This article is supported by the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives
December 17, 2023
By Laiba Hussan
PESHAWAR
Rising extremism, terror attacks and target killings in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), especially against minorities, has prompted the province’s various religious communities to relocate.
According to one estimate by Sikh rights campaigner Radesh Singh Tony, a total of 30 members of his community have been killed in targeted attacks since 2013, while some 70 percent of the province’s Sikh population has fled to other, far safer parts of Pakistan or abroad. The first Sikh casualty this year was herbalist Dayal Singh, who on March 31 was shot dead by unidentified assailants in his Dir Colony shop in Peshawar.
Eight months after his murder in broad daylight, neither have the culprits been traced nor has Dayal’s widow, Sarjeet Kaur, received any form of support from the state. With virtually no source of income to rear and educate her four children, she was able to find employment at the Jogan Shah Gurdwara. But even with whatever support her community can provide her, the trauma of her husband’s brutal killing, the emotional toil on her children and the financial strain for Sarjeet are burdens far too heavy for any lone woman and her young family to bear.
“I was out paying the electricity bill when I was informed of my husband’s murder, and I came back home sobbing the whole way,” she recalled. “My family is subsisting on the work I do at the Gurdwara and the charity of others, but it is still very difficult.”
A year prior to Dayal’s target killing, on May 15, his relatives Ranjit and Kuljit Singh were also murdered in a similar fashion inside their spice shop on Batta Tal Chowk. Ranjit was also Sarjeet’s brother. The spate of murders ruined many of her family member’s small but once-flourishing businesses and forced them to flee Peshawar for safer parts of the country.
Arinder Singh also lost a brother, Manmohan Singh, in the second target killing of a Sikh in Peshawar this year. Per Arinder’s account, on June 24 between 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm, Manmohan was gunned down by unidentified motorcyclists outside his cosmetics shop in Peshawar’s Kakshal neighbourhood.
“He was closing up shop when some people on a motorcycle wearing helmets drove up to him. They shot him and fled. I got a call from home that my brother got shot outside his shop and to hurry home,” he told Voicepk.net.
Like Sarjeet, Arinder also serves at the Gurdwara and is sometimes aided by his community to take care of his aging parents.
“My father is too old to even run his small shop but he has no choice. We reported the killing when it happened, but till date we have been able to find nothing,” he said.
Manmohan’s murder was claimed by the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), a terrorist group which has carried out targeted attacks against religious minorities in Pakistan. A day prior to Manmohan’s murder, another Sikh shopkeeper, Tarlog Singh, suffered a gunshot wound on his leg in an attempted target killing in the same neighbourhood.
At least one other Sikh has been killed this year. On May 6, Sardar Singh was gunned down in a drive-by shooting in Lahore’s residential neighborhood of Nawab Town – an area regarded by many as a stronghold for an extremist party.