Sikhism must not be put on trial after Henry Nowak’s murder

Some reports of Henry Nowak’s killing have described the murder weapon as a Sikh sword, a ceremonial knife or a large Sikh dagger. That matters. Once the word ‘Sikh’ is attached to the weapon, the crime begins to look like a case about religious liberty. It was not. The Sikh faith was invoked in Vickrum Digwa’s defence – but it should not have been. The kirpan is an article of faith. The criminal use of a blade – and the blade Digwa carried – is not.

More than 20 years ago, I published a paper in the Psychiatric Bulletin on the care of Sikh patients who wear the kirpan. It was about a practical question: how clinicians might respect a patient’s religious observance without compromising safety on a hospital ward. I did not expect to return to the subject because of a murder. The killing of Henry Nowak in Southampton, and the debate that followed, has made that necessary.

The facts established at trial are stark. Digwa was convicted of murdering 18-year-old student Henry Nowak. Digwa inflicted five wounds with a large blade and then told the police, falsely, that he had been the victim of a racist assault. The jury rejected his claim of self-defence. The sentence has since been referred to the Court of Appeal as potentially unduly lenient, though that is a separate question from the one I wish to address here.

What is important is that this murder does not turn into a religious dispute. Whatever else may be said of the case, no question of religious entitlement arises from these facts, and it is a source of real distress to me, and many other Sikhs, that the language of faith was enlisted in his defence at all.

Digwa did not kill with the small kirpan that was recovered, unused, from around his neck. He killed with a separate and much larger blade. Some reports have called the weapon a kirpan. Others have called it a Sikh sword. That loose language is a problem. A blade cannot be carried or used as an offensive weapon just because the man carrying it is Sikh.

There is a martial inheritance in Sikhism. That should not be denied or airbrushed away. Shastar Vidya, the art of weaponry, has a place within parts of the Sikh martial tradition. But it is a discipline, not a licence. It does not require a weapon to be carried in public, as has been widely claimed. Still less does it justify drawing one in anger. To present the carrying of an offensive weapon as a religious duty is an inversion of Sikhism.

The kirpan is one of the five articles of faith, the Panj Kakkar, worn by initiated Sikhs of the Khalsa, the order constituted by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699. Its name is commonly understood as joining kirpa (mercy) and aan (honour). The kirpan is normally sheathed and worn against the body. It is not there to suggest the wearer has a right to violence – it is a reminder of one’s duties: to resist injustice, protect the vulnerable and govern one’s own passions. Sikh teaching is clear that it is not to be drawn in aggression. A man who turns a blade on an unarmed youth has not exercised a religious right. He has betrayed the discipline the kirpan signifies.

English law already draws this distinction. Under section 139 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, it is an offence to carry a bladed or pointed article in public. The act provides a defence where it is carried for religious reasons, but the burden is on the accused to establish that this is the blade’s purpose. What’s more, it is only a defence for possessing such a blade – it is not a licence to use a blade as a weapon. The Nowak case is not evidence that religious minorities get away with violence that would be punished in others. Instead, it is evidence that the law’s existing limits operate as intended.

Other countries have faced the same concern. In Canada, the Supreme Court held in Multani v Commission scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys that an absolute ban on a non-violent schoolboy’s kirpan infringed religious freedom, while allowing conditions: the kirpan had to be secured and sewn inside his clothing. The court sensibly observed that many ordinary objects may be misused without being prohibited. Italy went the other way. In 2017, the Court of Cassation upheld a fine imposed on a Sikh man in Lombardy for carrying a kirpan of almost 20 centimetres outside his home. The court was explicit that public safety must prevail and that those who choose to settle in a country are bound to observe its law.

Parts of that judgment’s reasoning, which strayed into pronouncements upon the proper character of Italian society, were criticised. Yet what followed is instructive. The roughly 200,000 Sikhs in Italy, the largest such community in continental Europe, did not respond with defiance or disorder. They accepted the ruling and continued, as before, to be counted among Italy’s most industrious and law-abiding citizens. Liberal societies can set different boundaries. What they should not do is confuse religious symbolism with permission for violence.

There is a wider point here. In many countries where Sikhs have settled – Britain, Canada, East Africa and Italy among them – the pattern has generally been one of hard work, integration, civic loyalty and service. There is no contradiction between Sikh identity and obedience to the law of the land. Sikh tradition enjoins respect for just law. It also forbids the use of the kirpan as a weapon. A Sikh has no more quarrel with legal limits on a blade designed to cause harm than a Scottish Highlander has with legal limits on the sgian-dubh.

We must resist two mistakes. The first is to let one crime cast suspicion on every Sikh who wears the article Digwa dishonoured. The second is to let religious language soften the plain character of what happened. It was murder. The sentencing judge himself remarked that Digwa’s actions had wrongly associated a faith-based symbol with a brutal crime. That false association is what should be challenged – not the Sikh faith, nor the community.

The right response is the calm application of a law that already draws a necessary distinction between violence and non-violence, and not the diminishment of law-abiding Sikhs who have given this country, and many others, a great deal more than they have ever taken.

Swaran Singh was a commissioner for the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and is professor of social and community psychiatry at the University of Warwick and an NHS consultant psychiatrist.