New Jersey Senate has unanimously passed a resolution to condemn the Sikh massacre in India that took place in 1984 and called it a “genocide.”
The resolution will be presented to US President Joe Biden as well as Vice-President Kamala Harris.
The resolution will also be forwarded to the majority and minority leaders of the United States Senate, the speaker and minority leader of the United States House of Representatives, and every member of Congress elected from this State, the report said.
The resolution has been sponsored by Senator Stephen M Sweeney, and according to it, the Sikh community of India, which is predominately concentrated in the country’s Punjab province, began immigrating to the United States over 100 years ago. It said the Sikh community has “played an important role in developing the United States and New Jersey.”
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Sikh genocide in India
“The Sikh genocide began on November 1, 1984, after the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in New Delhi and the states of Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Orissa, Jammu and Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, Tripura, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, and Maharashtra,” the report said.
As per the resolution, “Sikhism is the world’s fifth-largest religion with nearly 309 million adherents, including roughly 1,000,000 in the United States.”
New Jersey Senate passes resolution
It said the “genocide lasted three days and over 30,000 Sikhs were brutally murdered as they were hunted in their homes, where they were hacked and burned alive”, per the report.
The report further added that on April 16, 2015, a resolution was also passed by the California State Assembly recognising the “systematic and organised killings of Sikhs by the Indian government and remembered those who lost their lives during the 1984 Sikh genocide.”
Akin to that, on October 17, 2018, Pennsylvania’s General Assembly of the Commonwealth also unanimously passed House Resolution HR-1160 in which it was declared that the November 1984 anti-Sikh violence in India was, indeed, “genocide.”
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