My memorable visit to the site of racist massacre in US Close to the 12th anniversary of the killings of seven Sikhs at Oak Creek Gurdwara in Wisconsin, the ghost of the incident continues to haunt minority communities in the US. The August 5, 2012, incident left six worshippers dead, including the temple president Satwant Singh Kaleka. A seventh, Punjab Singh, was in a coma, and breathed his last in March 2020.
The victims included one woman, Paramjit Kaur. The other four were Prakash Singh, Suveg Singh Khattra, Ranjit Singh and Sita Singh. The lone gunman, Wade Michael Page, later killed himself. Going by his ideological background, this was clearly a racially motivated crime directed against a visible minority group, as he was a part of a neo-Nazi network.
This was not the first time that Sikhs were targeted by white supremacists. There has been a spate of attacks on both Sikhs and Muslims since 9/11. I was recently vacationing in Chicago and Milwaukee with my wife Rachna Singh, who is the BC Minister for Education, and our two children. She was previously the Parliamentary Secretary for anti-racism initiative. Since we have followed these developments very closely, she being a political activist and anti-racist trade unionist for years before being elected in 2017, and I being a professional journalist, we decided to stop at the gurdwara on our way back home from Milwaukee on July 29.
Since it was a Monday there weren’t many people inside the temple, which is busy over the weekends. Rajinder Singh, a hymn singer, opened the main door for us. A sign outside warned against bringing inside any weapon. He told us that these doors are bullet proof, and the temple has limited access on ordinary days for security reasons. Singh gave us a tour of the gurdwara and shared many details of how it all happened. He showed us the bullet hole inside the door leading to the congregation room. Not only has the sign of violence been preserved, but the pictures of all those who laid down their lives are sitting inside the library.
Singh told us that they are planning to display these pictures permanently on the wall in the hallway for everyone to see. He then explained how the killer could have claimed more human lives, as he was able to get inside the community kitchen room where many women had locked themselves up in a safe spot. When we left, it took us some time to process everything within our minds. I had covered it remotely on Radio India in Surrey, where I used to work back then. This memorable visit coincided with Donald Trump’s effort to get re-elected as US President. Trump is known for his racist views, and emboldened white supremacy during his last term, while his Democrat rival Kamala Harris could become the first woman of colour to lead the US. For the record, she is half Indian and half Black.
Unfortunately, during our weeklong vacation, a very few Sikhs we met in Milwaukee were either eager to support Trump, or perpetuated racist stereotypes about Blacks. To be fair, we did not meet many people to test the general mood within the broader Sikh diaspora, which is definitely diverse and cannot be painted with one brush. But it showed that in spite of the history of what happened in Oak Creek, there is a lot to do to keep anti-racist conversations alive and defeat bigotry. Under no circumstances can the politics of Trump be normalized, nor should it be presumed that racism is dead. And that goes for Canada where right-wing political parties continue to gain ground. After all, the Surrey Gurdwara also witnessed the murder of Nirmal Singh Gill by neo-Nazis in 1998. There have been racist attacks on mosques, synagogues and Black churches across North America over all these years. So let’s be awake. That’s my takeaway from what we learnt during this trip.