It had been almost two years since Savinder Singh Kakkar (42) had met his family in Delhi. On Saturday, the day he died in a terrorist attack in Kabul’s Gurdwara Dashmesh Pita Sahib Guru Gobind Singh, Karate Parwan, his body was not brought back to Delhi and his family watched his cremation over a video call.
Two days later some gunmen stormed inside the Gurudwara complex in Kabul set on fireAfter killing Kakkar and Ahmed, the local security guard of the Gurdwara, members of the Afghan Sikh community in Delhi gathered at Gurdwara Arjan Dev Ji, Tilak Nagar and organized a prayer meeting in his memory. Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri and SGPC President Harjinder Singh Dhami were also present in the prayer meeting.
Local Afghan Sikh community leaders said that Kakkar had moved his wife, three sons and a daughter from Afghanistan to Delhi in 2012 for his safety, but he himself juggled between Kabul and Delhi for work and service to the gurdwaras. Will keep doing He had a small grocery store in Kabul, which he did not sell even after his family moved to Delhi and it was his only source of livelihood in Kabul. It had now been almost two years since he had come to Delhi to meet family and was waiting for a visa to be issued after the Taliban took over.
Kakkar’s son Ajmeet Singh, who has returned from the UK, said that his father was a sevadar at a gurdwara in Kabul and that throughout his life, serving gurdwaras in Afghanistan was his priority. “He used to prepare langar in the gurudwara and lived in a small room there. Even when our mother and we four siblings moved to Delhi, he used to stay in Kabul because of Gurudwara Seva,” said Ajmeet.
Ajmeet said that for months his father was waiting for the visa to be issued to come to India but the approval was not received.
“Many times he had applied for a visa to come to India as the earlier visa had expired, but he never got it in his lifetime. Had the visa been approved earlier, my father would have been alive today.
Kakkar’s younger son Jaganpreet Singh said what is the use of issuing and publicizing 111 visas for Afghan Sikhs now when his father died. “Leaders like Manjinder Singh Sirsa are now boasting that they have issued 111 visas for Afghan Sikhs and Hindus but my father is gone. Will he come back? Why didn’t his visa come when he was alive? Knowing very well what is the situation in Afghanistan, why do they wake up only after sacrificing their lives,” Jaganpreet asked, adding that in 2012, his father had taken a loan to send him to Delhi.
Kakkar was a native of Ghazni city in Afghanistan but later moved to Kabul. “Every Friday he used to go to Ghazni to serve the Gurudwaras and spend Saturdays there. However this week he did not go and it happened. Since our father or my brother rarely lived together in Delhi, we never clicked a family picture,” said Jaganpreet (13).
Kakkar is survived by wife, three sons and a daughter. While two sons live in the UK, the wife, a son and a daughter live in a rented accommodation in Delhi. “We never had our own house, neither in Kabul nor in Delhi. My father kept saying that he would come home soon but he never did. We could not even see his body and the cremation took place in Kabul. My mother broke down seeing the cremation on the video call,” said Jaganpreet.
Mansa Singh, a local Afghan Sikh from Kabul, remembers that Savinder never wanted to send his family to Delhi, but an unfortunate incident with his daughter forced him to do so. “His daughter was returning from school when some local Islamic fundamentalists cut her braid and humiliated her. It compelled them to think about the safety of their children and send them to Delhi,” he said.