Banning Sikh Voices On Social Media – OpEd
By Gohar Rehman
The Sikh community in India is facing circumstances, given the guidelines of the Narendra Modi government, to battle for their liberties. The secessionist motions tend to be deepening in India and the Sikh neighborhood has denounced Indian government. The BJP and RSS have actually collectively engineered systematic oppression against Sikhs.
Modi’s BJP government to ban Sikh voices, have stifled numerous formal Pakistani accounts in recent weeks. On July 2, Twitter withheld Khalsa Aid founder Ravinder Singh’s Twitter account at the behest for RSS backed BJP government.
“This is the real face of democracy under BJP!” the UK-based frontrunner of the non-profit and relief organisation reacted on Twitter. “Banning Sikh social media accounts won’t stop us (from) raising our voices! We will just get louder!”
While condemning the government’s decision in a facebook live program, Singh spoke against calls for langar (the Sikh community kitchen) to be stopped in India in retaliation. The Nobel Peace Prize nominee, whom launched Khalsa Aid in 1999, reminded people that langars serve poor and hungry and ought not to be politicized.
The Indian government meanwhile, will continue to discipline dissent. Sikhs are now being banned on social media. Kisan Ekta Morcha and Tractor2Twitter, two Twitter accounts had been recently withheld in reaction to issues filed by the union government.
The account of another figure at the forefront of the farmers’ movement, Sikh Kashmiri activist Amaan Bali, has also been prohibited. Bali is thinking about teaming up with other people blocked to approach the judge jointly.
Mass targeting of Twitter handles of Sikh diaspora organisations has taken place recently. GoI is using 69A IT Act like a tool to stifle Sikh voice online. Sikh censorship and also the spread of anti-Sikh disinformation on social networking systems, including Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube is on the rise. While these tactics have been in place for many years, they’ve broadened significantly as a result of opposition against the Indian Agricultural Acts of 2020, popularly known as Farm Laws.
Oftentimes armed with information obtained from online platforms, Indian government features targeted, arrested, and tortured reporters and activists with their advocacy contrary to the actions associated with the government of India.
The actions for Indian government, in conjunction with the full cooperation of big-tech corporations like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, play right into a broader motion of unapologetic nationalism at the cost of religious minorities in the country.
Weeks after Punjabi-Canadian Rap Star Moosewala was murdered in broad daylight, his group introduced his tune SYL on his official Youtube channel. It talks about Punjab’s water-sharing disputes with neighboring and the federal government, the disputed Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal.
The song’s video clip additionally features moments associated with the Sikh flag becoming hoisted at the Red Fort during last year’s farmer agitation.
On July 04 2022, over 17,000 Sikhs have voted for the secessionist Khalistan Referendum in Italian capital Rome, demanding the creation of separate homeland called Khalistan for the Sikhs of Punjab on the call of advocacy group Sikhs For Justice (SFJ).
The SFJ dedicated the function to remember famous assassinated singer Moosewala who was simply a supporter of Khalistan movement and the voting center in Rome was dedicated to Moosewala.
Sikhs have actually always considered on their own as having an independent, separate identification, initially as being a reaction to continuous oppression by Mughal emperors, later as reaction to the Brahamanical Indian state.
The definition of oppression is quite extensive when you look at the light of present day’s capitalist nation-states, whereby along with class oppression, other types of oppression like gender, caste, language, and religion prevail. It really is in this linear, one-dimensional understanding of oppression that separatist voices of Punjab tend to be burgeoning.
Gohar Rehman is Islamabad-based independent freelance journalist.
India I say has too much freedom of speech. ALL minority communities including Muslims in India have held highest positions including the President and large numbers have risen to the ranks of Generals. In India Sikh community is the most respected whereas in Pakistan the Sikh community is hunted around with their women not safe and their language Gurmukhi script not taught in schools. Even Indian Muslims in Pakistan are treated as outcasts. Lahore boasts of a noticeable population of Sikhs, yet the city is without a single school where Gurmukhi script is taught and lovers of the language, especially the Sikh community, remain deprived of their basic right to learn to read and write their mother tongue. Even where taught (Shahmukhi) it is written from right to left like Urdu! So friend look within first…