Who Speaks for Sikh Americans?
"Why are Sikhs having to argue with anyone else, from white academics to Hindu American activists, about how to define our community, our history, and ourselves?"
Harman Singh
April 7, 2025 | 4 min. read | Opinion
Two distinct—but related—recent events related to education and representation in the United States have once again drawn into focus an essential question for the Sikh diasporic community: Who speaks for, and defines, our community?
Speaking before a California school board meeting in March, a staffer from the Hindu American Foundation asserted that the state’s ethnic studies model curriculum was wrong to suggest Sikh American was a distinct identity:
For example, in the Indian American Ethnic Studies, the terminologies coined as "Bengali American," you know, "Sikh American," "Punjabi American"—so if there is a learner who is learning about this from outside Asia, they really do not understand how these ethnicities have lived together for ages and represent one identity.
When challenged on this point, HAF insisted that it was Indian Americans, rather than Sikh Americans, who were being ‘erased’ by the idea of individuals expressing their own distinct identities. They then quickly retreated—as they often do—to the conflation of the Sikh community with terrorism and extremism.
While this back-and-forth was occurring, the Sikh Coalition remains in an ongoing dialogue over Sikh representation in American social studies standards with an advocacy organization calling itself Civics Alliance. The Civics Alliance advances a “model” social studies standard, called “American Birthright,” that is meant to provide a blueprint for the topics that students learn in schools; this content is normally decided though state-specific processes that involve policymakers, educators, and community stakeholders, but the Civics Alliance prefers to advocate for its model standards via legislation to override these local processes. Within the American Birthright standards, Sikhi is mentioned twice: Once regarding its founding as a world faith, and again in the context of 10th graders needing to learn about “Muslim, Sikh, and Tamil terror” as part of their studies on contemporary India.
Pushback to the standards’ focus on “Sikh terror” has been vociferous. More than 40 Sikh organizations, gurdwarae, Sikh Student Associations, and Sikh academics have joined an open letter explaining to the Civics Alliance that the focus on “Sikh terror” lacks any context regarding the Indian government’s treatment of the Sikh community, and also runs up against the more than two decades of hard work that American Sikhs have done to distance themselves from stereotypes and prejudice related to terrorism that surged in the post-9/11 years and still harm Sikh students today. An additional 600+ sangat members from across the country have sent emails to state legislators publicly aligned with the Civics Alliance to point out this serious issue with American Birthright.
For their part, though, Civics Alliance continues to insist that they are doing the Sikh community a favor: Via blog posts and media appearances, they argue that there is “no greater champion” for the Sikh community than themselves, and that the focus on Sikh terror—divorced from historical context pre-, during, or post-1984 in India as well as the Sikh American experience—is in fact uniquely wonderful representation for Sikhs in American schools. (It is not, given the trend of more and more states including Sikh in their standards through established and inclusive update processes.)
Of note, the very issue of the Sikh community’s connection to extremism in India was litigated by more than 50 Sikh Scholars just five years ago in response to a Macdonald-Laurier Institute publication entitled “Khalistan: a project of Pakistan.”
At face value, these conversations approach the point of absurdity: Why are Sikhs having to argue with anyone else, from white academics to Hindu American activists, about how to define our community, our history, and ourselves? But unfortunately, this is far from a new fight in the context of education or advocacy in the diaspora—and specifically the United States.
Starting in 2008, the Sikh Coalition worked with the Texas Sikh community to correct more than 50 errors in major school textbooks. Among the debunked claims were that Sikhi “is based on the Hindu devotion to Vishnu” and “an attempt to blend aspects of Hinduism and Islam;” the campaign to accomplish these fundamental corrections took six years. And from 2014 to 2016, the Sikh Coalition joined with interfaith allies to fight back against attempts by some groups to replace references to Sikhs with “Indian culture,” eliminate fact-based information about caste, and more in California’s textbooks and classrooms.
These obfuscations about Sikh identity affect the political space, too.
In 2023, Congressman Shri Thanedar (D-MI) announced the formation of a so-called “Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and Jain Congressional Caucus”—without consulting any Sikh organizations, leaders, or gurdwarae. While a caucus can be a great tool for representing community interests on Capitol Hill, it only works if the stated groups are actually included in the effort. Unfortunately, Congressman Thanedar has spoken at several events organized by HinduPact, a VHPA initiative; VHPA, of course, asserts in a now-archived webpage that “Hindus are those who believe in, practice, or respect the spiritual and religious principles having origins in Bharat (India), which includes Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs and people, worldwide, of various religious sects within the Hindu ethos.” Interfaith coalitions, Sikh organizations, Michigan gurdwarae, and Michigan-based advocacy groups have all since criticized the Congressman’s lack of inclusivity.
It is also impossible to consider this conflict around Sikh identity without reflecting on Indian history.
India's own Constitution fails to recognize the Sikhi as an independent world religion; Explanation II to Article 25(b) of India’s Constitution states that “reference to Hindus shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jaina or Buddhist religion, and the reference to Hindu religious institutions shall be construed accordingly.” Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha, a renowned Sikh scholar, authored Ham Hindu Nahin (“We Are Not Hindus”) to dispel such narratives back in 1898. And of course, the emergent Indian government post-British control originally promised Punjab a measure of autonomy that never ultimately materialized after independence.
The sum response to all of this—whether it be to actors in the Indian or U.S. governments or organizations ranging from the VHPA to HAF to the Civics Alliance—is ultimately simple and self-evident: Every community has a right to define itself, and the Sikh community has categorically rejected definitions of Sikhi put forth by non-Sikhs. Continued engagement at the intersection of public education and advocacy remains the only antidote to countering these pernicious narratives, whatever their motivations may be.
When it comes to state standards, this means continuing to fight for the inclusion of Sikhi as a world religion (alongside other faith traditions) as well as the experiences of the U.S.-based Sikh community, which are most pertinent to American schoolchildren of all backgrounds. Thankfully, more than 20 states plus Washington, DC, include Sikhi in their standards somehow—either in the standards themselves, or in associated curriculum materials. State standards conversations have become more fraught in recent years given conservative hysteria about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work in schools, but the Sikh American community has been succeeding at this work long before the invention of the idea that representing students from different backgrounds was somehow a bad or harmful thing to do.
Students should see Sikhi reflected in constitutionally- and age-appropriate ways throughout their elementary, middle, and high school curricula. Including Sikhi at multiple levels of education will ultimately allow students to both understand the faith tradition in the context of other global religions and explore the context around Sikh American immigration to the United States (including the factors driving that immigration, like the Sikh Genocide). And it can all be furthered by the continued creation of Sikh-centric lesson plans and books written by Sikh authors, as well as the simple action of Sikh parents coming to their children’s classroom to talk about faith and identity in a positive way.
At the end of the day, we as a community cannot allow the Sikh spirit and ethos to be deterred by bad faith actors.
We must ensure that the next generation of Sikh students in America do not spend time in classrooms wondering why their community is either entirely absent from textbooks and lesson plans, subsumed into another identity, or labeled as extremist for seeking the right to self-determination. Doing so requires a balanced approach between both continuing to pushback against harmful narratives from outside the community, while also raising our voices and advancing our own stories in the context of education advocacy work.
Harman Singh is the Executive Director of the Sikh Coalition, the largest Sikh civil rights organization in the United States.
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