Anti-Sikh hate crimes rise by 169% in UK, says British MP Gill

United Kingdom’s member of parliament from Birmingham, Preet Kaur Gill, wrote a letter to British home secretary Suella Braverman and secretary of the department for levelling up, housing and communities (DLUHC), Simon Clarke, asking for urgent action to address anti-Sikh hate crime in the UK. In the letter, Gill, who was elected as the first British Sikh female MP, said that she was writing in response to the release of hate crime statistics for 2021-22, which reveal a startling 169% increase in reported crimes against Sikhs from the previous year. “I am deeply concerned by these new statistics. 301 hate crimes against Sikhs were reported in 2021-22, up from 112 in 2020-21. The 169% increase is compared to a 38% increase in reported religious hate crimes overall”, she said.

She further wrote, “You may be aware that in November 2020, the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Sikhs published “A Report into Anti-Sikh Hate Crimes”. This report was shared with both the home secretary and communities secretary at the time and was an attempt to consult the government on the definition of Anti-Sikh hate and suggest a community-led solution to under-reporting. However, despite multiple promises of substantive response and offers of a meeting, the home office and DLUHC, between them, have failed to respond”.

“As we highlighted then, the experience of hate crime has risen among British Sikhs in recent years according to both survey data and the home office’s statistics. In recent years, we have seen high-profile incidents of this with the attack outside Parliament, the well-publicised case of a young boy in Telford whose turban was knocked off his head by other students, and the sickening attack on Avtar Singh in Manchester which left him with life-changing injuries”, added Gill, who belongs to Jamsher Khera village in the Jalandhar district.

She concluded that she was writing, therefore, to ask the minister to take urgent action to reverse this alarming trend and protect the Sikh community by implementing the recommendation of the APPG report, specifically regarding the terms, definition and support of anti-Sikh hate crime reporting.