Turban diktat kicks up row in Punjab's Sikh school

By Krittivas Mukherjee

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Hindu parents at a school in Punjab are protesting after the school's Sikh authorities asked all students to wear traditional Sikh headgear to school.

School authorities in the Sikh-dominated state says they were merely enforcing a stipulation in its prospectus that students of all faiths have to wear the traditional Sikh headgear called the "patka" or "dastaar".

But parents of other faiths say this is an affront to their religion, and have drawn parallels to Sikh protests in France in 2004 after the government there banned religious symbols such as Sikh turbans and Muslim headscarves in state schools.

About 150 parents sat in front of the Akal Academy in protest on Thursday, and reports said they had blocked roads, chanted slogans at the school gates and written to the local education minister saying the school be asked to withdraw its diktat.

"This is unfair to Hindu students," Sanjeev Kumar Jindal, one of the parents, told Reuters. "Schools should stay clear of religious dogma."

Hindus said the Sikh school authorities had imposed their religious values on followers of another religion, and said Sikhs had been equally unhappy when France's secular authorities had crossed into personal religious space with the turban ban.

Sikh religion requires followers to grow their hair and wear a turban. France justified its move saying it was aimed at checking what officials said was the rising influence of radical Islam among France's large Muslim population.

"What do the France school protests mean if they do it here?" asked Ashok Jindal, another parent offended by the school's diktat, was quoted as saying by the Times of India. "It is just not fair."