This man is a diamond of the Sikh Panth. His name is Shaheed General Subegh Singh Ji and he gave his life for the Sikh Nation in June 1984.

General Subegh Singh Ji was a very successful General within the Indian armed forces. He was highly regarded and awarded having led many successful military actions. However despite his duty to his country, that India turned it’s back on him as it did to other Sikhs and the General came to join Sant Jarnail Singh Ji Khalsa Bhindranwale.

Having faced discrimination first hand he joined the Sikh struggle for justice and guided the defence structure of Sri Darbar Sahib. He ensured that the Singhs were able to effectively defend themselves from the inevitable and pre planned attack by the Indian Army. He went on to to give his life defending Sri Harmandir Sahib. He will forever be remembered for his sacrifice and for his fortification seva. Without his defence strategy who knows how many more thousands would have been murdered by the Indian Army in June 1984.

Source : Sikh2inspire

One of the Guru Angad Dev Sahib Ji’s wealthy disciple named Gobind decided to build a new township on the river Beas to honour the Guru. Guru Angad Dev Sahib Ji sent Amar Das to supervise the construction of this new township which came to be known as Goindwal. When it was completed Guru Angad Dev Sahib Ji instructed Amar Das and his family to move there. Amar Das complied. Every morning he would get up early in the morning and carry water from the river to the Guru and remain in his company the entire day before returning to Goindwal in the evenings. Each year Guru Angad Dev Sahib Ji would present a turban as a symbol of honour to his devoted followers. Such was the devotion of Amar Das that he would wear one on top of the other, refusing to discard the Guru’s gift. People ridiculed Amar Das for his blind faith, but he was never concerned.

Once a village women once ridiculed Amar Das for his faithful devotion as being that “homeless old man who carries water every day for his Guru daily.” When Guru Angad Dev Sahib Ji heard this he embraced Amar Das and told his congregation; “Amar Das is not homeless, he is the shelter of the unsheltered. He is the strength of the weak and the emancipation of the slave!” Finding that Amar Das was his most worthy disciple and feeling that his end was near Guru Angad Dev Sahib Ji announced that Amar Das would be his successor. Guru Angad Dev Sahib Ji’s two sons were unhappy with their fathers decision but the Guru told them that the honour would go to Amar Das because he was the most worthy and humble. Guru Angad Dev Sahib Ji bowed before Guru Amar Das placing five copper coins and a coconut before him signifying as Guru Nanak had done before him. Guru Angad Dev Sahib Ji then had Baba Buddha anoint the forehead of Guru Amar Das with a saffron mark.

Shortly thereafter Guru Angad Dev Sahib Ji left this world on March 28, 1552.

~ Source: Connect2Sikhi

Humayun was the only son of Babur, who was the king of Delhi. When Babur died, Humayun became the king. He was lazy and weak. So one of his officers, named Sher Shah, rose against him. There was a battle in which Humayun was defeated and Sher Shah became the king of Delhi. Humayun had to run away to save his life. On his way to Lahore, he had to pass by Khadur, where Guru Angad Sahib Ji lived. He wanted to become king once again, so he went to Khadur to see the Guru and ask for his blessing.

When Humayun reached the Guru’s house, Guru Angad Dev ji was busy teaching students. Therefore, he did not notice the king. The king was upset. He did not like waiting. He thought “How dare the Guru not show any respect to the King!” This feeling made him very angry. In a fit of anger, he drew out his sword to kill the Guru. In the meantime the Guru had finished his prayers and was ready to listen to the king. Seeing what the king was about to do, he smiled and said, “You are brave enough to draw your sword to kill or frighten the peace-loving people. Why didn’t you use it in the battlefield, from which you come running like a coward? Your sword did not work in the battlefield, but now suddenly you seem to have become a brave fighter.” Humayun felt ashamed. He begged the Guru’s pardon.

“I am very sorry, sir,” he said, “I really lost my head. You know that Guru Nanak was kind enough to bless my father, who became the king of Delhi. I am no good, because I’ve lost the throne to Sher Shah. Your blessing alone can make me the king once again. Please have mercy on me and bless me.”

The Guru kept quiet for some time. “My blessing has no magic,’ he said smilingly. ‘To be a king means to be kind, just and helpful to the people. If you promise to do that, you will be a king with God’s grace. Be patient and always remember God, who grants all wishes.” Humayun hurried away to Persia determined to act upon the Guru’s Advice.

After a few years, he gathered his soldiers and also received help from the king of Persia. He came back to India with a very large army and this time, he and his soldiers fought very bravely. Humayun won the battle and became the king of Delhi once again. Humayun was full of gratitude towards the Guru and he wanted to do him a favour, but by that time Guru Angad Sahib Ji had left the human body. Guru Amar Das ji had become the third Guru of the Sikhs. The Guru sent a message reminding the king to be kind and good to his people and to respect holy men. Sometime later, Akbar, the son of Humayun, visited Guru Amar Das ji and offered help for the Guru’s Langar.

“The Lord can make the blind see clearly; He treats Man as He knows him, no matter what one may say. Where the truth is not seen, know that pride is strong there. Nanak, how shall a man buy anything if he likes it not.” -(Guru Angad Dev ji)

~ Source: TuhiTu.com

PUNJAB, India — Three days after her mother died, Rajinder Kaur sat quietly on the edge of a rope cot, staring at her sandaled feet as the buzz of her friends and family filled the courtyard of her village home in Sher Singh Wala in rural Punjab.

The 20-year-old nursing student, with a girlish frame and long black braid, listlessly recounted the details of her mother’s last 40 days — from a sudden diagnosis of blood cancer to the unaffordable treatment that left Kaur with few options but to watch the pillar of the family suffer in the hospital until she passed away.

Kaur’s mother, who died in May, is among the latest casualties in India’s northern state of Punjab, home to the highest rate of cancer in India. Here, in the country’s breadbasket, 18 people succumb to the disease every day, according to a recent report published by the state government. There are ninety cancer patients per 100,000 people compared to the national average of eighty. And the Malwa region, where Kaur’s family lives, has been dubbed “the cancer belt” of the state because of its particularly high incidence of the disease.

In villages like Sher Singh Wala, working class, agricultural communities are bearing the heaviest burden of this complex crisis — one that involves limited resources, lack of political will and a toxic environmental problem that could foreshadow what many other Indian communities will experience as they follow the state’s economic model.

“We need to strike at the root,” said J.S. Thakur, professor and researcher at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, who has conducted extensive studies on cancer in Punjab.

An Indian farmer walks near agricultural fields on the outskirts of Amritsar, India. In this region, there are ninety cancer patients per 100,000 people compared to the national average of eighty. RAMINDER PAL SINGH / EPA
While the causes of cancer are complicated and still unknown, Thakur and his team found that contaminated water from rapid industrialization and excessive use of chemical fertilizers for high-yielding crops are contributing to the steep rates in the state. Just miles away from the Kaur family’s home are colossal industrial plants that have polluted the irrigation system in the area.

Malkit Singh, a member of the panchayat, or village council, in Sher Singh Wala, said cancer deaths affect almost every other home in his 2,000-person village. Including his: Singh lost his brother and two cousins to cancer in the past decade.

But Singh, a broad man who wears a traditional turban, said that the government’s inability to regulate toxic chemicals is not their only downfall. There is also public outcry that the state has done little to expand the limited healthcare resources available for families who can’t pay to travel to a private, specialized clinic.

“The overall responsibility goes to the government, and the people are also responsible because they have not made an issue of it,” he said.

The region’s only government cancer ward was established just six years ago in the town of Faridkot, an hour’s drive from Sher Singh Wala. On a morning in May, frail women and men slept along the hallways and on the floor of the waiting room as they anticipated the next available doctor, or further tests.

Every day the hospital — staffed with just four oncologists and nine residents in training — receives about 20 new cases and 150 regular cancer patients, said Dr. H.P. Yadav, head of department at the Guru Gobind Singh Medical College and Hospital. Since the service started in 2008, there has been an influx of patients from the region, who previously traveled to nearby states like Rajasthan or New Delhi for treatment.

“There is a scheme for people from Punjab: They’ll get a financial assistance of 1.5 lakh rupees [about $2,500],” Yadav said. “We are trying to give more assistance from our side but the treatment cost is high.”

Meanwhile, a senior official at the hospital who asked that his name not be used said the state has done little to support the center. Most of the initial funding, instead, came from the national government, universities and donors.

Costly treatment is an undeniable burden for most people in this agriculturally rich but poverty stricken region. For them, the government assistance under the Chief Minister’s Cancer Relief Fund scheme is only a temporary solution. When medicines cost almost 20,000 rupees ($400) per month, families are often left to make difficult decisions.

Part of that price tag comes from lack of regulation and oversight. Some pharmacies in the region were charging more than ten times the original price for certain cancer-related drugs, according to a private investigation by the Bhai Ghaniya Cancer Roko Sewa Society, a local nongovernmental organization.

“We focus on poor patients,” said Kultar Singh, vice president of the group. “We started this NGO because people were being overcharged and we were fed up with the politics.”

Their efforts have proven fruitful. Last year the team wrote a letter to the chief justice of Punjab’s high court, prompting them to hold the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority accountable for 46 anti-cancer drugs that are supposed to be affordable. In May, the Punjab government rolled out a plan to provide subsidized medicines to cancer patients at public hospitals.

Costly treatment is an undeniable burden for most people in this agriculturally rich but poverty stricken region. For them, the government assistance under the Chief Minister’s Cancer Relief Fund scheme is only a temporary solution. When medicines cost almost 20,000 rupees ($400) per month, families are often left to make difficult decisions.

Part of that price tag comes from lack of regulation and oversight. Some pharmacies in the region were charging more than ten times the original price for certain cancer-related drugs, according to a private investigation by the Bhai Ghaniya Cancer Roko Sewa Society, a local nongovernmental organization.

Their efforts have proven fruitful. Last year the team wrote a letter to the chief justice of Punjab’s high court, prompting them to hold the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority accountable for 46 anti-cancer drugs that are supposed to be affordable. In May, the Punjab government rolled out a plan to provide subsidized medicines to cancer patients at public hospitals.

~ Source: nbcnews

Daljeet Singh, a 30-year-old Sikh man who speaks hardly any English, is a political asylum seeker from India. After spending about a month in an immigration detention center in Arizona, he had set out on his journey from Phoenix to Indianapolis only one day before the frightening incident.

A Sikh man is rightly raising hill to Texas authorities and demanding that action be taken after he was dragged off of a Greyhound bus and spent the next 30 hours being questioned by the Amarillo authorities for committing no other crime than wearing a turban and speaking a language other than English.

In a statement, Singh explained that while he was traveling he spoke to friends and family members on the phone in his native language, Punjabi. He also met another man on the bus who spoke the same language, a Pakistani man named Mohammed Chotri, and they sat for a while and talked. Both men were happy to have come across someone they could share a few minutes of conversation with.

When they reached Amarillo, though, people began to get suspicious of them. Other passengers began taking pictures of them and some were even showing aggression towards them. A woman on the bus apparently decided to report that she had heard Singh say the word “bomb.”

Daljeet Singh and Mohammed Chotri were arrested after another passenger in the Greyhound bus they were travelling on falsely reported that she heard them say the word “bomb” numerous times. Daljeet Singh and Mohammed Chotri were arrested after another passenger on the Greyhound bus they were traveling on falsely reported that she heard them say the word “bomb” numerous times. Via Amarillo Globe News.

Shortly after the bus pulled out of Amarillo, two other men on the bus restrained Singh in his seat until police showed up. Officers dragged Singh and Chotri, who had also been recently released from an immigration holding center, off of the bus.

When I exited the bus, approximately 15 police officers stood outside with guns pointed at me. Police arrested and searched me, removed my religious turban, placed me in handcuffs, and placed me in a police vehicle,” said Singh.
A bomb squad was called to check the bus and a portion of Interstate 40 was closed down. Both men were detained in Amarillo and questioned by authorities for 30 hours before they were finally released after they were interviewed by the FBI. No charges were filed against either of them.

The only crime I committed was wearing a turban, having a beard, and speaking in a different language to another brown man on a bus,” Singh said.

Mohammed Chotri stands next to a police car in handcuffs after he was arrested for no other crime than speaking a foreign language and looking too Middle Eastern in Texas. Via Amarillo Globe News. In his complaint, Singh is asking Potter county attorney Scott Brumley to pursue criminal charges against Tianna DeCamp, the only person on the bus who had claimed to hear the word bomb, for making false accusations, and also against the two men who physically restrained him before police arrived.

According to the police report, DeCamp claimed that Singh and Chotri had “been acting strange since they left Phoenix … slowly moving towards the back of the bus, sometimes taking other people’s seats.”It adds: “Once at the back of the bus the male subjects pulled out some envelopes and began opening them … the male subjects were talking on multiple cell phones in Arabic and during the conversations she stated she heard one of them say ‘bomb’ multiple times.”

Singh, whose turbanless mug shot was splashed all over local media, said he was traumatized and humiliated by the harrowing turn of events.The Sikh community is very concerned about the dangers they face here in America. Sikhs are often mistaken for Muslims and because of the rising Islamaphobia in the United States, thanks in no small part to Donald Trump, Sikhs are facing more discrimination and violent assaults are becoming all too common.
In December, an elderly Sikh man was attacked and beaten in Fresno, CA. his attackers called him “Bin Laden” as they assaulted him. Via Winning Democrats archives.

Gurjot Kaur, senior staff attorney with the Sikh Coalition, which filed the complaint on Singh’s behalf said that reports of profiling and discrimination have increased twofold since the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernadino. As long as hateful rhetoric rises to the top in our political discourse then incidents like this will continue,” said Kaur.

“We believe that you can’t just go around accusing people who look different to you,” Kaur said, explaining that false reports of potential terrorism are aren’t punished nearly as harshly as other types of bullshit claims that squander police resources. “There has to be a limit to ‘see something and say something’,” she said.

~ Source : winningdemocrats

An Indian-American woman Sikh lawyer from California has been elected to a key position in the Republican party at the national level.

Harmeet Kaur Dhillon was born in Chandigarh , she was elected as the newest member of the Republican National Committee on Sunday by thousand-plus votes in attendance at the California Republican Party convention. She was earlier the vice-chairman of the California Republican Party.

She was the first woman elected to this position of vice-chair of the California Republican Party.

A nationally recognised trial lawyer, Dhillon was born in India, but raised in rural North Carolina after her Sikh parents moved to the US.

“A little girl from Chandigarh, India, the Bronx, and Smithfield, North Carolina back in the day, to being one of California’s three votes on the RNC. For the next four years starting in late July, I will help shape the policies of the party of Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Tubman, the party of liberty and opportunity,” Dhillon said after her election.

Following her clerkship with Paul V Niemeyer of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, Dhillon’s practice in New York, London, and the San Francisco Bay Area has focused on federal and state commercial litigation and arbitration, with a particular emphasis on unfair competition/trade secret misappropriation, intellectual property (including trademark litigation and internet torts), complex contractual disputes, and First Amendment litigation.

Based in San Francisco, Dhillon among other things also sat on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union, and once made a financial contribution to Kamala Harris’ campaign for local office — Harris who is a US Senate hopeful and rising star in Democratic politics.

Source : SikhNet