The Kirpan Is Not the Wound

An offering for vichaar

Excerpt

Henry Nowak was murdered. The man convicted of killing him used a 21cm shastar, while the court heard that he also wore a smaller kirpan under his clothing. A human life was taken, and a sacred Sikh Article of Faith is now being dragged into a wider public argument. The debate has moved to the length of a blade and the volume of Sikh presence, when the deeper questions are older and harder: what severed the teaching of Sikhi, who failed a wounded generation, and where is Shabad in our response? The kirpan is not the wound. It is what the wound is now being blamed on.

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This is a companion to an earlier offering, The Kirpan Must Be Taught Before It Is Defended. That piece argued that the kirpan must be understood under Shabad before it is explained to a state, a school, a workplace, or a court.

This one asks a harder question.

If the kirpan is so often defended badly, misunderstood publicly, and sometimes carried without formation, we should ask why. The answer is not found in steel alone. It is found in the severing of teaching, the failure of institutions, the wounds of Punjab, the weakness of transmission in the diaspora, and our repeated habit of answering spiritual collapse with public-relations management.

But one thing must be said first.

An eighteen-year-old young man was killed.

His family’s grief is not an argument to be used by anyone. It should not be turned into a weapon against Sikhs, and it should not be brushed aside by Sikhs anxious to defend the kirpan. Murder is murder. No Sikh should excuse it. No Sikh should hide behind religious language to soften it. If a person uses a blade to kill an innocent person, the guilt belongs to the killer.

That is not the question.

The question is why a Sikh Article of Faith is now being placed on trial for the crime of one man.

The wrong argument

A debate is moving through Sikh forums, media spaces, and British politics at the same time.

In the Southampton case, a student was murdered. The man convicted of killing him had claimed that he carried the blade for religious reasons. Court reporting records that the prosecution described the blade as a 21cm shastar, a Punjabi and Panthic term for a weapon. The court also heard that he had a smaller kirpan around his neck and under his clothing, and the prosecution argued that the smaller kirpan satisfied any religious obligation, while he had chosen to carry a much larger blade. That distinction matters. A shastar is not automatically the kirpan carried under Rehat. The Sikh Article of Faith being defended here is the kirpan, carried under Shabad, discipline, and responsibility. The prosecution described his allegation of racist abuse as a wicked lie, and told the court that this was not a case about Sikhism, not a case about racism, but a case about murder.

A man committed murder. He lied. He was convicted.

And yet the argument that has followed is about the kirpan.

Some political voices now demand that kirpan protections be restricted or removed. Some public commentators speak as though the kirpan itself produced the crime. Some people who had never cared about Sikh discipline, Sikh teaching, Sikh vulnerability, or Sikh contribution now present themselves as guardians of public safety.

But within the Panth, another error can arise in response.

We may begin to accept the wrong ground. We may begin by apologising for Sikh visibility rather than grieving the victim, condemning the crime, and teaching the kirpan properly. We may begin with blade length before we have spoken about Shabad. We may begin with reassurance before we have asked what kind of Sikh the kirpan is meant to form.

That is the wrong order.

Public safety matters. Law matters. School and workplace policy matter. Responsible guidance matters. But none of these can define the Sikh meaning of the kirpan.

For the Sikh, Shabad comes first.

Step back and look at the scale. In England and Wales, the year ending March 2024 recorded 262 homicides committed with a knife or other sharp instrument, 46% of all homicides. Teenage victims were far more likely to be killed by a knife or sharp instrument than victims overall: 83% of teenage homicides. In that same year, the most commonly identified sharp instrument in homicide was the kitchen knife. Police-recorded offences involving a knife or sharp instrument remain in the tens of thousands each year.

That context does not lessen Henry Nowak’s death. It deepens the seriousness of the problem. Britain has a real knife-crime wound.

But that wound is not the kirpan.

If the answer to one terrible killing is to place a whole Sikh Article of Faith under suspicion, while the ordinary instruments of knife violence remain the main statistical reality, then the debate has become symbolic in the wrong way. It is no longer only about safety. It is about which visible minority can be made to carry the public fear.

A serious safety measure would face the ordinary knife, the violent quarrel, the gang, the county-lines network, the boy with nothing to lose, the home where a blade is already within reach, and the social conditions that turn young lives towards violence.

Banning or shrinking the kirpan would not heal that wound. It would only remove a Sikh’s faith from his side.

Two incomplete answers

When pressure comes, two instincts rise. Both may sound responsible. Both may contain some limited practical concern. But both become evasions if they replace Shabad-governed vichaar.

The first is to shrink the symbol.

Fix the length. Make it modest. Make it acceptable. Make it easier for the state, the school, the stadium, or the employer to tolerate. This may answer a narrow administrative question in some settings, but it does not answer the Sikh question.

The kirpan is not made safe merely by being made small.

The second is to shrink the community.

Hold fewer Nagar Kirtans. Be less visible. Keep religion private. Adapt to local values. Do not attract attention. This may sound mature to people who fear backlash, and public sensitivity is not wrong. Sikhs should not be careless neighbours. Sikh public life should be disciplined, clean, considerate, and answerable.

But fear-driven invisibility is not Gurmat.

The problem is not Sikh visibility itself. The problem is visibility without formation. The problem is the symbol without Shabad, identity without Rehat, courage without Naam, and public assertion without truthful conduct.

A smaller kirpan may answer a policy question.

A quieter procession may answer a local complaint.

Neither answers the wound.

The Sikh answer is not to make the kirpan smaller as a substitute for teaching. The Sikh answer is to bring the Sikh more fully under Shabad.

And consider what the counsel of invisibility can ask of us when it is driven by fear. It asks the Sikh to become less visible in order to be safer. But the record of the last quarter-century shows that visible Sikhs have often been victims of hatred, not its cause. Four days after the September 11 attacks, Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot dead outside his petrol station in Mesa, Arizona, by a man seeking retaliation for 9/11. Eleven years later, a white supremacist entered the gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and killed six worshippers; Baba Punjab Singh, who was severely wounded and paralysed in the attack, died in 2020 and is widely remembered as the seventh victim. Sikhs across the West have repeatedly absorbed hatred meant for others, precisely because the dastaar and kesh make us seen.

So when we are told to lower our profile for our own protection, we should test that counsel under Guru Tegh Bahadur Sahib’s line: the Sikh gives fear to no one and accepts fear from no one. To make ourselves invisible because others hate what they see is not wisdom. It is accepting fear.

The Guru gave visible identity so that the Sikh would not disappear under fear.

Who is trying to use this grief?

We should also be honest about the wider political climate.

Britain is living through a sharp rise in anti-immigration and far-right activity. Independent monitoring has recorded a significant increase in anti-immigration demonstrations, and the political right has learned a repeated method: take a local crime, strip it of its particular facts, and turn it into a national verdict against a minority.

The clearest recent example came after three little girls were murdered in Southport. False claims spread online that the attacker was an asylum seeker or Muslim. He was not. Police said he was born in Cardiff. But the lie was enough to help fuel disorder, hatred, and attacks connected to asylum accommodation and Muslim communities.

That pattern matters here.

Some of the loudest calls to restrict or remove kirpan protections have not come from careful Sikh vichaar, nor from a neutral review of public safety. They have come from political actors and media spaces already organised around anti-immigration anger, “one rule for all” slogans, and suspicion of minority difference.

That does not make public fear false. It does not make Henry Nowak’s death less real. A young man is dead. That is a true sorrow. The dishonesty is in the use being made of the sorrow: one death, one killer, and one Sikh Article of Faith are being folded into a campaign that was already looking for a face.

For the Sikh, the answer cannot be hatred in return.

Nirvair forbids it.

Nor can the answer be shrinking.

Nirbhau forbids it.

We answer as Sikhs must answer: by remaining what the Guru made us, refusing to let others define the kirpan in our place, and teaching it so well and living it so truthfully that the lie finds less ground to stand on.

What actually broke

We did not arrive here in a single week, or because of a single crime.

To understand why a generation can inherit the symbol without the teaching, we have to look at where the teaching was severed.

This does not excuse any crime. Trauma does not excuse murder. Drugs do not excuse violence. Migration does not turn a person into a criminal. The overwhelming majority of Sikhs in the diaspora have built honest, decent, contributing lives. That must be said clearly.

But communities are not formed in a vacuum.

Punjab did not pass through the late twentieth century untouched. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the counterinsurgency period, human-rights organisations documented torture, enforced disappearances, unlawful killings, secret cremations, and staged encounters. Families were left without bodies, without answers, and without justice.

Jaswant Singh Khalra exposed evidence that police had secretly cremated bodies as unidentified or unclaimed. Official processes later examined thousands of illegal cremations in Amritsar district, while human-rights organisations and Sikh activists alleged a much wider pattern across Punjab. Khalra was abducted, tortured, and murdered in 1995. Police officers were later convicted for his killing.

Hold that image.

A man documents the disappeared, and is disappeared.

Mothers wait for sons who do not return.

Families search for bodies that were burned without their consent.

And in those years, visible Sikh identity itself could become dangerous. Many families remember the fear around kesh and dastaar. Some cut their sons’ hair not because they rejected Sikhi, but because they were trying to keep them alive.

Think about what that means.

The identity meant to form Nirbhau — fearlessness — was sometimes removed in fear.

Then came another wound: the drug crisis. Punjab has faced a severe and continuing epidemic of substance abuse, including heroin and chitta, overdose deaths, treatment demand, trafficking, and devastated families. Official figures record overdose deaths year after year. Wider studies and reports point to a deeper crisis of addiction, unemployment, mental-health weakness, trafficking, and social injury.

Again, we must be careful. Not every death, not every addiction, not every crime, and not every migration story has the same cause. But the pattern is still real. A people already wounded by state violence, fear, migration, unemployment, institutional weakness, and social fracture then saw many of its young people consumed by drugs, gangs, or despair.

Those who could leave often left.

Canada. Australia. New Zealand. Britain. America.

The diaspora became a place of hope, work, study, dignity, and survival. It also became a place where some young Sikhs arrived dislocated, under-taught, and carrying wounds they could not name. Many were never properly given Sikhi, because the families and institutions that should have transmitted it were themselves recovering, fleeing, working, surviving, or divided.

This is where the kirpan becomes vulnerable.

Not because the kirpan is weak.

Because transmission was weak.

Symptom, not cause

When a generation receives the symbol without the Shabad, the symbol becomes vulnerable.

It can be worn as defiance.

It can be worn as insecurity.

It can be worn as habit.

It can be worn as culture.

It can be worn as costume.

It can sit on the body of someone who was never taught what it demands.

That is not an argument for removing the kirpan.

It is an argument for finally teaching it.

The controversy abroad is downstream of a root that was cut at home and not properly replanted in the diaspora. The kirpan is not the wound. The severed transmission of Sikhi is the wound. We are debating the dressing and ignoring the cut.

Where is the vichaar?

On Ang 62, in Sri Raag, Mahala 1, Guru Nanak Sahib says:

ਸਚਹੁ ਓਰੈ ਸਭੁ ਕੋ ਉਪਰਿ ਸਚੁ ਆਚਾਰੁ ॥੫॥

Sachahu orai sabh ko, upar sach aachaar.

Plain-English sense: Truth is higher than everything; higher still is truthful conduct.

Image is not conduct.

A community reputation managed before the British public is not the same as a community living truthfully and teaching its young. A letter to Parliament may be necessary. A statement of regret may be necessary. A meeting with police may be necessary. Guidance on public carry may be necessary.

But none of these is formation.

A document is not Santhia.

A policy is not Rehat.

A press statement is not Nitnem.

A public apology is not Shabad-vichaar.

If our only answer is administrative, then the same emails will be written again after the next incident. The language may be polished. The names may be respected. The concern may be sincere. But the root will remain untouched.

The Guru does not ask only whether our statement was balanced.

The Guru asks whether our conduct is truthful.

The Sikh does not frighten others

On Ang 1427, in Salok Mahala 9, Guru Tegh Bahadur Sahib says:

ਭੈ ਕਾਹੂ ਕਉ ਦੇਤ ਨਹਿ ਨਹਿ ਭੈ ਮਾਨਤ ਆਨ ॥

ਕਹੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਸੁਨਿ ਰੇ ਮਨਾ ਗਿਆਨੀ ਤਾਹਿ ਬਖਾਨਿ ॥੧੬॥

Bhai kaahoo kau det nahi, nahi bhai maanat aan. Kahu Nanak sun re manaa, giaani taahi bakhaan.

Plain-English sense: One who gives fear to no one, and does not accept fear from another — Nanak says, listen, mind: call that person spiritually wise.

This line must govern the kirpan debate.

The Sikh must not give fear.

The Sikh must not accept fear.

If a Sikh uses a kirpan, a shastar, a knife, or any blade to intimidate or murder, that Sikh has broken the spirit of Gurmat. No community defence should hide that.

But if, after one man’s crime, the Panth begins to accept fear as policy — shrink, hide, apologise for existing, and make Sikh presence smaller so others will not be disturbed — then we have failed the other half of the line.

We should not frighten others.

We should not be frightened into self-erasure.

The kirpan sits between these two failures. It must never become intimidation. It must never be surrendered to fear.

Courage and cowardice

There is a courage that faces outward.

There is a courage that faces inward.

The outward courage is to say: do not blame a whole Panth for one man’s crime. Do not use a murder case to place a Guru-given article of faith on trial. Do not speak about the kirpan as if Sikhs have not lived, served, fought, worked, sacrificed, and contributed with honour in this country and many others.

The inward courage is harder.

It is to ask why some young Sikhs know the symbol but not the Shabad.

It is to ask why many can defend the kirpan legally but cannot explain it Gurmat-wise.

It is to ask why our gurdwaras often give routine without learning, visibility without formation, and public events without deep transmission.

It is to ask why elders sometimes discuss reputation more quickly than education.

It is to ask why youth sometimes inherit anger before they inherit Bani.

It is to ask why the wounds of Punjab are remembered in slogans but not healed through Shabad, seva, and disciplined rebuilding.

This is not one person’s failure.

It is a pattern.

Patterns are either owned collectively, or they continue.

One Jot, not two Sikhis

On Ang 966, in Ramkali Ki Vaar by Rai Balwand and Satta, the transmission of Guru-Jot is described:

ਜੋਤਿ ਓਹਾ ਜੁਗਤਿ ਸਾਇ ਸਹਿ ਕਾਇਆ ਫੇਰਿ ਪਲਟੀਐ ॥

Jot ohaa jugat saai, seh kaaiaa pher palteeai.

Plain-English sense: The Jot is the same, the Jugat is the same; the Sovereign only changed the body.

This line is not about the kirpan directly, and we should not pretend that it is. But it gives a governing principle. The Guru-Jot is one. The bodies change; the Jot and the Jugat do not become another faith.

There is no early “spiritual” Sikhi and later “martial” Sikhi to be traded away under public pressure. There is no Guru Nanak Sahib without Guru Hargobind Sahib. There is no Shabad without lived responsibility. There is no Piri that abandons Miri, and no Miri that may escape Piri.

The kirpan belongs inside that wholeness.

But it must remain under Shabad.

The kirpan without Shabad becomes danger.

Miri without Piri becomes power.

Courage without Naam becomes ego.

Identity without Rehat becomes display.

Public defence without teaching becomes noise.

The Shabad-first answer

The answer is not only a smaller kirpan.

The answer is not only a quieter Panth.

The answer is not only a better letter to Parliament.

The answer is a more fully formed Sikh and more honest institutions.

The answer is teaching before defending.

It is Deen before ego.

It is Nirbhau and Nirvair.

It is fear given to none and accepted from none.

It is the slow, unglamorous work of Nitnem, Santhia, seva, sangat, Gurmukhi learning, Sikh history, Rehat, and Shabad-vichaar.

It is rebuilding at home and in the diaspora the transmission that was broken.

It is teaching the young Sikh that carrying the kirpan does not make them larger than others. It makes them more answerable.

It is teaching that the kirpan is not for quarrels.

It is not for road rage.

It is not for domestic fear.

It is not for gang display.

It is not for settling insults.

It is not for social media.

It is not for ego.

It is for the Sikh who has come under Guru and is being trained to live for Deen.

The world will keep arguing about the blade.

The Sikh must keep returning to the root.

Shabad first.

Everything else second.

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Verification note

Checked 31 May 2026.

Every quoted Gurbani line, with Ang and attribution:

• ਸਚਹੁ ਓਰੈ ਸਭੁ ਕੋ ਉਪਰਿ ਸਚੁ ਆਚਾਰੁ ॥੫॥ — Ang 62, Sri Raag, Mahala 1, Guru Nanak Sahib.

• ਭੈ ਕਾਹੂ ਕਉ ਦੇਤ ਨਹਿ ਨਹਿ ਭੈ ਮਾਨਤ ਆਨ ॥ ਕਹੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਸੁਨਿ ਰੇ ਮਨਾ ਗਿਆਨੀ ਤਾਹਿ ਬਖਾਨਿ ॥੧੬॥ — Ang 1427, Salok Mahala 9, Salok 16, Guru Tegh Bahadur Sahib.

• ਜੋਤਿ ਓਹਾ ਜੁਗਤਿ ਸਾਇ ਸਹਿ ਕਾਇਆ ਫੇਰਿ ਪਲਟੀਐ ॥ — Ang 966, Ramkali Ki Vaar by Rai Balwand and Satta.

Cross-check

Readers are encouraged to cross-check every Gurbani line cited here against Shabad Guru Granth Sahib Ji directly. For digital checking, SearchGurbani, SriGranth, Dekho-Ji, and SikhiToTheMax may be used as tools. Guru Granth Darpan may be consulted as teeka and interpretive aid, not as authority above Shabad.

Romanisation in this article is a learning aid, not a Santhia guide. For paath, uchaaran, and Santhia, learn from competent Gurmukh teachers and listen carefully in sangat.

Correction note

If any Ang, attribution, Bani heading, transliteration, or plain-English sense here is found to be in error, the error is mine and should be corrected.

On the recent UK case: this article relies on public reporting and official police statements available at the time of writing. The key points are that Vickrum Digwa was convicted of murder and possession of a bladed article in a public place; court reporting records the prosecution describing the blade as a 21cm shastar and separately identifying a smaller kirpan worn under his clothing; the prosecution argued that the case was not about Sikhism or racism but murder; and public debate has since moved toward the kirpan and Sikh religious exemptions. If later sentencing remarks, court records, appeal documents, or official statements clarify any detail, this article should be corrected.

On UK law: this article is not legal advice. The law of England and Wales contains religious-reason protections and defences in relation to kirpans, but how those apply in any particular case is for the courts and competent legal advice.

On the historical record: the killings, disappearances, illegal cremations, and staged encounters of the 1980s–90s are documented, but the scale is reported in ranges and through different kinds of evidence: official inquiries, court records, human-rights documentation, and activist estimates. Larger totals should be read as allegations or documented advocacy claims unless and until formally judicially determined.

On Punjab’s drug crisis: official and reported figures show a severe and continuing crisis, but no single statistic captures the whole wound. This article therefore avoids claiming one exact total or one simple cause.

On the political context: the article criticises a public political pattern, not any private individual. It does not deny that public safety is a serious concern. It argues that public safety is not served by placing a Sikh Article of Faith under suspicion for the crime of one man.

This article is offered as vichaar, not as a ruling, not as legal advice, and not as an accusation against any named Sikh elder, organisation, or institution.

Source note

Gurbani text and Ang references were cross-checked against digital Gurbani resources including SearchGurbani, SriGranth, Dekho-Ji, and SikhiToTheMax. Guru Granth Darpan may be consulted as teeka where relevant.

Historical and contextual sources consulted:

• Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary statement on the conviction of Vickrum Digwa.

• UK press reporting on the Henry Nowak case, including The Guardian, Sky News, ITV, and The Telegraph.

• UK legal and institutional material on the kirpan, including the Criminal Justice Act 1988, the Offensive Weapons Act 2019, UK Government guidance, and College of Policing material.

• Office for National Statistics homicide data, Home Office Homicide Index material, and the House of Commons Library knife-crime briefing.

• Ensaaf material on Jaswant Singh Khalra, illegal cremations, disappearances, and Punjab human-rights abuses.

• Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Punjab Documentation and Advocacy Project material on enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, fake encounters, and impunity in Punjab.

• Government of India / NCRB overdose-death figures and reporting by The Indian Express and The Tribune on Punjab’s drug-overdose and NDPS data.

• Reporting and documentation on the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi and the Oak Creek gurdwara shooting, including Sikh civil-rights organisations, Sky News, FBI/US Justice Department material, and public reporting. Oak Creek is described with six killed on the day of the attack, with Baba Punjab Singh remembered as a seventh victim after dying in 2020 from injuries sustained in the shooting.

• ACLED, Reuters, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and other public reporting on anti-immigration mobilisation, misinformation after Southport, and calls to restrict or ban kirpan protections.

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Bhul chuk maaf.

Gurjit Singh Sandhu
PanthSeva