For Sikhs in New York, a decade of progress since 9/11

Like countless New Yorkers, Amrik Singh Chawla remembers the moment. He had just exited a cab and was walking to the World Trade Center PATH station when he looked up and saw the large wheel of an airplane.

 “A few seconds later, I heard a sound that’s louder than anything I’ve heard before,” he remembered in a recent interview. “It was the second plane flying into the other tower.”

As he moved away from the burning skyscrapers, Chawla came across another threat. “I found myself walking down Broadway,” he said, “and a couple of guys started yelling, “Hey, you better take your turban off.”

He walked faster as the men followed, finally running into the subway station at Canal Street and boarding a train. When he stepped off in Brooklyn, Chawla removed his turban.

Chawla, a Sikh who was 25 years old on Sept. 11, 2001, had experienced the first in what would become hundreds of bias incidents against his religious group in the weeks after the terrorist attacks.

Sikhism is the world’s fifth-largest religion. For observant men, wearing a turban is mandatory. Another requirement, to carry a kirpan, or dagger, has been contentious in the heightened security of the post-9/11 era. Sikhs also refrain from cutting their hair and beards.

The religion is totally distinct from Islam, and no Sikh was among the Sept. 11th terrorists, yet turbaned Sikhs have often been incorrectly associated with al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, who also wore a turban and a beard.

Many Sikhs in the U.S. still grapple with the unexpected fallout from the late terrorist leaders’s most notorious act. Last month, the Sikh Coalition held a community hearing in Manhattan on discrimination and violence in the years since.

"There's been a significant decline in hate crimes, but the average American still does not know about Sikhs," said Amardeep Singh, director of programs for the organization. "The backlash after 9/11 was horrific but not surprising. There has always been discrimination. And there still is a good amount of it, especially in schools, workplaces and airports."

The bias incident involving Chawla was just one of several examples in the New York area in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack.

Attar Singh had just finished praying at the Richmond Hill gurudwara on 118th Street on the evening of Sept. 11th when the 63-year-old man was attacked by six teenagers wielding baseball bats studded with nails.

"He was bleeding in the face, back and legs and never recovered from the shock," said his son Amarjeet Singh, who owns a clothing store in Hicksville, Long Island. Singh said his father’s health deteriorated considerably thereafter; three months later, he was dead.

The rash of anti-Sikh violence was not limited to New York. Four days after the terrorist attacks, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner, was shot dead in Mesa, Ariz. "He was standing with four landscapers," said his brother Rana Sodhi, now a resident of Phoenix, Ariz. "The shooter specifically targeted him."

These were among of the first of 645 reported incidents of bias and hate crimes around the country in the week after 9/11, according to the nonprofit advocacy group South Asian Americans Leading Together. A 2006 study by the Discrimination and National Security Initiative at Harvard University named turbaned Sikh Americans as the group most affected by hate crimes immediately after the attacks.

In the years since, watchdogs have charted a welcome drop in anti-Sikh violence. But a decade later there still aren't many turbaned Sikhs in the public eye, said Harpreet Singh Toor, a TV-show host in Richmond Hill, Queens, who recently became the first Sikh to run for a City Council seat in New York City history.

"Many of us are doing well for ourselves," Singh Toor said, "but people need to see us doing important jobs. We need to be more in the public sphere."

About 80,000 Sikhs live in New York City, according to an estimate compiled by Gurinder Singh Mann, a professor of Sikh studies at the University of California in Santa Barbara. The U.S. Census doesn't track religious affiliation.

Sikhs in the city are perhaps most visible in the yellow-cab industry, and turbaned drivers have been something of a barometer for public sentiment in the years since the attack. In the period after Sept. 11 "people used to see my turban and refuse to get on the cab," said Paramjeet Singh, a 34-year-old cabbie. "But I feel things are different now."

Chawla, the first Sikh to face bias in the minutes after the attack, is now 35 and working as a financial consultant based on Long Island. He feels optimistic about the growing acceptance of Sikh Americans. "I've never seen more Sikh politicians in office than I have today," he said, pointing to local figures like Ravi Bhalla, who sits on the City Council in Hoboken, N.J., and wears a turban.

"In the grand scheme of things, the definition of what it is to be American has grown after 9/11," Chawla said. "It's become richer."

This piece was first published in the Wall Street Journal website