Ambassadors of faith
Chicago Sikhs reflect on 1984 Operation Blue Star massacre in India, formation of Sikh American identity
In the early 1980s, Amrith Kaur Aakre’s father was the co-host of a locally produced television show that served Chicago’s growing Indian American community.
Her father abruptly ended his run on the popular show “Chitrahar” in 1984 when producers refused to speak out against Operation Blue Star, a military assault that took place in the north Indian state of Punjab in June of that year on the Golden Temple, the holiest site in the Sikh faith, and 41 other gurdwaras, or Sikh houses of worship, leaving thousands dead and the holiest structure in the Sikh faith destroyed.
“He left; he left in protest and never went back,” Aakre, 41, recalled.
Today, generations of Sikhs in Chicago and across the United States continue to grapple with the legacy of the events of 1984. As older generations keep the tradition of protest and remembrance, strong, younger Sikhs are adding new perspectives and forms of expression to the conversation.
Though they lack the firsthand experiences of their parents and grandparents, their perspectives are aided by the new age of social media and information sharing, a post-9/11 America, and modern understandings of race and discrimination, according to Simran Jeet Singh, executive director of the Religion & Society Program at The Aspen Institute and a scholar of religious pluralism.
Newer generations take a unique approach to 1984, as “they are very much inclined to see the world through intersectionality” and “how people’s experiences connect across different identities,” Singh said.
“For this generation that is up and coming, they see the world so different from how so many of us, including myself, were raised … I’m 37 and when I was growing up it was ‘You experience race as a Sikh and that’s different than what Muslims in America face and that’s different from what Black people face,’ ” he said. “What’s different now is that ... it’s becoming increasingly clear to us that these experiences and functions of persecution and marginalization are very much interconnected.”
A unique Sikh American identity
Aakre’s family immigrated to Chicago in the 1970s, joining a growing community of Sikh families in the emerging Sikh Religious Society, which built the Palatine gurdwara in the late 1970s. For Aakre, the gurdwara was a place where she and other young Sikhs, who were often the only Sikhs in their schools, could find “community” and “cohesion.”
In June 1984, political and religious tensions between Sikhs and the Indian government came to a head when the Indian military launched Operation Blue Star, a military assault on the Golden Temple in Punjab to remove religious and political leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his followers from the temple complex. Later that year, on Oct. 31, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards, prompting mass mob killings in New Delhi and Punjab in November.
As a new wave of Sikh immigrants who experienced this violence firsthand settled in the Chicago area in the 1980s, the existing community experienced a shift in values, Aakre said. Making sure the next generation really understood Sikh values replaced previous inclinations toward Americanization.
According to Aakre, now the legal director of the Sikh Coalition, a volunteer organization founded in 2001 in response to hate violence against Sikhs after 9/11, a “mental shift” occurred in her household in the 1980s. The Chicago Sikh community, which had embedded itself in the broader Indian diaspora in Chicago, felt the ripple effects of political and religious strife occurring in India.
“My family always identified as Sikh; we’ve been Sikh now for seven generations that we know of, and the Sikh identity is strong. However, post-1984 we genuinely identified as Sikh. Before we (identified) as Indian American, we were Sikh American. That became like the crux of our identity. And I don’t think we’ve ever looked back,” Aakre said.
Across the United States, there are approximately 400,000 to 500,000 Sikhs, with an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 residing in the Chicago area. Sikhs belong to the world’s fifth-largest faith. Founded in the 15th century by Guru Nanak Dev Ji in Punjab, Sikhism emphasizes ideals such as civic duty and selfless service.
The highly visible nature of the Sikh identity, most notably the turbans that many men and women wear, has made Sikhs vulnerable to extensive hate crimes in the United States, including targeted violence following 9/11, the 2012 Oak Creek mass shooting at a gurdwara in Wisconsin, the 2021 FedEx shooting in Indianapolis and the recent assaults on Sikhs in Queens, New York.
“I think when you have people that are strongly committed and identify strongly with a certain faith that has such visible characteristics like Sikhism, there’s always going to be some sort of a backlash because it is different from the norm to some extent,” Aakre said.
As a lawyer, Aakre has seen firsthand how the communal trauma of 1984 continues to hang over Sikhs old and young.
“I’ve represented many clients in discrimination cases here in the U.S. who by the time they reach out to the Sikh Coalition for legal assistance … they’ve endured discrimination for years,” she said. “I’m convinced that they allow themselves to endure it because they are so done with conflict, because they lived through and experienced 1984 and how traumatizing that was and they have a threshold for emotional and physical trauma that they should not have.”
Generational differences
Every year since 1984, community leaders in Chicago have organized protests outside the Indian Consulate in downtown Chicago during the anniversary of Operation Blue Star in June and the anniversary of the anti-Sikh riots in November.
Jairam Singh Kahlon, who moved to Chicago in 1988 and is the board of trustees president of the Palatine gurdwara, noted low turnout from younger members of the community in recent years.
“(Enthusiasm) is declining. I would say the new generation is not keeping up, or for some reason they are not connected, probably because of lack of awareness. … That is a big disconnect we see right now,” he said.
Parminder Singh Mann, 41, an active member of the Palatine gurdwara community, believes that the annual protests at the Indian consulate have become routine: “It’s almost like something that is done, it’s just done as a motion, right? Like, oh, yes, June, oh, we’re supposed to go protest. There’s no consistency.”
Mann, who grew up in Chicago and helped found the University of Illinois Chicago’s first Sikh Student Association in 2000, cited new forms of expression among younger generations of Sikhs, pointing to Canadian poet Rupi Kaur’s work and the music of the recently slain Punjabi rapper Sidhu Moose Wala as “expressing the sentiments of the Sikh community about 1984 through poetry, through songs, through art.”
This year, the Palatine gurdwara held an exhibit for the anniversary of Operation Blue Star that showcased each day of the operation. As a “parent and leader,” Kahlon noted a sense of duty to make sure future generations are educated on “what happened to them, to their parents, their grandparents.”
Knowledge of 1984 has been maintained through the telling of personal stories and anecdotes between generations, a trend that held true for Singh when he first learned of the events of 1984 in the early 1990s. According to Singh, the Sikh community has become “increasingly better about bringing voice to these experiences” and creating spaces for survivors to share their stories.
“The surprising part for me was (these survivors) weren’t new people I had never met before, they were people I had known all along and I had just never heard their story,” Singh said.
For 16-year-old Esees Kaur, her first exposure to 1984 came when she was 7 years old attending Camp Sikh Virsa, a semiannual camp in Wisconsin. Kaur said her “connection to ’84 is mostly through anecdotes.”
“As a young kid, you don’t fully understand the gravity of the situation,” she said. “I would say that it wasn’t until this year that I really started to research a little bit more on my own. I started reading books and watching documentaries on it and really just trying to understand all perspectives of what occurred.
… I think that really just helped me understand the personal accounts that I’ve heard a lot better.”
Mann grew up knowing many elders who began practicing their faith more strongly after 1984. After 9/11, seeing the Sikh identity again under attack in the United States, Mann found himself in a similar position and decided to start keeping his hair. Many Sikhs keep their hair uncut because they believe in the perfection of God’s creation.
Two defining incidents behind Mann’s decision to keep his hair were a Fox News anchor pointing out a turbaned Sikh man on live television just after 9/11 and declaring, “Here’s one of them,” and the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man who was the first victim of hate violence after 9/11.
For Mann, the decision to wear a turban was a part of the broader Sikh spirit, which he says is “about standing up; it’s never about cowering.”
“I was born here. I can speak the language. I want to be an ambassador of my faith. I want people to come up to me and ask me and I want to do that work, right? Like I don’t want to just get lost in the masses. So that was another connection for me to ’84 and how I live my life in America.”