The Taliban are learnt to have stopped a batch of 72 Afghan Sikhs and Hindus, including two minority members of Afghanistan parliament, from boarding an Indian Air Force (IAF) plane on Saturday. They were sent back from the Kabul airport.
Seeking evacuation to India, this first batch of Afghan Sikhs and Hindus had been waiting outside the airport for over 12 hours since Friday, president of World Punjabi Organisation (WPO) Vikramjit Singh Sahney told news agencies.
“Taliban fighters stopped them from boarding the IAF plane and said that since they are Afghans, they must go back. Now the group has safely returned to Gurdwara Dashmesh Pita Guru Gobind Singh ji Karte Parwan in Kabul,” said Sahney, adding that minority MPs Narinder Singh Khalsa and Anarkali Kaur Honoryar were a part of the group.
“They were to board along with nearly 80 Indian citizens,” said Sahney. “Now the only way to evacuate Afghan Sikhs and Hindus is to negotiate with the Taliban and tell them that Sikhs need to visit India for the ongoing 400th birth anniversary celebrations of Guru Teg Bahadur ji.”
Since the Taliban takeover, a group of 280 Afghan Sikhs and 30-40 Hindus have taken shelter at Karte Parwan Gurdwara in Kabul. They also held two meetings with Taliban representatives who assured them of ‘peace and safety' and said that they need not leave the country.
However, since March 25, 2020, when at least 25 Sikhs were killed after an Islamic State (IS) gunman allegedly stormed the Gurdwara Guru Har Rai Sahib in Kabul and opened fire, members of both minority communities have been urging the governments of India and Canada to evacuate them from Afghanistan.
Afghan Sikhs and Hindus are nationals of Afghanistan who hold passports of the war-torn country. They come to India on Long Term Visas but the families, who are financially weak, prefer to stay in that country as their sources of livelihood are mainly in the cities of Kabul, Jalalabad and Ghazni.
At the time of the Kabul Gurdwara attack in 2020, there were less than 700 Sikhs and Hindus in Afghanistan. Since then, at least 400 of them have migrated to India. Once a country which had over one lakh Sikhs and Hindus, members of these communities left Afghanistan after the Mujahideen took over in 1992.
