Understanding the issue of separate ethnic tick box for Sikhs in the UK

For a long time, a group of Sikh organisations and some Gurdwaras have been asking to add a separate ethnic tick-box for Sikhs in the census 2021.

ARGUMENT IN FAVOUR OF THE ETHNIC TICK BOX FOR SIKHS

Labour MP Preet Kaur Gill from Birmingham Edgbaston and Chair of the all-party group for British Sikhs has been very vocal about her support to the cause and told India Today TV that, “Sikhs are invisible to the UK policymakers. The issue of an ethnic tick box for Sikhs is not a matter of religion or theology but that of how the UK delivers its public service.”

Government departments use ‘census ethnicity question for monitoring and allocating resources’.

Needs of the Sikhs in the UK are different, MP Preet Kaur Gill insists, and the lack of a separate ethnic tick box for them results in “majority of schools, hospitals, local authorities and other public bodies ignoring Sikhs when considering jobs and service provisions”.

She also points out the fact that 83,362 Sikhs rejected the “existing ethnic group categories and ticked ‘other’ and wrote Sikh…if Sikhs want to identify themselves as Sikhs then they have a right to do so.”

ARGUMENT DIS-APPROVING AN ETHNIC TICK-BOX FOR SIKHS

Lord Indrajit Singh of Wimbledon has been opposing the move on the basis that it goes ‘against the very foundations of the Sikh religion’. He is of the opinion that “Sikhism is a religion that recognises the equality of all people and does not look favourably on people trying to be exclusive groupsthe difficulty is that there is a lot of ignorance about religion and particularly the Sikh religion.”