Group of Afghan Sikhs arrives in India with ashes of man killed in Kabul attack

Arrangements were made by the SGPC for the transfer of the Afghan Sikhs in coordination with the Indian World Forum and the Indian government

The government on Thursday facilitated travel of 11 Sikhs from Afghanistan to India, along with the ashes of Savinder Singh, who was killed during the terrorist attack on the gurdwara at Karte Parwan in Kabul on June 18.

This was the first batch of Afghan Sikhs to be brought to New Delhi after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government recently deployed a ‘technical team’ in the Embassy of India in Kabul. This development comes 10 months after it had evacuated not only most of its citizens, but also all its officials posted at its embassy in the capital of Afghanistan in the wake of the fall of President Ashraf Ghani’s government and Taliban’s return to power in August 2021.

India on Thursday also supplied the seventh batch of medical assistance to Afghanistan, consisting of six tons of essential medicines. The medicines were handed over to the Indira Gandhi Hospital, Kabul. In response to the urgent appeals made by the United Nations to assist the people of Afghanistan, India has, so far, supplied altogether 20 tons of medical assistance, which includes essential life saving medicines, anti-TB medicines and 500,000 doses of Covid-19 vaccine. The medical consignments have been handed over to the World Health Organization(WHO) and Indira Gandhi Children Hospital, Kabul.

Savinder Singh, a Sikh citizen of Afghanistan, was killed when the Islamic State Khorasan Province attacked a gurdwara in Kabul recently in response to the comments about Prophet Muhammed made by the two leaders of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Alarmed by the incident, New Delhi decided to issue e-visas to Afghan Sikhs and Hindus on priority.

A large number of minority Sikhs and Hindus of Afghanistan left the country after the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul in August 2021. Most of the Afghan Hindus and Sikhs escaped to India. A source in New Delhi said that over 150 Hindus and Sikhs were still living in Afghanistan and many of them had applied for visas to travel to India.

The source said that the government would facilitate the travel of remaining Hindus and Sikhs of Afghanistan to India soon.

India has provided food assistance of 35,000 MTs of wheat in order to ensure food security in Afghanistan. It supplied almost 28 tons of relief assistance in two aircraft for the quake-hit people of Paktika and Khost. These relief consignments were handed over to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), UN World Food Program (WFP) and the Afghan Red Crescent Society (ARCS).

India is in the process to ship more medical and food assistance to Afghanistan in coordination with the UN agencies on ground, Arindam Bagchi, the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs, said.