Hindu parents block road over academy
order on turban
Sushil Goyal
Tribune News Service

Sangrur , May 8
Nearly 100 parents of students of Akal Academy, Cheema, 15 km from Sunam, today blocked the Sunam-Mansa road for one hour at Cheema village against the order of the management of the academy asking all students to wear turbans, including Hindu students, after class VI.

Sangrur SSP Gurdip Singh Pannu said the police had taken an application from the parents of Hindu students to sort out the matter as the Hindu students had protested against this order of the academy.

Sources said this order of the academy had put a question mark on the future of many Hindu students of the academy as they could not now move to any other school in the area as the session had already started more than a month ago.

The parents of the students also reportedly met the principal of the academy to get the order quashed, but he said that it was a decision of the management.

When the parents failed to get proper reply from the Principal then they reportedly resorted to blockade of the road.

my first reaction to this was..

same thing i would do if the Christian school Principal tried to force my sikh students to wear crosses/neckties around their necks..under the pretext of school rules/policy on uniforms.... I would protest too - why should sikhs wear crosses ??

then again...dastaar is not something the hindus.muslims never wear. Its part of Indian culture - they wear dastaars during weeddings etc..and if they can wear WESTERN coats blazers neckties etc all in the name of "uniform"...why not indian dastaar ??

Anyway bottom line is SIKHS should not do to others what they dont want others to do to them. IF a student is HINDU/MUSLIM - he should be exempted/allowed to discharge from the school. BUT SIKH students should be actively DISCOURAGED from attending nanga sir/small patka... and shoudl be ENCOURAGED to wear FULL DASTAAR as this is a SIKH SCHOOL.

JSGyani.

I always thought that Pagh was an Indian custom regardless if you are Sikh/Hindu/Muslim. Untill the last 50 years, the Pagdi was very common amongst all religious, cultural, caste based groups in Punjab. So the students dont mind looking like westernised christians, but they have a problem with how a traditional Punjabi Indian ideally looked like until recently. perhaps in the future they should also become christians if they like Christians culture so much and hate traditional Indian culture.