«« Intégration et religion

Sikhs compromise to placate majority

When 12-year-old Gurbaj Singh's concealed ceremonial dagger fell out of his clothing in a LaSalle schoolyard in November, no one could have guessed the widespread controversy it would generate.

Rights groups, Sikh organizations, Web sites and newspapers across the country and as far away as India picked up a story that would have gone unnoticed if the local governing board of Gurbaj's school had accepted a compromise negotiated between Gurbaj's family and the parent school board.

Instead, the matter is now in court while parties involved in the dispute and observers of all stripes give vent to their anguish or rage on the issue of whether or not a baptized Sikh boy should be allowed to wear a sheathed, concealed kirpan with a 10-centimetre blade at school.

For some 40 parents, a few of whom joined their kids in hurling epithets like "Paki" at Gurbaj, the issue is simple. The kirpan, whatever its ceremonial or spiritual significance to Sikhs, is a knife with a sharp blade, a potential weapon and unsafe in a school environment.

For the world's 23 million Sikhs, and particularly the 15 to 30 per cent baptized ones, the issue is also simple - it's all about the freedom to practice one's religion.

For society, and presumably the majority of the parents in LaSalle who did not keep their kids home when Gurbaj returned to school wearing his kirpan under a temporary court order, the issue is less clear-cut.

On the table are a heap of related issues and questions involving law, spirituality, cultural identity and the clash between individual and collective rights and beliefs.

As a source of social controversy, the kirpan is hardly a newcomer. It continues to generate vigorous and often hostile debate in the tangled land of its birth, India, where Sikhs constitute a tiny minority of around 2 per cent, considerably behind Christians and Muslims in absolute numbers and dwarfed by the majority Hindus.

The kirpan emerged as a religious symbol in Sikhism in the 1600s, many decades after it was founded by Guru Nanak (1469-1539 AD) as a monotheistic offshoot of Hinduism and Islam.

Guru Hargobind, the sixth of 10 Sikh gurus, is recorded to have carried two kirpans as symbols of a Sikh's spiritual and temporal obligations.

(Indeed, two such kirpans, a double-edged sword called khanda that cleaves truth from falsehood and a circle representing the infinite are on a commemorative stamp issued by Canada in 1999 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Sikh presence in this country.)

The kirpan gained formal symbolic status under Guru Gobind Singh, the last Sikh guru, in 1699. ( Henceforth the Sikhs would worship their holy book, the Granth Sahib, as their guru.)

Guru Gobind Singh introduced a baptism-by-the-sword ceremony in which the initiate is instructed in the duties and obligations of becoming a khalsa - one belonging to God.

The ceremony, which includes imbibing a blessed nectar of sugar and water stirred in a steel bowl with a kirpan, enjoins the khalsa to live by the moral and spiritual standards of the Sikh gurus at all times, to abstain from smoking, drinking and other intoxicants, to pray daily and wear the five distinct physical symbols of Sikhism.

The khalsa is required to have on his person at all times the panch kakke - the five Ks. These are the keshas (unshorn hair), the kirpan (sheathed sword), the kachhehra (underwear), the kanga (comb) and the karha (steel bracelet).

The Sikh code that describes these requirements does not specify the length of the kirpan or how it is to be worn. Thus kirpans can be metre-long swords carried by Sikhs during religious festivals, marriages and parades. They can also be daggers with blades as tiny as 3 inches.

Indeed, before security concerns led to their banning from planes in India and since Sept. 11 in North America, many airlines, including Air Canada and the defunct Canadian Airlines, used to allow Sikhs to carry a sheathed, concealed kirpan on board whose blade length did not exceed 4 inches, the generally accepted legal length at the time for carry-on penknives and other sharp instruments.

In the past few decades, the length of a kirpan and the material from which it is made have been a key part of the debate for security-dictated environments like airports, planes and legal courts. Traditionally, a kirpan has to be made of steel and have a sharp blade. But there have been cases where Sikhs have compromised by wearing blunt plastic representations.

Whatever its size or sharpness, Sikhs are forbidden from using the kirpan as a weapon except in the most extreme of hypothetical cases where spiritual and moral justice is under attack.

As a minority wherever they live, Sikhs have been forced to protect their distinctive religious symbols, which have come to include their beards and the turbans or special cloths male Sikhs wear over their neatly combed and knotted, uncut hair.

They have also learned to accommodate the values, beliefs and practices of the majority in honourable compromises that retain the essence of their beliefs and practices. Indeed, in the wake of Sept. 11, Sikh groups, newsletters and Web sites have been forthright in advising their community to respect the new air-security regulations.

As a general rule, the constitutions, laws and courts of free nations like Canada, India, Britain, Australia and the United States have upheld the right of Sikhs to practice their religion, whether it concerns the wearing of turbans (and kirpans) by Mounties or by schoolchildren, teachers or soldiers.

If the Quebec Superior Court's final verdict expected on May 16 is in favour of Gurbaj Singh, the court will be siding with the remarkably enlightened reaction of the majority of people affected or reacting to his case.

- Ashok Chandwani can be reached at (514) 987-2469. His E-mail address is ashok@thegazette.southam.ca.