NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Hindu parents at a school in Punjab are protesting after the school's Sikh authorities asked all students to wear traditional Sikh headgear to school.
School authorities in the
Sikh-dominated state says they were merely enforcing a stipulation in
its prospectus that students of all faiths have to wear the traditional
Sikh headgear called the "patka" or "dastaar".
But parents of other faiths say this is
an affront to their religion, and have drawn parallels to Sikh protests
in France in 2004 after the government there banned religious symbols
such as Sikh turbans and Muslim headscarves in state schools.
About 150 parents sat in front of the
Akal Academy in protest on Thursday, and reports said they had blocked
roads, chanted slogans at the school gates and written to the local
education minister saying the school be asked to withdraw its diktat.
"This is unfair to Hindu students,"
Sanjeev Kumar Jindal, one of the parents, told Reuters. "Schools should
stay clear of religious dogma."
Hindus said the Sikh school authorities
had imposed their religious values on followers of another religion,
and said Sikhs had been equally unhappy when France's secular
authorities had crossed into personal religious space with the turban
ban.
Sikh religion requires followers to grow
their hair and wear a turban. France justified its move saying it was
aimed at checking what officials said was the rising influence of
radical Islam among France's large Muslim population.
"What do the France school protests mean
if they do it here?" asked Ashok Jindal, another parent offended by the
school's diktat, was quoted as saying by the Times of India. "It is
just not fair."
The school is run by a Sikh trust, but
around 20 percent of its estimated 1,400 students are reported to be
Hindus. Any student failing to comply with the rule is asked to pay a
fine of 10 rupees a day.
"It's in the prospectus -- you take it or
leave it," Beant Kaur, the principal of the school's Punjabi division,
told Reuters. "This is not about religion. This is part of proper
uniform, for uniformity in the uniform."
Swaran Kaur, the school's English
division principal, says most non-Sikh parents were not bothered about
the turban diktat and only a handful of "troublemakers" were creating
problems.
"We have information that some of these
people don't even have children studying in our schools," she told
Reuters. "They are obviously trying to give this a religious colour."
The school's prospectus says its
curriculum lays special emphasis on spiritual development so that the
young learners develop into virtuous adults and be the torch bearers of
society.
"Moral and spiritual education is compulsory for all students," it said.
"All non-Sikh students follow their own
religion but they have to cover their head ... and they have to follow
the spiritual and religious curriculum of Akal Academy."
-By Krittivas Mukherjee
(Additional reporting by Geetinder Garewal)