Sikh community still under attack a year after Indianapolis mass shooting

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Komal Sahi was home the night of April 15, 2021, when reports started streaming in of a shooting at the Indianapolis FedEx ground operations facility where her mother had started working the week before.

“It was just so shocking,” said Sahi, an immigration attorney in suburban Indianapolis. “That warehouse had a lot of Sikh workers. From hearing my mom, it was like, you make friends because you’re working with people like you. It was a community. Everybody knew somebody who worked there.”

Just after 11 p.m. that night, a 19-year-old gunman fatally shot eight people at the facility, four of them from Sikh families. Sahi’s mother had been off duty that evening, but at Sahi’s aunt’s home the next day, “that was all anybody could talk about. And the reaction was that this was a hate crime.”

A year later, as the community honors the lives lost and wrestles with its collective trauma, some still question investigators’ conclusions that the attack was not motivated by bias but instead a premeditated “act of suicidal murder” by a former facility employee.

“Our community has known much pain for many years because of how we look and who we are,” Komal Chohan, whose grandmother was among the victims, said in a statement issued this week by Sikh Coalition, a national civil rights organization. “If that is why my Naniji (grandmother) was senselessly murdered, I will never know. But I do know that she was a hardworking woman all of her life whose only hope was to see her family succeed.”

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In addition to Chohan's grandmother, Amarjeet Kaur Johal, 66, those killed were Matthew Alexander, 32; Samaria Blackwell, 19; Jasvinder Kaur, 50; Amarjit Sekhon, 48; Jaswinder Singh, 68; Karli Smith, 19; and John “Steve” Weisert, 74.

Several months after the incident, Indianapolis police said white supremacist websites had been found on the shooter’s computer during a search of his home in early 2020 as part of a mental health check, but a subsequent FBI interview had determined he was not driven by any racially motivated extremism.

Amrith Kaur Aakre, legal director for the Sikh Coalition, said that detail, along with the number of Sikhs who worked at the facility and the number of Sikh victims, “all of these things paint a picture, and it’s a picture that Sikhs and other marginalized communities know all too well."

Aakre said that as a highly targeted group, Sikhs are already "always vigilant. For us, it feels like a familiar refrain."

Many in the American Sikh community have been on edge since 9/11, when Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh entrepreneur in suburban Phoenix, was murdered four days after the terrorist attacks by a revenge-minded white mechanic who mistook him for an Arab Muslim. Then, in 2012, a white supremacist fatally shot seven Sikh people at a temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, before turning the gun on himself.

“That was a huge blow for our community,” said Sahiba Kaur of the Sikh American Legal and Defense Fund, based in Washington, D.C. “We were already uncertain of our status in the U.S. and trying to show that we belong here, that Sikh values are American values. Now, in addition to Indianapolis, we’re seeing hate crimes. Everyone is a little frightened.”

Hate crimes targeting Sikhs have risen yearly since the FBI began collecting those statistics in 2015, climbing 68% from 2019 to 2020, or from 56 to 94. Meanwhile, anti-Muslim hate crimes have fallen over that time.

Kaur attributed the rise in anti-Sikh hate crimes to a willingness by more victims to come forward to report attacks, in addition to the pandemic and anti-immigrant rhetoric stirred up during the Trump administration.

"People are speaking up more," she said. "But I do think the pandemic has played a huge role in how people are behaving toward us. Mental health problems are through the roof."

This month, Sikh men were assaulted in two separate attacks in a Queens, New York, neighborhood and both are being investigated as possible hate crimes. In January, a Sikh taxi driver was assaulted by a man at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. The suspect in that attack was charged with a hate crime.

“There’s all these layers and layers and people ask themselves, when is enough, enough?” Aakre said. “When are people going to recognize that the community deserves justice? But until we see broad perspectives within law enforcement and the halls of power, I am concerned that we are not going to overcome those challenges.”

Sahi, whose great uncle also works at the Indianapolis FedEx facility but was off that night, also wonders about the gunman’s motives.

“It felt personal,” she said. “It felt like it was an attack on a community and a people rather than just a random shooting.”

A Sikh 'renaissance' in America's Heartland

Kanwal Prakash “K.P.” Singh says he was one of the first Sikhs to settle in Indianapolis. When he arrived from India in 1967 to work as a senior city planner, a local newspaper carried a blurb the next day asking readers if they had witnessed a turbaned, bearded man, he said.

“Many people had not seen a Sikh up close and personal,” he said.

Singh said he was determined to show locals not only that he could fit in but that he could help take the city from an afterthought to national prominence. Other Sikhs who arrived after him, he said, heeded his example of civic engagement, and he’s now an architect, artist and Sikh community leader.

Sikhism originated in Punjab, in northern India, and is the world’s fifth most popular religion, with more than 25 million believers. Practicing Sikh males wear beards and uncut long hair under turbans.

Two decades ago, Indianapolis’ Sikh community was still relatively small, with few temples, but the recession of 2008 brought a new influx as struggling Sikh farmers in California sold off their land and headed for the more affordable Midwest. With minimal education, many found jobs in logistics and distribution facilities that had chosen the heartland for its central location.

“Our claim to fame is that we’re within 24 hours of 75% of the U.S. population,” said Mark Myers, mayor of Greenwood, an Indianapolis suburb that many Sikhs now call home. “We’re kind of the crossroads of America.”

Sikh truckers traversing Indiana as they rumbled across the country “saw the economic value of relocating to the Midwest from the expensive coasts,” Singh said. “They saw something familiar to them – the open spaces, trees and the fellowship of the neighbor next door, that informality of people saying hello across the fence.”

Singh called the growth of the Hoosier Sikh community "a robust cultural renaissance in the Hoosier Heartland."

More than 5,000 Sikhs are now estimated to reside in the Indianapolis metro area, with 10,000 estimated statewide, and “communities like Greenwood and Plainfield look like where I grew up,” said Sahi, the immigration attorney, who’d relocated to the area as a 10-year-old from Brampton, Ontario, a Canadian city with a large Sikh population. “You go outside and see people like you.”

Still, growing pains have accompanied Sikhs’ arrival into Indiana’s conservative, historically white enclaves. Sahi noted an incident in February at a high school just south of Indianapolis in which students bullied a Sikh student and knocked his turban off his head.

“People don’t necessarily know about different cultures and faiths,” Sahi said. “When I took world history, Sikhism was one paragraph in a chapter on India. If you don’t have that background and awareness of what diversity looks like, there is some resistance. It’s going to take time, but there needs to be a consistent push. It shouldn’t just be in the wake of a tragedy.”

'You just keep going': A culture of resiliency

On Sunday, Indianapolis Sikhs held a memorial for the FedEx shooting victims at the Sikh Satsang gurdwara, with Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett among those in attendance. Next week, eight trees will be planted at a central Indianapolis park in honor of the lives lost as part of urban beautifying efforts.

“We continue to mourn the loss of our team members in the senseless tragedy that occurred nearly one year ago," FedEx Ground said in a statement. "FedEx Ground is extremely proud of our diverse and inclusive workforce at the station in Plainfield and April 15 will be a somber day of reflection. There is no higher priority for FedEx Ground than the safety of our team, and we have provided and continue to offer support in multiple ways to those affected."

Singh said city and religious leaders offered condolences and support in the wake of the shootings, “and in the year that has passed, this kindness has only magnified…. Walls that were there began to crumble. Have all the walls crumbled? No. Has the bullying in schools stopped completely? No. But we are on the right path. For us to survive, we need to be partners.”

Confronting grief, however, has proved vexing for a community that doesn’t often speak of trauma and mental health and typically copes by picking up the pieces and moving on. Before the shootings, no Sikh-specific services existed for victims of violent crime.

“We grieve for those families and the loved ones they lost,” Singh said. “But at the same time, we need to move forward. One step at a time.”

Punjabi Sikh culture has been forged by oppression and trauma, Sahi said: Adhering to a faith that evolved in the 1600s even as its leaders were executed by Indian Mughal rulers, her grandparents lived through the harrowing migration that followed the division of India and Pakistan. Then, her parents’ generation saw the religious persecution of Sikhs in India during the 1980s and beyond.

“For us, processing grief has always been about being resilient,” she said. “After the shooting, people didn’t really pause to grieve. We’ve been shaped by all of these historical events. It’s generational trauma. You don’t learn how to grieve because you’ve never been taught how. So you just keep going.”

As a result, she said, people don’t have the tools to deal with the anxiety and stress that accompany worries about venturing into society at the risk of being assaulted, or worse.

Recognizing the need to address the issue in a way that was culturally appropriate, the nonprofit Immigrant Welcome Center, in partnership with Central Indiana’s local health system, recently launched a federally funded “virtual resiliency center” to conduct culturally specific outreach and assistance to Sikhs through a pair of Punjabi-speaking Sikh “community navigators.”

“Research consistently shows that people of color have more trust when you have people who look like them and speak their language,” said Gurinder Hohl, the center’s chief executive officer.

“People think grief will pass,” Hohl said. “That is common in Sikh culture and one reason it was important for us to have a Sikh person to reach out to the community, to make them aware that it’s OK to feel loss and trauma when something like this happens.”

For Sahi, hearing about the program came as a relief.

 “I really hope it works,” she said. “Because our community really needs those resources.”