Afghan Sikhs flee after the Taliban takeover

Who: Afghan Sikhs and Hindus; the Indian government's Operation Devi Shakti and the Indian Air Force; Sikh bodies, among them United Sikhs in the US and the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee, Khalsa Aid International and the Hemkunt Foundation in India; and the Taliban, who entered Kabul on 15 August 2021.

What: On 22 August 2021 an Indian Air Force C-17 flew 168 people from Kabul to Hindon airbase near Delhi, among them 23 Afghan Sikhs and Hindus and the Afghan lawmakers Narender Singh Khalsa and Anarkali Honaryar. On 23 August United Sikhs said more than 260 people, including women and over 50 children, were sheltering at Gurdwara Karte Parwan in Kabul, that the 10 km drive to the airport through checkpoints was the biggest obstacle, and that only India was then helping Afghan Sikhs leave. On 24 August 78 people reached Delhi through Dushanbe with three saroops of Sri Guru Granth Sahib, received by ministers Hardeep Singh Puri and V Muraleedharan. On 10 December a charter flight brought 104 people, 94 of them from the Afghan Hindu-Sikh minority, with three more saroops, which were taken in procession to a gurdwara in Mahavir Nagar, Delhi. In Delhi the DSGMC opened its guest houses, the Hemkunt Foundation set up a shelter for 500 people and Khalsa Aid International planned a helpline.

Those who stayed faced further danger. In October 2021 unidentified gunmen forced their way into Karte Parwan and vandalised it. In January 2022 community leaders put the Sikhs still in Afghanistan at about 140, mostly in Jalalabad and Kabul, against about 240 a year earlier and about 100,000 in the 1970s, by community figures. India offered priority visas and long-term residency but not citizenship. One leader said families were leaving "out of sheer hopelessness", while others said Afghanistan was their homeland, and one woman who went to Delhi came back because work was scarce and costs were high. The attack on Karte Parwan in June 2022 followed.

Where: Kabul and Jalalabad in Afghanistan, and Delhi and its surroundings in India.

Why it mattered: A community that its own figures put at about 100,000 in the 1970s had shrunk to about 140 people by January 2022. The flights carried not only people but saroops of Sri Guru Granth Sahib, six in all across the two flights described above.