PARIS, Sep. 07, 2004
AFP
NRI Press

Around 30 young members of France's small Sikh community were refused access to classes Tuesday, as a row broke out over whether their headwear constitutes a breach of the country's new ban on religious insignia in state schools.

Sikh students speak to journalists in front of the Louise Michel High School in Bobigny, outside Paris on Tuesday.
Parents of the teenage boys expressed anger that a compromise deal under which the pupils could wear a kind of under-turban - a more discreet version of the full turban worn by all Sikh males - had been broken by education authorities in the northeast suburb of Bobigny.

"My son was supposed to go to classes today. He was able to get into the lycee but was not allowed into the classroom. Right now he is in the dining-room," said Gurdial Singh outside the Louis-Michel lycee.

"And yet he was wearing an under-turban, just a thin cloth for hiding the hair, just as we agreed with the authorities," he said.

A spokesman for the community, Manprit Singh, said in all some 30 cases of boys being barred from classes had been reported in the school district of Seine-St-Denis.

Schools re-opened across France last Thursday, but the boys were told to stay away till Tuesday in the hope the dispute could be resolved.

"Overall there are about 300 Sikh boys attending school and all are wearing what we call the 'keski' - the smaller headcovering that they normally use for sleeping in. So obviously some schools are being much stricter than others," said Manprit.

None of the boys had been formally expelled from their schools, and talks were continuing to find a solution he said.

Teachers from Bobigny quoted in Liberation newspaper said they did not recognise any exemption for Sikh pupils from the "secularity law," which was passed in March with the aim of reinforcing the separation of religion and state in France.

"You can't have two standards -- one for the headscarf, one for the turban," said Daniel Robin of the SNES teaching union

Though the law's main target was the growing number of girls wearing the Islamic headscarf to school, large Christian crosses and Jewish skull-caps are also banned.

However the authorities admitted that they had failed to consult the country's 7,000-strong Sikh community, for whom wearing the turban is a mandatory injunction. In January, Sikhs from across Europe rallied in Paris to demand a dispensation from the law.

In discussions with the government, the community argued that the turban is not a religious symbol but a cultural one because the rule contained in Sikh scriptures is for men not to cut their hair and the turban is merely a way of containing it.

"In a letter on May 10 the prime minister (Jean-Pierre Raffarin) gave us guarantees that our children would receive an education. In fact they were promises made out of thin air," said another parent Karmvir Singh.

Some members of the community, which arrived in France in the 1980s have threatened to emigrate if their sons cannot be educated at state schools wearing the turban. Some 80,000 Indian Sikhs are estimated to have died defending France in World War I