IAPI honours Ravi Singh for standing up for human rights and needy

ravi singh khalsa aid

Indians Abroad for Pluralist India (IAPI) has honoured a world-renowned Sikh philanthropist who has made headlines for organizing relief camps in various conflict zones—including Syria and at the Myanmar-Bangladesh border—with a Radical Desi medal for standing up for human rights and needy without discrimination.

The medal was presented to him at the Surrey Arts Center following a conference organized by Spark Within Youth (SWY) on Sunday, October 28. Ravi Singh was a keynote speaker at the event.

He is the founder and CEO of Khalsa Aid, which was created in 1999 to help people in humanitarian crises due to wars and calamities.

He had also refused to accept a nomination for an “Indian of the Year” award from a British Indian group because of the anti-Sikh massacre in November 1984.

Thousands of innocent Sikhs were killed across India following the assassination of then-Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi, by her Sikh bodyguards.

They were outraged by an Indian army attack on the Golden Temple complex, the holiest shrine of Sikhs, in June that year.

The army operation was launched to flush out religious extremists who had stockpiled arms inside the place of worship.

The ill-conceived military operation left hundreds of innocent worshippers dead, and many important buildings were destroyed.

This enraged the Sikh community, who believed that the army attack could have been avoided by using other means to deal with the situation.

The November 1984 massacre was organized by the members of the slain leader’s Congress party with the help of police, but subsequent non-Congress governments also failed to punish the guilty, even as Sikhs continued to campaign for justice and closure all over the globe.

None of the senior Congress leaders who were seen instigating the mobs have been convicted.

Singh believes that such action was important as the ugly events of 1984 encouraged an era of impunity, which has led to other minorities in India continuing to face persecution.

Under a right-wing Hindu nationalist government in India, attacks on all minority communities have grown.

Singh and his group have received a harsh backlash on social media from Hindu fanatics for standing up for Rohingya Muslims, who came under attack from Buddhist extremists and the army of Myanmar.

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