some influential elements of the Sikh diaspora that provide both moral and material support to their activities. This phenomenon will be more visibly seen this time around.

Sixth, recent revelations about alleged fake encounters during the decade-and-a-half of extremism that points a finger at certain officers of the Punjab Police. If these revelations are correct, then those involved would have to face the legal system because state terrorism cannot be accepted. It is a travesty that officers facing heinous criminal charges for gross human rights abuse continue to occupy the highest positions in the state police. In addition to the domestic turmoil, Punjab is also a frontline border state that is always in Pakistan’s cross hairs, as can be seen in the Pathankot outrage.

What Punjab requires at the moment is resuscitation of the normal governance processes. It can ill afford to experiment with the AAP’s ochlocracy that is on display in Delhi. There is only one template for decent governance in Punjab: A competent administrator that can run the state and impartially protect its interests.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/on-the-brink-of-an-abyss-punjab-s-governance-economy-are-in-shambles/story-9zoQR2xLAmwI362Qu6entJ.html

What people have to bare in mind is that only two sides are really interested in the facts of what happened - us and the British. If you know anything about the way in which the British describe their history it comes as no surprise the way they describe their losses as being small. Each historical book written by British historians that I have read tends to round off each battle with a little paragraph about how there were more enemies than Brits but somehow they still managed to kill plenty of the enemy and win. - it can feel like reading a cricket score rather than an actual factual set of figures! It's a bit like those war films where the people who made the film like to show their side mowing down loads of the other side, whilst each of their losses is given a heroic moment to signify their importance over the enemy. It should therefore come as no surprise that the British fudged their casualty figures during the Anglo-Sikh Wars, doing things like only reporting on one regiment's losses as the figure for the entire army, not counting how many of their own sepoys they lost or simply just ordering the press not to report on any casualties. Considering how many British regiments used to have days named after battles from the Anglo-SIkh Wars where the officers would hand over all battle standards to their sergeants to commemorate how during the actual battle their officers were wiped out just shows where the actual truth lies. Or reading more factual accounts showing the levels of shell shock and grief caused by their losses inflicted on the Brits mentally.

As for our losses, we'll never know. The casualty figures were kept by the regiments but after the Wars the headquarters would have been taken over by the Brits so all evidence would no longer be available. Some accounts are passed down by the families from some of the old regiments but these are largely anecdotal. Personally, I think Sikh casualty figures were lighter than the Brits for most battles but overall may have been higher in the first war due to the events of Sobraon and what went down in Patiala. In the second war I think the massacre of Sikh troops retreating from Gujrat would have tipped the casualty figures to balance earlier British losses in the war.

On balance, it's probably best not to get too worked up about the actual numbers. The British could replace their losses in the time it took a ship to sail from Portsmouth to Calcutta, where as we were a minority ruling a empire full of backstabbers and idiots, we could not replace the quality and quantity we lost. Not even all this time since those wars.

12 hours ago, jaikaara said:

Very interesting , the die-hard patriotism of the Ghadrites is just beyond compare. One thing worth noticing is how biased is man for his own selfish motives. The diaspora there is reluctant to teach their children about this man in order to curb herofication and they preach hatred against the land of their origin and the Hindus.

I thinks the reluctance is more to do with the fact that the average sikh coconut in Canada has more in common with the singhs hired by the likes of Hopkinson than they do with a freedom lover like Mewa Singh. It's a bit rich for Hindustanis to appropriate the Ghadar party especially as many of their beliefs were a mixture of Sikh Imperial attitudes towards liberating all of India from the pre-colonial era combined with newer schools of thought that included Socialism and Nationalism. I doubt the Ghadars from the turn of the last century would celebrate Partition, 1984 and the way Hindustan has become a more modern version of British India with brown folk instead of white folk in charge of impoverishing the masses and poisoning their minds with bigotry and fecklessness.

Do you know what pound shot that swivel gun alongside the swords fires and how old it is? Wonderful pictures btw, any measurements you have of the firearms would be great to know.

If there's a ful blown recession most of these countries will have to pull out of their commitments against Daesh anyway, the coalition America has put together is such a loose bunch of nobodies everyone knows its just for show.

On 14/01/2016 at 5:12 PM, kdsingh80 said:

A nation that was almost invincible 75 years ago is now in such a state that immigrants are raping and molesting their women and they can't even defend them

That's one way to look at it. But it would be a pretty Daily Mail way of looking at it.

In Britain, the Government has instigated insurrection against the Syrian government, sold weapons to Saudi Arabia that have made their way to terrorist groups in the country and refused to take any more than a handful of refugees. The Germans on the other hand have sent modern arms to the Kurds, offered homes to the displaced and opened their health and psychiatric facilities to the Yazidis in order to rehabilitate their girls and women who have been tortured by ISIS. They have even flown some of these girls out of Iraq at their own expense and not moaned about it. Compare this to the UK where the NHS and Social Services have no hope of helping the thousands in Rochdale, Rotherham, Oxford etc who have been abused and it's laughable anyone points fingers at the Germans. It's not their fault the Sunni men are renowned for being brave when it comes to taking advantage of women and children, but not when it comes to fighting a proper fight. How the Sunnis can act like this in a country that has taken them in has just shown others not to be so sympathetic - the Sunnis are shooting themselves in the foot in the long term.

I've noticed this about you KDS, you are keen to point out problems in other societies, but you must have heard about the grooming in Canada/UK amongst Sikhs? You must also known that Badal has banned media outlets from reporting on the caste and religion/race of sex offenders after the massive spate of rapes in East Punjab perpetrated by muslims? Plenty of horror stories coming out of East Punjab about muslim men raping widows and grooming girls in orphanages whilst intiimidating staff. Not to mention all the weapon stockpiles discovered in Ludhiana and Chandigarh in houses containing large numbers of sulleh. Maybe we should be a bit more worried about what's about to go down under our noses rather than watching what happens elsewhere like it's a soap opera on some banal desi TV channel.

5 hours ago, dalsingh101 said:

What's up with all the attacks on education institutes?

Just like after the 'peaceful' protests ended in Syria in 2010, the extremists shift to attacking education and media outlets. The media outlets are targetted to spread fear and to reduce the ability for the other side to keep their populace informed. The educational establishments are targetted to disrupt career progression of young people by forcing them to look to other means of making a living - in Syria a lot of former university students have been drafted into the ranks of various ISIS units who conduct special operations. Attacking educational establishments such as cadet academies and universities highlights the states inability to protect it's young.... and in turn safeguard it's future. That's the message behind this.

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The community had long been reluctant to discuss the actions of Mewa Singh, an immigrant and freedom fighter who shot a Canadian government official

Last weekend in Vancouver, people attending the play The Undocumented Trial of William C. Hopkinson got a chance to relive a part of Canadian history that’s usually seen as a mere footnote in official textbooks.

The play tells the story of Mewa Singh, a young Sikh man who emigrated to Canada from India in 1906. He was involved in the Ghadar Party movement seeking Indian independence from British rule and killed immigration officer William C Hopkinson in 1915, an act for which he was tried and hanged. This incident is considered a closing chapter in the 1914 story of the Komagata Maru steamship, in which Sikhs were turned away from Canadian shores. It is now widely accepted as an example of a “deliberate, exclusionary policy of the Canadian government to keep out ethnicities it deemed unfit to enter the country [in order to] keep Canada a White Man’s Country”.

Singh’s story may be lore for many members of the South Asian Canadian diaspora, and more specifically the Sikh community in British Columbia. But others in Canada – many of whom knew nothing of Komagata Maru incident until the centennial commemoration – have no idea of the role that Singh played.

The story goes that Hopkinson, who had lived in India and was fluent in Hindi, was working as an intelligence agent in Vancouver, “monitoring any perceived seditious, anti-British activities among the South Asian population… particularly after the formation of the Ghadar Party in North America”. He employed informants and created friction within the South Asian community. Another one of his informants, Bela Singh, ended up killing two men in a gurdwara. When Hopkinson tried to recruit Mewa Singh, his response was to shoot him. In a written statement, Mewa Singh explained his actions by blaming Hopkinson for creating trouble in his community.

Close to home

For Paneet Singh, the writer of the play, that history helped make sense of his own contemporary struggle. Growing up as an observant Sikh, he often felt like an outsider.

“I felt this dichotomy – on the one hand, I was going to the gurdwara, and then I had a separate life watching hockey and all those typical Canadian things,” Paneet Singh said in a telephone interview from Vancouver. “But I was not sure where I belonged.”

He said the identity crisis got worse after the 9/11 terror attacks in New York, when Sikhs wearing turbans and beards were targeted.

“I remember in high school, during winter, two kids pushed me into a pile of snow, and were throwing snowballs at me, calling me Osama Bin Laden,” Paneet Singh said. “When I learnt about Mewa Singh, and his defiance, and his armed resistance that fit in with the Sikh ethos, it solidified my place. The history of Mewa Singh is no different than the history of [Canadian icon] Terry Fox. He made me feel I belong here, he brought my worlds together.”

Although Paneet Singh had been researching Mewa Singh’s history out of personal interest for years, he embarked on writing The Undocumented Trial of William C. Hopkinson last year. Last January, he was part of a group that commemorated the centennial of Mewa Singh’s execution by organising a funeral procession, which was preceded by a panel discussion on the legacy of Mewa Singh. He was mulling over creating a short documentary or film on Mewa Singh, when the idea of a site-specific play crossed his mind.

“I’ve had a sporadic realisation that we don’t know our own local history,” he said. “When I started doing my research, I went into the archives, looked at news reports, pulled up microfilms… A few months later, I was on this quest to find the jail where Mewa Singh was held. Although I had heard the story so many times orally – from my mother or other elders – there were different versions. And I thought, Mewa Singh got capital punishment, there must be records somewhere.”

In the end, this piece of information was found far closer to home.

“I have travelled so many times to Punjab, and visited different historical sites,” he said. “But I was not connected to this monumental piece of Canadian history. And as it happens, I live five minutes from where Mewa Singh was hanged. But there is no homage, no marker.”

The site-specific play that Paneet Singh ended up writing is being staged at the Vancouver Art Gallery, which was once the Vancouver Provincial Courthouse where Mewa Singh’s trial took place in October 1914. The play, which runs till January 11 – the day that Mewa Singh was executed – aims to re-examine the trial, “transforming it from an open-and-shut case to a surreal debate of conscience,” according to the playbill. All shows are sold out.

Coming to terms

According to Gurpreet Singh, a journalist and author of a book on Mewa Singh, the story of Hopkinson’s assassin is not very well-known especially among the larger South Asian Canadian diaspora across Canada. He said that this is partially because of the older generation’s cautionary attitude about valourising someone who killed a Canadian government official.

Gurpreet Singh learnt about Komagata Maru and Mewa Singh only after he came to Canada in 2001.

“Throughout my schooling in India – I went to Kendriya Vidyalaya – nowhere ever did I have the opportunity to read about the Ghadar history,” said Gurpreet Singh, who is also a talk show host for Spice Radio in Burnaby, British Columbia. “We read about Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad… but never the Ghadar Party. I had a brief idea because I have relatives in Jalandhar, and there is a Ghadar memorial there. But this has never been part of popular or mainstream history.”

While studying social history at the University of British Columbia, Gurpreet Singh proposed writing on Mewa Singh. Though professors welcomed the idea, many elders in the Sikh community discouraged him for bringing up an "inconvenient history".

Now, there are many groups trying to keep Mewa Singh’s legacy alive, and some that are petitioning him to be declared a Canadian hero.

“What he stood for would be recognised as Canadian values today – against racism, for equality,” said Gurpreet Singh. “There are some youngsters who are doing a good job, trying to get a plaque to recognise him or get January 11 recognised as Mewa Singh Day.”

http://scroll.in/article/801617/a-century-on-canada-sikhs-are-making-peace-with-an-inconvenient-history-with-a-play

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In Dallas, Armaan Singh Sarai spent 3 days in juvenile detention after a classmate said his backpack held a bomb

Imagine that your twelve-year-old son doesn’t come home one day after school. You’re always worried about him because he’s not even a teenager but has already required three open heart surgeries thanks to a congenital condition. He’s not a tough kid but a “goofball,” and you’ve recently moved from San Antonio to Arlington, a suburb of Dallas, Texas, where everything is bigger, including the trouble. Nobody is telling you where he is. Nobody will answer your questions. He’s just…disappeared.

School officials aren’t helping. Neither are the police. Eventually, you discover that he’s being held in a juvenile detention center. He’s born and raised in Texas. An American citizen. A kid.

Why did the Arlington police hold a twelve-year-old boy with a heart condition for three days without alerting his parents? Why did the school principal call the police in the first place?

Because his name is Armaan Singh Sarai, his working-class Indian family is Sikh, and a “bully” at his school accused him of having a bomb in his backpack.

According to a Facebook post by Ginee Haer, who identifies herself as his cousin,

“On Friday, December 11th, 2015, my cousin attended school, like any other normal 12 year old child. A bully in class thought it would be funny to accuse him of having a bomb, and so the principal, without any questioning, interrogation, or notification to his parents, called the police. Worried & frightened at home, his family was concerned as to why he had not reached home right after school. They started calling every police department in the area, only to find out he was sent to a Juvenile facility. They kept him held behind bars for three consecutive days, before finally releasing him on Monday, December 15th.”

Armaan had carried a “power bag” to school, meaning his backpack has a built-in battery charger for a cell phone. Numerous companies sell these bags, which are not cheap but popular enough to be sold out right now in several styles and categories on Amazon. “The student in front of me, who is the one who made the accusation. . . said that [the backpack] looked like a bomb,” [Armaan] Singh said, per a report in the Washington Post. “Then Friday. . . I came back to that period and he was in front of me again and he said ‘I’m going to go tell on you. I’m going to go tell on you and say all this stuff about you. I’m going to go tell on you.’ Singh said he laughed at the other student, who did the same.

But the other student wasn’t joking. He made good on his threat, telling the teacher that Armaan had a bomb. The teacher told the principal, who called the police, which came to school and “grabbed” him. Now at home because he’s been suspended from school, Armaan must wear an ankle monitor as he awaits his court date. Though he is twelve years old, it is currently unclear whether he’ll be tried as a juvenile or an adult, and what charges he will face for the crime of carrying a trendy backpack to school.

There are more than a few parallels to “clock kid” Ahmed Mohamed, who was fourteen years old and living with his family in a Dallas suburb when he was accused of bringing a bomb to school. But the specifics of Armaan’s situation more closely resemble the targeting of Veereender Jubbal, a Sikh who was set up to become the face of terrorism after the November 13 Paris attacks. Veerender is not a Muslim or a terrorist. He’s a Canadian. But, like Armaan, Veerender has a goofy sense of humor and loves to play video games, and he was maliciously targeted by racist individuals in the gaming community who knew that he had no involvement whatsoever with Islamic extremism, but went ahead and labeled him a terrorist anyways. Newspapers around the world picked up a doctored image of Veerender which had falsely identified him as one of the 11/13 Paris bombers, thereby placing his life in real danger. Since November 23, after being inundated with vitriol and threats, Veerender turned himself into “Ghost Veerender” and went on a Twitter hiatus.

In Armaan’s case, a nameless “bully” targeted the most vulnerable kid in striking range at his school: a boy with a serious heart condition who was not only the new kid but whose race and religion identified him as an outsider. The bully chose his victim well: the police are vociferously defending their actions despite no evidence of any wrongdoing on Armaan’s part. Instead, at every step of the way, the bully’s lie was supported, endorsed, and reinforced by the actions of every adult authority figure who ought to have known better. That they did not is far more troubling than a child acting cruelly. The institutional response is only comprehensible inside a racist framework that makes it seem reasonable to assume that all brown people are Islamic extremists conspiring to blow up white Americans, and presumed to be guilty rather than innocent.

“Protect and serve? My ass,” the Sikh bank clerk complains in Spike Lee’s film, “Inside Man,” 2006, about a confounding bank heist where the police are unable to distinguish the hostages from the criminals, and so they treat the victims as if they’re violent felons. “Where’s my turban?” the bank clerk asks angrily. “I’m not talking to anyone without a turban. It’s part of my religion to cover my head as in respect to God. I’m a Sikh. Not an Arab, by the way, like your cops called me outside…First you beat me and now you want my help…admin cut tired of this shit. What happened to my admin cut civil rights? Why can’t I go anywhere without being harassed?”

It shouldn’t even be relevant that Sikhs are not Muslims, because being mistaken for “an Arab” isn’t the nut of the problem. What’s wrong is being attacked and bullied, period. What’s worse is the cultural condoning of such violence. Yet numerous reports have not only been tracking a surge of Islamophobia since 9/11 and the spike of hate crimes against Muslims since 11/13, but also they’ve also repeatedly pointed out–in tones of near despair—that, collectively, white Americans are fine with it. Islamophobia is so thick and pernicious that a shameful number of Republicans (and Democrats) are in favor of bombing Agrabah  just because it’s somewhere in “Arabia” — when it’s actually the fictional setting of the Disney film “Aladdin.”

Given the difficulties of countering the Disneyfied geographic imaginary, it shouldn’t be too surprising that in Texas, racist paranoia has made it possible for a bully to accuse brown kid of bringing a bomb to school, and the institutions of education and law enforcement rush to validate the accuser, not the victim. In this era of “see something, say something,” an increasingly intolerant political narrative affirms that the bully did the right thing. Things you learn by going today to school and obeying the rules.

Paula Young Lee is the author of "Deer Hunting in Paris," winner of the 2014 Lowell Thomas "Best Book" award of the Society of American Travel Writers. She is currently writing outdoor adventure books for middle grade and young adults. Follow her on Twitter @paulayounglee

 

http://www.salon.com/2015/12/18/its_the_clock_kid_all_over_again_a_12_year_old_sikh_boy_is_the_latest_victim_of_racist_terrorism_paranoia/

So annoying how people live like paupers over here just to horde their wealth over there and rub it into poor people's faces. Farm Land ownership and foreign money need to be detached, the older generation need to make money from one or the other, not wreck their homeland to act like old school Sardars. Acting like this in a modern, post-Partition world is just laughable.

On 29/12/2015 at 10:46 PM, dalsingh101 said:

 

What foreign rulers have you seen bowling about in the equivalent of a bottom of the range, market stall kurta pajama and national health glasses? 

Eh? He's wearing traditional Punjabi business attire, stop being so racist.

Seriously though I was more on about his attempts at building a road system and ambulance service which are more like something a cargo cult would do than what the people in E.Punjab actually need. And indebting them for his visions,

 It's part and parcel of British class culture that some people are above question and others are guilty simply due their station in life. One thing about people with no power is that they are reluctant to see the worst in those who rule them as the truth can be too hard to contemplate - that the lives of the poor and disadvantaged are subject to the whims of the rich and powerful. That is why this issue has been untouched in their society - no one had the will or power to see it through to bring people to account. Also in the last couple of decades British society has come the closest to escaping the 'Layer Cake' social system it has been renowned for exporting around the world. Personally I think these exposures will be whitewashed and brushed under the carpet eventually so people can go back to holding their 'betters' in awe. My respect to those who still uncover the dirt and rub people's noses in it though.

Historically, this probably started with the Saxon invasion of Britannia and the Norman invasion of England. The treatment of women and children after both invasions has been ignored by historians, mostly as the English are never going to be negative about their ancestors. In the aftermath of both invasions one group found itself having total power over another, with no recourse for any crimes committed, allowing them to use rape and paedophilia to keep others subjegated. I could go on, but there isnt much point in boring you all - just look at how quickly female equality spread in Britain after the age of marriage was increased, slums were cleared and orphans were treated better. It was things like that which made it harder for these sickos to get away with what they wanted.

As for our own history, everyone knows those stories about British officers chasing after orphan boys in Lahore's marketplaces had an element of truth about them...

Sikhs are having so few kids as for the last decade all the youngsters in Punjab have left to be 'brickies and prossies' abroad. Obviously if they hadnt and had families the decline wouldnt be so severe. You also have those men/women who get married later or arent in a position to support a family. The government, community and religious institutions should be trying to help but most of those are in the hands of selfish idiots.

As for the arrests, why not name,publicise and shame the police officers involved? Start a letter writing campaign? Amnesty International have used these tactics and they do work.

The Badals are beyond contempt. Even George Osbourne and IDS wouldnt sink to such depths to get money out of the common people.  When are people there going to realise how much damage Badal has done trying to live like a foreign ruler?