India Post News Service

NEW YORK: The Sikh community in New York took out a protest march in Queens last week to protest against a spate of hate crimes against Sikh school students while urging the Department of Education to take proactive steps to stop the menace. Organized by the Sikh Coalition, nearly 200 Sikhs, many of them school children, marched on June 30 from the two gurdwaras in Richmond Hill in Queens, shouting slogans and waving placards to stop hate crimes against Sikhs.

The latest incident that prompted the protest march was when 12-year old Gurprit Kaur, a student of Public School 219 in Flushing found that at least three inches of her hair was cut off by a fellow student. The Sikh religion mandates that followers of the religion do not cut their hair. The school immediately suspended the girl’s attacker.

The Gurprit incident was preceded by another one where Jagmohan Singh Premi, an 18-year old from the Richmond Hill School was allegedly punched in the face on June 3 after a tried to remove his patka (smaller turban). Premi’s attacker too had been suspended by the school. These were not isolated cases since the Queens borough has been witnessing a series of anti-Sikh crimes over the past several months.

Last year, 15-yer old Harpal Singh Vacher’s turban was pulled off and his hair chopped off with scissors by a fellow student in an Elmhurst School. The attacker was later convicted of hate crime. The purpose of the protest march was to push the New York Department of Education to end bias-based harassment of Sikh children in city schools. "It is about time that the Department recognizes that Sikh children in particular are vulnerable to bias-based harassment and violence in school," said the Sikh Coalition.

The Sikh protesters demanded that the Department of Education take proactive action rather than react whenever an incident occurs. Several Sikh children who marched in protest said that they had all been victims of either verbal or physical abuse perpetrated by fellow students at school. The Sikh Coalition, a New York-based advocacy and rights group, released a report in April, which said that almost 60 percent of the 400 Sikh students surveyed had suffered bias-based harassment or violence in city schools.

John Liu, New York Council Member who is on the Council’s Education Committee, also addressed the protesters. "Continuing inaction by the department of education in the face of repeated bias attacks in our public schools is utterly reprehensible, not only because of the bigotry and hate involved but also because the department refuses to acknowledge the magnitude of this persistent problem," Liu said. School officials who met with the Coalition discussed diversity educational programs to be implemented at the beginning of the new school year in the Fall.

However, Sikh Coalition says the Department has not been clear on whether these programs will include specific education for teachers and students on Sikhs and Sikh concerns in school. The Coalition called on the Department to implement a more Sikh-specific program since Sikh children are uniquely vulnerable to bias-based harassment.

In addition, the Sikh Coalition has formally requested that the Department share with the Coalition the Department’s planned Chancellor’s Regulation on addressing bias-based incident in city schools. The Department has agreed to meet with the Coalition before any such regulation is made public or implemented so that the Sikh Coalition can have input on its implementation.